Chapter 2: One Man, Alone

Jyn cuffed the Cursed dude, then she backed off and let one of her squadmates cuff her in turn.

“Now that I’ve been charmed, I am a threat to us all,” was her reasoning. It was part of protocol in dealing with charmed squad members, so HQ shouldn’t find anything wrong later on when they’d go through the report.

The cuffs had some sort of magic on them that suppressed charm effects, so the guy was allowed to talk. Jyn was doing the interrogating, just in case there was some other magic at play that could still reach her squadmates.

In the meantime, they were following a trail out of the forest. Jyn was at the very front, leading the column. The dude was trailing behind her, and the rest of the knights were trailing behind him, keeping a slight distance.

“State your name,” Jyn said. He wasn’t sure if this was some sort of attempt at small talk or part of an interrogation.

“I … don’t know mine,” he answered anyway.

“Thought as much.” She’d Appraised him a while ago. "It is uncommon for reincarnators to be without a name, but it has happened—wait, why am I acting so familiarly…"

Her squadmates clenched their teeth. To them, Jyn was as good as gone. Even if they went to kill the man, the charm effect wouldn’t go away. It never would. The splinter of the curse in Jyn would simply cause her to be forever sorrowful that the man had died, no matter what the actual substance of their relationship.

The dude sighed. He wasn’t clear on a bunch of things, but it was obvious by the way the knights were acting that they had a long-standing enough problem with the Blessing of the ###### God to the point that they had procedures for dealing with it—and he’d been roped into all of it.

… Overall not his fault that the knights had been sending reproachful glares his way for the past 20 minutes.

“I just wanna get this out of the way,” he said. “I don’t wanna make anyone do things that they wouldn’t before any of this magic stuff popped up. It just doesn’t sit right with me—”

“That’s what they all say,” Jyn replied. “But they all come to love the power that comes with it. You will become a beast very soon, or even just later on. I assure you—they all do.”

Her visage twisted into a frown that the dude didn’t see, but neither, too, did any of them see his own frown.

It wasn’t sadness. It was fear. He really wasn’t that type of guy. Sure, he liked girls, but girls made really good friends. They laughed like angels, and their smiles made the world good. The banter was often nice, too.

Above all, hugging them was really nice. It’s just not the same when it’s a fellow guy.

… And now they were telling him that he’d become something that saw none of that. What a Blessing this was.

They reached the end of the trail, and there was a wagon waiting in a rocky clearing. Two other female knights were there. Why there had only been female knights so far, the dude could only wonder.

The waiting knights noticed the group approaching, nearly jumping down in excitement to meet them. Then they noticed Jyn. She was wearing a frown, and with the dude being tugged along behind her, the two waiting knights figured out pretty quickly what was going on. Mostly.

“You bastard!” one of the waiting knights drew her sword. Unlike Jyn and the others, these knights didn’t have their visors down, so the dude had a full view of her anger. They must have really cared for their squad leader.

“Yalina! No!” Jyn stood in her way.

“Don’t tell me you’re standing up for him!” Yalina becried.

“This is part of protocol! Stand down!”

After the rest of the knights followed and explained the situation, Yalina calmed down. She didn’t stop shooting sour looks at the dude, though, at least not until they boarded the wagon and started off towards the nearby town.

The rickety wagon, pulled by two horses, was dealing continuous damage to the dude’s ass. He’d be an ass himself if he asked for padding to sit on, so he perservered.

The wagon followed a dirt road, and they eventually cleared the forest. The town was in sight. The first thing about it was its wooden stockade, which completely encircled it. There were a few sentry towers looking over the horizon, and then there was a bell tower just beyond the wall, and some sort of stone keep. None of them looked any higher than five stories, but it was plenty for a small town like this.

They went past a few kilometers of crops before they reached the gate of the walled town. Again, even the gate guards were female.

The dude had the urge to ask about it, but it’d probably be better to appear harmless and well-behaved until he could find someone he could actually ask about mundane stuff and not get murderously glared at for it.

The gate guards sent him a few wary glances, but being surrounded by a full squad of knights, and himself being in magical cuffs, they just left it at that and sent the wagon on its way.

The first thing they passed was a market, which gave way to a cluster of wooden homes. There weren’t too many people; this was probably the liveliest the town could get. There were some town watch patrols making the rounds; they each had gambeson, a short spear, and a wicker helmet. He hadn’t seen any other knights long the way, so the ones accompanying him likely already represented a good chunk of all the knights in town.

They stopped in a wide street, in front of another stockade—the stone keep was watching them from just behind it. The gate wasn’t quite wide enough to accommodate a wagon, so they hopped off. No one offered to help him down.

His captors ushered him up to the gate. Jyn said some official-sounding stuff to the knight sentries up above, and they opened the gate.

Not even five steps through the gate, he was separated from Jyn.

They tossed him into solitary confinement—the keep’s dungeon.

