WeTried Translations
Translator: Coughing Baby
Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble
Chapter 103
──────
Reunion (4)
"......?"
Brian Burns's head turned toward Brett Lloyd almost against his will.
He couldn't help it. What came out of the man's mouth was enough to make him doubt his own ears.
Get serious?
Did that mean they hadn't been serious until now?
He couldn't understand it. It made no sense by any reasonable standard.
The swordsmanship the two of them had already shown was a level young people simply didn't reach.
No, more than that, they were stronger than him. Stronger than someone who himself was close to Expert rank.
'That would mean... both of them, not even twenty years old, have already reached Expert level.'
And even that wasn't the end of it?
He stood there in a daze for a while before turning his head back toward the sparring ground.
That wasn't all, either.
Kora Murray and every last member of the Murray Merchant Company had drifted closer to the sparring ground to watch.
Judith swept a glance over them all and spoke.
"Better than I expected, Airen."
"I trained hard."
"Yeah, it shows. When you said you were looking for your own sword, I figured you'd just be sitting around meditating the whole time. Guess that wasn't it?"
"Ha ha......"
"You couldn't have learned all this alone. Who taught you?"
"Well......"
Airen Farreira made an awkward face at the question.
Saying he'd learned it alone felt wrong, but saying he'd learned it from all of them felt just as wrong. If he tried to explain it simply, he was pretty sure they'd think he'd lost his mind.
"I'll tell you later."
"Fair enough, that's not what matters right now anyway."
Judith settled back into her stance.
Not a drop of sweat on her, and the grin still hadn't left her face.
Both told him exactly how much room she still had left in reserve.
But Airen had plenty of room too.
He focused his mind and looked at Judith, and Judith stared back at him, her eyes carrying tension, anticipation, and excitement all at once.
The tension in the air now was nothing like what it had been at the start of the match.
In an instant, Judith's outline blurred.
Craaack!
A leap powerful enough to crack the sparring ground floor!
She hadn't jumped into the air.
Low stance, skimming across the ground, she moved like a single streak of light.
Airen didn't miss it.
His sharp, gleaming eyes caught her movement.
A moment later, his massive sword came crashing down.
Pwang!
Judith dodged. Not to the side, not backward.
She stamped her foot again, dashed in fast, and drove her left elbow at Airen's stomach.
A surprise strike flying in along a line far shorter than any sword's reach.
Airen raised his right knee to block it.
Thud!
Because his weight had already shifted back, the distance between them opened in an instant. In that gap, Airen recovered his sword and reset his stance.
But Judith's offensive wasn't finished.
No, it was only just beginning.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Kwang!
Kwaaang!
A string of strikes bursting out one after another, like sparks exploding!
The speed was outrageous.
Most of the people gathered at the sparring ground just stood there dazed, unable to follow what was happening, watching Judith's onslaught with blank expressions.
Among the Murray family's people, only Brian Burns managed to track her movements with his eyes, and even he had no confidence he could block any of it.
Which made it all the more shocking.
That ruthless barrage, the kind even he, with thirty years poured into the sword, couldn't have blocked, and yet the young man matching her strike for strike, blocking every single one of them.
No, more than that. The swordsmanship of this young man named Airen Farreira, answering Judith blow for blow with attacks of his own, shook something deep in Brian Burns.
Just then, a low voice cut in from the side.
"What the hell......"
It was the blue haired young man, Brett Lloyd.
Something about it struck him as strange.
Before he'd agreed to witness the match, he'd been told this man was a companion of Judith and Airen Farreira.
Which meant he should already know exactly how skilled they were.
'And there was what he said earlier, too.'
But the expression on his face as he watched the match was every bit as stunned as Brian Burns's own.
'What's going on with him?'
The question crossed his mind for a moment, but Brian Burns quickly cast it aside.
There was no room to dwell on that. The swordsmanship in front of him was simply too incredible.
Even the moment he'd spent glancing at Brett felt like a waste. He sank himself fully back into the match.
Watching for a long while, he noticed something.
The two of them, man and woman, fought with strikingly similar swordsmanship.
Kwaang!
Bang!
Kwaaang!
A stability and balance that could only come from an extraordinarily trained core.
That was what made the tremendous rotational force possible, and combined with the reactive power kicked back from every clash, it produced tremendous Forceful Strikes.
Of course, there were differences.
Where the blond young man's swordsmanship was blunt and repetitive, the redheaded woman's was far more lively.
Above all, her footwork was free.
She circled around the young man, raining down attacks from every direction, and the sight of it was fierce yet unrestrained, almost like watching a wildfire spread.
But the young man didn't fall.
"......"
"......"
Slower and heavier movements than his opponent's. His greatsword, always half a beat behind, left him teetering on the edge.
But he never crumbled.
On and on it went.
Even in the kind of tension that made onlookers hold their breath, he never lost his composure, never stopped holding his ground.
As it went on, the anxious knot in Brian Burns's chest slowly began to ease.
And at the same time, he felt something close to awe.
He realized, almost instinctively, that the blond young man's swordsmanship had somehow shifted into something else entirely.
'It's like he's wrapped himself in water, dense water, all around him!'
However fierce the flames thrown at it from outside, however violent the explosions, that strange atmosphere seemed like it would sweep every bit of it away.
It really was an unbreakable defense. At the very least, he had no confidence he could have broken through it himself.
He suspected any blade caught in that strange, circling current would be dragged off course, wherever it didn't want to go.
