Maximum Intimidation Knight In a World Full of Mages-Chapter 36 : Getting cozy with each other already!

My gaze landed on a wicker basket beneath the side table. Soft white bundles overflowed the top, looking harmless enough. Cleaning rags, perhaps. Or packing scraps. Or the remnants of cotton someone had tossed out.
Perfect. Trash is merciful. Surely the atelier wouldn’t mind if I took some of his discarded scraps for my perusal.
I crouched and grabbed a fistful of the fluffy material. It felt strangely fine, softer than expected, almost silky. Probably expensive cleaning cloth that had been demoted to the bin. Even better. They’d finally have a noble purpose.
Durand stood placidly as I wrapped his torso and shoulders like a very dangerous infant being swaddled for the first time by someone who had never met a baby. He blinked at me once, and I managed to pin it down and immobilize it without resistance. A small miracle.
Durand’s blinking slowed to a content, marble-smooth stillness. Excellent. Stability achieved. My masterpiece of emergency swaddling complete, I gave the last wrap a firm knightly tug.
Only then did the throbbing in my ribs remind me I was operating on a heroic
10 HP
.
I sighed, dug into my belt pouch, and pulled out a small vial.
A healing potion... for bruised ribs inflicted by a rock-based toddler.
Saint Merin, forgive me.
I uncorked it and downed it in one swallow.
[Minor Healing Potion Consumed: +25 HP]
[HP: 10 → 35]
That was when a voice drifted in from the door.
“Sir Henry?”
I turned.
Anabeth’s head peeked into the chartroom, her copper curls framing a look of puzzled delight—like she’d caught me performing some strange woodland ritual rather than preventing structural apocalypse.
“Are you not going to follow?” she asked, blinking brightly.
“Yes,” I intoned.
She opened the door wider then pressed her arms to her cheeks. “Awwww,” she breathed. “Look at you two! Getting cozy with each other already!”
I stared back at her, dead-eyed.
Durand stared too, but with the flat indifference of a creature who didn’t know what ‘cozy’ meant, only that he
objected to it on principle.
Before I could correct her, Durand shifted in my arms.
It seemed like an innocent wiggle.
Then one cotton-muffled elbow drove itself directly into my ribs.
[Skill Detected: Gentle Affection (Bludgeoning)]
[HP: 35 → 21]
A soft
huhk
escaped me. The kind only knights, martyrs, and men experiencing internal organ rearrangement make.
[Intimidation Aura Amplification Activated]
“HUHK!” I thundered as if I was demonstrating ancient knightly dominance rather than protecting my spleen.
Anabeth clasped her hands earnestly. “Durand! You should listen closely when Sir Henry demonstrates the tenets of knighthood and valor!”
I followed my knightly dominance with smaller yelps of dominance. “Huhk... huhk...”
“Once you two are done, do hurry inside!” Anabeth chimed. “Master Derevin is waiting!” Then she vanished down the corridor.
Once her footsteps faded, I inhaled carefully, then wrapped another layer of cotton around Durand. For good measure. For safety. For the survival of the knighthood.
The moment we stepped into the cramped chartroom, I made sure Durand was wrapped in a strategic, completely sensible layer of cotton. A full cocoon. A tactical softening initiative. I’d found the cotton in a bin beside the door, or at least what I assumed was a bin. At that point, asking questions felt medically inadvisable. My cooldown wasn’t over, and after my earlier rhetorical tragedy, opening my mouth again felt like an invitation for fate to punch me through another wall.
So Durand, now resembling a homicidal dumpling, toddled at my heel with significantly reduced capacity for damage. I would have loved—
loved
—for Anabeth to take responsibility for her own compact stone murderling, especially as she was the one Derevin actually liked at the moment, but she was in the middle of currying his academic favor, so the burden fell to me.
Master Derevin glanced at me only once as I maneuvered the cotton-swaddled menace to a harmless corner. His gaze always had this disapproving quality to it, sharp enough to shave vellum. It would have intimidated me if I wasn’t supposed to be the intimidation incarnate myself.
Then he turned right back to Anabeth without a single acknowledgement that I had just prevented property damage, workplace injury, and possibly a small-scale ink apocalypse.
Yes. I was still fuming from the disrespect.
Then he slid a stack of parchment across the drafting table without so much as a thank-you.
“Right,” he said, already reaching for a brass compass. “Miss Anabeth, you first. Sir Henry, you can observe from back there. Quietly, if possible.” He had asked for our names earlier, and neither of us were willing to give out our surnames.
I stopped two full paces behind Anabeth, as if Derevin had drawn a chalk line on the floor. From that distance the table was an ordered array of instruments: long-armed compasses built like jointed spears, weighted plumb-lines hanging in perfect discipline, rectangular inkstones arranged in regimented rows, vellum squared with marching gridlines, and a revolving prism whose faces turned with the rhythm of a patrol on rotation.
