WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble

Chapter 74

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Krono Fencing Hall (6)

Lance Patterson's face hardened.

He couldn't make sense of the situation at all.

He wondered if he was mistaken. He wasn't the only person in the world who specialized in rapid strikes.

Sure, it was rare for every single strike in a combo to carry devastating force, but if he thought hard enough, he could probably name someone else who managed it.

Airen Farreira might just be one of those people.

But the more of the guy's swings he blocked, the further that thought drifted away.

Boom!

Boom!

Booooom!

The strikes kept coming, relentless, without pause.

The attacks came fast enough to make it seem like several people were swinging at once. But that wasn't true.

Only Airen was swinging the sword.

The reactive force from each impact simply layered with rotation, building acceleration.

Of course, that wasn't easy. It was borderline impossible.

Maintaining this insane pace required monstrous grip strength to absorb the shock of every blow, and a rock solid center that wouldn't get swept away by centrifugal force.

The baseline physical ability required for this was simply absurd.

And Airen wasn't hammering away at some inanimate object.

He was striking a person who could actively react to whatever came at him, and not just any person. Lance Patterson, official trainee of Krono Fencing Hall.

He was intimately familiar with this kind of pressure.

Partly because his own style specialized in defense followed by counterattack, but also because one of his classmates used swordsmanship strikingly similar to this.

Lance Patterson had spent years training and studying just to hold back that classmate's relentless, all offense style.

Which was exactly why he could tell.

Now he was certain.

This guy... he's learned Judith's swordsmanship. No question.

Boom!

"Guh!"

Lance Patterson groaned.

His mind had wandered, and his reaction came a beat too late.

He bit down on his lower lip to keep his scattering focus together.

He widened his eyes and did everything he could to read his opponent's next line of attack.

But it was hard. A question kept surfacing again and again, tangling up his thoughts.

Amid a barrage of strikes that felt like a firestorm, he kept thinking it through.

When had the guy learned it?

Had the two of them met without his knowledge? Had Airen secretly met with Judith, and shown up here today just to catch him off guard?

No. That couldn't be it.

As far as he knew, Judith had never once left the city.

Unlike Brett Lloyd or himself, she had no parents, and naturally, no family estate to return to.

Which meant she'd spent the entire five years here, and nowhere else.

Then that meant...

"...!"

Lance Patterson's eyes went wide as he blocked Airen's sword.

Because he finally understood. He'd eliminated every wrong answer, one by one, and the only possibility left told him this had to be the truth.

Five years ago, at the Final Evaluation, when a hundred trainees had gathered to show off what they'd each come to understand.

Based on that single memory, Airen had turned Judith's swordsmanship into his own.

That's insane!

Booooom!

A thunderous crash rang out. Same as always, the sound of blade meeting blade.

Airen swung like wildfire, and Lance Patterson blocked like solid stone.

The only difference this time was what happened after the collision.

For the first time since the assault began, Airen's stance broke.

The force from his opponent's block had exceeded his expectations, and he couldn't recover his sword as it got knocked outward.

The first opening in over ten exchanges!

Lance Patterson didn't let it slip by.

Having crouched like a turtle this whole time, he shot forward with a thrust like a bolt of lightning.

"Haaap!"

It wasn't an attack born of cold calculation.

Lance Patterson didn't have that kind of composure left in him.

The fact that the opponent in front of him had shown off another absurd flash of talent, the fact that the same sense of deprivation he'd felt five years ago might be about to repeat itself, shattered his cool reasoning.

Burning anger took its place. The strike he'd just thrown had come from that very source.

An even trade between precision and power. Plus and minus canceling to zero.

That was how the attack should have ended.

Whoosh.

But it didn't.

Despite the burning anger behind it, Lance Patterson's blade was beautiful.

There was nothing wasted in it.

If anything, it traced the most beautiful line of any thrust he'd ever thrown, driving straight toward Airen Farreira.

It wasn't a fluke.

It wasn't luck either.

It was the topmost stone laid on the tens of thousands of hours of effort he'd stacked up to this very day.

It was the finest strike he had, meant to shatter the wall he'd wanted to break down for so long.

But.

Thunk!

Airen, already braced in a defensive stance by then, swept his blade through.

A motion completely different from anything he'd shown so far, soft yet unyielding.

Lance Patterson's thrust couldn't pierce through it. Thrown off by a counter he hadn't expected, his sword flew high into the air.

Whoosh...

Thunk!

The greatsword landed, driven diagonally into the ground.

Lance Patterson turned to check it.

Then he turned back to look at Airen Farreira.

The same blank expression as at the very start. The same one from five years ago.

"Ha, hahaha..."

A hollow laugh escaped him before he even realized it.

"Even reproduced Brett's swordsmanship... no."

Muttering to himself, Lance Patterson took the word back.

"Reproduced" wasn't the right word.

Shaking his head, he thought back to Brett Lloyd and Judith as they'd been as kids.

If he'd crossed swords with the two of them back then, what would have happened?

He probably would have crushed them both, even two against one. That wasn't speculation. It was simple fact.

And he beat that version of me... calling it a reproduction would be an insult to him.

Airen Farreira had taken the swordsmanship of Judith and Brett Lloyd from five years ago and developed it into something all his own.

The same way the current Judith and Brett Lloyd had grown past who they used to be.

Behind that kind of achievement...

There was probably bloody, brutal effort.

Lance Patterson let out a laugh.

This time it wasn't hollow. It was the clean, satisfied smile of someone who acknowledged his opponent and accepted the outcome.

Airen Farreira's talent was real. Watching the guy do what he did stirred up enough jealousy to twist his stomach.

But his effort was real too.

That was something you couldn't understand unless you'd seen it firsthand.

