Literature / Knight's & Magic

Following a car accident, a mecha otaku is reincarnated into another world as nobleman Ernesti Echevalier, nicknamed Eru. In this world exist huge humanoid weapons known as Silhouette Knights, whose task is to defend humanity from demon beasts — ravenous monsters that, unless stopped, devour everything in sight. Dreaming of piloting the Silhouette Knights, Eru, with childhood friends Archid Walter and Adeltrud Walter, aims to become a Knight Runner. Helping the matter are the memories of his past life, which inspire him to improve his own Knight in ways people from his own world could never imagine.

Knight's & Magic is an ongoing Web Serial Novel by Hisago Amazake-no which was first released on the self-publishing website Shousetsuka ni Narou in October 2010. It later began publication under Shufunotomo's Hero Bunko imprint in 2013 as a series of Light Novels, with artist Kurogin being put in charge with illustrations.

A manga adaptation by Takuji Kato started in April 15, 2016 on Square Enix's Young Gangan magazine. An anime adaptation started on July 2, 2017, directed by Yusuke Yamamoto and the animation studio 8-Bit. It is available for legal streaming with subtitles on Crunchyroll here, and with an English Dub on Funimation here. The Simuldub started airing on July 30th, 2017. The Light Novel was licensed in English by J-Novel Club on July 1, 2023.

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Knights & Magic provides examples of the following tropes:

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: In the anime, the movements of the Knights and the behemoth have this special brand of fluidity and weightlessness that makes it obvious they're CG.
• Academy of Adventure: Laihiala Academy, where piloting giant mecha and fighting magical monsters is part of the curriculum.
• The Ace:
  • Kurata, the past life of Eru, excelled at his programming job.
  • Edgar is possibly the best pilot at the entire academy, and definitely the best in his year. During his mock battle against Helvi, he manages to knock away a fast-moving close-range magic projectile with a sword swing, and he gives her a hard time despite Helvi having a superior machine.
  • Helvi herself is no slouch either. There's a good reason she was selected to be the test runner for the new Knight model.
• Adaptation Distillation: The anime adaptation compresses large chunks of its paper predecessors into the first episode, dropping several subplots and moving others around to keep the most important events while limiting the number of time skips.
• Anchored Attack Stance: The cape-like structures on the Goldleo and Jilbatiga come equipped with hidden spikes that extend into the ground as anchors before they fire their Blast Howling attack.
• Anti-Air:
  • Eru invents the Missile Javelin to deal with the Levitate Ships used by the Zaloudek Empire. They are launched via Backpack Cannon.
  • Horacio Collazo invents a wyvern-shaped Levitate Ship that projects electricity as its own anti-air defense (which are effective against the before-mentioned Missile Javelin), along with Silhouette Knights embedded on it as turrets.
• Badass Adorable: Eru, Chid, and Ady. They look cute, but they can fight as well as adult soldiers.
• Badass Bookworm: Eru has memorized everything he has read about Silhouette Knights and is one of the world's best pilots.
• Best Served Cold: The Zaloudek Empire stole some of Fremmevira Kingdom's tech, killing a large amount of civilians and soldiers in the process. A few years later, their soldiers get absolutely destroyed by the same people they stole their technology from when the Fremmeviran forces help repel their invasion of another country.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Eru, Chid, and Ady are all good and decent people. Provoke them at your peril.
• Blood Knight: Eru is this on the battlefield, and all his allies know it.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Eru and Horacio's conflict is deeply personal, but the ideals they're fighting over have nothing to do with morality as we'd understand it. Eru considers it a moral imperative that only a mech can destroy another mech, while Horacio wants the freedom to cruise the skies in a giant battleship, and Eru takes great offense at the way Horacio is using Silhouette Knights as glorified turrets for Vyver, pledging to "free them". The driving question of the war is whether future conflicts will be dominated by Silhouette Knights or Levitate Ships.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The final shot of the anime has Ernesti in his mech saluting the viewer before flying off into the sunset.
• Chaste Hero: Eru isn't interested in girls and is more interested in riding mechs. Partly due to his age, but then again he was a huge mecha otaku in his past life.
• Child Prodigy: Eru has extensive knowledge and understanding of the inner workings of Silhouette Knights, as well as the ability to perform very advanced magic. This is due to his extensive study of both of them, as well as his memories of his past life as a mecha otaku and programmer.
• Child Soldiers: Some of the members of the Silver Phoenix Knights are technically this; unlike most examples, they don't seem to get too angsty about it.
