WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble

Chapter 160

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The Great Chieftain's Treasure (1)

The battle against Karakum, the greatest warrior of the orcs, had come to an end.

That wasn't the only thing that had ended. The bandits who'd threatened the merchants had also been dealt with, every last one of them.

The Durkali warriors judged them beyond redemption and cut them down without exception, then gathered the bodies in one place and burned them.

The smell of charring flesh mixed with the reek of blood, an odor foul enough to turn the stomach.

Airen Farreira watched the scene without a word.

".........."

His first kill.

He hadn't killed a human, but orcs and humans alike were sentient beings, and that distinction didn't really matter in the end.

Not that he regretted it.

There might have been a better choice available, but at least in that moment, he hadn't had the luxury to agonize over it.

What he could actually do was think it through beforehand, so that if he ever faced the same situation again, he'd be able to make a better call.

And to keep training his swordsmanship harder, so he'd never end up on the losing end of a fight like that again.

Those were the only two things that mattered.

'He wasn't a Master, but he felt strong enough to rival one. That was dangerous.'

Airen thought of the orc bandit leader, then lowered his gaze to the black cat curled against his chest.

'Is Lulu really just a cat?'

He knew Lulu had poured tremendous effort into growing stronger, and that the transformation had come from somewhere in that process.

But he'd never expected the transformed shape to have anything to do with a dragon.

He'd figured she'd turn into some bigger feline predator, or maybe a full human form.

Granted, it had occurred to him that it might just be some character out of a fairy tale or novel Lulu liked to read...

'Maybe it has something to do with Lulu's past.'

He couldn't rule that out entirely.

It wasn't as if Lulu had never shared stories from before.

Unfortunately, the memories this adorable little Sorcerer had of her own past were far from whole.

Whole stretches were simply gone, and even the parts she could recall, she always described as hazy, like looking through fog.

While Airen turned that thought over, Lulu, who'd been fast asleep, cracked her eyes open.

Then she spoke.

"Airen........."

"Yeah, Lulu."

"I did good, right? Way better than last time, right?"

"Last time?"

"When we met Ignet. That mean woman."

"Ah........."

Ignet Crescentia.

Not a pleasant meeting by any stretch, but she'd given him a spark he needed.

Because of that, Airen didn't hold too poor an impression of her.

But for Lulu, who'd probably felt nothing but helplessness back then, it clearly hadn't been the same.

Seeing that she'd carried that memory with her the whole time left him feeling both a quiet ache and a warmth.

Airen smiled faintly and stroked Lulu's head.

"Yeah. You did great. Really reassuring. Thank you."

"Hehe... ah, but I'm so sleepy. Transforming is really tiring........."

"It's fine. Sleep more."

"There won't be any more fights, right? Then I'll sleep a little longer. I might not wake up for a few days, so don't worry too much."

"Got it. Rest well."

Lulu nodded, climbed up Airen's shoulder, and slipped into his backpack.

Airen, feeling the warmth against his back, was still smiling when Brett Lloyd walked over and said,

"Let's get some sleep too, even if it's not much. One of Karakum's soldiers came by and said we'll probably head out pretty early."

"Mm."

Airen looked up at the sky.

Still dark, but with June closing in, morning would come fast.

Given that, going to sleep sooner rather than later seemed wise.

He asked, "How are the merchants?"

"No injuries, obviously, and some of Durkali's forces are going to escort them the rest of the way to their destination."

"That's good."

"Yeah, don't worry about that side. If anything..."

We're the ones who should be worrying.

Airen nodded at the rest of what Brett hadn't said aloud.

He was right.

Things were calm now, but only a short while ago they'd all had weapons drawn on Karakum, Durkali's greatest warrior.

Countless orcs had watched the whole thing unfold.

And that wasn't even the end of it.

The reason Airen's group had come all this way.

Setting foot here as Kubharu's escort was, in itself, the single biggest source of unease for the orcs.

'Kubharu was, in human terms, Durkali's crown prince.'

Not anymore, of course.

These days, the great warrior Karakum had stepped down from the chieftain's seat, and his second son, Tarakhan, ruled in his place.

There had once been a rift between those who supported Kubharu and those who supported Tarakhan, but surely that wasn't still the case now.

'Kubharu said he left Durkali seventeen years ago...'

But power settling into place didn't mean anyone would welcome back the old crown prince with open arms.

