Reincarnation of the Sword Demon - Chapter 2

WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Reincarnation of the Sword Demon

Chapter 2

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Kyle

'What... is this?'

The last thing he had gripped was the handle of his beloved sword, the one he'd held for decades. But the sensation now wrapping around his palm was strange.

Soft.

Squishy, even. When had his hands last felt anything like this?

"Lady Arian, is it really true?!"

He had no idea what was going on and tried to look around, but his eyes wouldn't cooperate. Not the blackout darkness from just before dying, something different. Light wavered at the edges of his vision, blurry and formless, nothing coming into focus.

"Auu..."

He tried to open his mouth and produce a sound. Even that refused to obey him. Of all the helplessness he'd known in a lifetime, this kind was the most foreign.

He wasn't dead.

That much, he could feel through all of it.

Whatever had happened, he had survived. Why? Didn't matter. He'd been certain he was finished, and yet here he was. Surely that called for a roar of triumph.

"Waaah!"

He had tried to laugh. What came out of his wide-open mouth was not laughter but a wail. Why? He couldn't understand it. He tried to stop, and found he couldn't. Once it broke loose, there was no reining it back in.

"Waaah! Waaah! Waaaah!"

Was he really the kind of person who could cry like this? The hot tears he'd shed when his father died, decades ago, those had been the last tears of his life.

Well, he'd come back from the dead. Maybe crying with joy made sense. But...

He didn't want to cry like a child. That was the thought. His body paid it no attention.

"Oh my, listen to this one crying...!"

His own wailing was deafening him. Then, through it, another voice reached his ear.

Tired but warm. Soft. The kind of voice that settled something in the chest just from being heard, no clear reason why.

The crying that had refused to stop, no matter how hard he'd willed it, slowly began to quiet.

'Who is this?'

A voice that moved him this deeply. He strained his eyes, searching for a face, and failed even at that. Tears streamed freely from eyes that could barely see, everything ahead blurred and shimmering with light that wouldn't resolve.

"Aha ha."

A pleasant laugh. Warmth enveloped him entirely. And then, what every effort of will had failed to achieve happened on its own.

The crying stopped.

"I'm your mother."

The soft voice tickled his ear. Careful hands moved over him, the way you'd handle something fragile. The touch. The voice. All of it rattled something deep inside him.

'...Mom?'

Was this a dream? Some dying vision? He didn't know. His eyes wouldn't focus. The voice was too gentle, too close. His thoughts went hazy, like the last moment before sleep.

'Mom?'

Had that word ever felt this warm?

In the confusion, something brushed lightly against his nose. His hand didn't want to move, but he reached for it anyway and caught it.

"Wow!"

A laugh, cut through with surprise.

"Ceryl, look at this! He grabbed my finger again!"

In the middle of all that bright, pure laughter, he worked his fingers with everything he had. He needed the texture of it to confirm that this was neither a dream nor a vision.

"Kyle."

A whisper full of love reached him as he kept squeezing.

"That's your name. Kyle Alastor."

'...What?'

What did she just say?

"Waah..."

My name is what?

Apparently, he had been reincarnated.

Raical, the Sword Demon.

Kyle Alastor, now. He accepted that truth a few days after his birth.

After that, he spent a long time turning it over.

How could something like this happen.

He'd never given serious thought to what came after death. But being born again as an entirely different person, every memory of his previous life still intact, he at least knew that wasn't normal.

'Good things are good.'

No amount of brooding produced a clearer answer. Kyle decided to leave it at that.

In truth, the body of a newborn was far too inconvenient for any of that anyway.

His vision was useless. Opening his mouth produced nothing resembling speech. His arms and legs refused to obey.

Think too hard and his thoughts would cloud, his eyes drifting shut on their own. On top of that, his stomach demanded feeding at every possible hour, and whenever it did, crying erupted from his mouth without his permission.

The most mortifying thing of all was...

"..."

Already in the past. Nothing to gain from dwelling on the shames of a life already lived. Kyle shifted in his cradle.

Between his various reflections and his slow acceptance of reality, the sleeping and eating and the other thing, his first birthday arrived before he knew it.

"How can anyone be this cute?"

Arian hung over the cradle, giggling, and pressed a finger into Kyle's round, soft cheek.

Arian Alastor.

His mother.

The hardest thing for Kyle to accept, carrying every memory of a former life, was her. His eyes had been useless at birth, but they'd cleared before long. He'd been able to see her face properly ever since.

Arian was a beautiful woman. Deep red hair, lustrous and full. Gold eyes that caught the light like gemstones. Skin like pale jade. Everything the word "beautiful" conjured, all of it belonged to Arian.

Kyle had no memory of his mother from his life as Raical. She had been a camp follower attached to a mercenary band. Which meant there were a brother or two in the band who were technically his, and probably others scattered somewhere in the world.

Not that he'd ever thought of them as brothers.

His father had never loved his mother. His mother had never loved his father, or Raical. In that sense, Raical's mother had been a professional.

