Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble - Chapter 198

WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble

Chapter 198

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Sword of the Heart (2)

Before he'd killed the Jester Demon, back when he'd first come face to face with his past life self, Karen Winker.

Feeling that man's power seep into his sword, Airen Farreira had realized something was different about himself.

It wasn't that his bones or muscles had changed.

His Aura hadn't suddenly surged either, and no new knowledge of controlling it had seeped into him.

Fragments of his past life memories had drifted through him from time to time, sure, but his past life self had been far behind him in raw sword technique to begin with.

And yet he'd felt overflowing confidence.

And yet he'd felt full of vitality.

Standing before that towering, hideous demon, one that might have lived for who knew how many years, he hadn't felt afraid, not even a little.

Something sturdier than Aura had wrapped itself thickly around him and his sword.

And now.

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

The moment he heard Ignet Crescentia's rough explanation of the Hero's Sword, no, the Heart Sword, Airen became certain that the power he'd felt back then had been exactly that: the goodwill he and the man from his past life shared toward the world, made manifest as tangible energy.

Whooosh!

Airen swung his sword.

Unlike usual, something about the motion felt off. He looked like someone who had never trained with a sword in his life.

If he wanted to exaggerate it a little more, the movement was clumsy enough to belong to someone who'd never even moved his own body properly.

It made sense, really.

Just as someone using their muscles for the first time couldn't move with any real precision.

Just as someone feeling Aura for the first time couldn't smoothly apply the six concepts of Aura control.

Airen swinging the Heart Sword right now was bound to look just as lacking, just as unpolished.

But nobody watching could laugh at what they saw.

Especially not those who had reached Expert rank, and even more so those strong enough to have climbed to Master.

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

"...Unbelievable."

He'd learned the Hero's Sword.

And he'd learned it just from hearing the concept explained.

Sevion Brooks had suspected as much, to some degree.

Watching the young man through the first trial and everything after, he'd come to believe this was someone whose whole life had been built from goodwill toward the world.

He'd even been certain that if anyone alive could actually learn the Hero's Sword, it would be this young man, first among all others.

But awakening the power the instant he heard it explained...

Whoosh

Whooosh

Whooooosh!

While everyone around him still couldn't hide their shock, Airen kept swinging his sword.

It was hard. Coordinating muscle and Aura while also tuning the Heart Sword demanded a level of focus that was almost impossible to imagine.

The technical shortfall was probably part of the problem too. There had to be tips and tricks for not wasting mental energy that he simply didn't know yet.

Having thought this far, Airen stopped swinging.

He looked at Ignet with a burning gaze and said.

"Let's move to the next part."

"N-next? What next?!"

He flinched.

Startled, Airen turned around. Amira Shelton, Calven's Vice Commander, stood there, her face lit up with obvious excitement.

She wasn't alone either.

One by one, people who had only now come back to their senses turned sharp, wide eyes on Airen.

Their eyes carried undisguised jealousy, a hollow kind of frustration, and a touch of anger they couldn't quite hide.

'...Did I mess up somehow?'

He felt a little embarrassed.

He clearly hadn't been paying attention to the people around him, and he'd gotten ahead of himself.

He thought back on the time he'd spent conversing with his past life self in dreams, constantly reading that man's will, learning Sorcery from Lulu, training the power of his heart day and night without rest.

Unlike him, the others hadn't had any of that.

They probably had no preparation at all, not even familiarity with the concepts Ignet had just described.

He scratched his head and pulled back the foot he'd already stepped forward with.

Then he waited quietly among the others for Ignet's next words.

But something unexpected happened.

"Airen, come here."

"Yes?"

"It'll be better to move at your own pace, separately."

"But..."

Airen glanced around. He felt the sharp stares land on him again.

The looks seemed to say, "Because of you, the rest of us got shoved aside!" Illia Lindsay's eyes were among them.

Fortunately, there was at least one relief. Someone else could teach the basic concepts of the Hero's Sword.

"Then, allow me to explain the basic concepts."

Georgu Poive.

Vice Commander of the Holy Kingdom's Black Knight Order, a Sword Master in his own right, and a powerhouse no one on the continent could afford to dismiss.

