Wilderness Kingdom Veneli, Western Frontier Expanse, central sector—Toscana Frontier Town, main manor garden.

The town is newborn, like wet clay still smelling of earth. Grain barely feeds its own mouths, like bowls scraped clean at dusk. Luxury goods only just cover their cost, like gold dust swept back into the scales. Everything sits at the trailhead of growth, with no spare breath for fountains or frills.

The only spot you’d call pretty is the manor garden, a patch of color like a silk fan in plain wind. Lady Toscana tends and trims it by hand, each stem a stitched thread. Only the Frontier Knight’s household has the heart and hours to keep it neat. It sits in the town’s very center, like a stone dropped in still water. At a glance, the whole town seems built outward from that ripple.

Truth be told, that’s not wrong. The Frontier Knight led pioneers to camp on the Bloodbattle Plain, like stakes hammered into bedrock. They guarded the folk from the monster tide, holding like a seawall in storm. Then the next Frontier Knights moved onward, pushing the human border like dawn pushes night.

Now Toscana Frontier Town no longer faces the tide head-on; the surf has rolled farther away. Safety thickens like a second roof. Merchant caravans grow by the week, jingling like river chains, and the town grows rich with their clatter.

In those earlier years, monsters came near daily, like thorns growing back overnight. Robin Toscana, the town’s lord and Frontier Knight, wore wounds as constant as shadow. Each day he was either wrapping bandages like winter scarves, or he was armoring up again, taking shield and longsword, and riding out like thunder.

Now the front crawls forward, and the Toscana estate grows as calm as a pond at noon. As he often says—

Easier and easier, so easy it blurs into a kind of aimless fog.

Right now, Robin is sparring with his two children, blades tapping like rain in bamboo.

The second son and the eldest daughter are twins. Robin doesn’t know what shape their futures will set into, like clay before the kiln. He doesn’t know if they’ll hold to their own wishes, like boats rowing against current. He hopes they’ll be like him—know why they live, and carry it through like a torch in wind. So he grants every request he can, like opening doors along a hall.

When a child wanted to learn the Telu qin, and study mathematics and poetry, Robin called on an old comrade. From the big city he brought a philosopher fit for a professorship, a lantern-bright mind. The man had no papers or seals, yet in talk Robin felt the depth in him, not just some Douglas Academy student on a Grand Tour.

When a child wanted swordcraft, grappling, shieldwork, and the craft of fighting in full plate, Robin held nothing back. He poured out decades of training squire-knights, like wine from a full cask, and even invited famous front-line adventurers to guide them, like eagles teaching the updraft.

Maybe they’ll be heroes. Maybe they won’t. Great or not, a father’s heart weighs love, not titles.

Robin doesn’t want his children to meet their futures with regret, like walkers who missed a turn. He wants them safe and smiling. So he gives them choices to pick, and lessons to climb, like steps laid before dawn.

He turns his blade and catches Aurico’s diagonal chop, steel meeting wood like a struck bell. The boy’s weight hasn’t fully shifted; the form is textbook true. It’s easy to recover, but thin on force, like a wave that breaks too soon. It leaves the balance tilting toward the opponent.

Robin rides the turn of his blade, bite to bite, like gears locking. He sidesteps to deny Barbara a chance to pounce, stepping like a cat around a jug. Experience tilts the bind; he presses the edge to Aurico’s shoulder. If he wished, he could tap the neck like a gong.

Take one down first.

Relief loosens Robin’s chest a little, both for the bout’s rhythm and for his children’s climb.

They’re excellent, bright as young steel—like he was. No, maybe a touch brighter, like metal folded one more time.

Before “Frontier Knight,” that title any adventurer can apply for in Segbaru, Robin was a knight, plain and true. He served in the National Black Briar Knightly Order, a thorned flower on a black banner. He was the former Grand Knight-Commander, a helm beneath many skies. When age crept in, he stepped down, turned west for the frontier, and sought an estate for his family, like a tree seeking gentler soil.

He often tells his road-stories, threads woven with forty years of knightly creed. The children can hear it—no, they can’t miss it—the pride and the burn, like sun on mail.

