Chapter 66 - < Thank You for Your Effort >

“Lord Kyle.”

Before they reached the Fourth Training Ground, Lucia cautiously spoke up.

“There will be a great many applicants. Your duel with Lady Xenafelt made quite an impression.”

“The more, the better. It gives me more options.”

“You said you would only take one. What exactly are your criteria?”

Kyle considered this for a moment without breaking stride. His criteria. He had said he only needed to like their swordsmanship, but explaining exactly what kind he liked was no easy task.

‘It was the same back then.’

Trying to explain the sword to Helenas had led him to discover things he had never consciously recognized himself. The more one understood the sword, the harder it became to put into words.

“I’ll know when I see it.”

“Well, you might,” Bruno grumbled. “You’re going to assess all those people yourself?”

“Yes.”

“How many days do you plan to spend on this?”

Bruno looked incredulous. They were already approaching the Fourth Training Ground, where, just as Lucia had predicted, nearly a hundred people had gathered. Not only the young warriors attending the exchange gathering but apprentice knights who had yet to choose an order had come as well.

“Days? I’ll be done in half a day.”

“Half a day...? How exactly are you going to assess them?”

“I’ll have them swing their swords.”

Lucia nodded with a quiet murmur of admiration, but Bruno and Jade looked utterly bewildered. Kyle felt no frustration at their expressions, thanks to his memories of Helenas. Compared with her, their incomprehension was easy enough to accept.

“They won’t even need to do it several times. Just once.”

“Commander, can you really tell anything from a single swing?”

“I can tell a great deal.”

Kyle’s gaze drifted into the distance for a moment. He recalled the first time Helenas had brought her sword down from overhead.

“Watch someone swing once, and you get a rough idea of the person, too.”

Jade and Bruno furrowed their brows, trying to understand.

“Then did you see something when you first saw my swordsmanship? Did it tell you anything?”

“Back then, I saw nothing in your sword.”

“What...?”

“There was nothing to see, and nothing had been decided. You weren’t in the sword you swung back then. There was only what someone else had told you to learn.”

“...”

“But you’ve been filling it ever since. Now you’re in your sword.”

Bruno looked as though he almost understood, but not quite. Jade chuckled at his expression.

“From the sound of it, Commander, you must have seen me very clearly in my sword.”

“That’s why you’re here.”

When Kyle and his companions returned to the Fourth Training Ground, every eye turned toward him. He strode down the wide path that opened before him and stood before the applicants.

“First, let’s form a line.”

Lucia moved at once. As the applicants followed her gestures and lined up in single file, Kyle lightly tapped Fenris.

Black mist swirled, and the wolf appeared. Kyle looked at Fenris with curious eyes and whispered,

“You take a look, too.”

Perhaps someone among them had a connection to a goblin. A goblin wasn’t a requirement, but as Galen’s case had shown, one inhabiting a tool meant its owner had handled and used it with considerable attachment. If several candidates qualified, choosing one with a goblin might not be a bad idea.

The applicants finished lining up. Lucia naturally took her place beside them and spoke.

“Would the first applicant please step forward to Lord Kyle?”

The young man at the head of the line stepped out nervously. He was one of the young warriors attending the exchange gathering. Judging by his clothes, he appeared to come from a noble family.

“What is your name?”

“Reis Wolfgen.”

“Very well. Swing your sword once.”

“Just... once?”

“Yes. Once will do.”

Confusion entered Reis’s eyes. Once? What could anyone possibly learn from a single swing? The thought crossed his mind, but he could not bring himself to ask.

Kyle’s duel with Xenafelt was still vivid in his memory. Everything Reis had witnessed then lent Kyle authority here. He steadied his breathing and drew his sword.

“May I swing however I like?”

“Use the swing you’re most confident in. There’s no need to add aura.”

Reis nodded, then swung his sword from right to left.

‘Not bad.’

Kyle made a brief assessment to himself. The stance was neat, the sword’s path clean and free of wasted movement. This was swordsmanship learned from someone else and diligently practiced. He must have been a good student under a good teacher.

But that was all. It was textbook swordsmanship, and nothing beyond it.

Kyle did not know this man named Reis Wolfgen. Naturally, this was his first time seeing his swordsmanship.

Did that lack of familiarity make him want to know more? Did he want to see more of his sword?

No. What Reis had just shown him stirred neither curiosity nor interest.

“Thank you. Next.”

“Would the second applicant please step forward to Lord Kyle?”

Lucia called the next applicant as soon as Kyle spoke. Reis hesitated briefly, then stepped aside. He wanted to ask how he had done, but he couldn’t. He was not oblivious. He, too, had clearly seen the change in Kyle’s eyes before and after his swing.

“Erik Schreiter.”

The second applicant was a large man carrying a greatsword. His swing overflowed with power—so much that it was excessive.

His downward stroke scarred the training ground’s floor. He had done that without even using aura. The applicants exclaimed at the destructive force.

‘If he breaks the floor, do I have to fix it?’

With that thought, Kyle assessed the swing he had just witnessed. The power behind it was impressive, but he could see nothing else. It was as crude as driving a nail with a hammer. Erik’s swordsmanship looked more like work with a bludgeon than a sword.

“Next.”

“Would the third applicant please step forward to Lord Kyle?”

The third, the fourth, the fifth.

The line dwindled quickly. Naturally so, when one look was all he needed to judge. The assessment was swift, but Kyle’s eyes examined every sword in detail.

The thirteenth applicant’s sword was too timid. It was only natural to lack killing intent outside real combat, but even so, the swing was so dull that it carried no sense of sharpness at all. Why someone with not the slightest intention of cutting another person had come to join a knightly order was a mystery.

The twenty-second applicant’s sword was quite good. It clearly expressed its wielder and had a direction of its own. But it did not go so far as to stir Kyle’s curiosity.

The thirty-seventh applicant’s sword conveyed a love of swordsmanship. It was welcome, but that love was not directed at the sword itself. It was directed at the self who wielded it well. That sort of self-love crumbled all too easily the moment one could no longer wield a sword well.

The fifty-ninth.

‘This one deserves a place among the candidates.’

Kyle nodded inwardly. The change of direction within a single swing was interesting. The applicant wielded his sword like a whip; strung together, those motions would create a distinctive rhythm.

“Would the seventieth applicant please step forward to Lord Kyle?”

The person who strode forward looked different from everyone who had come before. Dark brown skin, long braided black hair. Black tattoos covered exposed arms and shoulders.

Kyle remembered those tattoos. They belonged to the tribes living on the Abara Plateau at the southern end of the continent.

Five hundred years ago, a southern kingdom had tried to use the ongoing wars as an opportunity to expand its territory. Even a war of conquest like that normally required some pretext to proclaim to neighboring kingdoms, but five hundred years ago, war already raged everywhere. There was no need for a pretext.

The southern kingdom had attempted to swallow the Abara Plateau. Its tribes were insignificant beside the kingdom’s army. They had no walls, no trained soldiers or knights, no mercenaries gathered with money, and certainly no mages.

Yet the tribes had withstood the invasion.

By then, Raikal was already known as the Sword Demon. He belonged to no faction and simply wandered from one battlefield to another as his interest took him. That occasion had been no different. Hearing that a great war was being fought in the south, he had gone there to swing his sword.

When Raikal arrived, war was in full swing on the plateau.

The knights’ swords were polished and swift. They formed ranks, arranged formations, and moved at their commanders’ orders.

The tribes were the exact opposite. The Abara Plateau did not have just one tribe to begin with. Dozens lived there, protecting lands passed down from their ancestors. Naturally, compared with the kingdom’s forces, the tribal alliance was a disorganized jumble.

Yet that jumble of tribesmen held its own against the royal army.

Kyle remembered the tribal warriors he had seen then. Swords, clubs, spears, axes—the weapons in their hands varied, but their fighting was like a dance.

Unlike the knights, who moved together like interlocking gears within their formations, each warrior of the tribal alliance danced separately. Their dances resembled one another, yet every one was different.

Back then, Raikal had stood in the plateau wind and watched the battle in a daze. The booming of the great drums the tribesmen beat. The heavy smell of blood carried on the wind. Their shouts and cries had sounded like a desperate song.

It was an impression he owed the people who died on that battlefield an apology for, but Raikal had found the battle before him beautiful.

Raikal joined the war on the tribes’ side. In the end, the kingdom failed to swallow the plateau. Instead, the troops it lost in that war proved its undoing, and another neighboring kingdom destroyed it.

On the day he watched the invaders retreat, Raikal became a friend to the tribes. Invited to their feast, he drank heavily and listened to many stories.

The warriors of Abara learned combat as dance. They watched the warriors dance before the campfire, copied them, and the dances etched into their bodies became fighting techniques.

To the tribal warriors of the Abara Plateau, fighting meant dancing, and to stop dancing meant to die. They danced until the moment of death, but they did not break.

Having wandered countless battlefields, Raikal knew their laws. Victory and defeat were not determined solely by the number of soldiers or knights. A battlefield was a place where dozens whose resolve wavered could be slaughtered by a single person whose spirit would not break.

Even without Raikal’s intervention, the southern kingdom would never have swallowed the Abara Plateau.

‘It might have taken a little longer, but they would have failed in the end.’

Returning from the past of five hundred years ago, Kyle looked at the woman before him. Why was a member of those tribes, who spent their entire lives secluded on the Abara Plateau, here? That alone made him intensely curious about her.

From the southern Abara Plateau to northern Gladiheim—from one end of the continent to the other. Kyle glanced at the woman’s waist. Two swords hung from her leather belt.

“Your name?”

“Narua.”

“You’re from the south.”

“Yes.”

Narua stared at Kyle’s face as she asked,

“You said swing sword once. Narua has two swords. What do I do?”

“As long as you move them together, that’s fine.”

“Understood.”

Narua nodded and drew a sword with each hand. A matched pair, their short blades curved like crescent moons. Their edges were keen, but the flats bore many scars—traces of countless collisions, chips, resharpenings, and further collisions.

Kyle smiled. Beyond her origins, he now wanted to know how those swords would move.

“I swing now,” Narua said.

She placed one foot half a step forward and spread her arms to either side as though unfurling wings.

Her left foot glided forward. Her upper body sank as her right sword flowed sideways. Then the sword in her left hand rose from below. At the same instant, Narua spun, the sideways-flowing blade tracing a full circle while the raised sword descended diagonally.

The paths of the two swords cut through the wind. Fenris, who had sat curled up beside Kyle through seventy turns, pricked up its ears and sniffed. As it stared at Narua’s paired swords, its tail began to wag.

‘You see it, too?’

Something shimmered over Narua’s swords. It had no distinct form like the dwarf inhabiting Galen’s hammer. It was an afterimage of dark red light flowing over the surfaces of the two blades. The shimmer stretched along even the paths the swords had just traced.

‘Flames...’

Flames that swayed in the wind but did not go out. They reminded him of Abara’s campfires and the tribespeople dancing before them.

The goblin inhabiting Narua’s swords was fire. A flame that wavered as though it might die, yet never did. Instead, the stronger the wind blew, the more fiercely it burned.

The fiery afterimages lingering in the air slowly faded. Galen’s goblin had chattered away, but Narua’s did not speak to Kyle. Perhaps this goblin, too, was unable to speak, like Fenris.

Narua returned her paired swords to her waist and stared at Kyle. He looked back at her in the same way.

To be honest, Narua’s swordsmanship was not the best he had assessed so far. In sheer skill, she might rank sixth or seventh, generously speaking.

But those twin swords contained Narua in her entirety. These were not the movements of someone merely reproducing what she had learned, but of someone whose very life had become her sword. If so, her swordsmanship would change even more dramatically according to what she experienced from here on.

“Next.”

The assessment was not over yet. Kyle committed Narua’s name to memory.

“Would the seventy-first applicant please step forward to Lord Kyle?”

Once he had assessed all the applicants—over a hundred in total—Kyle called the names he had remembered.

Four people in all. Narua was among them. Those whose names had not been called did not leave at once, but withdrew to watch the remaining assessment from a distance. They wanted to know which of those four would be chosen.

“This assessment will be the same. All you need to do is swing your sword.”

Not quite the same. Kyle drew Fenris.

“The difference is that this time, you’ll swing directly at me. With everything you have.”

Kyle let Fenris hang at his side. Both his red hair stirring in the breeze and the smile on his lips seemed utterly relaxed.

He had merely drawn his sword; nothing else appeared to have changed. As the candidates tilted their heads in puzzlement, one stepped forward.

The fifty-ninth. The young man who had wielded his sword like a whip.

At that instant, Kyle’s demeanor transformed. The young man involuntarily gasped. Pure killing intent washed over him, entirely different from the pressure created by releasing mana.

Kyle had shown no killing intent when facing Xenafelt earlier. He had been relaxed and merciful then. He had even struggled to find something to praise in Xenafelt.

Now he was different. Kyle had drawn his sword—Fenris—in earnest and resolved to kill his opponent. Even Lucia, standing beside him, could feel that fierce killing intent.

Lucia swallowed hard and clenched her fists. A chill ran down her spine, and her heart pounded. It affected her this much without even being directed at her.

“Ugh...”

The young man somehow managed to draw his sword and take a stance, but the posture he had barely assumed began to collapse rapidly. Seeing this, Kyle strode toward him. Fenris still hung loosely downward, yet the young man imagined that pitch-black sword slicing him into hundreds of pieces of meat. The terrible fear that this vision was about to become reality hacked his mind apart.

One step.

The young man backed away. Realizing what he had done, he turned white. He tried to step forward again, but when Kyle took another step toward him, his foot retreated once more.

“Urgh...!”

He gritted his teeth and braced his legs. But his body would not obey his mind. No—it was obeying his mind perfectly. Deep down, he did not want to approach Kyle.

“Thank you for your effort,” Kyle said evenly.

The young man bowed his pale face.

“Next.”

The second candidate stepped forward. The thirty-seventh applicant—the man whose swordsmanship had overflowed with self-love in the first assessment.

He could not even draw his sword. The instant Kyle unleashed his killing intent, the man’s hand froze on the hilt. His fingers trembled faintly. He tried to draw, but his fingers would not close around the grip. They merely shook.

One second, two seconds, three seconds.

As time passed, sweat beaded on the man’s forehead and his face flushed red. His self-love crumbled, and shame seized him.

“That will do.”

When Kyle withdrew his killing intent, the man’s legs gave out and he sank to the ground. Startled, he staggered to his feet and hurried away from Kyle as though fleeing.

“Next.”

The eighty-ninth applicant. After Narua, he had left the strongest impression—a man who had demonstrated distinctive, unpredictable swordsmanship honed in actual combat.

He was clearly different from the two before him. Facing Kyle’s killing intent head-on, he drew his sword. His hand trembled around the hilt, but he clenched his jaw and even took a bold step forward.

The man swung.

He did swing, but... the blade’s path wavered horribly. Its starting point and endpoint were aimed in completely different directions. His body, crushed beneath the killing intent, had shaken the sword off course.

Managing to swing at all was impressive, but none of his earlier impression remained. This was a stroke forced out by fear. Had he been a child, it would have deserved praise, as Bruno’s had. But the man before him was no child.

“Thank you for your effort.”

The third candidate withdrew with a bitter smile. He knew perfectly well what a mess his last swing had been.

“Next.”

Narua stepped out. She strode up to Kyle and drew a sword with each hand.

As the killing intent struck her, her eyes trembled faintly. But her feet did not retreat, and her hands did not shake. Her sword stance remained utterly still.

Kyle released even stronger killing intent. He poured out the bloodlust he had accumulated on battlefields five hundred years ago, as much as this body could possibly unleash.

The air over the training ground grew heavy. Even among the spectators watching from afar, a few fell to their knees, unable to withstand the killing intent. Bruno, watching from behind, gritted his teeth, while Jade unconsciously felt at his waist for his sword. Lucia’s breathing quickened as her heart surged.

Narua stood still.

She did not clench her teeth or strain to endure it. Gooseflesh rose across her brown skin under the concentrated killing intent. The muscles in her arms began to twitch of their own accord.

Yet Narua did not retreat. Her body was clearly reacting, and she knew what fear was. But Kyle’s killing intent did not feel like fear to her.

Narua placed one foot half a step forward and spread her arms to either side. It was the same stance she had taken in the first assessment.

The denser the killing intent grew, the clearer the flames shimmering over her paired swords became. Fire burned more fiercely when the wind blew. Kyle’s killing intent was wind to Narua, and rather than going out in that wind, the flames blazed brighter.

Narua moved.