GDTEA Chapter 116

Just One Hit

Ren climbed onto the sparring ground, wooden sword in hand.

The gazes of the knights watching him were sharp and hostile.

Of course, that wasn’t enough to deflate Ren’s spirits in the slightest.

“I’ll personally beat that insolent attitude out of you.”

Instead, he made sure to keep the opposing knight’s spirits quite alive.

Ren turned his head away from the knight standing before him, toward the knight captain.

“I trust you’ll honor the terms.”

“I swear it on the House of Chelonar.”

The knight captain nodded readily.

Ren swung his wooden sword lightly to loosen up.

[How about we each put forward one condition? If you lose the match, you apologize—if you win, you receive the apology.]

[That’s fine with me, captain! Let’s make it so he gets down on his knees, bows his head, and apologizes!]

[Is that all?]

[Isn’t that enough?]

[That knight’s apology isn’t something I’d consider worth winning through a match.]

[Hahaha. Then tell me what you want.]

The knight captain, fully confident his subordinate wouldn’t lose to some mere mercenary, had only one condition to contend with from Ren.

[One condition—the freedom to come and go from the count’s mansion as I please, even if just for a single day. That’s all I need.]

The attendant listening in cried out in vehement opposition, but Ren did not withdraw the condition.

A knight captain of the House of Chelonar likely had that level of authority.

In truth, it wasn’t particularly unfavorable to the knight captain either. He hadn’t demanded to go unsupervised the whole time he was out, so assigning a knight to tail him would do just fine.

‘Even without meeting Sha directly, there are plenty of ways to relay the situation here.’

He and Sharti had already prepared countermeasures thoroughly in advance, so being tailed or watched wouldn’t pose much of a problem.

Ren gripped the wooden sword and looked at the opposing knight.

“I am Denver Weasley! A knight of the proud House of Chelonar!”

“Ren.”

Denver sneered at the brief self-introduction.

A mere mercenary who wasn’t even a noble—he could finish this in a single blow. And Denver was no ordinary knight.

“Begin!”

At the knight captain’s shout, Denver kicked off the ground and launched himself at Ren.

He’d show this foolish mercenary, no doubt off his guard because it was only a wooden sword, what real pain tasted like.

“Against me, who stands on the threshold of Sword Master, you’re nothing but—”

Denver saw it.

The moment his blade reached the neck of that insolent mercenary.

At the same time, he felt a thrill of exhilaration.

“—Die!”

Even a wooden sword was more than enough to sever a man’s neck.

The price of ignoring a difference in skill as vast as heaven and earth was death.

Denver widened his eyes, eager to see the expression his opponent would make in the last moment of his life.

“……?”

But that was as far as it went.

The next time Denver opened his eyes, he was lying in a bed in the medical room of Count Chelonar’s mansion.

Wrapped head to toe in bandages, at that.

****

Ren, having worked his body out to his heart’s content through the late afternoon, turned his back on the stunned knights and returned to the guest room.

The merchant was not in the room.

“Ah, the merchant is currently with the attendants.”

The merchant, never one to miss an opportunity now that he was inside Chelonar’s mansion, was in the middle of dazzling the attendants with his flashy sales technique, showing off all manner of rare goods.

Ren wasn’t particularly curious, so he dismissed the attendant and washed up lightly.

“Huu…….”

Ren sat on the edge of the bed, having only roughly pulled on his lower garments.

He tried opening and closing his hand to shake off the lingering tingle still left at his fingertips, but it was no use.

The heat that remained in his body was the same.

“His character was trash, but I definitely felt something from that sword.”

Ren recalled Denver’s sword, which had come at him the moment the match began.

In the instant a strange energy rose faintly from the blade, Ren’s fingertips trembled.

Before his mind could even register the sensation, his body had already reacted to the trajectory of Denver’s sword.

‘What was that?’

He remembered that knight, Denver, had boasted so confidently about something or other regarding a Sword Master.

Along with that came the muttered whispers of the surrounding knights at the moment he’d turned Denver’s attack back on him.

‘……Aura, they called it?’

A question had formed, so he’d charged at Denver to find the answer.

He’d thought that Denver, having had his attack reversed, would use Aura again.

