WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Sword Master of the Fallen Kingdom

Chapter 67

──────

Crossing Blades (2)

The inside of the cathedral was quiet. Only the faint, small breaths of two people echoed through it.

Moonlight poured through the stained glass. A shadow lay beneath the half-collapsed goddess statue. The wind died against the closed wooden doors and the colored glass windows. Beside the pillars, light fell at an angle across the rows of long pews.

White dust drifted through it as if floating on the surface of water. It was close to midnight. The interior of the abandoned cathedral felt strangely dreamlike. Damian's gaze slowly swept over the scene, then came to rest once more on the back of the man seated in the front pew. In the fading moonlight, the black of his hair and the sword leaning beside him both seemed to darken.

He's calm.

Damian thought. Was it confidence with good reason, or resignation?

"Helping an Imperial traitor when you know what she is. You must be insane. Or... did you come here looking for a place to die?"

Either way, it did not matter. The red-haired knight started walking again. His footsteps rang out clearly. The sharp clicks stopped only when he reached the middle of the chapel.

"Did you come alone?"

The answer came then. The black-haired man was still looking at the stained glass above the goddess statue.

"What?"

Damian frowned and asked back on reflex.

"No wyvern either."

"..."

"Is it because of that tracking method of yours? I burned away the wyvern mana clinging to the princess's robe hem back at the gate, so you must have needed another way. The wyvern isn't here because it had already reached its limit by the time you crossed the Ligrid Mountains. As for the other wyvern knight... he headed in the opposite direction, toward where the princess escaped."

The black-haired man spoke calmly. Damian's eyes widened a little. He was right. It was as if he had known Damian's side of things from the start.

"You have sharp instincts. How long did you wait?"

His surprise did not last long. Damian asked in the same composed voice as before.

"Thirty minutes."

"That's quite a wait. Were you looking back on old memories one last time before you died?"

No answer came this time. The black-haired man kept looking forward. He was not even holding his sword. He looked as though he were praying or meditating.

That was not something anyone should do with a wyvern knight of the Celestial Knights at his back. He seemed not to have considered the possibility of a surprise attack at all. Either that, or he was that confident. Damian narrowed his eyes as he stared at the man's back.

Now that I look closer, that confidence isn't entirely baseless.

One could get a rough sense of his skill from the air around him. Damian had known he was no ordinary Silver-rank mercenary. The security at Ligrid Gate was not so easy to breach. Yet he had crossed the gate with the princess, exhausted from a long forced march, shaken off the pursuit force, crossed the mountains, and even passed through the fortress.

That meant he was at least comparable to a Gold-rank mercenary. Even so, it was not a serious problem. Still, one thing kept bothering him. The voice of the black-haired man speaking to him kept tugging at his nerves. It stirred a strange sense of wrongness. Somehow, it sounded familiar.

A low voice he felt he had heard several years ago.

A voice carved deep into his mind, though their exchange had been very brief.

"Looking back on old memories... That's not entirely wrong. Aside from the fact that it's closer to a grudge, it is something from the past."

His question did not last long. The black-haired man slowly rose. After looking up at the goddess statue for a moment, he turned around.

Kyle stood there with the light of the stained glass at his back.

Damian's eyes widened as if they would tear open. Black hair. Black eyes. An exotic appearance, slightly different from the usual people of Velia. Only then did he remember that painfully plain sword beside the pew. He could not forget it. More than one wyvern knight had fallen beneath that blade.

The final Commander of the Knights of Ash. The Blue Wolf of Hailen.

"Ha, haha..."

"..."

"Hahahahaha!"

All at once, Damian burst into wild laughter. His laughter thundered through the quiet cathedral.

"Is this fate playing with me? Or... did God guide me all the way here?"

Damian's laughter slowly faded. Yet a smile he could not hide still lingered on his lips. His red eyes, glaring at Kyle, gleamed with explosive joy.

"Blue Wolf of Hailen... I never expected to meet you again like this."

Kyle did not answer. He only stared quietly at the red-haired knight with cold, sunken eyes.

Damian Carvello. The eldest son of House Carvello, one of the Empire's greatest houses.