Nobody voiced a single complaint about him stepping up.

Except that.

Hmmmmm...

"...Even I can't handle this well enough to use it in real combat. The heart is, in the end, only fuel for action. Turning that into tangible energy takes just as much effort, and just as much talent, as moving the body itself."

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

"And weaving it into swordsmanship, not just holding onto it but actually building it into technique, takes even greater talent. Unfortunately, I lacked the talent for it. Maybe I lacked the effort too. Most likely, it was both."

People fell silent, listening to Georgu's words.

There wasn't much else they could do. Here was someone who'd reached Sword Master before even turning forty, telling them he lacked talent. Telling them he'd lacked effort.

So what did that make the rest of them, who'd barely scraped their way up to Expert?

A tangled knot of feelings rose up in their throats, but in the end, none of them said a word.

Thinking about it, it made sense.

If the Hero's Sword were something anyone could learn with ease, it wouldn't be called the Hero's Sword at all.

The swordsmen forced their emotions down. Even Sevion Brooks, a fellow Sword Master, did the same.

"First, let's start by strongly picturing the state of mind opposed to a demon's demonic aura. Protective Will."

"Whoa, Georgu's a good talker."

"Right? He's good at this."

Anya and Lulu watched the scene unfold like it had nothing to do with them.

Airen and Ignet were the same. But their attention drifted away from that group soon enough.

The Black Knight Commander smiled and looked at Airen.

"Shall we begin too, then?"

"Please."

"Good. But don't go thinking it'll be easy just because you managed to form the Heart Sword right away."

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

"Coordinating the heart, the body, and Aura all at once, and turning it into a usable swordsmanship... even for me, it wasn't easy."

"I understand."

Airen nodded.

He did understand. He'd known that already.

It wasn't only the heart. Building his body, mastering Aura, none of it had come easily on the way here.

But that didn't mean he had any thought of giving up.

If anything, Airen carried an even bigger ambition than Ignet imagined.

'The Five Elements Divine Technique.'

If he could add in the spirit power he'd learned from the great warrior Karakum too...

'The range of choices I have to protect the world will only grow wider.'

Hmmmm...!

A faint tremor stirred. It came from Airen's heart.

Not something he'd forced out to awaken the Hero's Sword, but goodwill toward the world he'd carried inside him all along.

Ignet noticed it and let out a short, dry laugh.

But she didn't look at him the way the others did, with envy in her eyes.

'I've already gained plenty myself.'

"Good. Let's begin."

With that, Ignet started a private training session meant for one person alone. Her lecture and Georgu's filled the whole dungeon with noise.

And in the middle of it all.

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

The silver haired swordswoman committed every word of Georgu's teaching to memory without missing a beat, her eyes fixed on both a friend and an enemy at once.

A faint tremor rang out in her heart too.

* * *

Three weeks passed.

Life inside the barrier had gone on long enough to drive anyone mad, but things were still holding up well.

Anya's fiery errand-running had turned into Sorcery gold coins, which turned back into emergency rations and small necessities. Material abundance brought a certain peace of mind.

Still, there was one person who remained gloomy through it all.

Sir Sevion Brooks, the finest knight of Phalanke.

He sat leaning against the cave's stone wall, watching two young swordsmen train hard with their blades.

That was because he, along with everyone else, had given up trying to learn Ignet's swordsmanship.

'Teaching something like that, and learning it, none of it makes any sense.'

Turning the will to protect someone into tangible energy?

It sounded simple enough to say, but the delicacy it took to actually pull it off went past anything he could imagine.

Just as an Expert swordsman couldn't imitate a Master's Aura control, he'd run into a wall too massive to climb.

Even that much, though, counted as decent progress.

Turning the resentment and fury he'd felt during the civil war into the opposite, feelings of peace and stability, Sevion Brooks had managed, with Ignet and Georgu's help, to somehow give shape to a Heart Sword.

But that was as far as he got.

The instant he tried to layer the Heart Sword over an Aura Sword, the thought that he couldn't take a single step forward took over his entire body.