It was damp. The stone floor and walls were cold. A heavy wooden door kept him penned inside, while a tiny crystal in the ceiling was the only source of light.

Unexpectedly, it was pretty bright, almost like sunlight, so his stay wasn’t as depressing as it could be. Maybe it’s some sort of skylight?

A port at the foot of the wooden door opened, and a tray slid through. The port closed.

“… Well, at least it’s fresh.”

Fresh, fluffy bread seemed quite a bit luxurious to serve to a dude like him who was in a ‘guilty before proven innocent’ type of situation. He’d expected something like … stale bread that might break his teeth or something.

Oh well. It’s bread.

He ate the nice fluffy stuff with his hands still cuffed together. The cuffs themselves were magical. Why couldn’t they just magic the room itself? The cuffs were rubbing quite a lot against his skin, and he’d really rather have them off.

He was like this until the next morning. The closest he got to a meal variation was “bread with potato,” but the potato actually tasted pretty good, what’s up with that?

There were feet marching down the hallway outside the door. The five wooden bars that kept the door shut were being lifted off, and finally, the door creaked open.

On the other side was a man with flowing black robes, a wrinkly face, and no hair to speak of. In one hand was a pen, and the other, a book.

“Greetings—”

“Holy shit, a man.”

T-that wasn’t exactly what the inquisitor expected. He’d been told that the dude was open to negotiation. He wasn’t told wrongly, but, something like this…

“First, state—no, choose your name,” the inquisitor continued.

The dude remembered that that was still unfinished business. The inquisitor marched in, two knights with full-coverage scarlet armor behind him, and handed him the book.

The dude received it, a bit unsure about anything that was going on. But eh. Whatever.

The book turned out to be a book of names. That’s nice and all, but…

“Do I get only one name?” the dude asked.

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow. “Are you a noble?”

“… No?”

“Then you get one name.”

It’s that kind of thing, huh. He rifled through the pages and noted a bunch that sounded like they’d curse him with some sort of destiny.

None of that for him, no way.

He wasn’t feeling especially resolved in this life. More like, his current objective was to get an explanation out of Minimine—by finding a temple to Maximine, apparently? That was the last thing she said, anyway. He was just really miffed that he didn’t know what was going on with everything. He’d want to explore places a bit, and, well, there’s magic, so learning about that would be nice. Of course, that’s all in the pursuit of getting some real, juicy context about his current predicament.

If there was anything he knew, it’s that whatever happened in that last part wasn’t supposed to happen. Once he figured out stuff, he’d wing it from there.

With that in mind, he looked for a neutral-sounding name that aptly described a guy who was just a little bit lost and was just finding his way around. Damn, that sounded like my college life, though.

He stopped his finger over a name:

‘Diego.’ What.

No, surely, that name was associated with a certain kid explorer’s cousin, but that wasn’t the sort of exploration he was thinking about.

His finger stopped over another.

‘Kalender.’

“This one,” he said. It was a gut choice. He had no idea what the name actually meant, and it didn’t really sound neutral at all. Actually, he was pretty sure that that was what an industrial roller pin was called on earth, but whatever.

“Interesting,” the inquisitor smirked, “for you to choose a Liberator’s name.”

What—whatever. His status updated.

***

Name: Kalender

***

His name flashed as a notification for a split second, then minimized off to oblivion.

“Mister Kalender. I am Inquisitor Djarren Yal. Follow me.”

Kalender felt a bit of danger in following the two-named inquisitor, but he was being ushered out by the two scarlet knights. He couldn’t even see their eyes through their visors, and they were towering over him, so, probably not antagonize the obviously-elite knights.

He barely remembered the path he took going down in the dungeon, and neither did he recognize the path they were taking to go up. They were going up quite a lot, though.

At some point, there was a window. They were maybe two stories up in the air by now. His legs were complaining a bit, but the scarlet knights behind him didn’t let him slow down.

He was led to a room—a courtroom, really. It wasn’t that big. There were three pews for people watching, then an elevated podium for the judge. Looked like the defendant sort of just stands in a cage between the pews and the podium. There weren’t any furnishings for a jury or witness stands anywhere.

Speaking of, the scarlet knights exuded just a little bit of authoritative pressure. Kalender held a wry smile as he voluntarily showed himself into the defendant’s cage.

As soon as the cage was locked, it glowed.

“Hands,” one of the scarlet knights called. “Bring them here.”

Kalender placed his ends near the edge of the cage. The knight grabbed them with a bit of crushing force. It hurt, but nothing was breaking so far. The knight keyed something into his cuffs, and they came off.

“Huh.” He was just surprised by the apparent courtesy, but strings of tiny runes on the cage glowed red, giving off a tiny amount of heat.

The inquisitor took his place on the judge’s seat. The scarlet knights took their places on either side of him.

After a few minutes, more armor was marching through the court’s door. It was Jyn, in cuffs and without her armor, escorted by one of her squadmates in full-plate.