[G-, I… you… hisss…….]

But Denver had turned out to be weaker than expected.

Denver, who had been sent flying across the sparring ground from just a hit to the face, had taken a blow to the head from smashing into the wall and was in no condition to stand properly.

‘The more I think about it, the more absurd it is.’

Ren, who had thought surely no one with this level of skill could be a knight of the House of Chelonar, showed no mercy and beat Denver relentlessly with the wooden sword.

The knights watching the match had also been too slow to react, unable to believe their fellow knight was actually getting thrashed this thoroughly by a single mercenary.

In the end, the knight captain stepped in late to stop Ren, and that was how the match concluded.

‘After that I was given a corner of the training ground and swung my sword for a while, but in the end I couldn’t replicate it.’

He had wanted to observe Aura from the other knights as well, but the knights, wary of Ren, had merely hovered about before clearing out of the training ground early.

“I felt like I could do it…….”

It was a vague instinct.

Since the number of times he could remember properly holding a sword was few enough to count on one hand, it was also a confidence without basis.

Above all else, he couldn’t even execute a proper sword technique, let alone Aura. Ren, who had no memory of formally learning swordsmanship, honestly acknowledged that in terms of swordsmanship alone, he was far worse than Denver.

Yet Ren couldn’t shake the thought that he was capable of wielding an Aura far more vivid and powerful than Denver’s faint one.

“My body is too slow.”

The fact that his body couldn’t move as his mind intended—the fact that things wouldn’t go as he willed—went beyond frustrating and was downright agonizing.

“Is this also because of my damned memories?”

Had his body grown dull following his broken mind? Or was it a sign that his body’s memories were trying to return before his mind’s?

Either way, it wasn’t something that would be resolved right now.

Ren lay down on the bed and covered his eyes, his expression irritated.

“…….”

As he closed his eyes with a deep sigh, he found himself wanting to see those brilliant vermilion eyes, brighter than the sun.

They had been apart for only half a day, yet he missed Shar terribly.

Then a hollow, self-deprecating laugh escaped him.

“Sha probably isn’t thinking about me at all.”

Sha would obviously have all her attention focused on making the antidote.

Or she’d just be sitting there with a gloomy expression, worrying about Tein.

It wasn’t anything new, so he wasn’t hurt by it.

It was just this silence—this very moment of missing Shar alone, without her beside him—that felt unbearably, maddeningly lonely.

“……I’d planned to leave tomorrow, but I can’t help it.”

Ren shot upright.

Wallowing in loneliness, sitting here pitifully—that was supposed to have ended back in that damp, pitch-black cave.

“Oh, wh-where are you going?”

Ren grabbed his coat to leave and ran into the merchant.

Perhaps because he’d made a tidy profit, the tension had completely vanished from the merchant’s face.

“I’m stepping out for a moment.”

“Ah, yes.”

The merchant nodded, assuming it was a light stroll.

“Oh, right—there’s something new I found out! But…….”

The merchant, who had called out to stop Ren just as he was about to leave, rubbed his jiggling double chin.

At his trailing, ambiguous words, Ren turned to look at him.

“The young lady of Count Chelonar. What did you think of her when you saw her?”

“Ordinary.”

Ren closed the door for the time being and crossed his arms.

Under Ren’s gaze that said go on, the merchant instinctively leaned forward slightly from the waist.

“They say a demon has possessed the young lady.”

“……A demon?”

Ren frowned as if he’d heard something ridiculous.

“A maid here said so. The fact that the young lady’s personality changes every night and she can’t remember—it must be because a demon has possessed her, apparently.”

“Nonsense.”

A demon, of all things, possessing a girl younger than Tein.

As Ren’s brow tightened with displeasure, the merchant lowered his voice further.

“The one who said this was the youngest maid, the one who handles the menial work—and that youngest maid says she witnessed it. The young lady behaving strangely, and it wasn’t even nighttime.”

“Strange behavior?”

“Yes. She was hitting her own head with her fists.”

What the youngest maid had seen was Eryl, sitting blankly on the bed, striking her own head over and over in self-harm.

It had happened in a gap when the attendants had briefly left their posts so that Eryl, who was always nodding off, could sleep comfortably.

