Yomigaeri no Maou

The wind rang out as it blew across the meadow.
There stood two men, and watching those two was a young woman and a girl who looked of about 16.

The two women both possessed radiantly beautiful faces, and if you described the young woman as somebody who possessed a bewitching beauty, then the younger could be described as a single, graceful flower in the moonlight.

However, they weren’t the lead actors of this scene.
Instead, the ones who held the lead role were the two men with swords a certain distance away from them, facing each other down.

The two of them had fairly similar looks with intellectual and calm eyes, and were almost like mirror images of each other.
However, if you had to say what was different, one of them was a boy who had not reached 15 yet, whilst the other was a man in his mid-thirties.
Furthermore, their hair colour was different.

Whilst the boy’s hair was an inky black that housed a deep darkness, the man’s hair was a blonde that glittered in the light of the sun.
The quality of their hair was quite similar; both soft-looking, and cut just above their shoulders.

Having examined thus far, the fact that they were parent and child became obvious.

In other words, the boy’s hair colour was inherited from the woman standing there, and the characteristics and quality of his hair were inherited from the father standing opposite him.

“…I’ve waited impatiently for this day.”

The boy――――Luru, was talking to his father about how today was the day of the promise.
A long time had pa.s.sed since the day they made the promise seven years earlier, and today was the day when he became a year older and turned 14.

In other words, it was the day that Luru’s dream would be realised.
For the sake of that dream, the man in front of his eyes, Patrick, was a wall that he had no choice but to surmount.

“Me too, Luru. You’ve become strong… Your body, and your heart too can’t even be compared with seven years ago. I’m sure that today you’ll surpa.s.s me… That’s your plan, right? ”

Whilst saying that, Patrick’s eyes housed a pa.s.sion that showed absolutely no intention of losing.
Luru knew that Patrick wasn’t the type to lose intentionally as a parting gift to his son, but even so, seeing the state Patrick was in with his own eyes made him feel just a little nervous.

He looked straight at Patrick.
Seven years had pa.s.sed since then, and even though Patrick should have aged too, not even a shadow of it could be seen from his appearance.
Because he had a gentle and calm atmosphere to begin with, and he actually often seemed a little older than his age, but because he hadn’t changed much, on the contrary, these days he often seemed younger.
His body was just as robust as back in those days, and Luru knew that just below his loose clothes were muscles that had been trained to the limit.
He was the opponent that he trained together with day after day.
You could say that they knew each other’s habits, each other’s strengths; everything.
The problem was clearly that the father had trained his skills to a higher level, and Luru couldn’t even beat him in pure arm strength, but the problem of skill aside, at least for this match, the issue of arm strength would not be a problem.

If Luru ran his huge reserves of mana to use for Body Reinforcement, he could probably win via brute force. However, as long as he had chosen not to do so and partic.i.p.ated in a match of pure swordsmanship then Luru wouldn’t be using that mana. His father though, also suggested suppressing his own superior arm strength.

It wasn’t Luru’s suggestion, but in the end this match was just to determine whether or not Luru had properly learned the sword, so Patrick using brute force to win was pointless, and neither would Patrick find it enjoyable that way.

And Luru felt more or less the same.
To Luru, if he used his mana freely then he could suppress Patrick via brute force without caring about swordsmanship or anything like that.
However, doing so in this match would be cla.s.sless, and to begin with, doing so would have rendered his training under Patrick as meaningless.
Luru learned his era’s swordsmanship so that the power that he wielded in the past as the demon king could be allocated to the position of a trump card.
But if despite that, during the final test when he would find out if he had properly learned this or not, if he started to freely use other techniques in the battle with Patrick, the test would have very little meaning to Luru.

That’s why the result was that Luru restrained his mana, his father wore a Magus Tool on his finger to decrease his physical strength, and hoped for the fair fight that this was going to be.
Before the battle, they had adjusted the Magus Tool while arm wrestling to balance the power, and right now their arm strength was certainly equal.

After this, all that was left was a battle of skills.
His father had a slight handicap due to being unused to the feeling of his weakened body, but to begin with, his father had the advantage in modern swordsmanship.
On top of that, this battle was something they had decided beforehand, so his father had practised his swordsmanship under weakened physical conditions until he could fight without a problem in expectation of this.
You could consider it as almost equal.

Having thought that far, Luru drew his sword, and took a guard.

“Of course… I’ll definitely surpa.s.s you. And when I do, the next instructor for the Royal Knight Order will be me.”

Patrick laughed at Luru’s joke.

“I’m surprised that something like that came out of your mouth… I thought that you’d definitely throw away your position as a n.o.ble, you know. If you intend on succeeding me, and I don’t have to worry about adopting somebody or giving you a younger brother, then that’s fine too, though… Well, that’s for later though. Right now I can’t hand my position over yet. After all, I have a wife I need to support.”

What came from Patrick’s mouth was another joke.
Even if he quit his job as a swordsmanship instructor, he still had this village.
Just that much would be more than enough to eat, and even if Patrick was fired as an instructor, if he decided to create a dojo and accept applications, a huge number of students would probably come in no time.
He possessed that much fame as a martial artist.

Thinking about it again, being stuck in a position where he had to defeat such a person made him shudder, but as the one once called the world’s strongest, having said that he had only learned these techniques for about 10 years, he couldn’t lose here.

So Luru spoke.

“You can still say that after all this time? …I’m looking forward to it. …Here I go, Father[/Tousan]!”

“Come! Luru!”

And like that, the battle began.

Pressure was gradually released from their two bodies.
Their stances were like reflections of each other, both in a middle guard[chuudan] and the two showed neither any signs of unsteadiness nor any openings.

The time that pa.s.sed with them in guard like that felt like both an eternity and an instant.
In terms of swordsmanship itself, Luru was inferior to Patrick.

However, he shouldn’t have lost in the ability to read the opponent.

In his days as the demon king, Luru had much experience with battle, and what that meant was that it worked no matter the opponent.

However, unlike those days, right now his body was that of a human, so Luru’s physical abilities were lowered, and his eyesight was no exception.

The shifting of his opponent, their breathing, the sounds of their muscles moving; the demon king’s technique of integrating all of these to predict the future was weakened in this era.

As a result, right now his ability to read the opponent was the same as Patrick’s, and even the possibility that he was a little inferior existed.

That’s why Luru naturally decided to give up on predicting things like where the opponent was going to strike if he went first.

He knew that if he attacked first, then Patrick would accurately see through his openings and attack there.

However, if they kept staring at each other, at this rate it would never begin.

He would just take the first move, and then everything after that he would leave to his instinct-sharpened responses.
There would probably be no time to think.
However, he had trained for many years in moving spontaneously without thinking.

Thus…

Like that, Luru kicked off the ground.

Of course, Patrick immediately sensed his movement, and moved his body to deal with Luru’s attack.

It seems that the fact that Luru would not swing his sword but thrust, was accurately predicted by Patrick, and lowering the sword tip just a little, Patrick bent his body horizontally and avoided the attack.

However, to Luru, there was no way that he didn’t know that was going to happen.
Sensing that Patrick would immediately take evasive action, Luru forcibly pulled back the sword that had been thrust, and shifting his body to the side, attacked Patrick once more.

“…-!?”

Patrick had been thinking that Luru could probably immediately get in another strike, but all the same, he was left wide-eyed by the speed.
Patrick naturally brought down his sword between his body and Luru’s sword, and repelled the attack just fine, but he had no choice but to take some distance; he had retreated until they were about the same distance apart as when they first started.
From the point of view of Patrick, who was aiming for a counter after being forced to move first by Luru, he didn’t think that it was a very good choice.
In fact, in Patrick’s gaze who was standing 5 steps away, what was there was not the calm gaze from before, but a burning glare.

Leaving aside how things might be under normal conditions, now that Patrick’s physical strength was decreased, he recognised that the one before him was not an opponent he could challenge while holding back.

It was what Patrick hadn’t seen in training even up until yesterday; Luru’s aggressive and greedy side.
He hadn’t really shown it in his sparring with his father, and Luru’s style of the modern swordsmanship that he had practised together with Rusty, was aggressive enough that it seemed difficult to cope with upon seeing it for the first time.

“Not bad, Luru. Why haven’t you used this fighting style up until now?”

Asked his father with a smile, who despite being a little surprised, still hadn’t lost his composure.
However, Luru could tell from his smile that his father’s fighting spirit was starting to heat up just a little.
Patrick had recognised Luru as someone worth fighting.
Realising this, Luru felt an elation like the one he felt fighting the hero in his previous life.

“Didn’t you say it yourself, Dad[/Tousan]? …That it’d be better to have one or two trump cards in hold. I don’t want to die, so once I become an adventurer I’ll be going all out then, but even so, I think it’d be better to avoid using all my cards, so… I’ve been thinking about it too.”

Luru’s trump cards…
In other words, they his mana and techniques as an ancient demon, but also the aggressive style of fighting that he was using against his father.
The techniques that he was now using were unmistakably close to the school of Orthodox Swordsmanship that he learned from his father, but if you looked at it and at Luru as a whole, you would probably immediately mumble:

‘That’s the Demon King’s fighting style.‘

If you had to describe them, his father was the stype of swordsman who would take away his opponent’s escape routes one by one and drive him into the corner, whilst Luru was the type of swordsman who would chase and destroy them no matter where they ran to.

Luru had learned his father’s method of pursuing the opponent, but Luru naturally absorbed this, and came up with a new style of fighting unique to him.

Were Luru a normal boy, he probably couldn’t have done this.
To customise and improve a sword system that had been pa.s.sed down and rationalised over a long period of time was normally impossible.
However, Luru had piled up many experiences for this sake.

Creating a rational style of fighting that suited oneself, all without leaving the framework of modern swordsmanship, was not something impossible to Luru, but on the contrary merely an interesting project.

And the result was that Luru’s style of swordsmanship was a few steps more advanced than the swordsmanship system that had been pa.s.sed down until now.
That advancement was not something so simple that you could immediately cope with it just by seeing it.

Even Patrick was no exception, and it was for this reason that he showed his admiration for Luru’s technique.

“Thinking about it, huh…? The foundations of your style are definitely the things I taught you, but… The details are different, and it’d be better to consider the ideology itself behind the movements as different, huh. …Are you a genius? But… It actually looks like the fighting tactics of a veteran backed with experience, but… Hmm.”

Patrick began to mutter this while they met blades a number of times.
Considering that after only a few exchanges, the answer that his father had come up with was almost completely correct, on the contrary Luru was the shocked one.

“Well, whatever… I more or less grasp what you’re trying to do. We’re both close to reaching the limits of our stamina. Shall we make the next rally the last…?”

Said Patrick, as he retreated just a little.
Luru could feel a might from Patrick’s spirit, incomparable to everything else so far.

The technique he was about to use…
It looked like an ordinary swing from above.

However, it was actually different.
It would be fine to call it a surekill technique that encompa.s.sed the entirety of the Orthodox Swordsmanship that Luru and Patrick had trained thus far.

Not just Patrick, but Luru and even Rusty could use this technique, but his degree of skill in it was incomparable.

However, right now there was only one technique that Luru could use to deal with this.
Thus, he resolved himself.

Like that, Luru and Patrick faced each other down, and at the same time, yelled the name of the technique.

“Let’s go, Luru… Single Longsword!!”

“Take this, Dad[/Tousan]… Single Longsword!!”

They met in an instant, and thus the outcome was immediately apparent.

The one standing in the end, without a single wound, was the blonde man.

It was Patrick.

/Chapter 16 END