Virgin Knight Who Is the Frontier Lord in the Gender Switched World - Chapter 179

Leaving behind the encampment of Her Highness Valiere, I stepped outside.

Normally, at night, the area would be alive with the loud boasts of mercenary groups celebrating their martial achievements, almost beast-like in their rowdiness, causing one to furrow their brow in disdain.

But tonight, all was eerily silent.

It was to be expected.

Tomorrow, no one could be certain of their own fate.

Deception was no longer an option for anyone.

“Yes, that’s just the way the world is.”

Though the path of ruin Amelia von Berlichingen had predicted was slightly different, the end result was the same.

Everyone had awakened from their dreams.

They had abandoned the illusion that their lives could be completely transformed on this journey.

The heresy inquisition by the Archbishop of Mainz against the Cologne Sect and the disbanding orders from Her Highness Valiere to her troops marked the end of everything.

Amelia walked a lonely road.

She had always walked this path alone.

Since the time she lost her mother, she had always walked this road this way.

Always unchanging.

She bore her own sword on her shoulder, swore to violence, and ended up a mere bandit knight.

Even after rising to become the worst bandit knight in the history of the Gusten Empire, nothing had changed.

Not her castle, her people, her knighthood, nor when she acquired the name that came with her territory of Berlichingen.

At this moment, everything seemed futile.

Surely, she had been deceiving herself all this time.

As death loomed closer, everything felt utterly meaningless.

“…It’s lonely.”

The brigade of Valiere, silent with no one shouting, presented a very lonely scene.

Not a single voice reached Amelia’s ears.

To repeat, it would normally be quite noisy.

Having become the foremost in martial prowess on the journey to the imperial capital, and having been honored with a knighthood ceremony from Her Highness Valiere herself,

those under her command, as well as peers who had successfully transitioned from bandit-like mercenaries to legitimate royal soldiers, would normally be spending money jovially, joking with merchants who came to wish them well, and raising their glasses in loud cheers.

But now, no one spoke a word.

Everyone was holding their breath in the face of the large force of the Archbishop of Mainz, only concerned about what their own standing would be tomorrow.

“That’s fine.”

Everyone had finally realized.

It was indeed just a dream.

A march of dreams.

That if they followed Her Highness Valiere, she would lead them to a place where their dreams of happiness and fulfillment could be realized.

Such convenient stories simply didn’t exist.

Everyone had been dreaming foolish dreams.

“For Her Highness Valiere, that was more convenient. It’s better this way.”

As long as the circumstances were so dire, she wouldn’t be blamed.

Amelia understood that part of the cause of this situation was within herself.

If necessary, to protect Her Highness, it might even be acceptable for Amelia to spread rumors within the brigade that she was the cause.

Desperate to keep the brigade together as she was aware, she could afford to do that much.

If she did, instead of being arrested by the Archbishop of Mainz, she might be torn limb from limb right here today, but well, that’s alright.

“Hmm.”

To be honest, she had no suicidal wishes, and she normally hated the thought of dying.

However, she had always understood that such an end might come to her one day.

Of course, when she was younger, absorbed in her reckless youth, she wasn’t the reflective person she was now.

It wasn’t like when she had struck the village chief’s skull, who had failed to pay the agreed sum after she had subdued a band of bandits, burning down his house and leaving.

Nor was it like when she had protected a highway only to have a merchant in the city turn defiant the moment they entered, threatening not to pay and to call the city guards, prompting her to set fire to his mansion and seize his wealth.

Those were just everyday trivialities for a bandit knight like her.

“Ah, yes. It was when I set fire to the church.”

Such behavior, though hardly unusual for a bandit knight, could even be boasted about as the proper conduct of a knight.

If she had grown old, she might have told her children or subordinates, “Did you know I once set fire to a church?” as a boast.

Extravagance is an important element for a knight.

The true and proper way of being a knight.

But—yes.

Setting fire to the church, she recognized as a clear sin.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t so much the act of burning the church itself, but the guilt over those who had died because of it.

“It was when I was still young.”

