WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble

Chapter 9

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Krono Fencing Hall (3)

"Shall we all go for a morning stroll together?"

Chuckles broke out here and there, followed by sighs of relief.

Instructor Karaka had suddenly gone grave, and the tension that had built up snapped loose.

The trainee candidates answered "Yes, sir" a beat late.

Karaka nodded and clapped his hands again.

"Good. Then let's take a slow walk around the fencing hall. No need to keep formation, just follow along at your own pace."

Of course, that wasn't really possible.

However relaxed his tone, he was still an instructor. The children still remembered the pressure Instructor Ahmed had radiated the day before.

So they fell into rough rows and columns anyway. Like that, a crowd of roughly four hundred began a slow circuit of the fencing hall.

"This is the indoor conditioning room. It gets used when the weather turns bad."

"This is where we run theory lessons. Ah, first time hearing about this? Krono Fencing Hall doesn't just teach you how to swing a blade. To perfect mind, technique, and body all together, proper theoretical instruction is..."

"Ha, went on a bit long there. What I really wanted to say boils down to one thing. Before you sharpen your sword, I'd like you to sharpen your spirit and heart first. Understood?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good. Ah, and we've arrived at just the right moment."

Karaka turned out to be quite the talker. The stroll kept going, filled with useful, sound, but thoroughly unexciting talk, and boredom began creeping across the trainee candidates' faces. More than a few started drifting off in thought.

But that didn't last.

The moment a broad road stretched out long before their eyes, Karaka dropped a surprise announcement.

"Last stop. This is a place for physical conditioning, cardiovascular and muscular endurance work. There's a bit of uneven terrain, but it's an ordinary running course."

"Uh, huh?"

"So does that mean..."

"All right, let's run and have some fun!"

The instructor finished speaking and picked up his pace fast.

From a brisk walk to a slow run. Gradually, step by step.

But he never slowed down. The trainee candidates, flustered at first, quickly settled into expressions of adjustment and pushed hard to keep up behind Karaka.

"Whoo, whoo."

"Hff, hffff."

"Good, isn't it? Doesn't moving your body clear the mind right up?"

"Yes, sir!"

A booming chorus of replies rang out.

Young as they were, these were children who had walked the path of the sword for years already.

Every one of them carried stamina that outmatched a grown man's, so not a single groan of complaint had surfaced yet.

Of course, this was only the beginning.

Karaka let out a hearty laugh and said,

"Good. Very good. Then let's pick up the pace a little more!"

"...Yes, sir!"

This reply carried a note of anxiety that hadn't been there before.

And a moment later, that anxiety turned into reality.

"Hah, hah!"

"Haa, hff, haa..."

"Good. A bit faster now!"

The pace kept climbing.

And the incline kept steepening along with it.

The trainee candidates' faces twisted more and more into pain.

Breathing that had been steady turned ragged beyond comparison to before.

A few of the younger ones already felt their legs starting to give out. The neat rows and columns had vanished without a trace some time ago.

But Karaka didn't stop.

And the children who still had something left in the tank had no intention of stopping either.

Everyone had realized a competition had started.

'I have to run to the end!'

'I have to hold on, no matter what it takes!'

'Damn it, if I drop out early, I won't be able to face my house again...!'

Stubbornness, grit, pride.

Every emotion imaginable fed the fire. The trainees were ready to keep running until the flame inside them burned out.

It looked like this surprise test was going to take quite a while to finish.

But not everyone had room to spare.

"Guh, guhk, hhuh!"

A child whose breathing sounded ready to give out at any moment.

No, not quite a child, someone who'd lived well past that age.

The oldest trainee candidate, the lazy lord, faced his first real hardship since entering the hall.

* * *

Before coming to Krono Fencing Hall, Airen Farreira had swung his sword harder than anyone.

It was genuinely astonishing. A boy who'd never properly finished anything in fifteen years of life had transformed overnight into someone diligent.

His family, who'd hoped for his reformation, had grown worried, and the soldiers watching over him had felt the need to hold him back. He'd trained that hard for the past month, so no one could dismiss the effort Airen had poured in.

But no matter how brilliant that month had been.

Even if he'd pushed past what any ordinary boy could manage.

Compared to those who'd been walking the path of hardship long before him, his sweat still fell short.

That result was showing itself now.

"Guhk, kkeuk, ggeh... kkeulk..."

He'd stopped breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth the proper way long ago.

Tears and snot streamed down his face, and dust-mixed spit had been dripping from his mouth for a while now too.

Airen was fighting with everything he had just to keep from falling behind the pack.

It was a sight that went past pitiful into something closer to heartbreaking.

But no one moved to help him.

Instructor Karaka looked gentle but was cold underneath, and the other instructors watching the test from various points were even colder.

The other trainee candidates?

They were the ones hoping hardest of all for Airen to drop. That was the kind of place this was. Somewhere you could only reach your dream by climbing over someone else.

So everyone prayed for it. Especially the kids near the bottom, gasping for breath, prayed hardest of all.

That the older trainee would fall soon. That his will would break, his knees would buckle, and he'd drop out of the pack, becoming the springboard that let them leap ahead.