• Color-Coded Characters: In the anime, the four major character each have their own distinct colour pattern:
  • Blue and white for Eru
  • Dark purple for Ady
  • Brown and black for Archid
  • Dark red for Batson
• Compressed Adaptation: Chapters 1-5 of the manga are condensed into Episode 1 of the anime, skipping over much of Eru's childhood and rushing him straight into school.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The first version of Telestale is stronger, faster and more heavily-armed than the previous Knights, but its mana consumption is ridiculous, to the point it runs out of fuel after just a few minutes of fighting. In fact, most of the early upgrades that Eru's team makes have this flaw.
• Dirty Coward: One of the Knights Runners-in-training fighting the behemoth, flees, despite sitting inside a Humongous Mecha, claiming he can't do anything, despite being one of the only two soldiers left on the scene — to be fair though, he just saw his friend being burned to a crisp while still inside his Knight.
• Eagle Squadron: The Silver Phoenix Knights rename themselves the Silver Phoenix Merchant Association to rescue Princess Eleanora of Kuscheperca, and then to fight alongside The Remnant of Kuscheperca's knights.
• Explosive Overclocking: Eru is able to take out The Behemoth with a single Silhouette Knight by tearing out the control cylinders that he's too short to operate anyway, wrapping the cabling inside them around his gun rods and operating the mech with full manual controls via his vast magical knowledge, effectively bypassing the mech's limiters in the process and making it much faster and stronger than any other currently existing SK, but doing so completely wrecks its internal mechanisms by the time he finishes killing The Behemoth.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: Erus' personal Silhouette Knight Ikaruga is designed with this aesthetic in-mind, sporting a more Eastern-Stylized armor and crested helmet that makes it look more like a Shogun.
• Foreboding Fleeing Flock: The Behemoth causes birds and smaller Demon Beasts to flee from its presence. The latter even run into and past students who were in the forest for training. Eru realizes this trope after dealing with the smaller Demon Beasts.
• Functional Magic: Combine symbols — each of which has its separate meaning — into a script in your head and channel it through a magic crystal at the end of your Magic Staff. It's similar enough to programming that Eru has little to no problem mastering advanced spells.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Several characters in the series, unsurprisingly.
• Geometric Magic: Spells are visualized as patterns of geometric motifs.
• The Good King: Most of the monarchies are ruled by kind and wise families with the marked exception of the Zaloudek Empire.
• Grand Theft Prototype: Agents from the empire of Zaloudek steal some of Eru's first-generation prototypes so their country can have a technological edge over the countries they wish to conquer.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: Eru designs a grappling hook accessory for the Silhouette Gears.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: Names in the fantasy world are in a random mix of different European languages, with Finnish being particularly prominent. Sometimes with hilarious results if you know the language — e.g. the name of the capital city Kankkunen means hangover.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: While unofficially Eru is credited in defeating a powerful beast by himself, the Kingdom gives a cover story that is was the Knights who defeated it not only to save their own reputation, since it will make them a laughing stock if the people learn a 12-year-old defeated the beast, but also because the existence of Eru and his talents might get him some unwanted attention.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: Ooh boy, there's quite a bit in this series but the biggest one is between Eru and Horacio with Doroteo cutting in at times.
• Heroic Bastard: The Walter siblings are the illegitimate children of Marquis Serrati. While their older half-sister Stefania cares about them, their older half-brother Baltsar hates them very much and has an inferiority complex which he fears Archid might become better than him and made heir of the Serrati family.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode of the anime is "Something" & "Something".
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: The reaction to most of the females over Eru. He weathers it with truly stoic demeanor.
• Impossibly Graceful Giant: Eru's new-design Silhouette Knights are even more agile than humans, due to their magical control system.
• Impossibly-Low Neckline: In the anime, Helvi is wearing some sort of corset that by all rights should be sliding right off her, given it has no armstrips and starts halfway down her cleavage. YMMV, as corsets usually start not much higher and correctly made and fitted ones don't need shoulder straps. On the other hand, that is quite low for the culture we see...
• Improvised Lightning Rod: In the anime, the Behemoth was defeated by Ernesti using an electric attack on a sword impaled in its eye, which travels through its nerves and to the brain.
• Irony: Baltsar believes his younger half-siblings enrolled at Knight School so they can get legitimized by their father and become members of the Serrati family, when in truth the Walter siblings have no such intentions and just want to live their own lives and only enroll due to their friend Eru.
• Magic Staff: Humans need to use rods with catalyst crystals at the end of them to cast spells. One of Eru's earlier improvements is a rod that's shaped like a gun and thus can fire magic more accurately.
• Magitek: Silhouette Knights are made using alchemy, which is like science, but can only be controlled by using magic.
• Meaningful Rename: Helvi's Knight, Trandorkis, is renamed to Telestale following its refit with new weapons.
