Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Lars would never forget the moment he became a knight.

He had knelt on the hard flagstone floor, sunlight pouring unobstructed through the tall, narrow windows on all four sides and falling upon the stone statue before him. War God Xisaluo, clad in the armor of the legendary Paladin, held a longsword and shield. His sword pointed toward the heavens, while the blade that symbolized steadfastness and justice pierced through a demon’s chest.

The lord he had sworn to serve for life stood before him and tapped his shoulders lightly with a knight’s longsword.

Lars bowed until his face touched the ground and kissed the stone tile beneath Xisaluo’s feet. In a solemn voice still tender with youth, he made the vow of his life: I shall treat the weak with mercy. I shall face mighty enemies with courage. I shall oppose sinners without reservation. I shall be faithful to my friends. I shall be sincere in love…

Never fear! Never retreat! Never betray justice!

And it was not only him. Every knight went through the same ceremony. Lord Maxen, the Silver Knight who had conferred his title upon him, had done so as well. Since he, too, had once stood before Lord Xisaluo’s divine statue and solemnly sworn that vow with his life, how could he possibly have done… done the kind of thing Ruiyin claimed?!

Lars curled in on himself, stubbornly refusing to believe it. He sat quietly in one corner of the prison cell, watching the sunlight that came in through the narrow skylight slowly cross the room. He watched the stars hang in the night sky, and kept watching until the faint first light of dawn. Yet no one came. Not Lord Maxen, not even the jailer who brought meals, nor the warden who had said he would come to carry out the execution.

They had been abandoned there to wait for death.

“Well? It’s daylight now.” A hoarse voice interrupted his waiting. Lars abruptly turned his head and saw Ruiyin curled up in another corner. In all the long hours he had been waiting, she had not made a single sound. Perhaps for as long as he had watched the window, she had been watching him.

A sudden surge of guilt rose in Lars’s heart.

“I’m sorry,” he said remorsefully. “I…”

“Stop!” Ruiyin cut him off with a dark expression. “If you’re about to apologize with your life again, you’ll set a new miracle the God of Death can’t harvest.”

“But I really am sorry…” Lars looked at her uneasily. “This is all because I dragged you into it. You’re a girl, trapped in a place like this, and you’ve gone so long without food or water. You must… you must be suffering, right?”

Ruiyin fell silent for a moment and curled in a little tighter. “I’m fine. In the past… it’s not as if I haven’t been through worse. So, do you believe what I said now?”

Lars opened his mouth, then finally deflated and changed the subject. “I still can’t believe it… Lord Maxen is clearly a knight, isn’t he? How could he do something like this? We clearly… we clearly all swore before Lord Xisaluo’s divine statue. Why… why would he…”

“It has nothing to do with knights or vows,” Ruiyin said quietly. “What a person is, and what a person says, don’t decide what kind of person they are. Take me, for example. I could say ten thousand nice things to you, then shove you in front of the Orcs without hesitation the moment danger appears.”

Lars was surprised. “What’s wrong with that? I’m a knight. Of course I should take danger upon myself for a lady!”

“…” Were knights’ brains all made of paste?!

Ruiyin forcibly suppressed the urge to pry someone’s skull open and see whether there was a brainstem inside, then continued her patient, persuasive education. “Then set aside the female factor. If the person you met on the battlefield wasn’t a woman, but someone like me, who doesn’t know the road, can’t fight, steals things from corpses, keeps slandering you and Galahad, and finally gets you thrown in prison because of the ‘evidence’ on her body, would you still have traveled with me this far?”

Lars was even more shocked. “Of course I would! Ruiyin, you’re the benefactor who saved me from the battlefield. And all along the way, you never abandoned me. You constantly encouraged and tempered my spirit, and even here, you still haven’t left me alone. Sincerity, humility, justice, sacrifice, courage… Ah, if you weren’t a girl, Ruiyin, you would surely become an even greater knight than Lord Maxen!” As Lars grew more emotional, he actually stood up, his eyes burning with flames of yearning. “Ah… to be able to travel with someone as noble as Ruiyin, I truly am so fortunate!”

Ruiyin stared at him expressionlessly for a while, then asked, “Hey. Are you serious?”

“Of course!”

Ruiyin decisively gave up on lecturing him, rolled over, and went to sleep.

This technique of ingenious sarcastic insult, where every word was filled with praise so sincere it came from the heart, yet every word struck right at the softest spot… Were all knights actually undercover reporters for People’s Daily Exposé?!

Unfortunately, Lars’s desire to talk had already been stirred up, and he refused to stop. Lying on the prison’s damp stone bed, Ruiyin was forced to learn the entire upbringing of a knight so upright he would rather break than bend. His impeccable roots were enough to make eight generations of poor peasants hang their heads in shame. Interspersed throughout were praises of Ruiyin’s character that gave her the involuntary, infuriating feeling of, “Damn it, I tried to trade insults with a mentally challenged child and still lost.” Only when Lars had talked himself dry did this Führer’s speech finally pause.

He looked at the sun, which had long since reached noon, and said with some worry, “We have no food or water… If this continues, can we survive until my lord realizes his mistake and comes to rescue us?”

Ruiyin decided that from this day forward, she would ignore Lars’s brainless personal worship.