Just look at human kingdoms.

Whenever a throne changed hands, people who posed no threat whatsoever still got killed off, simply for having a claim to succession. It still happened all the time.

Once they reached Durkali proper, Airen figured, far more orc eyes would be on them than what they felt now.

And Kubharu knew this better than anyone.

Yet even knowing all that, the reason he'd come back to his homeland was clear.

'...He wanted to see his family, even if it meant risking everything else.'

As Airen thought of Kubharu, the faces of his own family back in Hale Kingdom rose in his mind.

His father, his mother, his younger brother Kiril, and even his birth mother, who was no longer in this world.

Bringing each beloved face to mind one by one, Airen slowly drifted off to sleep, waking a few hours later.

Once again, the man hadn't appeared in his dreams.

'...Once we meet Kubharu's Master, that problem will probably sort itself out too.'

Surrounded by Durkali warriors bustling about, Airen got himself ready to move as well.

* * *

A few days later, Airen Farreira's group arrived safely at the Durkali tribe's fortress city.

Calling it a "tribe" almost undersold it. The place rivaled any major city in the human world.

And this wasn't even the whole of it. Five surrounding fortresses also fell under Durkali's territory, which meant the group had effectively stepped straight into the kingdom's internal politics.

The one saving grace was that Illia Lindsay's and Brett Lloyd's standing carried enough weight that even the orcs couldn't dismiss them lightly.

The influence of high nobility from Adan Kingdom, one of the Western Five Kingdoms, and from Gerbera Kingdom, a major power in the continent's center, wasn't remotely comparable to anything from Hale Kingdom.

Judith, being a commoner, went without saying.

"Must be nice being a noble."

Of course, even she wasn't someone to be brushed off these days.

She was, after all, an official trainee of the continent's foremost fencing hall.

Still, given how on edge the high-ranking Durkali warriors were bound to be, especially those on Tarakhan's mother's side, Judith's and Airen's standing did feel a bit thin by comparison.

'The one who really matters, of course... is Tarakhan.'

Tarakhan, chief of the Durkali tribe.

A remarkable figure who'd reached Master rank at the young age of thirty. According to Kubharu, he had a gentle, warm-hearted temperament.

Airen's group didn't buy it, though. Brett was the reason.

"Word is he's the roughest of the rough, even among orcs. We should all stay on our toes."

Honestly, Brett's version felt a lot more believable than Kubharu's.

Karakum alone had radiated a terrifying presence, after all.

If Tarakhan had inherited even a fraction of that temperament and raw strength, it only made sense to lean toward the grimmer prediction.

So when the four of them were summoned by Tarakhan late on the night they arrived in Durkali, their faces were tight with nerves.

But nothing they'd feared came to pass.

"Ha, welcome. I'm Tarakhan."

He stood a full head taller than Kubharu, an enormous frame.

But his expression was the spitting image of his brother's, warm and easy in a way that put people at ease.

Even the mood in the room wasn't heavy at all.

They'd braced for a grim-faced escort of countless subordinates surrounding them, but the audience chamber held only Tarakhan.

'Wait, is this even an audience chamber?'

The space was too modest for that, and what had been laid out was fairly simple.

One reasonably fine table, cups matched to their number, a dozen or so bottles that looked like hard liquor, and a few small dishes.

'A dozen bottles of liquor...'

Judith's expression darkened.

What on earth was he thinking, laying out that many bottles?

Surely he didn't mean to drink through all of it?

While she was caught up in that worry, Tarakhan, smiling, spoke to her.

"No need to worry. If it's too much to drink, I won't press you."

"Huh? Ah? Ah........."

"Ah, my apologies. I chose a place like this specifically so I wouldn't burden my saviors, and here I am giving off the feeling that I'm forcing drinks that don't suit everyone........."

Airen's group exchanged glances.

For how tense they'd all been, the tribal chief Tarakhan's manner of greeting them, so painstakingly courteous, almost made them wonder if the excess politeness was some kind of act.

But it wasn't.

Tarakhan looked around at all of them, then rose from his seat.

With a serious expression, he bowed at the waist and said,

"I want to express my sincere thanks, for bringing my brother home."

"........."

"I say this not as chief Tarakhan, but as Kubharu, my brother's, younger brother. So there's no need to feel burdened by it."

