WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble

Chapter 6

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Those Who Watch (3)

Early morning, dew still clinging to every corner of the grounds. The Farreira territory's soldiers filed into the training ground with tired faces.

They'd have given anything for a few more hours under warm blankets, but there was no helping it.

At the very least, they had to show up for the mandatory training day that came once a week.

The soldiers yawned and stretched as they shuffled into ranks.

"What are you doing over there? Move it!"

"Useless, the lot of you! You couldn't take down a single goblin like this!"

A knight barked at the soldiers, harsh and unforgiving.

But the truth was, he found the whole business just as tedious as his men did.

He'd hit forty without noticing. The fire of youth, the drive, even most of his hair, all of it was gone now. He did this because it was his job, nothing more.

'Damn it, my head's still pounding from last night's drinking.'

Since he wasn't doing this for love of the work, irritation came easily.

The knight scanned the area, looking for something to vent his temper on, and his eyes landed on an old man watching the training from a distance. He snapped at him.

"You there!"

"Me?"

"Yes, you! What exactly are you doing? You can't just let outsiders watch soldiers train!"

"Well, it's not like this is some special tactical drill, is it? Just conditioning, from what I can see."

"But still..."

"I already got the lord's permission, so what's the problem? I'll just watch quietly, don't mind me, go on with your work."

"...You there! Back row! Straighten up!"

Unable to find a comeback, the knight took his frustration out on an innocent target. The soldier who got called out flinched and swung his sword with extra force.

Watching from the corner of the training ground, the old man, the wandering knight Bran Sommerville, clicked his tongue.

'No good at all. Every last one of them's got their head in the wrong place.'

Past seventy now, most of his old presence faded, Bran Sommerville had once stood his ground against the terrifying demonkin without flinching an inch, forty years ago.

To a man like that, this territory's soldiers, slack as they were, discipline gone to rot, couldn't look anything but pathetic.

Not that this was unique to House Farreira.

Over the past several years, nearly every territory he'd passed through kept soldiers of about the same caliber.

'It's the peace, is what it is. They've gotten soft. This generation, I swear...'

Bran Sommerville shook his head.

Not that peace itself was the problem.

The ease that came from it put smiles on people's faces, and let an old man like him get treated like a war hero wherever he went.

That was the very reason he could stay as a guest at the Farreira manor.

But he had to keep something in mind.

Enjoying this peace, savoring it for as long as possible, took constant effort.

'Not that saying so gets me anything but called an old crank.'

The aging wandering knight smiled, wry and tired. He turned his head toward the entrance of the training ground.

Right then, a boy with bright golden hair came into view.

Bran caught sight of the boy's pale skin and frowned faintly.

'So that's the deadbeat young lord everyone's been talking about.'

He'd only spent a single day in Farreira territory, but the old man already knew most of the rumors surrounding Airen.

That was inevitable. A lifetime of wandering had made him fluent in just about every kind of story there was to hear.

He even knew that the boy had been humiliated by the son of a neighboring house, and that it was only because of that humiliation that he'd suddenly thrown himself into sword training.

It was almost funny.

Bran Sommerville didn't stop at thinking it. He let the laugh out loud.

"Heh, heh heh."

"What's that old geezer's problem now?"

The knight overseeing the soldiers muttered, scowling. The old man heard it and ignored it.

He kept watching as the deadbeat young lord drew his wooden sword and walked off to a corner.

Certainly not with any expectation in his eyes.

'A boy who doesn't take the sword seriously at all.'

There was no need to treat swordsmanship as some sacred calling. If everyone did, no one outside a proper knightly house would ever be allowed to pick one up in the first place.

But treating it too lightly was worse.

At the very least, starting out of spite, after a lifetime of never caring, just because someone said something you didn't want to hear, that wasn't something he could look kindly on.

'Today makes fifteen days, was it? He's put in real effort, I'll give him that.'

The point where his strength gave out would come soon enough. Maybe he'd even quit today.

That was how it usually went with people who started 'out of spite.'

At first they burned hot enough to feel like they could do anything, and then the moment the firewood ran out, they went cold just as fast, as if none of it had ever happened.

And a fire once out rarely lit again.

Bran had watched more greenhorns than he could count give up and vanish like that.

Even among the ones people had once called prodigies, geniuses, talents overflowing.

Which was why he could say it with confidence.

That boy wasn't going to make it.

Not because he'd started later than everyone else, but because of the shallow, tainted reason he'd picked up the sword in the first place.

"Hm, well, might as well watch anyway..."

Despite all the grumbling running through his head, Bran Sommerville kept his eyes trained closely on the deadbeat young lord.

Mostly because he had nothing better to do.

An old man on the edge of retirement couldn't very well swing a sword alongside the young ones. And the soldiers doing their conditioning drills didn't look particularly entertaining either.

So the old man settled into a chair under a shade tree and began watching the golden-haired boy.

He watched when the soldiers finished their morning drills and headed back.

He watched when the boy finished lunch and picked his sword back up.

He kept watching even as dusk crept in and most everyone else had already gone indoors.

Bran Sommerville ended up following the deadbeat young lord's training clear through to the end of the day, and only rose from his chair once Airen had left the grounds.

Pacing around, lightly stretching his back, he murmured to himself.

"He hasn't been slacking the past two weeks, that's for sure."

But pushing himself that hard, there was no way he'd show up again tomorrow. Young ones never did know when to hold back.

Grumbling all the while, the old man came out to the training ground early the next morning anyway.

And the deadbeat young lord appeared at exactly the same time.

Ten days passed like that.

One trained, one watched. The same hour, the same routine, day after day, like a stamped copy of the one before.

* * *

Whoosh!

Whoosh!

