Chapter 37: Chapter 37

No one knew how long the people of Horais had been obsessed with the selective breeding of horses.

From the distant past when the Arman Empire existed, when the mighty magical nation of the Altoan Empire stood strong, or perhaps even further back than that.

The inhabitants of the plains had strived endlessly to make these four-legged beasts, their companions, somehow stronger.

Their efforts, which had begun even before the creation of written text, had at some point reached a realm beyond ordinary horses.

Unicorns, bicorns, kelpies, pegasi…

For hundreds of years, they struggled to absorb their power by crossbreeding any monster that bore even a slight resemblance to a horse.

Five hundred years ago, during the schism between the New Faith and the Old Faith, their efforts finally bore fruit when they borrowed the power of magic in exchange for supporting the New Faith.

The Mount Horais warhorse.

Named directly after their country out of overwhelming pride, this beautiful horse was stronger, faster, wiser, and sturdier than any other breed in the world.

On top of that, it was ferocious enough to trample and bite to death even most monsters.

Naturally, such a formidable creature was bound to have at least one flaw.

The Horais warhorse was infamous for not easily obeying its master’s commands.

No, for the most part, it did not even acknowledge anyone as its “master” in the first place.

It merely regarded them as servants who fed it delicious fodder.

The horse standing in front of Shan right now was no exception.

Looking down on him with an intensely arrogant and haughty gaze, as if asking what kind of greenhorn he was…

“From now on, your name is Arwin.”

Regardless of its attitude, Shan tightly hugged its neck, finally giving a horse a name for the first time.

After all, this creature was on a completely different level from ordinary horses that could be bought and sold at any time.

He felt a little sorry for the black horse he had ridden for nearly a year without a name, but…

“Whoa!”

Snap! As Shan hurriedly jerked his head back, the horse snapped its teeth right where his head had been a split second ago.

The beast neighed as if disappointed, then turned its head away, pretending nothing had happened.

Considering the bite force of a horse, if he had failed to dodge, his skull likely would have been crushed, killing him on the spot.

“…Wait, what on earth?”

“Well, now that the award presentation is finished, I shall take my leave.”

As the Marquis quickly departed after watching that scene, Roden hurriedly took the horse’s reins from the Marquis’s servant.

Fortunately, the beast seemed to have no particular affection for its former master, handing over quietly without resistance.

“It tried to bite my head off right out of nowhere! You call this the best warhorse!?”

“Taming a picky creature is also part of a first-rate knight’s skill. Well, can’t you just take your time getting close to it…?”

Seeing Shan express a sense of betrayal like a boy rejected by his first love, Roden gave an awkward chuckle and tried to soothe him.

After exchanging greetings with several other knights (where Sir Lug chattered the most here as well) the two returned to the mansion, leading Arwin and the black horse used in the match.

The horse Shan originally rode possessed enough courage not to cower before most monsters, yet the Horais warhorse easily intimidated even that horse into submission.

“I’ll be busy taming this guy for a while.”

“We still have some time before carrying out the princess’s request anyway. Though I don’t know if you can manage it in time. Do you feel confident?”

“For some reason, it doesn’t seem like it’ll be that easy.”

Shan answered with a soft sigh at Roden’s question.

Shan’s thought was proven to be an underestimation as soon as they returned.

Taming ‘Arwin’ was not merely difficult; it was terribly hard to the point of being nearly impossible.

First of all, the moment she arrived, she began throwing a rampage as if disliking everything from the stable facilities to the fodder.

Every time she raised and slammed down her large hooves, the trough was crushed, and when she rammed it with her head, the partition collapsed with a loud snap.

Even the outer wall built of bricks could not withstand her hind kicks and ended up with a hole blasted through it.

Seeing this, the other horses in the stable whinnied in terror and wet themselves.

“Wait, what on earth is…”

“What kind of crazy horse is this?!”

The stable master and servants who had come to help also wore bewildered expressions as they watched the scene.

At this point, was this even a horse, or practically some kind of monster?

Quite maliciously, she was not even rampaging out of wild excitement.

Rather, with an expression so calm it appeared almost cold, she wrecked place after place as if merely trying to display her foul temper, casting mockingly cold glanced around.

“M-my stable!”

Even Callion, whose face had lit up with a broad smile at the news of Shan’s victory, clutched his face in despair upon seeing the sight.

