"Damn it, I refuse to accept this!"

"Are you still going on about that?"

Cavalry Commander Pensler must not have had much else to do, because he came around once a day to whine at me. I’d never imagined he’d cling to me this persistently, dragging up his tournament loss every single time.

After being unhorsed by my surprise attack in the first round of the third match, the cavalry commander had fallen for the exact same tactic again. He knew what had taken him down, and he’d still walked right into it. Michael had predicted as much—they were men who only knew how to charge, so they’d fall for the same trick twice. Even the Viscount had agreed.

Surely not, even so.

But it actually happened.

The cavalry commander had charged in exactly the same way as the first round, and I’d ambushed him again. The only difference was that, expecting the ambush this time, he didn’t go down as easily.

So I engaged him one-on-one to keep him from attacking my allies, while our cavalry, with the numerical advantage, took down the lancers who had followed the commander through before circling back to join me.

Pressing the advantage in numbers, we battered the cavalry commander’s helmet with our blunted weapons until we finally unhorsed him. Payback felt good. There was definitely some personal satisfaction behind it, but the cavalry commander was too dazed to notice. He was only enraged at how easily he’d lost.

It was an unavoidable limitation of the Beren Lance Cavalry. Heavy cavalry can’t do much besides charge. Light cavalry existed to support and supplement them.

The flexibility of their tactics was worlds apart.

Since the heavy cavalry’s fundamental tactic was to repeatedly charge and break up the enemy’s lines, the cavalry commander had stuck to the destructive charge he was best at. That’s why he’d lost.

"Could you leave already? Why do you keep bothering me, whining about old news?"

"Hmph, leave? Now that you’re a Knight Commander, you think you’re my equal?"

He was so far removed from propriety that even when I, the lower-ranking party, talked back rudely, he didn’t bat an eye. That somehow made him even worse. I’d gotten extremely busy after the tournament, and his visits couldn’t have been more unwelcome.

"Commander. The candidates have been assembled in the parade ground."

"Vice Commander Fiel—more importantly, get this pest out of here."

"Haha, how am I supposed to throw out the cavalry commander?"

After the tournament, the formation of the knightly order kicked into full gear.

[Gale Knights]

The provisional name had been finalized as the official one.

Not only had the Altringen royal family lost the position of commander of their own direct knightly order to the Military Department, but as the Department’s influence kept growing, the alarmed ministers had tried to wrest personnel authority away from the War Minister’s family to keep them in check.

So the issue led to sharp confrontations at the Grand Council, but when the Grand Duke sided with the Military Department, personnel authority finally came to me. The Administrative and Finance Departments were left staring at the ceiling.

The whole concept from the start had been a mobile force the Grand Duke established because he valued my command ability and wanted to support the borders. If political factions turned it into a hollow shell, there would be no reason for the order to exist.

My father-in-law warned me to stay alert because political enemies could keep maneuvering against me.

So the first thing I did was appoint Fiel as Vice Commander.

I trusted Fiel’s ability, but it was also a way to bring the Steinhof family into the fold.

I’d been worried there might be lingering hard feelings after the tournament, but Fiel accepted readily. The match between the War Minister’s family and Steinhof in the finals had been a hard-fought affair in its own right.

Michael and the Viscount had been encouraged that we’d beaten the Beren Lance Cavalry with less damage and more easily than expected. The Viscount suggested that since Steinhof was a similar type, we could simply tweak the same tactic, but I objected. Fiel knew me too well.

Fiel had watched my tactical flexibility up close. Steinhof had traditionally stuck to a head-on approach, just like the Beren Lance Cavalry. But ever since Fiel had taken the lead, while keeping that head-on approach as the foundation, they had broadened their tactical range. The way they had isolated the Terese knights who tried to lure them into one-on-one duels was proof of that.

So the strategy we chose for the finals was the head-on approach. Fiel would have expected us to deploy the same flexible tactics I’d used against the Beren Lance Cavalry, so we turned that assumption against him beautifully.

The moment Steinhof split into two wings, every one of us swung over to the left flank, surrounded them with our numerical advantage, and attacked relentlessly. I held off the right wing long enough to prevent them from coming to their allies’ aid.

