WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Reformation of the Deadbeat Noble

Chapter 99

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Unexpected Proposal (4)

"Hm? Ack!"

"Huh? Airen, you're awake... eek!"

Kubharu and Lulu, jolted out of sleep by Airen Farreira's voice, let out startled cries of their own.

Ignet alone stayed calm.

Savoring the way the room's mood slid slowly from shock into wariness, she looked at Airen and spoke.

"Apologize. Because of you, those who were sleeping soundly have woken."

"..."

Airen didn't answer.

It was strange. He'd heard this kind of unreasonable demand from Judith plenty of times, and from Kiril too.

Usually he'd just brush it off and play along, but with Ignet, he didn't feel like doing that at all.

She studied him for a moment, then reached out a hand.

Startled, Airen tried to knock it away, but it was no use. She deflected his hand with some strange technique and flipped up the hem of his shirt.

Lulu shouted.

"What are you doing! You witch!"

"Witch? Watch your mouth with such blasphemous words. That's no way to address the commander of a Holy Kingdom knight order, of all people."

"No, what are you even... ugh!"

Airen couldn't resist as Ignet's fingers pressed into his stomach.

His body wasn't in any condition to fight back.

Looking down, he saw a bruise, dark blue shading into near black, spread across his entire abdomen.

But that lasted only a moment.

A low hum sounded, and white light poured from Ignet's hand. The pain began to fade at startling speed.

Kubharu blurted out in surprise.

"Holy magic!"

Direct healing, something supposedly possible only for the high priests of Abilius.

Given Ignet Crescentia's rank and position, this level of ability was, in a sense, to be expected. But it was still remarkable, considering she hadn't even served the Holy Kingdom for three full years.

Her swordsmanship talent was undisputed as the continent's finest, and she was also skilled in holy magic, and it seemed she even had some grasp of Spirit Magic.

There really was nothing she couldn't do.

Lulu, too, stopped her fit and stared with round eyes at Airen's stomach.

Watching the bruise fade by the second, he murmured.

"Incredible..."

But Ignet acted as though holy magic was nothing worth mentioning, and pointed out something else entirely.

"Of course it's incredible. My fists are rock hard, thanks to all my training. Solid enough that most fools would cough up blood and meet their end from a single punch."

"..."

"This one's body is fairly tough in its own right, but it doesn't come close to this body's strength. Hoho..."

Once she finished the spell, Ignet raised both arms and flexed, showing off her muscles.

All three of them watching her wore identical expressions of disbelief.

She seemed like she might be joking, but her face said otherwise, and there was simply no telling with her.

Of course...

I can't deny she's a formidable person, Airen thought.

He didn't mean simply her strength with a sword.

She herself, as a person, was strong. Strong in a way he couldn't even measure himself against.

She must have forged herself through countless experiences and struggles.

Ignet Crescentia.

She was famous enough, and she was Illia Lindsay's goal, so he knew a fair amount about her background.

A war orphan from Makan Kingdom, a country still gripped by civil strife. She had wandered the world and endured hardship after hardship.

And she had overcome all of it to stand proudly where she now stood.

Each of those experiences, one by one, must have hardened her.

She'd faced dilemmas far harder than anything he'd struggled with at Alhad Den, and she must have made countless choices that were nearly impossible to make.

Those choices, piled up and fused together, had become the conviction, the resolve, the goal that made her who she was.

He understood now.

The certainty behind every one of her actions existed because she had completed her own sword.

"What is your sword?"

So he asked.

An abrupt question, almost like something out of a Zen riddle.

But Airen Farreira's eyes were nothing but serious.

He wanted to know.

A fierce, restless curiosity welled up in him, a need to know what sword Ignet Crescentia had raised, she who had clashed with the world so much more fiercely, so much longer, than he ever had.

"An odd question. You said you're a Krono trainee?"

"That's right."

"That's Old Man Ian's way of speaking. Makes sense. Too deep a phrase for a greenhorn to come up with alone."

Fortunately, Ignet seemed to have grasped the meaning of the question without trouble.

Lulu and Kubharu had both heard similar lines from Airen before, so they waited for her answer without any confusion.

She thought for a moment.

It didn't look like she was struggling to find an answer, more like she was deciding whether it was even worth giving one.

After a moment she nodded and gave her answer.

"My sword is the sword of a king."

"...?"

"Not a sword in service of a king, but a sword to become one."

"That's insane..."

Kubharu shot up from his seat.

Lulu, who had been sitting on his lap, tumbled to the floor with a thud.

But nobody had the presence of mind to care.

Ignet's words had been too shocking.

A king!

Sure, the line between commoner and noble was blurring these days, but declaring oneself emperor or king was an entirely different matter.

Whether it succeeded or failed, fierce conflict would follow, and a massive war along with it.

The blood spilled in the process would be beyond counting, and all of it would widen the crack between the mortal world and the demon realm.

Just speaking the words aloud was enough to summon countless demonoids, maybe even a "demon" of the kind that hadn't appeared since a hundred years ago.

"Hyup!"

Ignet Crescentia locked eyes with Kubharu.

Her cool, dark gaze snuffed out his surge of emotion in an instant.

That wasn't the end of it. She strode toward Kubharu, who had gone stiff and silent, and reached out a hand.

The word "death" flickered through his mind for a brief moment.

Snatch.

But Ignet did him no harm at all.

What her hand landed on was the pouch hanging at his side, the one wrapped in a spirit seal.