• A Mech by Any Other Name: Silhouette Knight. Ernesti sometimes calls them "robots" anyway, much to everyone else's confusion,
• Medieval Stasis: Before Ernesti, the state of Silhouette Knight advancement was largely stationary, as most people felt that there really wasn't anything to improve about it. Much is made about entirely new designs for the Knights, as most advancements were really just small upgrades to the standard design than the paradigm-shifting innovations Ernesti spearheads.
• Mighty Glacier: Dwarves are described as this — they're twice as strong as humans, but very slow.
• Military Academy: Laihiala Academy — as well as the entire city surrounding it — exists for the sole purpose of training the future Knight Runners.
• Mini-Mecha: The Silhouette Gear is more of an oversized set of Power Armour, though still three metres tall.
• Moral Myopia: When the Zaloudek Empire is introduced, the citizens and soldiers are shown, for the most part, to be truly abhorrent warlords, and the royal family doubly so. Should their targets actually fight back successfully, they treat it as an unforgivable insult. It segues into Revenge Myopia when the crown prince decides to kill himself rather than surrender after losing a battle he started, and his sister, the crown princess, can think of nothing but vengeance, despite the fact that said crown prince had already murdered a king, taken that king's daughter captive, and the crown princess herself demanded he marry the captive princess against her will.
• More Expendable Than You: When a behemoth attacks the wall where he's stationed, the commander orders Stephan to carry a message back to HQ. He then apologizes to the rest of his men, since Stephan is an only son, and the rest of the team are about to get their tickets punched in a Last Stand.
• Ms. Fanservice: Great Elder Kitley is first seen mostly-asleep wearing a kind of gauzy and completely transparent fabric that does nothing to conceal her body.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The most notable improvement the new Knight model introduces is adding two sub-arms on the back that hold magic staves, allowing Telestale to fire even as it's using its sword and shield.
• Mundane Solution: Some of Eru's less grandiose accomplishments include these: to prevent the Grand Theft Prototype described above from happening again, he comes up with the fantasy equivalent of ignition keys which also double as small daggers, and his solution to the requirement of being able to use magic naturally in order to create his own custom Ether Furnaces is to jury-rig his own magic-based welding equipment to carve the necessary runes onto them since he's unable to channel mana into his fingers and write them the traditional way the Elvs have been doing for centuries.
• Not Quite Flight: Eru "flies" by using some sort of propulsion spell through the two gun-rods hanging from his hips. Addy is also seen using one of them for the same purpose to quickly fly to Eru when she's happy to see him again.
• Obviously Evil: When the Zaloudek introduce their "advanced" Silhouette Knight models fashioned after stealing Ernesti's designs, murdering quite a few Femerian soldiers and civilians in the process, not only are the Knights Red and Black and Evil All Over, but they're called "Tyrants," clearly advertising that the Zaloudek are not good people.
• Older Than They Look: Eru looks younger due to his short stature and baby face.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The dwarves in the Light Novel are pretty much the classic version — short, stout craftsmen who come from the mountains and do a lot of mining, with men who pride themselves on their beards. By contrast, the anime gives them a darker skin tone and eschews the classic dwarf beard for something less likely to get entangled in machinery.
• Our Wyverns Are Different: The Vyver is a colossal wyvern-shaped battleship which serves as the the Zaloudek Kingdom's secret weapon.
• Power Crystal: The "catalysts", which enable people to use magic, are crystals. Some creatures, like dragons, have them in their bodies and can use magic naturally, while humans have to use rods with crystals set in them to cast spells.
• Powered Armor: Silhouette Gears, which are man-sized versions of the Silhouette Knights and are wearable like most examples of this trope.
• Punny Name: The NTR Labs.^note National Technological Robotics Laboratory
• Reincarnate in Another World: The main character starts out as a mecha otaku from our world who dies and reincarnates as Eru.
• Required Secondary Powers: The series is all about digging into the structural and engineering processes, to the point that building and upgrading Knights is as challenging, if not more so, than the fighting.
  • More physical strength? Great! Too bad it rips the arm apart because the current technology can't handle that much tension. Fixed the "Ripping itself apart if it so much as flexes" problem? Wonderful! You still need to fuel it, though, and because the current cores weren't made for this level of sustained output, the Knights ran out of power obscenely quickly. Fixed the power output problem by adding more cores? You still need space for that, not to mention weight. The first prototypes were so bulky that they could barely move.
  • The Tzendlog is a centaur-shaped Knight designed for running down other Knights. To start, it needs two pilots because of how complex it is, and the power requirements are so great that it needs a second Magus Engine, greatly increasing its operational costs.
  • The mass produced models Gaizka add another little required secondary power- ease of piloting. In order for something not to be a one-off Super Prototype, like most of the things Eru makes, people have to be able to pilot them. Eru's test pilots confirm that while Eru's designs are great, they are really hard to control, and that very few people could operate them. Gaizka's models, though, are extremely simplified so that they maintain the improvements from reverse-engineering Eru's Knights while being able to be piloted by a wider number of people.