She was 18 at the time.

Her purse was not yet amply filled, and as a lone bandit knight, as a lone Black Knight, she had joined the forces of a certain Elector.

The Elector had gathered troops, of course, for plundering against enemies on the borderlines, and Amelia was working as one of those who attacked the city.

While the battle situation was favorable for their side, the takeover of a church in the city center, where knights and soldiers holed up inside continued to fiercely attack with bows and stones, was problematic.

Occasionally, the Musketeers among the Cologne Sect followers, firing off as if they remembered to, were particularly troublesome, having shot and killed more than twenty of our men.

The Elector was at his wit’s end.

Finally, he gave up on the takeover and attempted to blow it up with gunpowder.

He decided to burn everyone inside the church, be they clergy, knights, or commoners, turning them all into a fiery death.

Yes, that in itself was nothing to be bothered about.

The Elector, his accompanying knights, the regular troops, the mercenaries, and even I would probably have pointed and laughed and applauded at the sight of the burning church and the diverse crowd jumping out on fire.

That was all it was supposed to be.

The only difference was that there was a pair of mother and child on the church roof.

“God!!” The mother, imploring something utterly unreliable, held her child.

And fell from the roof of the church as one mass.

I learned of it only after hearing the sound of the flesh hitting the hard ground a little later.

Ah, I still remember it vividly.

How could I ever forget?

I think I will never be able to forget that moment for the rest of my life.

“…What was that?”

The Elector asked someone.

Not out of concern for the mother and child, but truly because it was so sudden, he might not have understood what had happened.

It even looked like a mass of rags.

I squinted my eyes and looked carefully.

It was a pair of mother and child in patched-up clothes, appearing to be impoverished.

“It’s a mother and child,” I blurted out involuntarily, and it felt as though the Elector had turned to look at me.

However, at that moment, being noticed by the Elector—a knight of one of the most eminent positions in this world—seemed trivial to me.

Unconcerned about the burning church, I slowly approached the mother and child and looked closely once more.

Indeed, it was a mother and child, clad in patchwork clothes, seemingly impoverished.

Due to the impact of the fall, the parent appeared to have died, blood flowing from her head.

“Ah,” a sigh of pity escaped me unintentionally.

Why were the mother and child on the roof of the church?

Perhaps they were refused shelter by the despicable clergy due to their poverty.

Or maybe they were driven out by the knights and soldiers because the church was being used as a defensive stronghold.

But for them, amidst the warfare, there was nowhere else to turn, possibly only a faint belief in God.

Thus, they climbed onto the roof of the church to escape the battle.

But we burned the church.

As the fire approached and the smoke enveloped the mother and child, there was no longer any escape.

I had heard somewhere that when fire and smoke close in, people feel the only solution is to trust in divine protection and jump.

Perhaps this deceased mother had jumped in a desperate attempt to protect her child.

“I see,” I muttered as the Elector, now close by on his horse, nodded appreciatively at my explanation.

He seemed to look curiously at the bodies of the impoverished mother and child.

“No matter how poor, no matter how much love she held for her child, the heart of a mother thinking of her child is noble, regardless of their status,” the Elector said with a tone of compassion and sentimentality as he brought his horse closer to the mother and child.

At that moment, I realized something terribly inevitable.

Ah, so it was.

That’s how it was.

Facing the pitiful death of the poor, although it’s truly a foolish thing to say.

At about the age of 18, this Amelia had come to understand what her mother had been thinking when she raised me.

Why my mother, who was nothing more than the lowest of Black Knights, scrounged at the bottom of her purse to provide me with an education in letters, arithmetic, and negotiation.

Why she didn’t abandon me at some poorhouse.

Why she would have taken on reckless banditry for just a few silver coins.

I had come to understand it all.

“Become a noble knight,” she had said.

“Please become a noble knight,” she had urged.

My mother had often whispered these words to me, and I had resented them.

How can you say such foolish things? How could someone from such a lowly background ever become a noble knight?

Isn’t the only way to rise in the world through violence?

I even held such foolish resentment and had indeed voiced it.