At the same time, he was a young genius knight who had joined the Celestial Knights at the youngest age. He was around Kyle's age. That had been true even during the Northern War more than three years ago. Back then, Kyle had been an ordinary knight, and he had struggled to face the wyvern knights who ravaged the north with their overwhelming mobility.

Because of that, the Knights of Ash had moved desperately to reduce the number of wyverns by any means. There had even been times when they deliberately set traps while accepting civilian casualties. Thanks to that, nearly thirty wyverns had been reduced to somewhere in the teens. Many wyverns and knights had died by Kyle's hand.

But he had not killed all of them. A small number had survived even after crossing swords directly with Kyle.

A few elite knights, excluding the former Vice Commander of the Celestial Knights, who was already dead. The Commander of the Celestial Knights who led them.

And Damian Carvello. The knight before him, with red hair and red eyes. The heir of House Carvello, the marquis house that had taken the place of House Lucent after the maternal family of First Princess Elysia fell completely from power. The man already chosen as the next Vice Commander, and one of those closest to becoming Commander someday.

"Now I understand. How you crossed Ligrid Gate, how you shook off the pursuit force, and why you protected a princess being hunted as a first-class traitor."

Damian spoke again. Unlike before, his voice was noticeably heated, perhaps because his emotions had risen.

"Were you on the same side from the start?"

Damian sneered. Kyle did not answer. He lifted the sword leaning against the pew beside him and fastened it securely to the belt at his waist.

"Come to think of it, the First Princess did exchange letters with the Federation from time to time starting in the early days of the Northern War. Collusion. How foolish. Born with blood nobler than anyone else's, yet she denies the blood flowing through her own body."

Contempt for Elysia showed in Damian's red eyes.

"Grand Duke Rivelius, Adrian Archandia. That man is the same."

Damian continued. Kyle recalled what Elysia had said in passing at a small village in the mountains not long ago. She had said that if she reached the Federation, her uncle, who had once rebelled against the Emperor, would surely help her. His name had definitely been Adrian Archandia. The uncle who had especially adored Elysia since she was young.

"He dared betray His Majesty the Emperor's grace. As if that weren't enough, he threw himself into the Federation. We should have wiped out his bloodline along with House Lucent..."

Grand Duke Rivelius. Once the person the Emperor cherished most, and his own younger brother. Now the leader of the opposition faction that had defected to the Federation. Everyone who needed to know knew that the First Princess was in contact with him. The two had been close from the start.

That had only become more true after Grand Duke Rivelius not only rebelled directly against the Emperor, but left Archandia entirely. There had been no letters exchanged between him and the princess after direct inspections began, but it was clear he had a large share in the princess's treason. Above all, the enemy of their enemy was their ally. In that case, all the pieces fit.

"Blue Wolf. Since when did you join hands with him? Are you gathering the surviving Knights of Ash to build an army for a counterattack? To take revenge on the Empire?"

The last knight commander of a fallen nation, and an old Imperial royal who turned his back on the Emperor and defected to the Federation. Since the enemy of their enemy was their ally, it would not be strange for the two to have joined hands. Damian stepped forward. The red sword at his waist caught the stained-glass light and gave off a cold glow.

"Or... is all of this just a coincidence?"

Kyle stayed silent. Damian tilted his head slightly. Silence flowed between them for a while. Kyle was the first to break it.

"Surviving Knights of Ash?"

"Ah... I see. You ran away, so you might not know."

A little time passed. When Kyle changed the subject, the red-haired knight sneered again. Under that mocking gaze, Kyle unconsciously touched the hilt at his waist.

"When Hailen's capital fell, your Knights of Ash were too busy trying to survive. You abandoned the capital, abandoned the nation, gathered together among yourselves, and when even that failed, you scattered in every direction."

Damian's red eyes turned toward the ceiling, as if recalling the past.

"Was it Crown Prince Yurian? His resistance was fierce. His swordsmanship was quite good for his age. Meaningless before the Commander's sword, though."

You don't know. You don't know what Yurian felt when he stayed in the palace until the very end.