She pulled the demonic-aura-tainted necklace from inside it and infused it with holy magic as she spoke.

A low hum sounded.

"Spirit mage orc, as you well know, this is an age of peace. Because the homeland forbids war between kingdoms. A reasonable measure, wouldn't you say. A hundred and fifty years ago, four hundred years ago, and further back still, whenever war raged without end, a great demon rose up and plunged the human realm into terror."

"..."

"But... a wandering orc who likes to roam far and wide should know this much. That even now, the world isn't exactly peaceful."

"...I know."

Kubharu nodded.

Great turmoil gave off negative energy, and that energy cracked the sturdy wall between the human realm and the demon realm.

To reduce the risk of demons and demonoids being born, Abilius, the strongest nation on the continent, had enacted a law forbidding wars between kingdoms.

But the problems never stopped.

Among the nations unafraid of foreign invasion, filthy and ugly civil wars had broken out one after another.

A low hum sounded.

"Makan Kingdom, where this body was born, was no different. Seven princes fought a bloody war among themselves for the crown, and nobles had to resort to every dirty trick imaginable to secure victory for whichever prince they'd hitched themselves to. The burden fell entirely on the common people, and I had to do whatever it took just to survive. Along the way, luck brought me to the attention of a Krono swordsman, and you all know roughly what came after. I built a mercenary company, became an honorary knight, rose to the rank of commander... that's the life this body has lived."

"..."

"And so I put an end to that miserable past and climbed to a position most would envy. But the memories from my childhood don't fade so easily. Especially... the old bonds I made while scraping by on stale black bread crumbs."

Ignet paused for a moment.

Airen couldn't tell what she was searching for in the empty air with her eyes.

But he thought he understood, at least a little, the feeling behind it.

A low hum sounded, rising in pitch.

"Hmph, seems it's all purified now. Take it."

"Hup!"

Ignet tossed the necklace to Kubharu. Startled, he reached out and caught it as her words kept coming.

"I don't know. I don't know how to save every last person still suffering out there, one by one, and I don't know how to control these filthy objects that keep quietly slipping into the human realm."

"..."

"But I thought, wouldn't it be worthwhile, at the very least, to build with my own two hands one nation free of all that. That thought struck me out of nowhere. From that moment, this body's sword became the sword of a king."

Ignet turned her head and looked at Airen.

Dark eyes.

But if you looked deep enough into them, you could feel it: a flame far larger than anything he could compare to himself.

Airen shivered as he felt it, and she continued speaking.

"I know the path I must walk, and I know it's a difficult one. I know those who follow me will have to shoulder that hardship alongside me, and I know that fact weighs on me."

"..."

"But there's one thing I believe more strongly than anything else."

In the end, I will overcome all of it and achieve what I want, to the very last.

Having said this much, Ignet stood up from her seat. Then she threw open the window.

With her back to it, her eyes swept over the three faces in the room.

"Kubharu."

"Yes."

"What you fear won't come to pass. This body will achieve its goal through peaceful means."

"...Countess, wouldn't the goal you've described be largely solved just by doing your duties as commander diligently?"

"Abilius is a fine place. It hasn't rotted despite its long history. But it has its stifling sides, and it's a little different from the nation this body envisions."

Kubharu opened his mouth again, but Ignet ignored him. Instead she turned to Lulu.

"Black cat."

"...What."

"It's fine to savor your happiness for now, but you'll need to put in a bit more effort for the sake of the bonds that matter to you."

"..."

Lulu glared at Ignet with eyes practically boiling over, but in the end couldn't get a single word out.

Watching him, the dark-haired beauty smirked. Then she turned to the last person in the room.

"Airen Farreira."

"Yes."

"Do you understand now? Why there's such certainty behind everything I do?"

"...Yes."

"Good. This body will make you the same offer again next time. Not to the steel inside you, but to Airen Farreira himself."

"..."

"If you want to turn it down again next time, you'll need to put in a great deal of effort too."

With a sharp grin, Ignet Crescentia finished speaking and flashed a fierce smile.

That was the end of it.

She dropped out the window without so much as a goodbye.

It was a three-story drop, but not one of them was worried. Naturally.

Who would worry about the third-ranked fighter in all of the Holy Kingdom of Abilius?

"..."

All three of them sank into deep thought.

Lulu with her own thoughts, Kubharu with his.

Airen Farreira closed his eyes and carefully went back over everything that had happened with Ignet Crescentia.

And at last, he understood.

Why he had felt anger toward her.

...I admired her, he realized.

That was it.

He had admired Ignet.

Compared to himself, still shaken and unsteady with his sword for lack of experience, lack of time spent wrestling with hard questions, lack of the courage to choose, she had mastered herself completely, and he had envied that.

And when the object of that envy struck exactly where it hurt most, the frustration had surged straight to the top of his head and turned into anger.

Now it had turned into something else entirely.

Something he had once carried, something he'd thought he had fully grasped and understood all over again.

Fighting spirit.

Feeling it deep in his chest, the blond young man opened his eyes.

Next time...

He wouldn't shrink back.

He wouldn't get angry.

He would stand before her with his head held high, wearing a clean, confident smile.

He would work himself to the bone to make that happen. He absolutely would.

Airen Farreira's eyes burned quietly as he made the resolution.

Red and hot, every bit as fierce as the Aura Sword of Ignet Crescentia, commander of the Holy Kingdom's Black Knight Order.

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