“Without food, if we conserve our strength, we can live for over a week. As for water…” She climbed up from the ground, moved close to the wall, and carefully licked the droplets condensed on the cold stone with her tongue. “There isn’t much, but the water here can keep us alive.”
After finishing the demonstration, she lay back down on the bed, closed her eyes in silence, and refused to waste even the slightest bit of strength.

Lars looked at the woman, whose brows remained furrowed even with her eyes shut, and suddenly remembered what she had looked like the first time he saw her. Beneath the enormous violet full moon, the young woman in battered armor had carried the brutal stench of a battlefield around her. Back then, too, she seemed to have worn this same impatient expression.

She had traveled with him through wind and rain, sleeping rough and fighting battles large and small. Though she always looked impatient, she had never uttered a single complaint. The look in those black eyes had always been faint and indifferent, as if she did not feel at all that, with two knights present, it was wildly improper for a woman to live such a dangerous, rootless life.

Even now, in such a hopeless situation, she merely leaned against the stone platform with a frown, conserving her strength to the greatest possible extent. Lars’s gaze moved from her disheveled hair to her closed eyes, to the stubborn upward slant of her thick black brows, to the soft lines of her face, to lips that had gone faintly pale from dehydration…

Lars whipped his head away, unable to stop his face from burning.

What… what was wrong with him?! How could he be so discourteous, staring so brazenly at a lady in distress…

Lars decided that once they got out, he would punish himself by copying the Knight’s Code one hundred times.

Of course, all punishment and repentance depended on the premise of “once they got out.” In the prison, Lars watched the sun rise and set twice with desperate eyes, and the last bit of fantasy in his heart finally sank completely.

“Have we been… abandoned?” The young man curled listlessly in the corner like a soaked puppy, muttering to himself with a touch of grievance.

“Obviously.” Ruiyin glanced at the sky and said thoughtfully, “So? It’s already been a day past the time limit for our bet. Are you going to admit defeat?”

Lars sniffled. After rummaging through his clothes for a long while with obvious reluctance, he carefully placed a small object in Ruiyin’s hand. “Here. Like we agreed. It’s yours.”

Ruiyin stared expressionlessly at the thing for a long moment, then flung it behind her like trash. “Hey, are you fucking kidding me?”

“How could you treat it like that!” Lars lunged behind Ruiyin in a panic, picked up the little object as if it were a treasure, blew off the dust, and looked at her reproachfully. “Didn’t we agree? If I lost, I would let you keep my knight’s badge for me.”

“…Who agreed to that?! Young man, your ability to fill in the blanks and substitute concepts has reached the realm of the divine! What I said was, ‘Use your War God Xisaluo to make a bet with me.’ What would I want your badge for?”

“But in my heart, it holds the same place as Lord Xisaluo! What do you want Lord Xisaluo for? How would you even have him?” Lars asked in pure, clear-eyed confusion, raising a question that absolutely should have been censored.

For the first time, Ruiyin found herself speechless in front of Lars.

“What do you want Lord Xisaluo for”? Since when did she want a stone statue?!

“How would you even have him”? She had only wanted Lars to give up that rock-solid faith of his, so that when everything was overturned and shattered, he would not fall apart completely. But why did the question become so damn suggestive when he asked it with that innocent face?! What would she want with that busted stone statue? Imprisonment play and fetishism?!

Lars looked at her faintly green complexion in confusion, then suddenly clapped a fist into his palm as if he had realized the truth. “Ah, could it be… you worship Lord Xisaluo too, so that’s why you want to obtain him? You can just say so! Even if you aren’t a knight, Lord Xisaluo loves all people equally. You don’t need to win him from me! Huh? Ruiyin, what’s wrong?”

Ruiyin, on her knees and clawing at the stone floor, said, “Nothing. I’m just reminiscing about the teacher who once criticized me for being stubborn and hard to teach.”

“Teacher?”

“Yes. I truly want to bring you to him and let him see. He would definitely praise me as the smartest and most adorable student he ever taught.”

Lars tilted his head and had just been about to say something when his expression suddenly changed. The young man lunged forward, grabbed Ruiyin, who was still weeping from grief, and shielded her firmly beneath his body.

Ruiyin was still trapped in the sorrowful thought that this brat would probably need Sakyamuni himself to enlighten him, and the sudden scorching embrace left her completely unable to react. Her head was pressed hard against his chest, leaving her no room to struggle. The strong masculine scent that filled her nose was tinged with blood, and only then did Ruiyin realize that the foolish nineteen-year-old boy before her had, physically speaking, already become a fierce and valiant man.

“S-sorry! Ruiyin, bear with it for a moment!” Lars’s face flushed crimson, but he did not loosen his hold on Ruiyin in the slightest. With one hand, he protected her behind him. With his sword in his right, the young man slowly turned around.

Over Lars’s shoulder, Ruiyin saw that the place which had just been a solid prison wall had been smashed wide open. It was dusk, and the eerie blood-red sunlight pouring through the breach was half-blocked by an enormous figure. As if sensing her stunned stare, the figure turned its head, and a pair of dark yellow eyes abruptly met her gaze. The thing opened its mouth and let out a roar that shook the heavens.

“…It’s the Orcs. The Orcs have invaded Kandel Castle!”