“I wondered why a Horais warhorse was put up as a prize for the jousting tournament, but now I understand. It was a troublesome thing to deal with from the start…”

Watching this from a short distance away, Roden muttered in a lamenting tone.

Come to think of it, hadn’t that Marquis also looked relieved to be rid of a nuisance, even if it was a waste?

Clearly, he had planned all along to pass off an uncontrollable horse as a generous prize.

If a knight recruited by the princes had won instead of an Altoan, he probably would have provided an expert capable of handling it.

Watching from behind, the servants whispered among themselves.

“What should we do about this? Setting aside the problem that taming it won’t just take a day or two, I have no idea where to put the horses to sleep tonight.”

“At least it’s a relief that it’s summer. It would have been truly terrible if it were winter…”

While everyone was plunged into bewilderment like that, Shan stood still watching the rampaging beast, then gave an instruction to the stable master beside him.

“Please prepare a saddle.”

“A saddle… sir?”

“Yeah.”

It was hard to understand what he intended to use it for in this situation, but the stable master obediently complied with the order.

After all, since Roden brought him, this Altoan boy had been treated practically as the youngest brother of the household, and now he had become an even more exalted figure.

Arwin, who had been rampaging about, stopped and stared at Shan intently as he approached carrying the saddle.

She held an attitude as if boasting, ‘Well, how’s that? I’m not an easy horse. Got it?’

Quietly locking eyes with her, Shan spoke in a calm tone.

“Right, impressive. How about the rest of us go outside and do this? It’s way too narrow for you in here anyway, isn’t it?”

Even though a horse could not understand human speech, Shan muttered so as he placed the saddle on her back and took hold of the reins.

Surprisingly, Arwin quietly complied and began walking as she was led along.

Everyone else simply stared blankly as one person and one horse walked out the main gate side by side.

Roden hastily followed behind Shan and spoke.

“Wait, how did you tame that wild beast in a single stroke!?”

“I didn’t tame her. She just agreed to my proposal.”

“Proposal? What proposal?”

“A match? Hmm, it’s a bit hard to explain in words… You know how Master said it back when he talked about how to take good care of horses?”

Among the things Sir Darkal taught during combat general education was how to take good care of horses.

He imparted all sorts of methods, saying that a good warhorse was like a companion to a knight and should be cared for with utmost devotion… though he himself had bought and rode any random horse, claiming he was retired.

One of those methods was precisely to quietly lock eyes with the horse.

Did he say a good knight could instinctively know and empathize with what his horse wanted through that alone?

Though he could not yet call her his horse, Shan felt their thoughts communicate as he locked eyes with her.

She felt disgusted at being moved around like an object, and at having to obey these small, weyue humans.

Yet the only reason she allowed herself to be dragged along was that she lacked the confidence to escape this massive city built by humans.

In that situation, Shan offered her a challenge in a manner that was neither servile nor disrespectful, and she accepted it.

Considering two creatures unable to speak each other’s language communicated solely through slight gestures and gazes, it could be seen as a new epoch of interspecies communication.

“Wait, what… No matter if it’s a Horais warhorse, for a mere horse to think that far?”

“Not strictly like that, but that kind of feeling. A feeling.”

As the two walked while conversing, the residents of the capital gasped and opened their eyes wide at the sight.

It was inevitable, given that a warhorse with a metallic sheen flowing across its entire body had appeared right in the middle of the main avenue.

“Wait, isn’t that…?”

“It’s Sir Shan! The champion of the jousting tournament!”

“Is that horse the championship prize? From Horais? Indeed, it wasn’t an empty boast that it’s the most beautiful horse in the world.”

“By the way, where is everyone heading?”

Having finally passed through the city gates, Shan took a look at the wide road stretching out before him, then turned back toward Roden and the others behind him.

“It might take a few days, so go back and rest first.”

“A few days? What are you going to do?”

“That’s not for me to decide, but for this one.”

The moment Shan lightly leaped up onto Arwin along with his answer, she burst forward as if she had been waiting, demonstrating explosive leg strength.

It was less like a living creature charging and more like an arrow loosed after being pulled to its limit.

Everyone gaped as they watched Shan’s figure disappear into a distant dot in an instant.

*

‘Fast!’

The moment Arwin began to run, that was the only thought filling Shan’s head.

She was truly, terribly fast.

An overwhelming sense of speed, as if the entire world were being sucked backward…

The wind whipping before his eyes made them sting, and it was not even easy to clearly identify surrounding objects.