“As for heroes,” Robin often begins with that breath, like a drum before a march—

In that sigh, a sharp straight thrust slides up under Aurico’s ribs, quick as a swallow through reeds. It slips into Robin’s guard and pricks his defense awake, a sting like cold steel on teeth.

Looks like the two of them planned this for a long while, counting beats to spring the trap.

“Beautiful! That thrust, Barbara!”

Too fast. The bind on Aurico leaves him no time to recover and parry, like a door half-shut. That single heartbeat of wandering thought tips the scales toward defeat.

He fixes on the wooden tip spearing for his chest, a grain-sharp point, and a flood of memories surges, like tide over stones.

Time freezes.

Wind dies; blossoms and blades of grass stop swaying, held like brushstrokes in air. On the garden bench, his wife smiles at husband and children. The world holds its breath, a lake under ice.

After first stepping into the Godspeed Realm, Robin felt loneliness, the kind where the world forgets your name. It feels the same now, a hollow bell in a silent hall. He hates that abandoned taste, like ash on the tongue, yet this awareness let him live through fights with the Demonfolk, a thin bridge over night.

Only... now, this trump card seems to carry only its shadow.

Robin knows he’s no earth-shaking legend. The Godspeed Realm comes to him like a reflex, not a leash he holds. He’s old; to force movement inside it, to fight until the body cracks, is needless in a lesson with children, like drawing blood from a game of tag.

Time crawls, a snail on stone. Since turning fifty, that thought rarely rises like this.

He bears the small ache of loneliness and waits to step out of the Godspeed Realm, letting his daughter’s strike arrive like a raindrop that must fall. His mind drifts with it, like pollen on air.

It seems he’s planted expectations in his children, like seeds without checking the soil.

Aurico doesn’t like sword drills; he loves the flute, a breeze in reeds.

Barbara can’t climb higher arithmetic; she prefers to lean against his side, hear his stories, and mouth the rhythm of verse, like counting waves.

Yet like it or not, the twins keep pace with each other, step for step. They pour extra effort into the subjects they hate, like hauling buckets uphill, just to keep up with the other.

Two twelve-year-olds, studying with a near-anxious fervor, like moths drawn to a lamp. They aren’t born excellent; they force themselves hard as iron.

They want to become another Robin, to stand as knights like their proud father and elder brother, bright as polished shields. Every lesson they take is a stone on that road.

Yes, he does hope they become knights—because that’s the one road he knows, straight and sure. It’s the only path he can guide without detours, like a river he’s sailed a hundred times.

In contrast, he doesn’t know the music road—whether the flute sings well enough here, whether a small troupe would starve like sparrows in winter. He doesn’t know the bard’s road—how harsh the journeys run, or what to do if the songs won’t come, like a dry well.

He wants them to fly by their own will, like cranes over marsh, yet he fears the fall and the break, like wings in storm.

The children’s hope is to obey their father’s expectation, like seedlings bending toward sun.

Robin has wrestled with what to do, but found no answer, like hands clutching smoke. He even spoke with the philosopher boarding at the manor, the children’s tutor in letters, a lantern in the study.

The philosopher, wearing a white coat, gray hair long as river grass, a pale smile like morning fog, didn’t answer at once. He pondered a while, stones sinking in a well, then said:

Let’s leave the children’s education aside. The more we talk, the less it matters; the key is what you want, like the spring that feeds the stream.

No—no, not that. Those are only the question itself, only your brooding—“problem,” not “answer,” like clouds without rain.

I mean your resolve, your decision, your choice—steel on the anvil. What you’re asking likely isn’t about the children at all; it’s a pretext, a mirror to beg my nod.

I won’t say it. I won’t affirm you. I won’t help you choose.

That’s a personal creed, a line drawn like ink on paper.

It’s fine. My reply isn’t decisive, just as the outcome won’t change whether you asked or not. My presence, my words, are stray leaves on the current.

Because, and besides, in the end—I think you’ve already—

The shaved tip of the wooden sword thuds against Robin’s sternum, a drumbeat on bone.

His breath, driven quick by stirred emotion, is cut off at once, like a candle pinched. The old knight misses a breath, and darkness blooms like ink in water.