• Rightful King Returns: The ideology of the Zaloudek Empire is that they are the successor state to Phada-abahden, the kingdom that once ruled over a united West, and therefore have the right to reconquer the land again.
• Running Gag: People mistaking Eru for a girl, Ady hugging Eru and doing other things because he's cute, and people's reactions to Eru's designs, which go against that world's common sense.
• Science Fantasy: A world with high fantasy where knights and mages pilot technologically advanced mechas. Believe it.
• Seen It All: After having to deal with Ernesti's brilliant madness, the Silver Phoenix' reaction to a flying ship (something that had never been seen before in their world) is a glorified shrug.
• Shooting Gallery: The academy has a shooting gallery where students use their magic staffs to launch fireballs at wooden targets, with varying accuracy. Once Eru steps up with his gun-shaped staff, he shoots with pinpoint accuracy and obliterates the wooden targets.
• Shout-Out:
  • The basic premise of the series, a world of Magi Tech Humongous Mecha whose technology is revolutionized by the arrival of a young genius from our world, is remarkably similar to Aura Battler Dunbine.
  • In the anime, when the Ikaruga reveals its greatsword, it strikes the same pose as the Strike Gundam does when using the Sword Striker Pack's Schwert Gewehr in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED.
  • In the English dub of the anime, Ernesti often tells the Silver Phoenix Knights to "roll out" before heading into battle, referencing Optimus Prime's catchphrase from Transformers: Generation 1.
  • In the final episode, Doroteo pulls off a smaller sized version of a Colony Drop using the Cool Ship with Ernesti stopping it, just like Amuro did when stopping Axis. Ernesti even quotes Amuro that the Ikaruga "isn't just for show".
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: In contrast to the pragmatic The Saga of Tanya the Evil or the satirical Re:Zero, the world relies on a more idealistic outlook and how reincarnation into another world is technically awesome.
• Square-Cube Law: The behemoth's enormous frame is explained away by it using powerful spells just to keep itself from being crushed by its own mass.
• Technician vs. Performer: Horacio and Ernesti have this dynamic going, as exemplified by a spiritual argument they have in the climax. Horacio's opinion is that you don't need aesthetics on a weapon, you just need more power, while Ernesti's code demands elegance and a design philosophy rather than simply making a device with the best operating statistics.
  • Gaizka vs. Ernesti earlier on, when they have an exhibition match for the king. Ernesti's mechs are one Super Prototype after another, and individually they are a match for the Knights that Gaizka brings to the table (themselves mass-produced versions of earlier Knight designs Ernesti submitted). However, both admit that while Ernesti's knights did win the exhibition, being stronger and faster, the difference wasn't enough to overcome that the mass production models were overall better built and that had it gone on for much longer, Gaizka's knights would have won (due to the high Mana expenditure of Ernesti's knights). Further, it's noted that Ernesti's creations, while having high output and amazing performance, are really hard to use. One of the improvements that Gaizka's workers did over Ernesti's models was to make it so that people who can't code magic in their heads can use them easily.
• Testing Range Mishap:
  • Eru's testing for a crossbow Arm Cannon for the Silhouette Gear shows that the arrow not only easily breaks the wooden targets, but continues flying and destroying the wall behind it.
  • Eru's testing for the flight pack for his Silhouette Knight results in a sonic boom felt by the nearby village along with him crashing deep into a forest.
• Time Skip: Early on, the story skips a few years every once in a while to bring Eru from the point he first learns about Silhouette Knights to the point where he joins the Knight Runner academy.
• True Companions: Eru and all his friends.
• Tyop on the Cover: The title is intended to be Knights & Magic.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Combined with Entitled Bastard. The Zaloudek Empire, especially its Copper Fang Knights, don't care that the frontier country of Fremvaria keeps the Demon Beasts at bay at considerable risk and loss of life. They pointedly and constantly scheme to steal Fremvaria's best technology for themselves, even going so far as to use "lure powder", a chemical known to both attract and enrage Demon Beasts into a murderous frenzy, to act as distractions and active weapons of murder on the soldiers and civilians alike while claiming they're more "worthy" to have the best models than the very people building, designing, and using them to defend humanity as a whole.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Not a person, but most of Eru's early Knight Runner designs. Because of their raw power output they not only sacrifice operational length but also fine motor control, forcing their pilots into this fighting style. Skilled pilots who use them regularly (like Edgar, Dietrich and Helvi) can overcome this with practice, but only to a certain extent.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Eru seems to be more adult than many of the adults around him, due to having an old soul.
• The Workaholic: When Eru has an idea and wants to make it reality, he won't stop until it's complete or until someone tells him to rest. This also applies to his past life as Kurata, who had to deal with short deadlines at work.