“Stop lamenting your own origins and screaming at me the desires you wish you could have fulfilled, using my miserable life as a substitute!”

At that time, I truly believed that.

But now, I finally understood something different.

It was just the clumsy words my mother had never said, repeated only in her actions.

“I don’t matter. If my body can be wood, if it can be burned to keep you warm, then go ahead, it’s fine.”

I love you, she was saying.

And I had never once responded to that.

Stunned by this realization, I just watched as the Elector approached the bodies of the impoverished mother and child.

“What’s this?”

The Elector tilted his head curiously, then suddenly laughed.

“Hey, name unknown, but profoundly educated Black Knight. Indeed, a parent’s love is a noble thing.”

The church was burning.

Inside the burning church, the screams of people turning into human torches still echoed.

In such a hellish scene, the Elector dismounted his horse.

Approaching the dead, he gently gripped and then carefully released a finger from the body, and then he picked up the child.

“The child is alive.”

We are doing terrible things.

We normally plunder cities and stuff churches with gunpowder to burn them.

Such things were irrelevant to this Amelia and the Elector standing before me.

Moreover, we had killed the child’s parent.

But why?

“Someone, remove this child from the battlefield immediately and take him to a safe place. Of course, I, the Elector, vow to raise this child in honor. Born on a battlefield from hell, I assure you he will become a noble knight. Also, properly collect and bury that body.”

Why, despite such a tragic end?

Even if one of the causes of this child’s mother’s death was me.

Knowing that the mother’s body would be buried and the child’s future secured, for the first time, Amelia smiled like a blooming rose.

Ah, I smiled then.

Most likely, definitely, because a mother’s love had borne fruit, and the child’s future was promised.

And that the mother would be honored nobly in death was assured.

While I harbored guilt, at that time, from a perspective that was nothing short of tragic, it felt as though all the happiness in the world was before me.

“…That Elector was a noble person indeed.”

Though he was the type to stuff churches with gunpowder and indiscriminately massacre clergy, knights, and commoners alike.

In terms of knightly reputation, he was indeed considered a truly upright person by the world.

The problem was, there was no reason he would take me, a mere Black Knight, under his wing.

To be honest, even this Amelia couldn’t keep up with his magnanimous nature.

At least, he was not the ideal lord I had envisioned.

“Yes,”

That’s right, just that.

That alone was all the happiness I had witnessed in this world.

Despite witnessing all the happiness before me, I have achieved none of it now.

I couldn’t realize the happiness my mother wanted for me, to serve a noble lord as a knight.

Nor could the mother who raised her child be honored with noble respect.

All were positions I had failed to fulfill.

“It was truly a life of emptiness.”

Looking back, everything seemed like toys.

The territory, the castle, the custom prosthetic, the armor, the sword, the helmet.

Everything that made up a knight in me felt like it was given by no one, all seemed like counterfeits.

But still.

Let me complain just this once, Mother.

“There was no lord in this world noble enough for me to parade as a knight in good appearance and swear my true and heartfelt loyalty. I even gave up believing I could overturn the very injustice of this world through my own ‘Super Violence.'”

So, the end of this Amelia was inevitable.

In this cruelly unjust world, what I had spent a lifetime searching for was nowhere to be found.

The happiness I had witnessed in others was a rare fortune, never bestowed upon this Amelia and my beloved mother.

Everything was futile.

The love my mother gave me, the love I had for her, all was meaningless.

So, at least let me end it all with dignity.

If I am one of the causes of this conclusion, then let me not trouble Her Highness Valiere any further.

Quietly, let me be arrested by the Archbishop of Mainz.

And quietly, let me be hanged at the imperial court.

That would be for the best.

“This is the end,” I muttered dismissively.

Echoing that, a sobbing sound came from somewhere.

Of course, I couldn’t tell whose voice it was.

Perhaps a Black Knight with shattered dreams, a mercenary with no future, or a poor lender fearing the loss of his property.

But—to the ears of this Amelia, it sounded somewhat like my mother’s voice.