He could guarantee that compared to her sprint, the running of ordinary horses was nothing more than a casual stroll.

He could tell that the horse of Feonil he had seen in the past was definitely not something like a Horais warhorse.

‘If I fall off here, I’ll almost certainly die.’

Along with that thought, Arwin, who was running powerfully, leaped high into the air as if realizing that speed alone could not shake Shan off.

In an instant, his eye level shifted as his body escaped the pull of gravity and floated upward.

“Ugh…”

What followed was a dizzying drop.

Thump! With a heavy sound, his lower back throbbed as he settled back onto the saddle.

If he had not absorbed the shock as much as possible, he felt he might have slightly sprained it.

‘Fierce, isn’t she…’

Afterwards, Arwin sprinted wildly down the road stretching outside the walls of Hasra, then veered off path to race recklessly across fields, mountains, and forests alike.

Meanwhile, she gave no thought to whether her beautiful body suffered scratches from branches.

Without even caring about Shan clinging to her, she acted as if driven solely by a desire to take in as much of the outside scenery as possible and tread upon it with her own hooves.

Shan felt he understood her feelings.

For he had been the same back when he first left Willow Village to run and play freely across mountains and fields.

That feeling of pure bliss, derived simply from being able to freely enjoy the endlessly stretching world to his heart’s content.

Born and raised in the land of Pendia, thousands of kilometers away from its native home, this beast likely had never felt such a sense of liberation until now.

Though he had not heard anything about her upbringing, he could sense it instinctively.

Perhaps the reason they could connect just by locking eyes was that the two of them were alike.

Shan pressed his body, which felt on the verge of falling at any moment, tightly against Arwin’s back and hugged her neck with both hands.

Had he not done so, his body, jolted with every single leap, would have been flung off long ago.

After rampaging like that for minutes, tens of minutes, Arwin suddenly plunged into a nearby river.

It was the lower reached of the river flowing through the city of Hasra.

‘Inhale!’

Just before submerging, Shan inhaled as much air as possible and tightly closed his mouth.

Despite not breathing, a bizarre stench wafted from the water penetrating his nostrils.

It was probably due to waste dumped by mages, including those from the Magic Society, while concocting all kinds of elixirs.

Or perhaps it was the foul stench of all sorts of waste discharged through the capital’s sewers.

As several minutes passed while submerged in the water, his lungs burned with pain.

He wanted to breathe right away, but doing so would mean he could no longer hold out.

Shan held out by tightly covering his mouth with the hand not gripping the saddle.

‘Please, just a little more…’

Fortunately, just when he thought he could endure no longer, his head popped above the water.

Arwin had been unable to endure it and surfaced first.

Her lungs were large to match her massive frame, but naturally, the amount of air she needed to consume was equally vast.

“Keo-heok, hak, ka-hak.”

As Shan greedily sucked in and expelled air, he realized that Arwin was also gasping, her lungs repeatedly expanding and contracting to their limit, and he burst into laughter even while out of breath.

Perhaps feeling that the laughter was mocking her, Arwin flared up and began running across the land once more.

Naturally, no matter how close to the capital it was, Pendia was still Pendia.

Miscellaneous monsters occasionally popped out to block the path, but they were battered into bloody pastes by Arwin’s attacks without Shan even needing to step in.

Seeing water ghosts, nightmare creatures to residents living along rivers and coasts, bitten to death or crushed underfoot by a horse as they fled was truly a sight to behold.

Their contest of endurance, stubborn to the extreme, continued late into the night until the dawn broke.

By the time Arwin grew too exhausted to rampage any further, Shan was also in a state of near complete exhaustion.

The sight of both of them turned white from the foamy sweat produced by the horse’s body was amusing.

‘Sleepy…’

Before drifting off to sleep, Shan took off A Thousand Shapes, which he wore in the shape of a bracelet, lengthened it, rolled it into a rope, and bound his body tightly to the saddle.

Since it was a metal rope made of True Silver, it would never snap under ordinary circumstances.

“Good night.”

Arwin looked at Shan as if dumbfounded, then soon slumped her head while standing and tried to sleep.

What brought Shan back to consciousness was Arwin, who had woken up first, shaking her body to throw him off.

His body, flung out while defenseless, fortunately came to a stop thanks to the True Silver rope connected to the saddle.

Clinging back onto her back, Shan reverted A Thousand Shapes to the shape of a bracelet.