'...That was never a realm I belonged in.'

That was exactly why Sevion had given up on the Hero's Sword cleanly, without lingering.

Needless to say, the other swordsmen, who had even less talent than he did, didn't stand a chance either.

Aside from Amira Shelton, who was still out there thrashing around with her sword like a maniac, the real owners of the Hero's Sword were the two swordsmen receiving direct instruction from Ignet.

The surprising part was that Illia's progress was faster than Airen's, even though he'd been the first to awaken the sword.

'How is she managing that so easily?'

Illia Lindsay's progress was fast enough to make anyone think that.

Turning Protective Will, goodwill toward the world, into tangible energy wasn't the end of it.

Just as control mattered more than simply feeling Aura, controlling the Heart Sword mattered far more than just forming it.

And in that respect, Illia showed overwhelming talent. Even at a glance, her growth was easily twice as fast as Airen's.

Of course...

"You idiot. Can't even manage that much properly?"

"Hff, hff... if it's not working, I'll just keep at it until it does."

The most surprising thing of all was Ignet Crescentia herself, the one teaching the Hero's Sword.

Since she didn't bother hiding her own sword at all, everyone in the cave could pick up scraps of her teaching just by listening in.

Which was how they could tell. How difficult it was to put into words a swordsmanship technique so abstract, so vague by nature, at the highest level imaginable.

How deep her understanding of her own sword actually ran.

"Heh."

Sevion Brooks laughed. Thinking back on old memories, his face went hot with embarrassment.

To think he'd once imagined he could beat Ignet in a match, not knowing his place at all.

It really had been like a puppy barking at a tiger, no idea what it was picking a fight with.

'Don't dwell on it.'

Sevion Brooks closed his eyes. He steadied his mind through meditation, trying to push down the inferiority creeping over him.

It belonged to a different world entirely, anyway. Watching it only strained his neck, and it did him no good at all.

But deep in the old swordsman's heart, some attachment to Ignet's sword still lingered.

As things stood, it was an ordinary feeling, nothing dangerous about it, but one wrong step could easily twist it into something dark.

Still, it never got the chance to turn into anything like that.

Clang!

Claaang!

"Huh?"

"That sound..."

"What? What's going on?"

The expedition members, each absorbed in their own work, jumped to their feet in surprise. Every head turned toward the source of the sound.

Even as they turned, the sound kept ringing out. And it kept growing louder.

Claaaang!

Clang!

Claaaaang!

Crack, craaack...

Kwaaang!

The sound of something being struck, hard.

And the sound of the resulting cracks spreading.

Color rushed back into people's faces. The Black Knight Order members looked brightest of all.

They already knew, without needing to think twice, exactly who was breaking through the barrier of darkness.

Ignet was the same. Her injuries still hadn't healed, but she held herself as straight and steady as she could, waiting for the barrier to fall.

Airen and Illia, still under instruction, and Lulu, who had drifted over to their side at some point, all watched with serious expressions.

Then, the darkness gave way.

Kwaaaaang!

A passage opened with a violent roar.

Brilliant light poured through the massive opening. It wasn't ordinary sunlight. It was holy magic, cast by high priests blessed by the divine.

But it wasn't them that caught Airen's eye.

Pure white armor, spotless, without a speck of dust on it.

The moment he saw the old paladin, his white beard somehow lending him even greater dignity, Airen felt his whole body tense with something close to alarm.

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

Illia felt the same.

But it wasn't only him that drew attention.

Ten paladins approached a few steps behind, and she instinctively understood something about them.

Every one of them stood above her level, Sword Masters who had held that rank for a very long time.

'Eleven Sword Masters? Abilius may be the continent's greatest power, but how could there be so many of them gathered here...'

Illia Lindsay's thoughts spun in circles. Airen Farreira's mind was no different.

But a moment later, a feeling stronger than that began to rise in his chest.

"Ignet Crescentia. You're alive."

"Forgive me for showing you such an unsightly state, Commander."

Figuring out the white-bearded man's identity mattered.

But what mattered more was that not a single one of the eleven Sword Masters had spared even a glance at Airen.