A moment later, when Tarakhan lifted his head, his eyes glistened faintly with moisture.

Somewhat overcome, he began to tell them about his father, his brother, and himself.

Before Tarakhan was born, Kubharu had already been named crown prince.

Born to the second wife, but only because the first wife had gone so many years without conceiving that everyone had given up hope of a child from her.

But ten years after Kubharu's birth, a second child was suddenly born to the first wife.

That was when the chaos began.

Kubharu, though born of a lesser wife, had already been named crown prince, and one faction supported him. The other backed Tarakhan, who had his mother's powerful standing within the tribe behind him.

The conflict between the two sides only grew worse over time, and even Karakum wavered between them, torn, while wasted years slipped by.

And that was exactly why Kubharu had left the tribe to live as a wandering fortune-teller.

"A regrettable thing, all of it."

Kubharu had always hated conflict, and had never craved power to begin with.

To him, the chieftain's seat, the very thing stirring up strife with his own brother, was worth nothing at all. So from the moment Tarakhan showed a talent for combat, Kubharu had deliberately drifted from the path to the throne, throwing himself into fortune-telling, something with no bearing on succession, and made a show of staying uninvolved.

But even that hadn't been enough to stop the fighting, and in the end he'd had no choice but to make a decision. Once he did, Durkali quickly settled back into stability, just as he'd intended.

Tarakhan's faction wore satisfied smiles, and even some on Kubharu's side felt relief that an unnecessary civil war had been avoided.

In that current of near-universal satisfaction, only Karakum, Tarakhan, and Kubharu, who'd left the tribe, were left to carry the grief of it.

"And then my brother came back and said this to me."

"........."

"That he doesn't regret the choice he made back then. That it was the best he could do at the time. But..."

Tarakhan paused for a moment before continuing.

"He said that now, with all the experience he's gained and all the longing he's carried, he felt it was wrong to keep drifting on the outside. He said he knows our father, and he himself, and I, his younger brother, all three of us love and cherish each other. And that letting difficult circumstances scare him into running away forever wasn't right. That's what he told me."

"........."

"And he said the reason he came to that realization was entirely thanks to all of you."

Kubharu wasn't in the room, but he genuinely felt that way.

Brett Lloyd, who never gave up even after crushing setbacks and always came back to the fencing hall.

Judith, who struggled with something similar yet always rose again and pushed forward.

Airen, who never lost hope no matter how hard things got and kept pressing on, and Illia Lindsay, who was overcoming her own painful past because of the faith he placed in her.

Having heard all of it, Tarakhan could only see the four people in front of him as saviors, plain and simple.

"Well... things will get a bit more complicated than before, I'm sure. Plenty of loudmouths will have plenty to say. But that's fine. I'd rather live now, trying to find a better path even knowing all that, than spend more years apart out of fear of it. This is far more enjoyable."

Having finished speaking, his expression full of sincerity, Tarakhan tipped back an entire bottle of hard liquor in one go.

Judith was watching him with an exhausted look on her face when,

"On that note, I'd like to give you all, my saviors, some kind of gift..."

Judith's face, which had looked somewhat gloomier than the others, suddenly brightened with interest.

She didn't know much about the wider world, but even she could tell that whatever Tarakhan meant to give wouldn't be ordinary.

Say what you want, the Durkali tribe was the largest power among all the orc clans.

A gift from the chief of a place like that wasn't going to be anything ordinary.

As if to prove the thought right, the orc before them continued speaking, his expression brimming with confidence.

His gaze was fixed steadily on Brett Lloyd and Judith.

"As it happens, I have something that would suit the two of you perfectly."

"........."

"Well then, shall we go take a look? Ah, you can all look forward to it too. I know you're all people of high standing, but the Durkali chieftain's treasure vault holds its own reputation across the continent."

Tarakhan sprang up from his seat.

Despite having downed roughly ten bottles of liquor by himself, he looked perfectly fine.

For the record, Brett had drunk the rest, and he too looked completely unaffected.

Not that any of that mattered right now.

While the four of them, especially Brett and Judith, couldn't hide the anticipation blooming on their faces,

"Me too, give me one too........."

Lulu, poking just her head out of Airen Farreira's backpack, added her own two cents.

Tarakhan laughed heartily and nodded without hesitation.

"Of course. Feel free to pick out whatever you like too."

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