Of course, that wasn't happening.

Airen Farreira could still go on.

"Geulk, kheu, pheu, khheuk..."

'More... I can still run!'

Making sounds like a wounded animal, the lazy lord thought that to himself.

His lungs felt ready to tear, and pain stabbed at his side like a blade. His joints had been creaking for a long while now.

His muscles, flooded with lactic acid, screamed for mercy too.

So could he not move even one step further?

If asked that, the answer was already decided. He could still go on.

It wasn't stubbornness. It wasn't grit either.

It was simply stating a fact he already knew.

Because the man who swung a sword in his dreams every night never stopped at a point like this.

Because that man only collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath, after truly meeting his own 'limit.'

Having 'experienced' that secondhand, Airen simply couldn't allow himself to fall this early.

'What is wrong with that guy!'

'Stubborn bastard, he looks weak as hell but he's still running.'

'Please just fall already, fall! I'm about done myself!'

'Isn't he gonna die running like that?'

The trainees who'd been pushed to the back of the pack wore expressions of disbelief. A few even shot him glances tinged with worry and fear, wondering if something bad was about to happen to him.

Of course, Airen paid none of it any mind. He had no strength left to spare for that. Through a blurring field of vision, the lazy lord moved his body with everything he had left.

He ran for five more minutes like that.

Then he collapsed, dropping like a marionette with its strings cut.

"Get a potion into him fast, move him to the recovery room."

"Understood!"

The waiting assistant instructors rushed toward the exhausted Airen Farreira.

Fortunately, there was no real danger. With quick treatment, this was the kind of case that would recover with a day or two of rest.

Granted, someone should have stopped him before it got to this point.

But Instructor Ahmed hadn't been able to.

An unbearable curiosity had crept up on him and refused to let go.

'I only meant to check how far he could go, and nearly ended up hauling off a corpse.'

Ahmed thought to himself, shaking his head slightly.

With his sharp eye for observation, he'd been able to read Airen's physical state fairly accurately.

To put it in a metaphor, it was like a wet towel wrung out until not a single drop remained.

In other words, a body that had given its absolute 'best' and then collapsed from exhaustion.

'Not an impossible thing to hear about.'

He himself, his peer Karaka, and plenty of other swordsmen who'd graduated from Krono Fencing Hall had probably felt that at least once.

The experience of not stopping at some halfway point, but burning through everything you had, down to the very last of it.

But said the other way around, that also meant it was something 'difficult enough that even a swordsman who'd graduated from Krono Fencing Hall couldn't manage it often.'

"Strange kid. For someone so weak."

Ahmed pulled a roster out from inside his coat. He raised his pen and set its tip against the 'potential' column beside the name 'Airen Farreira,' trainee candidate.

After a brief moment of hesitation, what he wrote down was a question mark.

Shaking his head once more, he quickly hurried to catch up with the group.

* * *

"......"

The next morning.

Airen Farreira came to his senses staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling.

The white ceiling of the recovery room. The boy lay there blankly for a moment before nodding to himself.

'I collapsed while running.'

He couldn't recall the details clearly.

Once the pain crossed a certain threshold, the line between consciousness and unconsciousness had gone blurry.

It felt like he himself had been the one running, and it also felt like the man from his dreams had been running. Then his blurred vision had given way, and his body had followed.

Worry struck him suddenly. Was his body all right?

Airen sat up, his face tense.

A deep voice reached his ears.

"Don't worry about your body. You're healthy."

"......"

"Instructor Rune Tarhall. I also handle the recovery room."

"Ah... thank you."

So this was the person who'd treated him. Airen thought to himself and bowed his head in thanks.

Rune Tarhall nodded and replied.

"Of course you should thank me. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have recovered this fast."

The instructor kept talking for a good while after that.

How much investment Krono Fencing Hall poured into the recovery room, how excellent the equipment was, how impressive he himself was at handling that equipment.

He also added that the reason they invested so heavily in the recovery room was precisely because Krono Fencing Hall's training was that brutal.

"I suspect I'll be seeing plenty of you, Airen Farreira."

"I see."

"That was a joke. Don't answer that dead serious."

Despite his stern appearance, he turned out to be quite the talker.

While Airen was thinking that over, the instructor abruptly held something out to him.

A sheet of paper. Covered in names, and numbers beside them.

Airen asked,

"What's this, Instructor?"

"Rankings from this test. Ah, don't worry, it's not like the Mid-Term Evaluation or Final Evaluation that affect formal enrollment. We just wanted to get a sense of the trainee candidates' fitness levels, so we ran this casually."

Airen couldn't quite see it that way.

Calling it a casual test seemed off, given that every single trainee had been assigned a specific rank.

Maybe sensing that thought, Instructor Rune Tarhall added one more line.

"Well, a high rank feels good, so that's good, and a low rank gives you more motivation to work harder, so that's good too, right? These rankings are going to be completely scrambled a year from now anyway, so there's no need to stress over it too much."

Airen nodded.

That was true. Wherever he currently stood didn't really matter.

But curiosity was building up regardless.

Swallowing hard, the boy checked the results of a competition for the very first time in his life.

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