"The remaining Knights of Ash who had been cut off from one another were driven by wyverns and hunted slowly. We didn't even need to descend ourselves. The Celestial Knights weren't the only force we could use."

I know. I could never forget it.

"They crawled along the ground like dogs as they fought, throwing away meaningless lives just to save one person."

Because that person was me. Because I saw the final moments of the dying members with my own eyes.

"Even that didn't last long. They were stubborn bastards. Even while we were gouging into their limbs, they wouldn't give up information on their comrade. Even though they knew it was meaningless."

Even when Kyle had been left alone, he had not looked back. He had only looked forward and run.

"No, I suppose it wasn't completely meaningless. A few slipped away. You were one of them. But now even that seems to mean the goddess of fortune is smiling on me."

Damian took another step forward. Before they knew it, the distance between the two men facing each other inside the huge abandoned cathedral had narrowed to about fifteen meters.

"Is the curse lodged in you still all right?"

Damian glanced at Kyle's right forearm. He did not need to explain what curse he meant. Both Kyle and Damian knew.

"Izra's Thorn is a curse that burrows deep into the soul. Just like your former Commander, you should have died back then too."

"You rat bastards didn't even have the courage to fight head-on."

"Rat bastards?"

Kyle spat the words out as if chewing them. Damian chuckled like he could not hold it in.

"Rat bastards... That's rich coming from people who hunted wyverns using civilians as bait. War will break out soon anyway. Just like Hailen, the Federation's five nations will disappear this time."

A secret known only to the Emperor and a tiny handful of others. Damian did not care.

"In the end, we're the ones who will remain. You will be forgotten by history. The Federation will be the same. The Knights of Ash, the Chevaliers, all of those things mean nothing. Only the victor's record remains."

Kyle quietly looked down at his waist. The hilt of the sword he had fastened there earlier shone brightly under the moonlight growing stronger again.

He gently gripped that hilt with his right hand. The cold sensation somehow felt warm. He could feel his heart pounding hard through every blood vessel in his body. Yet his mind was cold.

Still, as if someone had poured cold water over it.

How many had died beneath this sword?

From the moment he had been granted a star iron sword, he had fought for Hailen. He had never questioned it.

To Kyle, the north was his second home. He had a new family there. Raising a sword against the ones who had trampled that home as they pleased had been perfectly natural. So he had fought until the end.

Elysia was the same.

Though she was the First Princess, she had left Archandia. She had abandoned her position as princess. Her own mother had been sacrificed to Izra's Thorn, and she herself had nearly died.

The reason was painfully simple. Her maternal family, House Lucent, had been a representative opposition house. So the Emperor killed his own wife and tried to erase his own child. Left isolated, Elysia stole information about the Dragon Heart and wyverns, then fled the capital.

And still, he despised her for denying her blood?

For a war of conquest. To expand their land. Did they want to trample others recklessly, laugh, and spill blood again this time too?

For what?

Kyle could not understand. He did not know what the Emperor was thinking either.

Only one thing was certain. He would not look back anymore.

He would not run away.

Even in this moment, that remained true. He only wanted to move forward.

Until he killed the knight before him, killed the wyvern, killed the Emperor, and the Empire fell.

I...

"You people are always like that."

Kyle slowly raised his head. The red-haired knight stood before him.

"I'll kill you. Just like the ones who died by my hand in the past."

This time, he did not hesitate. He did not falter either. Kyle pulled the hilt in his hand upward. In the lingering echo of a slow draw, a clear silver blade slid free. Beneath the stained glass, lights of every color broke into white across the star iron blade.

"We did cross swords once before, briefly."

Damian gave a faint laugh. Like Kyle, he tightened his grip on his hilt.

"If you think this will be the same as back then, you're mistaken. Ending Hailen's bloodline here wouldn't be bad either."

With a clear metallic sound, a dark red blade like blood revealed itself.

The red blade rose slowly, drawing a smooth semicircle. Before anyone realized it, the inside of the cathedral had fallen into silence again, just as it had been at the start. A silver blade and a blood-red blade pointed at each other's throats.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried