༺ 𓆩 Chapter 46 — The Boy's Transformation 𓆪 ༻
「Translator — Creator」
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
The rumor that Isaac had returned from Vinfeldt grown tall and striking had spread thickly through the manse.
Yet most of the household did not welcome the change in him.
By a sudden growth, the boy of twelve had taken on the body of a youth of fifteen or sixteen. Room remained for further growth, and the youthful look of a boy clung to him still, but the servants of the manse did not receive his transformation with a glad heart.
There were many reasons for it, but the chief among them was the danger of another mana eruption from Isaac. Even before his body had grown, his mana eruptions had frightened no small number of people and dealt out injuries great and small. Now that his body had grown larger, it was only natural for them to think that the eruption to come might be larger still.
His tastes at table, too, had grown harder to please.
"Tell them to bring more meat. Quickly. I am hungry."
Before, no matter what was set before him, he had never picked apart his food. That had been a kind of pride for the chief cook of the manse. It had meant that the meals had satisfied an Isaac who had once carried himself like a wastrel, and who was, even now, a figure of fear and avoidance. But for the Isaac who had returned from Vinfeldt, the chief cook now had to alter a fair part of the menu.
In truth, those most put out by the change in Isaac were the soldiers stationed at the manse.
“Mind if I use the training ground with you?”
"By what manner do you all train your bodies? Might I join you?"
From the very first day of his return, having had his fill of bath and food, Isaac had come to the training yard. It was a difficult thing.
With neither the margrave nor the Chamberlain in residence, the small Goethe was, out of nowhere, demanding to take part in their training. The soldiers could neither refuse him outright nor cheerfully agree.
If they refused, Isaac might be put out and erupt; if they agreed, he might be put out in the training itself and erupt. More than that, the presence of the Hellwolf, lying always at a little distance with its belly to the ground, weighed heavily upon them. Should Isaac take any small hurt during the training or sparring, or should he show the slightest sign of being angered, who could say whether that great wolf might not tear a man's head from his shoulders?
"Have no fear. The beast is gentle."
Isaac assured them, but not one of the soldiers believed it.
"My father's permission? It is well. While my father is away, I am the head of the house in his stead."
The soldiers found their grounds for refusal slipping away one by one, and Isaac was tenacious. In the end, they had to deal with a mana-bomb that might go off at any moment.
But, against their reckoning, those who went off first were the soldiers.
"Is that the whole of it?"
It began with Isaac's verdict that the training was tedious.
The soldiers, with baskets of heavy stones strapped to their backs, ran the path that wound about the manse, sweat pouring from them. Unlike the high road, the path was not flat. There were small rises, and stretches of gravel. Even soldiers who trained without a single day's rest were spent and gasping after a single circuit of that fixed course.
They had thought he would give up the training before he so much as left the manse, before he set foot upon the path. For mischievous soldiers had slipped not stones alone but lumps of iron into Isaac's basket. It was a kind of welcome customarily inflicted upon a fresh recruit.
Yet Isaac, even after seeing the brutal course through, stood firmly upon his two feet. He did not retch. He did not so much as utter the common word that the labor was hard. He had sweated as the others had sweated, and his breath came shorter, but he had nothing of the look of a man who had run rough and steep paths with a load of stones upon his back. He looked rather like a man who had taken a few easy turns about the manse garden. Indeed, his face wore a look of satisfaction.
"Less than I had thought. What is next?"
That word of his made the veins stand out at the temples of the soldiers. Knowing nothing of the battle in Vinfeldt, they saw in Isaac only a stripling who had grown in body alone. They themselves were, for the most part, men who had served in Winterband or in foreign armies, or who had made their way through one mercenary band after another. They had seen no small number of fights. And the training of such men, Isaac had belittled.
"Sparring, my lord."
A veteran soldier answered.
A killing-air had risen in the soldiers' eyes. Their origins differed, and the reasons that had brought them to this place differed, but at this moment they were of one mind.
‘We shall break this stripling.’
At their look, Isaac drew up the corner of his mouth.
"That should be amusing."
The soldiers were full of expectation. They wished to humble the stripling, to teach him how cold and how high the wall of the real was. Yet it was they who came up against the wall.
"Hraah!"
A soldier brought his wooden blade down in a vertical cut. Isaac bent his back lightly aside from the stroke, and then drew his rear foot forward and drove in with his weight behind it. Soldier and Isaac collided. From the outside there was hardly a sound, and yet the soldier whose shoulder had taken the hit felt the joints inside his body all ring. He scarcely steadied his wits and recovered his balance. He had been driven back three full paces without his knowing it. By the time he had moved to draw his guard up again, it was too late. Isaac's wooden blade lay against his neck.
“Is that all you’ve got?”
The soldier's face twisted in anger. But he could only acknowledge his loss.
"I yield."
"Next."
The soldiers came at Isaac one after another. And every time, they lost in the same fashion.
Among them there was none of smaller frame, nor of lesser height, than Isaac. They knew well how greatly mass tells in the close press of arms, and so had eaten heartily whenever they could, and had not let a day of training pass them by. And yet, in the bouts, they were always the ones being driven back. To collide with the trunk of Isaac's body was to feel one's bones smart as though one had crashed against a stone.
"He fights as the warrior tribes fight."
The veterans had seen this manner of fighting before. They had served at Winterband, where the fortress had drawn no small number of men from the tribes beyond the marches. Such men, with their large frames and hardened bodies, had always brought variables into the fighting where blade and shield were all that was given. Isaac was fighting in just that way. And in the manner of a veteran of decades, no less.
"What was that one's name? Ragna? Beorn? Did those berserkers not fight in just this style?"
"What in the name of the gods has he been doing in Vinfeldt?"
What had startled the soldiers was not the tribal style of fighting alone. It was the practiced swordsmanship woven through it. The line of his blade flowed as water flowed, and his attack turned to defense, and his defense to attack. For the soldier facing him, it was vexingly hard to predict. The way Isaac handled his wooden blade shifted with every breath. He used the wooden sword as a sword, and then in the next instant struck through the air with it as though it were an axe. A soldier accustomed to the techniques and the speeds of the sword could not but be put off by Isaac's strength of arm and by his blows that came half a beat early or half a beat late.
Harder still was the fact that the wooden blade was not his only weapon.
"Hahh!"
A soldier launched a clean rising cut, the kind that might have come from the pages of a manual itself, from below to above. Yet at once he found himself thrown into difficulty. Isaac had neither blocked the rising cut nor swept it aside. Instead, he had stepped abruptly forward into the soldier's guard. The soldier's arm, locked under one of Isaac's armpits, could not so much as stir. With his other hand, Isaac caught the soldier's wrist and bent it back.
"Aagh!"
The soldier let out a sharp cry, and the wooden blade fell from his grip. He was the fifth opponent, and was, in fact, the most skilled veteran among the men set to guard the manse.
"……"
A new light came into the soldiers' eyes. Sword-wrestling was a thing set down in many a manual of the blade, but it was of no great use in the press of real fighting. At best it was something seen from time to time in single duels. To attempt such a thing in the chaos of a battlefield was a fine way to get a blade between one's ribs and be sent off to the next world. On a field where there were knights who could wield mana, it was meaningless. One was outmatched even in plain strength of arm by a knight, and one whose sword poured out aura would not allow the closeness needed to attempt a wrestle. For that reason, unless a man had no small confidence in himself, in his strength, and in his understanding of the body's frame, the orthodox course was not to attempt it at all.
Yet Isaac had moved boldly, and as if to make a show of it, had stripped the wooden blade from his opponent's hand.
"Next. Next! Is there no next?"
There was no soldier who came forward to face him. All ten and more of them had been put down.
"I shall be the last, my lord."
So the soldier holding his throbbing wrist answered.
"Is that so? It falls rather short of what I had hoped for. You shall need to put more effort into it."
Isaac smacked his lips as though disappointed. At a murmuring meant plainly to be overheard, the soldiers, every one of them, ground their teeth and clenched their fists. The shame was no light thing.
"Until tomorrow, then."
The soldiers did not know how to take this turn of events. A small boy of twelve. A boy who had never been given instruction in the blade, who had been afflicted with the strange constitution of Mana Runaway. A boy who had become, of all things, the lord of Vinfeldt, and had returned to make every soldier of the manse yield. It had only been sparring, and the first few he had crossed weapons with had held back their hands somewhat. But once those first soldiers had been routed, the rest had given their utmost. Even had it been a true fight, the result would have been the same. They knew it by instinct.