Sleeping was one thing, but relying on it in other situations was cheating.

Now Arwin not only leaped up and down to throw Shan off, but also launched direct attacks by rolling on the ground or ramming her body against walls.

Every time, Shan endured by spinning 360 degrees atop Arwin’s body with his signature agile movements or clinging to the side opposite the direction of impact.

Naturally, in the midst of all that, there was no time to relieve himself.

He could hold back the big stuff, but the small stuff proved too difficult, so Shan relieved his bladder while clinging to her back.

As a wet and warm sensation passed beneath the saddle, he felt her recoil in disgust.

“If you don’t like it, just surrender!”

At his threatening words, Arwin snorted as if to say ‘not a chance’ and leaped high.

Yet even as she rampaged in all directions, submerged underwater, beat monsters to death with her forehooves or bit them along the way, or flipped her body over, Shan did not yield.

After another day (a full cycle of day and night) had passed like that, the exhausted Arwin finally buckled her knees and collapsed onto the dirt ground.

It took Shan several minutes to realize that fact.

Because he, too, was half out of his mind from remaining atop a madly rampaging horse while starving for nearly three days straight.

“…You lay down?”

At Shan’s question, the horse responded with a snort, as if lacking even the strength to reply.

Unlike her previous scoffs or angry roared, it was a sound of resignation whose meaning anyone could understand.

“Ha, haha…”

Unable to contain the joy welling up in his chest, Shan burst into laughter and tumbled right off the saddle, rolling onto the ground.

Despite finally throwing Shan off, Arwin merely looked down at him quietly instead of running away.

In the horse’s bluish-gray eyes lay a feeling of respect instead of her former arrogance.

“I won, right? Admit defeat man to man.”

After saying so, a sudden thought struck Shan; he got up, gently lifted Arwin’s tail, and looked at her groin.

“Oh, you were a girl. Fine, admit defeat man to woman!”

When he slapped her rump while saying so, Arwin replied with a snort, wearing a slightly pathetic expression.

*

After subduing Arwin, Shan rode her around the area until he found a nearby village, where he bought and ate bread and milk.

The sensation of food seeping into his body after three days was truly exquisite.

“Khee…”

The villagers looked at one another with confused expressions, wondering who on earth this mysterious stranger was.

The clothes he wore looked entirely like rags, but looking closely, the fabric itself was far from bad, luxurious, even, and the horse looked insanely magnificent at a glance.

Could he be some noble’s child who ran away from home?

If it were an ordinary rural village, it would not have been strange for them to kill him outright and rob him, but this was a civilized village not very far from the capital of Hasra.

Meaning they possessed enough wisdom and conscience to know they should not harm a boy who clearly did not seem to be of ordinary status.

It was truly a fortunate thing.

Of course, for the village side, not for Shan.

“Thank you for the meal. Here you go.”

“Oh my, noble sir, you are generous in your giving as well! Thank you!”

Finishing his feast, Shan patted his full belly and handed over a few gold coins he had on him to the village chief.

This included not only his own meal but also the immense amount of fodder Arwin had eaten.

Of course, even so, it was probably somewhat more expensive than the regular price, but what did it matter to pay a little extra when she ate so well?

She seemed pleased with the meal made by mixing high-grade hay packed with beans, oats, and rye, stuffing it greedily into her mouth even while wearing a sullen expression.

Having filled their bellies so heartily, the pair of man and horse departed from the village and ran toward the northeast.

Experiencing an organic run of mutual consideration for the first time, rather than merely clinging on, Shan marvelled once more.

‘So comfortable…’

Despite a speed far faster than other horses, the top of Arwin’s saddle was immensely comfortable.

Was it due to her unique gait? As long as he matched the rhythm accurately, it placed almost no strain on his waist and thighs, even less than walking leisurely.

Considering how terrible it had been clinging to her over the past few days, it was absurd to the point of being ridiculous.

Repeating the cycle of running until exhausted and then resting while walking briefly, Shan and Arwin covered the distance they had sprinted over the past three days in just two hours, returning to Hasra.

Considering it would have taken two days on foot under normal circumstances, it was truly an absurd mobility.

“Wait, you…”

“I’m back, Roden. A bit late, right?”

Roden, who had stayed awake all night for three days straight at the Weavers mansion, gaped in utter disbelief at the sight of Shan and Arwin returning on friendly terms.