Brian glanced sideways. The young man called Brett seemed to feel it too, his face deadly serious.
'But it feels less like he's shocked by that young man's skill, and more like something else entirely has caught him off guard......'
Just as another question was forming in his mind,
the young man's greatsword, having stayed on the defensive for so long, shot forward like an arrow.
"Hup!"
Judith let out a startled sound.
She'd been about to unleash an even stronger attack to break through his guard.
The thrust that slipped through that opening scrambled her breathing and her balance completely.
In the end, she abandoned her offensive and swept the strike aside with a rough, forceful motion.
Thud!
Fwip!
Then she fell back fast.
Silence settled over the ground once more.
"......"
"......"
Kora Murray and the onlookers, all of them stunned into blankness.
Brian Burns, wearing an expression of pure admiration, having momentarily forgotten his own predicament in all of it.
And Judith and Brett Lloyd, staring at Airen Farreira with the most serious expressions of anyone there.
After a moment, once she'd managed to steady her racing heart, Judith asked.
"That last move you showed me, don't tell me you copied that from me?"
"......I referenced it a lot."
"You're not telling me you just copied it right now, on the spot? No, that can't be it. From the middle onward it was Brett's swordsmanship you were using. And......"
Judith swung her sword out. A clumsy but unmistakable echo of the thrust Airen had shown at the very end.
She asked.
"......this is the Sky Sword, isn't it?"
"......!"
"......!"
Her words sent a shock through most of the people gathered at the sparring ground.
This wasn't just anywhere. They were in Mayos Kingdom, one of the Western Five Kingdoms.
People living here couldn't possibly not know what the words "Sky Sword" meant.
But why would it be brought up now, of all times?
That was when Brett Lloyd, who had stayed quiet until now, cut into their conversation.
"It's certain. That's the Sky Sword."
"Yeah?"
"I only saw it once, during the Final Evaluation, but... there's no way I could forget it. The shock of that moment."
Brett Lloyd closed his eyes.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, the memory from five and a half years ago rose up, sharp and clear.
One of the two swordsmanship styles that had left him utterly crushed.
He let out a slow breath, opened his eyes, and asked Airen Farreira.
"Don't tell me. Did you build your current swordsmanship on the memory of what you saw during the Final Evaluation?"
"......"
Airen's face turned awkward again.
It seemed Brett Lloyd and Judith had gotten the wrong idea.
He wasn't some incredible prodigy who could absorb a swordsmanship style into his own after seeing it just once.
But explaining that meant he'd inevitably have to go into detail about what had happened in the Otherworldly Realm, and Airen didn't want to do that out in the open like this.
In the end, there was only one thing he could really say.
"I'll explain that later too. I can explain all of it."
"Is that so."
"Yeah. It just doesn't feel like the right place to get into it here."
Brett swept a cold glance around the crowd. Everyone whose eyes met his shuddered involuntarily.
It was strange.
The two who had shown off incredible skill were the other pair, and yet Brett, who hadn't done a single thing, felt far more frightening with just that look in his eyes.
The mood shifted, as if he alone had suddenly become the center of everything happening here.
In the middle of it, Brett Lloyd nodded.
"Understood. I'll hear it later."
"Right. Let's just get the result from Sir Brian Burns over there and then......"
"No."
"Huh?"
Airen shot Brett a puzzled look for cutting him off.
They hadn't come here to fight to the finish.
This had all been to show Kora Murray, who'd picked a fight with Judith, exactly what they were capable of.
That was done now, so Airen figured the natural next step was telling the two of them what had happened over the last five years, since that was clearly what they were most curious about.
But that wasn't it.
That mattered too, of course.
But there was something Brett Lloyd considered far more important.
"There's still something you haven't shown us."
"......"
"You know what I mean, right? That technique you showed during the Final Evaluation. Show it to us."
"Oh, right! It'd be a shame not to see that!"
Judith said, wiping away sweat.
She looked thoroughly worked up, no less excited than she'd been when she first proposed the sparring match.
But it was Brett Lloyd radiating the far more intense mood of the two.
"You'll show us, right?"
"......"
On the surface, Brett looked no different than usual.
Even in his plain adventurer's clothes, there was a refined air about him, calm and composed, at peace.
But that wasn't the whole truth.
Airen Farreira, a half fledged Sorcerer as he was, could see into people's hearts more clearly than most.
Especially when he looked into someone's eyes.
And looking into Brett's now, what he saw was......
'Not normal!'
A look in his eyes like he might do something reckless if he wasn't shown the man in the dream's technique.
Airen had never seen Brett like this before, and it left him thoroughly rattled.
Still, separate from that, he didn't really want to turn Brett down either.
'Come to think of it, I haven't used that once since I met Ignet.'
After meeting Ignet Crescentia, Airen had come to understand what fighting spirit truly meant, and that understanding had gone on to help both his mental imagery training and his swordsmanship.
It was a technique hard to use in real combat, one he'd nearly forgotten about, but there was no telling if something had changed in it too.
Trying it out here, right now, didn't seem like such a bad idea.
The only problem was......
"If I use that, the sparring ground's going to get pretty... pretty badly wrecked, I think... is that okay? This isn't just packed dirt, it looks like a fairly expensive floor."
'Damn it! What in the world is he about to do, saying something like that!'
Kora Murray, having heard Airen Farreira's ominous remark, went pale with dread.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried