Children of the Rune – Winterer - Chapter 56

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 56.
Breaking Through the Trap, Into the Storm (26)
Two men had pierced my neck and shoulder blade, but I had also taken wounds to my thigh and arm.
The men had assumed they could handle me carelessly, but they were caught off guard by refined swordplay. Soon they began to form an encirclement. Eleven against one. There was no way I could lose.
The boy’s blade was maddeningly exquisite. It was fortunate it remained in a child’s hands—had a proper swordsman wielded it, over a dozen rabble would have fallen in an instant.
At this level, it was worth an army of hundreds. Not that a single sword could match such numbers in combat, but that the blade itself was so extraordinarily rare. That they could not seize it from a child—it was absurd!
I had fought tensely from the start and was tiring quickly. Yet my mind grew increasingly lucid.
As I wielded Winterer for the first time—a blade I had only ever carried—I began to grasp the value so many had coveted.
Even the shock and guilt I had felt upon taking a life paled before this blade’s intoxicating beauty.
A sword is born for killing; its beauty lies in perfect alignment with that purpose. Why should I fear it? Why should I flee?
Thoughts I had never entertained before flooded my mind. I did not understand why I was seized by them.
The more I became one with the blade, the more skillfully I wielded it, the more I felt a power surging from some unknowable place—and I wanted to possess it entirely. To handle it freely, as though it were my own body.
Stronger!
Winterer’s edge finally pierced a heart. Blood erupted into the air. Yet the sight thrilled me rather than horrified me. I did not grow numb with the thought that I had killed again.
Buoyed by confidence in what I had accomplished, my movements quickened as I parried an incoming blade. The arc of steel severed a man’s ankle cleanly.
So easily. So perfectly severed. It was beyond what I had imagined possible.
“Ugh… AAAAAGH!”
A pitiful scream tore through the air. Winterer had become unnaturally sharp. What had just occurred would have been impossible with an ordinary blade. A strange radiance spread across the edge.
“All together—charge!”
Before a blade that could sever with the merest touch, the enemies could not simply rush forward recklessly. Three men mounted horses and drove them savagely toward me.
Evading, I swung the blade again. Watching one horse’s leg cleave away, I felt an oddly exhilarating sensation wash over me. But in the next moment…
“Take this, you bastard!”
A dagger thrown by one man buried itself deep in my back. That was the precise moment everything changed.
Suddenly, chills raced through my entire body, and I was seized by the thought of what I had done. A dagger in my back… was this not the very thing I had once inflicted upon another?
The heightened emotion drained away like a receding tide. My grip weakened. Though the wound was deep, it was the sudden return of my ordinary mind—taking in the full situation at once—that created a terrible discord.
A man quickly seized my wavering form. Another twisted my sword hand. Winterer fell from my grasp.
They trampled the blade to keep me from retrieving it, and another man wrenched the dagger from my back. In its place, a fist crashed against my jaw.
“I’ll tear that worthless neck from his body and hang it before the castle!”
The man with the severed ankle cursed from where he lay. Other men seized both my arms firmly. One approached with a raised blade. My head would soon fly.
Then the situation changed.
Whoosh!
I did not understand what happened behind me. The men released me and retreated in panic. Though my hands were free, I collapsed to the ground, drained of strength.
Then I saw Winterer pinned beneath a man’s foot. I reached for it, and so did the man.
Our hands touched almost simultaneously.
“Get away!”
As our hands met, the man shouted and struck mine away.
I seized the blade desperately this time, grasping the edge itself. Blood began to flow from my palm. But I had no intention of letting go.
“This bastard!”
That was when a black robe swept past overhead, and the man gripping Winterer’s hilt cried out. Looking up, I saw a stranger in robes descending lightly behind the man.
A longsword had already pierced the man’s back and emerged from his belly. The robed man withdrew the blade smoothly and turned to rush at the others.
Blood flowed from Boris’s hand far more profusely than he’d anticipated. During the battle, Winterer had grown unnaturally sharp, and even the briefest contact had opened deep wounds. Had he gripped it any longer, his fingers might have been severed entirely.
Rather than tend to the wound, Boris seized Winterer in his left hand. His head spun, but he forced himself to his feet.
What greeted his eyes was a constellation of diagonal slashes—the lingering afterimages of a blade moving at impossible speed.
Too swift for the eye to follow, yet fluid and precise. The robed man wielding a single longsword cut through his enemies as effortlessly as scything wheat. In one fluid motion, he drew a blade across one man’s throat while simultaneously piercing another’s shoulder. He dropped low, then drove an upward kick into an approaching assailant. Launching himself on a single leg, he severed the arm of a mounted rider.
The sword he wielded was a bastard blade, comparable in size to Winterer, yet he wielded it with equal mastery in both hands and one.
In moments, half the force lay fallen, the rest scattering in panicked flight. Their faces bore the expression of men who’d glimpsed a phantom.
The stranger did not pursue them. He merely narrowed his eyes, as though savoring their desperate scramble. Soon, only blood-stained earth and two figures remained.
Boris’s horse, rather than fleeing, ambled toward its master. Yet Boris stood motionless, his gaze fixed upon the stranger, unaware of anything else.
“You….”
That familiar robe and hood—they belonged to the disagreeable man he’d parted with immediately after crossing the Rosenberg Gate. But there was more to it than that.
That technique, that swordplay—he could never forget it. Yet it seemed impossible, like a phantom glimpsed in a dream.
Why? How? Here? Now? In this manner?
The man turned to face Boris and spoke.
“Sheathe that blade. Do it before it’s too late.”
Without thinking, Boris obeyed. The worn scabbard lay some distance away, trampled by hoofprints in the dust.
The moment Winterer slid into its sheath, something that had been churning violently in his chest suddenly stilled. The blade’s white radiance vanished completely.
“Did my first lesson serve you well?”
Boris made no move to retrieve his belt, nor to stanch the blood still flowing from his hand. Pain itself had been forgotten.
The stranger spoke again.
“Will you not repay your savior?”
Grass rippled across the Meadow. Summer was coming even to the frozen Northern Plains, where a bitter wind perpetually circled—a season that would inevitably arrive, as it always did, everywhere and always.
“It may not be graceful, but….”
The stranger’s voice began to shift. What had been a shrill, irritating tone transformed into a soft, deep register.
It was not merely a change in inflection. These were the voices of two entirely different people. He’d never known such a skill existed in this world. Had it been otherwise, Boris would have recognized him instantly at their first meeting.
The hood fell away. Long chestnut hair, bound up until now, cascaded down to brush against her waist.
“Does a reunion of this sort suit you?”
Tension dissolved, and a cord wound tightly around his heart suddenly came loose. She was the one—the person Boris had disappointed, who had departed without concealing her disappointment.
He could not lift his face.

I opened my eyes and surveyed my surroundings. Clean sheets, a modest but immaculate room, a half-open window, and a basin of water someone had left for me.
I had fallen asleep sprawled across the bed and was just waking. When I tried to sit up, a vicious pain nearly sent me crashing back down.
Only then did I remember the wound on my back. I had received emergency treatment and applied medicine yesterday, but it would take considerable time to heal.
I rose carefully and descended from the bed. Even lifting my arm to wash my face required superhuman effort. I considered simply dunking my face into the water and pulling it out, but the basin was too shallow for that.
Gritting my teeth, I moved only my left hand to wash my face. The wound was near my right shoulder blade.
I tried to convince myself that it was nothing—I wasn’t dying, after all. But it was utterly impossible.
The simple act of opening the door and stepping outside consumed an entire day’s worth of strength. By the time I descended to the lower floor, I was utterly exhausted and could think of nothing but wanting the day to end quickly.
“Well, well.”
It was strange. Had I truly liked him? I couldn’t recall precisely.
I must have liked him somewhat, and I had felt an unclear resonance with him several times. Yet it was never enough to make me resolve to see him again.
And yet I was delighted. Unspeakably happy. Boris, who had wandered alone all this while, was starved for the sight of a familiar face.
“Come and have breakfast. No one’s going to feed you.”
Despite my pain, I nearly burst into laughter.
My lips moved slightly, but the moment I tensed my chest, the wound on my back throbbed sharply. I could barely speak, let alone laugh.
I settled into my seat, and before me lay a bowl of grain porridge and two pieces of bread. Across from me, I noticed a bowl of boiled chicken.
“You can’t have meat because of your wound. Dip the bread in the porridge and eat that.”
I picked up the food without complaint. I had eaten fine cuisine since childhood and had tasted countless high-quality dishes at Belnoir Castle, yet strangely, I harbored little desire for food. My palate was not particular.
Watching me finish the lukewarm porridge and bread before leaning back, my companion spoke.
“They say ‘those who eat simply can do anything.'”
I spoke quietly.
“Walnut Teacher….”
At that, he shook his head vigorously.
“That’s not my name anymore. The land I live in has changed, hasn’t it? Forget that name. I’m Isildor San now. Doesn’t it sound just like a Lemme name?”
Isildor San, once Walnut, appeared more robust than before. His hair had grown longer too. The stubble jutting from his cheeks remained, but his face was tanned, and….
“Your forehead seems to have gotten wider, sir.”
It was an offhand observation, but Isildor San reacted sensitively.
“What are you talking about! It was like this before. Surely you’re not suggesting I’m going bald?”
I had no such intention, but I was the sort to be tactlessly honest at times like these.
“That conjecture does seem to have some credibility, actually.”
“Consider the effect such baseless speculation might have on your health before you speak.”
“If the conjecture proves true, it would seem trivial compared to the effect it might have on your own health, sir….”
I wondered if we had always bickered like this. But even after Isildor San finished eating, we continued volleying back and forth over equally pointless topics, laughing and arguing.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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