How insanely the guy swung his sword.

How much that sight could exhaust a person, and force them to look inward.

...That's Airen Farreira, all right.

Facing the 27th cohort's greatest hard worker after so long, Lance Patterson reached out a hand.

And said,

"I lost. Good match."

"Good match."

And with that, it was settled.

Victory, overturning most people's expectations, belonged to Airen Farreira.

* * *

"W... wow..."

"..."

"That's really something. How is this even... how is this possible? Didn't someone say that blond guy might be 27th cohort too? Right? That's actually insane. The level here is... genuinely insane."

"..."

The junior who'd watched the match between Lance Patterson and Airen Farreira kept pouring out words nonstop.

He wasn't the only one.

Every swordsman gathered in the training grounds was talking, filled with the same excitement, no exceptions.

But Gilbert couldn't get a word out.

He felt like the moment he opened his mouth even a little, whatever he was feeling right now would leak out into the open.

What is this? What am I even feeling?

He couldn't put words to it.

For someone who'd never had a gift for words to begin with, explaining this itching, tangled sensation was close to impossible.

Something was welling up inside him.

He just didn't know what it was.

That was the best he could describe it.

Caught in that strange feeling, he savored the afterglow of the match.

He hadn't even picked up a sword himself, and yet his heart felt like it might leap out of his chest.

But that wasn't the end of it.

"...Huh?"

"The cat's flying!"

"Why's that so surprising? If it's a talking cat, why wouldn't it fly?"

The swordsmen murmured, watching the black cat float up into the sky.

If it had been an ordinary day, Lulu would probably have shot back some kind of remark at them.

But not this time.

Higher, and higher still. Rising to the height of a three story building, Lulu stared off into the distance.

The most serious he'd looked since arriving in Alkantrea.

He muttered,

"Is that him?"

"Hm? Him who?"

"Who's he talking about?"

"Kitty, is someone coming this way?"

"...Don't talk in that cutesy kitty voice with a face that scary."

Question marks floated over everyone's faces.

Most just blinked and stayed quiet, but a few sharper minds voiced their own guesses.

Maybe it was a graduate, worried about sending a trainee off alone, finally catching up. A few people nodded along to that theory.

Then, a moment later.

An old man appeared in the training grounds.

"...!"

"...!"

The old man's appearance was ordinary. An unremarkable build you could find anywhere, a face full of wrinkles.

The kindly smile resting on his lips brought to mind some warmhearted village elder you might meet in any countryside town.

But in front of that unassuming, easygoing old man, no one could open their mouth.

Only two elderly people walked around Krono Fencing Hall like it was their own backyard.

And of those two, only one was a man.

The owner of Krono Fencing Hall. Ian.

Everyone froze stiff at his appearance.

"Heh heh... now this is a sight I never expected."

Hall Master Ian swept his gaze slowly across the training grounds.

Swordsmen flinched every time his eyes landed on them.

On an ordinary day, he'd have cracked a joke with a smile to ease the tension. Not this time.

Something far too interesting had shown up at the fencing hall for him to bother with the small stuff.

Of course, even someone like him had one thing he couldn't help but notice.

What is that black cat?

Lulu, dressed in fine clothes, floating in the air. The Hall Master paused for a moment.

He was deeply curious about what the creature actually was.

But that's not what matters most right now.

The old man pulled his gaze away from the cat.

Walking unhurried to the center of the training grounds, he spoke a single name, low and even.

"Airen Farreira."

"...Hall Master."

"It's been a while. Have you been well?"

"...Yes. Well enough, I suppose."

"Looks like you've got a lot you want to say."

The Hall Master was right.

There was so much he wanted to say that he genuinely didn't know where to begin.

Airen Farreira's mind was a tangled mess.

But there was no need to sort it out.

Drawing his sword from his waist, the Hall Master said,

"Swordsman meets swordsman, so a conversation of blades should come first, shouldn't it?"

"..."

"And as master and student, that's only proper too. It's been a while since we've seen each other, so you should show me what you've got."

Wooooom!

The instant he finished speaking, an overwhelming presence surged out from Ian's body.

Even the swordsmen not directly exposed to that pressure felt a chill crawl up their spines.

A few with weaker resolve couldn't hold their ground and stumbled several steps back.

But not a single one of them was worried about their own safety.

The fact that the owner of Krono had drawn his sword was too shocking for anyone to think about anything else.

How many years has it been since the Hall Master pulled his sword in front of an outsider?

Four years? Five? Longer than that?

Every eye turned to Hall Master Ian, and to Airen Farreira, standing before him.

Who was this blond young man?

Just who was he, to make the owner of Krono lift his heavy sword?

Of course, Airen had no capacity to answer any of those staring eyes.

Bearing the weight of the Hall Master's presence, he thought.

This feels a lot like earlier.

Just like Lance Patterson, Ian had drawn his sword the moment he laid eyes on him.

It felt strange. Awkward, too.

If this was what a true swordsman looked like, then maybe he still wasn't one himself, not properly.

But.

Not bad, though.

Surprisingly, he found himself enjoying it.

Airen Farreira raised his sword.

And swung it.

Whoosh, whoosh. The sound of blade cutting through air rang out.

He'd meant it to steady his nerves, but it didn't work.

There was nothing to be done about that.

Staying calm in front of the continent's strongest swordsman would have been the strange thing. Airen decided to enjoy this moment instead.

It was a small change. But a real one.

"Here I come."

"Come."

The student offered his respects, and the master accepted them.

The instant after, Airen's body shot forward with the speed of a loosed arrow.

He still hadn't realized it yet, that something about himself had subtly shifted between the moment he first met Lance Patterson and right now.

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