The compass looked familiar enough; Sir Roland had carried one just like it, and he’d boasted he could always find true north with the thing, even in fog thick enough to drown a horse. And he
could
, to his credit. North never escaped him.
Where that north actually
led
, however... that was another matter entirely. Half the time we ended up in someone’s orchard while Roland insisted the mapmaker must’ve been drunk. He could always find north. He just didn’t know what to do with it.
Derevin placed the compass in Anabeth’s palms with the same poised care Roland never bothered with, and I stayed where I was. “Chartmaking,” he began, “is the art of reducing the world without diminishing it.”
“That’s—pretty.” Anabeth gasped.
Pretty... meaningless, though it might have just been because I wasn’t wise enough to understand it.
“In practice,” Derevin said, drawing the compass back and adjusting its hinge, “we begin with three fundamentals: scale, orientation, and anchor.”
Ah. Finally, words with edges on them that a person could grasp.
“Scale,” he continued, placing the compass legs onto the parchment, “is how much of the world you allow onto the page. A chart is a promise: this much distance in the world equals this much ink. Break that promise, and nothing you draw can be trusted.”
Anabeth nodded, bright-eyed.
“Orientation,” he went on, swiveling the compass so it pointed toward the far wall, “is direction. Every chart must declare its north, or the reader becomes lost before they’ve even begun. A good chart makes its north obvious. A great one makes it inevitable.
“Lastly, the anchor,” he said, tapping the parchment gently. “One fixed point. Something you know is true.”
“Like a hilltop?” Anabeth asked.
“Whichever landmark you knew existed in the vicinity: a hilltop, a tower, a river bend that’s existed longer than the kingdom that rules it. Anything whose position you can measure twice and get the same result. Once you mark that anchor, every other bearing has something honest to answer to.”
Derevin set down the compass and reached for a strip of twine marked with evenly spaced knots. Theory, it seemed, had finally run its course.
Good. If we lingered any longer in the land of ‘art’ and ‘truth,’ I might’ve walked straight into the revolving prism just to end my suffering.
“Now,” he said, adjusting the twine between his fingers, “this is where most novices make their first serious mistake.”
Wait. There’s more theory?
“They assume that once an anchor is chosen, the rest of the chart becomes a matter of simple measurement,” he continued. “But of course that isn’t quite true, because the act of choosing an anchor is itself a judgment call, and judgment—however well-intentioned—introduces bias. You see, two chartmakers can stand on the same hill, agree on the same landmark, and still produce wildly different charts depending on what they expect to find beyond it. This was the central dispute during the Fourth Cartographic Revision, which I’m sure you’ve at least heard mentioned.”There were accusations of intellectual dishonesty, deliberate distortion, even quiet acts of sabotage. Entire border conflicts can be traced back to nothing more than incompatible anchor assumptions. So when I say ‘anchor,’” Derevin said, turning back to Anabeth, “I don’t merely mean a point you trust. I mean a point you are willing to defend when everything else begins to contradict it. Now, some schools argue that this makes chartmaking an inherently political act,” Derevin continued. “Others insist it is purely technical, provided the chartmaker is sufficiently disciplined. Personally, I find both positions a little naïve. There’s also the question of recalibration,” Derevin said, lifting the twine again. “If you return to the same anchor years later and it no longer aligns with your previous measurements, is the fault with the world, or with your original assumptions?”
I stared at the table, trying to understand how a single word ‘anchor’ had managed to reproduce itself into something that felt three pages long.
Anabeth made a small, fascinated sound.
I stopped hearing the words and started hearing only the rhythm of them.
Something about traditions. Something about errors compounding over distance. Something about why the Western charts were still wrong, and always would be.
He was still going on about anchors.
At some point, I became aware of the warm and low light on my face, slanting in through the high windows.
For one blissful, disoriented moment, I thought it was dawn. A new day. A merciful reset. I wondered vaguely when I’d fallen asleep and whether this meant Derevin had finally stopped talking.
Then I focused. The light wasn’t rising. It was sinking. It was dusk.
I’d either slept through an entire stretch of daylight on my feet while a man lectured uninterrupted about anchors, or only ten minutes had passed.
[Passive Recovery Detected: +3% Stamina]
Apparently, it was the latter. At least I had managed to conserve my energy through the most meaningless part of the day.
Derevin finally cleared his throat and said to Anabeth, “Now, that was only the abbreviated version, of course, just enough to outline the theoretical disagreements and historical context. There are several supplementary frameworks, and at least three notable exceptions worth discussing, but we can return to those later. For now, let’s put your anchor to use.”
Praise the saints.