“The youngest maid, who had cracked the door open and was peeking in, was so startled she rushed into the bedroom uninvited to stop her—and you won’t believe what the young lady said!”

The merchant gave a light shudder, as if confessing an unsettling secret.

[Where is this? I need to find my dad, my dad……. Mm, who am I?]

“…….”

“The youngest maid thought she must be rambling from hitting her head so much.”

“Does everyone here know about this?”

Ren’s voice cracked slightly.

“No. After that, the young lady went back to being perfectly normal, so the youngest maid thought she must have misheard and kept her mouth shut.”

For a junior maid, reporting that yet another symptom had been added to the young lady’s list of mental ailments would have been too great a burden to bear.

Ren looked at the merchant coolly.

“For someone who kept her mouth shut, her lips seem to open quite easily.”

It seemed the maid had confided in the merchant alone what she hadn’t even told her fellow attendants.

Stung by Ren’s gaze, the merchant smiled awkwardly.

In a noble’s household, attendants must always be careful. They cannot freely speak of what they hear or see, and must be mindful of their words and conduct.

But junior attendants had as many weaknesses as they had fears.

“Just as noble lords have ways of communicating among themselves, we have our own little openings where things slip out naturally.”

Ren simply scoffed once and left it at that.

It wasn’t entirely incomprehensible. He just disliked the gossip that exaggerated a noble’s flaws with talk of demons and the like.

Ren checked the fading red sunset through the window and opened the door.

He needed to step out and return before dark fell completely.

‘……I think I should tell her.’

The attendant quickly fell into step behind him to keep watch as Ren stepped out of the mansion, but he paused and looked up toward the second floor.

There was nothing to be gained by hiding the fact that the young child was hurting herself.

After a moment’s hesitation, Ren reluctantly turned back toward the mansion.

Right now, he needed to meet Tein first.

“Wait, you there! Mercenary? The captain is calling for you.”

Just then, knights of the House of Chelonar in grey uniforms appeared. They stopped Ren, who was about to head back inside the mansion, saying the knight captain was summoning him.

Ren stared at the knights’ faces for a moment, then nodded.

“Ah, we were only told to bring the mercenary.”

“Leave him to us and go about your business.”

With amiable expressions, the knights separated Ren even from the attendant and fell into step beside him.

Walking flanked by the knights on either side, Ren rolled out the muscles in his neck with a bored expression.

“This way.”

The further they went toward a secluded area, the more hostile the knights’ eyes and gestures became.

Despite their overt animosity, Ren didn’t particularly slow his pace.

‘I can’t cause more trouble here.’

The knights leading him away were the ones who had been at Denver’s side.

Their intentions were obvious, but this time he had to play along with them to some degree.

Sure enough. Where the knights stopped, Denver sat on a wooden crate, seething, wrapped in layers of bandages.

“You little……. How dare you do this to the firstborn son of the Weasley family?”

“…….”

Feeling no need to respond, Ren simply met Denver’s gaze with a blank expression.

Denver stared intently at Ren’s face, struggling to read his expression, before suddenly breaking into a grin.

“You’re married, I hear? Hmm?”

“…….”

It seemed the merchant had been opening his own mouth while getting others to open theirs.

The moment Ren’s eyebrows barely twitched, the corner of Denver’s mouth twisted.

“Take just one hit—and I’ll let you go without a fuss. Clean and simple. How about it? Same as before, with a wooden sword.”

“Fine.”

There was no telling what underhanded thing he might do, but there was no point in provoking Denver and blowing things up further.

One hit, at most—it would do no more than break his nose.

‘Sha will worry though.’

Still, it was better than getting into a troublesome situation inside the mansion and making Shar tremble with anxiety.

The decision was swift.

“Hit me.”

“Ah, close your eyes. Who knows? Maybe you’ll suddenly change your mind and cowardly attack the moment we let our guard down?”

“…….”

Ren, no longer wanting to exchange another word, simply closed his eyes.

When Ren obediently closed his eyes, Denver smiled and jerked his chin at his fellow knights.

And the knights immediately swung their wooden swords.

Thwack—!

“……!”

Ren’s face contorted as he clutched his left hand and staggered back.

Glittering fragments fell one after another from his left hand.