The sound of wind cut through the quiet training ground. It was the sound of the deadbeat young lord Airen Farreira swinging his wooden sword.

No one was startled by it anymore. The shock of that first day had long since faded, and by now everyone treated the eldest son's morning training as simply a fact of life.

But no one still believed Airen was headed toward any real accomplishment.

Shedding the label of 'lazy' was a good thing, sure. That was as far as it went.

Swordsmanship wasn't forgiving enough to reward someone who'd fallen years behind everyone else, some frail weakling nobody expected anything from.

"..."

But not everyone thought that way.

Someone rated the deadbeat young lord's possibilities, his potential, far higher than that. Only one person, but that person existed.

Bran Sommerville.

Not a member of the territory, but a man who had watched Airen's training without missing a single day for the past ten days, and he thought to himself.

'I was... completely wrong about him.'

He didn't just mean misjudging the boy's talent.

He'd misread the very nature of the person in front of him.

The old man's brow furrowed deeper as the realization sank in, late as it came.

'I thought it was nothing but some cheap inferiority complex, some threadbare pride burning itself up for fuel...'

Not that a fire like that was a bad thing.

Most young prodigies lived like flames and burned their way up to greatness.

Some burned passion, some burned talent, some burned raw desire, and in doing so made themselves into something brighter.

That was a privilege that belonged only to the young, something an old man who'd already burned through most of his own life could no longer claim.

But the firewood the deadbeat young lord was feeding into himself amounted to nothing more than a bruised, threadbare pride and the inferiority complex that came from it.

Bran knew better than anyone how short a fire like that tended to burn, and that was exactly why he'd rated the deadbeat young lord so low.

But he'd been wrong.

The deadbeat young lord, no, Airen Farreira, wasn't a flame at all.

Unlike the boys who burned through their bright youth to move forward, he was spending each day with the mindset of a blacksmith hammering steel.

'How is that even possible?'

The old man couldn't make sense of Airen.

It made no sense to him.

Hammering iron, tempering yourself the way metal gets tempered, was tedious work through and through.

Doing the same fixed thing every single day, with no firewood, none of the brilliance a flame gave off, was a kind of suffering most people couldn't even imagine attempting.

Even across the memory of Bran's seventy-some years, only a handful of people had ever managed something like that.

And every one of them was long gone from this world now, people who'd lived to a ripe old age before they went.

'And yet... I'm catching that same air, from this young, no, this child?'

It shouldn't have been possible.

But it was happening right in front of his eyes.

Even at this very moment, the boy was refining his swordwork without a single moment of slack, without a single opening.

Like someone who'd devoted his whole life to one thing.

Like someone who'd already been living that way for decades.

A chill.

Gooseflesh rose sharp across Bran Sommerville's back.

He rose from his seat and thought it through.

An iron will that even the greatest heroes usually only finished forging once they'd reached a ripe old age.

If someone had already completed that at fifteen, and kept walking the path of the sword from here... where would that road actually end?

'Talent won't even be a question. Starting later than everyone else won't matter one bit either.'

All he'd need was a good teacher, someone to keep him from straying onto the wrong path.

And if that happened...

"Hup!"

The old man gasped out loud, startled by his own thought.

The training ground's caretaker gave him a puzzled look at the sound.

No wonder, considering the old man had sat there like part of the scenery for ten straight days, and now here he was acting strange.

And that wasn't even the end of it. The wandering knight looked around and hurried over, as if something urgent had come up.

Then he asked a question.

"Excuse me. Caretaker, sir! I have a question for you!"

"Yes, yes, sir! Ask away, no trouble at all."

"That young lord training over there. Does he happen to have a swordsmanship teacher of his own?"

"Ah..."

The caretaker hesitated for a moment.

He wasn't sure whether it was his place to share the territory's internal matters with an outsider.

But the hesitation didn't last long.

It's not like it's some big secret anyway, he muttered to himself, then spoke up.

"Actually, the lord's planning to assign him a swordsmanship teacher soon. The young master himself said he didn't need one, since he's not really aiming for anything great, but with him working this hard, it does seem wrong to leave him without a teacher. Wouldn't want him getting hurt by accident or anything..."

"I, I see. Then, would you happen to know who the teacher is?"

"No reason to keep that quiet. It's Sir Orlin Jukran, the knight who..."

"Absolutely not!"

"Wh, what?"

Hearing the name of the swordsmanship teacher, Bran Sommerville shouted loud enough to startle the caretaker into stumbling backward.

The old man paid no mind to the caretaker's reaction. He left the training ground quickly, went to his room, and pulled out two sheets of paper.

One was a letter addressed to Baron Farreira.

Bran wrote plainly in that letter. Orlin Jukran would not do.

Handing the deadbeat young lord, no, the eldest son, over to a man like that was the same as throwing away a rare gift and grinding it into the mud, he wrote.

'Orlin Jukran... that's the one. The one who got blind drunk the night before regular training and screamed his head off at the soldiers!'

That could not stand.

He could not let a boy like that jewel of a young man fall into the hands of someone so unfit.

Without quite realizing it, Bran had come to worry more about Airen Farreira's future than anyone else in the whole territory.

The old knight poured every bit of that sincere worry and hope into the second sheet of paper, pressing the pen down hard.

"There, done!"

The second document was finished as well.

The wandering knight rose from his seat with a faint smile.

Then he hurried to request an audience with the lord.

Baron Farreira read through the documents Bran Sommerville handed him, his expression rigid.

He read the second one especially closely.

'...Does my son really have that kind of potential?'

Krono Fencing Hall, one of the most renowned institutions on the continent.

Holding its letter of recommendation in his hand, the baron closed his eyes and sat with it for a long moment.

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