As a result, we took the first round easily.

But the second round was tough.

Head-on against head-on, and Fiel and I clashed for the very first time. Fiel had wanted to spar with me even before the war, but with my schedule packed with campaign preparations, it had never happened. We hadn’t met in the individual tournament either, so our clash in the team event meant a great deal to both of us.

Fiel was genuinely strong.

We landed our lances on each other and nearly went down together, but both barely caught our balance and went at it with our blunted swords. Even pulling out every technique I knew, I couldn’t easily bring Fiel down.

But that was also part of the strategy I’d intended.

The problem was that Steinhof’s command structure was concentrated entirely on Fiel.

The lack of supporting commanders to back him up was their one weakness. On our side, even without me, we had Michael and Viscount Loewenbert. So while I tied Fiel up and bought time, Michael and the Viscount worked together to take down the Steinhof knights one after another.

Their command ability might have been a step below Fiel’s, but the individual skill of the Steinhof knights was still formidable, and we nearly lost when the Viscount got unhorsed. While Fiel’s attention was divided, I teamed up with one of our riders to bring him down two-on-one, then went to rescue Michael, finally clinching the win.

The team competition title at the tournament went to the War Minister’s family.

I gobbled up 1,500 points and 100 prestige.

Family Prestige also reached 2,100 points (Recognition 43%, Governance 43%).

German Swordsmanship Manual Stage 4 (36/100)

Horsemanship Manual Stage 2 (78/100)

Mounted Combat Manual Stage 2 (82/100)

Stage 5 was supposed to be the peak, so why wouldn’t these go up?

It was true that my proficiency had jumped considerably, but unfortunately I hadn’t been able to break through to the next stage.

"Why’d you cut the men I recommended? They’ve got skill."

"I’ll grant you their skill, but their character is rotten. Character. Anyone like you, I filter right out."

"What matters on the battlefield is who fights well, not character! You really are a madman."

Being called a madman by a madman stung even more.

One of the reasons the cavalry commander kept showing up to bother me was the tournament loss, but the bigger reason was that I’d cut every single cavalryman he’d recommended. Sending me nothing but trash was a talent in its own right.

How bad were they that I’d rejected every last one?

"There are refugees being attacked. What do you do?"

"I kill the attackers and plunder the refugees."

That was the kind of answer most of them gave. The bigger issue was that they saw nothing wrong with war crimes. Unfortunately, the caliber of medieval soldiers was generally about this low.

This was exactly why I needed to filter out the ones with negative dispositions.

So I used the commonly known spirit of chivalry as a benchmark.

"There is a woman asking you for help. What do you do?"

"After I help her, I rape her."

"You son of a bitch! Get out!"

"Why? She owed me one for helping!"

That’s what I got when I asked about the spirit of chivalry.

So the order I led was going to be an ideal one that honored chivalry, protected the weak, and obeyed the Commander’s orders absolutely. With most of the applicants being like that, all the more reason.

And absolute obedience was the most important thing. Whether they were villains or saints, the worst kind were the ones who ignored orders and broke ranks. The bad ones broke ranks to plunder, and the good ones broke ranks to save people.

Of course, men who jumped in to save people were better than the lunatics for whom plundering came first. So my primary goal was to select those with positive dispositions and train them intensively into men who would follow orders. Skill comes naturally with training anyway.

"Already 60 of them gathered? Looks like even more than that, doesn’t it?"

"It’s because applicants keep pouring in, drawn by your reputation, Commander."

Fiel was looking at me with a gaze of sheer respect.

But I was the one who had to weed out every kind of villain from among them.

Constantly running the Manager Scouter was wearing me out, but selecting the right people was important enough that I had no intention of cutting corners. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel.

Out of a roster of 110, I’d picked 55 so far.

Just barely halfway.

Even with all the pickiness, applicants kept flooding in.

The reason such a huge number had gathered was that, not knowing any better, I hadn’t restricted recruitment to within Breisburg. I had wanted to find capable men from across the duchy. My father-in-law had wondered if there was really any need to go that far, but he’d accepted my plan.

I must have been out of my mind.