He barely remembered her anyway.

She'd died when he was around three, if he recalled right. Far too young for clear memories. His father hadn't cried. Raical hadn't either.

Carrying all of that with him, it was genuinely hard for Raical, for Kyle, to look at Arian and accept the word "mother."

"Peekaboo!"

But whether or not Kyle struggled with that, Arian was a gentle mother. She never left his side, always talked to him, brought toys and found ways to play with him. Always present, always trying.

Like right now. Peekaboo, over and over. Kyle smiled anyway. His body was a baby's, but the effort she put in deserved a response. He wanted to meet it.

He felt he had to.

'Let it go.'

The same thought as every day. Kyle released his grip on himself.

A defense mechanism, built to protect his sanity from the steady erosion of his dignity.

"Aboo boo boo!"

Setting the Sword Demon's ego aside, and acting exactly as a one-year-old's desires demanded.

It was Arian's first birth, her first time raising a child. But she had made up her mind early on.

'My son is definitely a genius.'

Every new mother thought this at least once, but Arian's conviction didn't so much as flicker.

"Young Master Kyle is without a doubt a genius."

And it wasn't only because every servant in the manor said so.

From the moment he was born, there had been signs. The surprisingly firm grip on her finger. The way he'd stared directly at her face even while crying. Kyle had never been ordinary, not from day one.

"Ex... cuse... meeee?"

He spoke his first words at a hundred days old. The servants with experience in childrearing said it was flatly impossible at that age. Kyle did it anyway.

What was more remarkable was that his first word wasn't "mama," the syllable most babies were supposed to produce first. His voice was small and imprecise, but what Kyle said wasn't a syllable. It was a sentence.

"Whooo... aare... youuuu?"

When Kyle spoke for the first time, Arian nearly fainted. Several wet nurses in the room actually did. That was how shocking it was.

"M-me? Who am I? I'm, I'm, your mother, Kyle! Me! Your mother!"

"Mo... mma...?"

"Yes, mother! My name is Arian Alastor, and, uh, and, I'm twenty-four years old. And..."

"Lady Arian, please calm down!"

"Kyle! Mama! It's mama!"

Arian was babbling, too stunned to put a sentence together. The wet nurses stepped in and shook rattles at him with everything they had.

"Mo... mma... mama...?"

A hundred-day-old infant saying that, with that expression on his face. Was that actually possible?

"Fff... food... food..."

After that day, Kyle began saying all kinds of words.

He never said "num-nums" like other babies. They'd always offered food that way, but Kyle said "food" outright.

"Bath... room..."

He didn't say "pee-pee" or anything like it either. When he needed to go, he said "bathroom."

"..."

Before his first birthday, he'd often gone before the words could come, and each time, Kyle made an expression of such profound wretchedness, the kind no baby should be capable of, then pressed his lips into a thin, tight line.

"If this isn't genius, what is?"

Arian laughed and stroked Kyle's cheek. Kyle, lying in his cradle, didn't pull away from her touch. There was something resigned in his eyes, but Arian, lost in a mother's love, couldn't read the hollow distance behind that look.

"Kyle, you are my treasure. A gift sent down from the heavens."

She'd said it many times before and said it again now, bringing her finger close to his small hand. Kyle, pacifier in his mouth, closed his fingers around it just as she wanted.

"Mmfmm."

"Ahahaha. How are you this strong?"

Arian smiled at his small, chubby fingers gripping and working at hers.

"Kyle, you grabbed my finger when you were born, too. Do you remember?"

"Mmmhm."

Kyle bobbed his head up and down around the pacifier.

"Wait, was that a real answer?"

Arian brightened and carefully took his hand. She didn't actually think Kyle genuinely remembered being born.

"From the moment you came into the world, maybe you were born to hold on to things."

She stroked his head with her other hand. A fine growth of red hair had appeared on his small head, the color that had always marked their bloodline.

"You probably don't know this yet, but our family has had quite a bit to do with weapons. Kyle, do you know what a weapon is?"

"Mmm... mmm mmm mmm...!"

The resigned look in his eyes flickered to life. Kyle spat out the pacifier.

"Ka... Kaal..."

"Your name isn't 'kal,' it's Kyle!"

"Kaaaal..."

Kyle worked at her fingers, trying to shape his mouth around the right sounds, and then he said the thing he had loved in a previous life, the thing he'd kept at his side for as long as he could remember.

"Swwrd..."

"Sword? Sword?!"

Kyle nodded vigorously at Arian's stunned expression.

"Good heavens, Kyle! Did you just say sword?"

"Swwrd..."

"You did, didn't you! Sword! Do you want to hold a sword?"

"Yehh..."

"You can just say yes!"

"Uh... uh-uh yes..."

"He answered!"

Arian burst into laughter and ruffled Kyle's hair into a mess.

"I'm sorry, Kyle. Right now you're too small, too young, and too adorable to hold a sword. So let's save that for later. Alright?"