Could it be that the young master, raised as a hothouse flower, had made one trip to Vinfeldt and become a genius of the blade?
Watching Isaac's back as he left the training yard, the soldiers each had heads burdened with their own thoughts. For that reason, they did not quite catch the last words Isaac had spoken.
***⚜***
There were three reasons that Isaac had provoked the soldiers.
First, they were a fitting opponent against whom to test his ability. Carlson and Bessemer were too strong. The soldiers of Vinfeldt, who had not trained at all under Pyke's mismanagement, were too weak. Set beside them, the soldiers of the estate were veterans in the matter of person-to-person technique. The guards of the manse had been chosen by the margrave's own hand. They were of no low rank in skill, nor were they men careless in the honing of it. They took pride in the keeping of the Goethe manse, and were men of a high loyalty toward the margrave.
Such soldiers were just the men against whom Isaac might loosen his limbs. The combat techniques he had taken from the King of Wolves, and the swordsmanship he had taken from Lucas. He had long wished to know how the two would serve him in true bouts. He had also wished to know what effect upon the body the mana now spreading through every part of him, since his use of the King of Wolves' runestone, would have.
The King of Wolves' runestone had not merely set his body to growth. Without his having been aware of it, the mana that had once dwelt only in his vessel had now spread through every part of his body, completing and strengthening his joints and his sinews. Just as the King of Wolves in his days of life, and as Bessemer, had been, the Baitur tribe had been so singularly strong a warrior tribe because they had known, by instinct, how to wield mana. Much as a knight ran his aura.
In that respect, the first sparring had been deeply satisfying. Isaac had gathered the threads of how he was to put his new gifts to use.
Second was for the spurring of the manse soldiers themselves. They were fine soldiers, true, but to the Isaac of now they had a long road yet to walk. War was coming, and Goethe, as matters stood, was in no position to swell its ranks of men. Each man would have to do the work of a hundred. They needed a goad to drive them on to further growth.
Third was the cast that needed, from this point onward, to be set upon Isaac's name in the wider world. The strange constitution of Mana Rampage, of Zeke von Goethe, who had once burned the royal palace. That inheritance, Isaac had taken up. The moment he should use magic, the entire house would stand in danger. And yet, he could not merely keep his head down and limit himself to working from the shadows.
To keep suspicion at bay while doing what needed to be done, Isaac required a fitting reputation in the world's eye. That reputation had two faces. One was the genius of the sword. The other was the wastrel. By those two, Isaac would secure his freedom of motion.
Of course, there was no need to play the wastrel before everyone.
"There was a forebear of ours, one Zeke von Goethe. He was the first and the last man in our history to ascend to the 10th-Class, an exemplar above ordinary men."
In the library of the house, Isaac was telling Jonas an old tale. It was a fact one would normally have learned from the records of the forebears, things one was meant to look upon only after taking the seat of the head of the house. But for Jonas, who was to become the master of Goethe one day, the earlier the knowing, the better. The weight upon his shoulders would grow, but it would also become a power to spur him into faster growth. It would be a hard thing for Jonas to bear, but this was the path that, also, was for Jonas' own sake.
"…The royal palace was burned, and Goethe was driven out here, to the marches."
"Truly? Truly, that is how…?"
The face of Jonas, who had not yet shed his baby-fat, paled with shock. It was a secret hard for one of his years to bear, hard even to take in. But Jonas, befitting one who was to be the head of the house, listened to Isaac's tale with care.
"Brother, how do you know all this?"
"It is something I read, in stealing into Father's private study. And, I think, the strange constitution of that forebear, of Zeke von Goethe, has come forth in me."
"Then the people who live in the royal city, are they afraid of you, Brother?"
"If it should become known. The whole of our house would, in that case, stand in danger."
"No, that must never be."
"Just so. So, Jonas, this is a secret only between you and me."
"Mm. Hush is hush. Never, never, never to be told."
Jonas pressed a small finger to his lips. Isaac let out a quiet chuckle.
"Brother."
"Mm?"
"I shall grow strong. I shall grow strong, and protect Father, and Mother, and Brother, and the people here, all of them."
So Jonas said, drawing his small voice into a serious tone.
"Aye. I shall put my faith in you."
Isaac smiled and ruffled the curling gold of Jonas' hair. The boy was both dear to him and bright beyond his years.
END σϝ CHAPTER