I Was a Sword When I Reincarnated (LN) - Volume 13 - Chapter 4.1

ASIDE: AMANDA

FRAN WAS DEPRESSED for a while after you disappeared. She didn’t show it, but her eyes and her voice…they were so lifeless. She would bury herself in Jet’s fur and look at the stars at night. It made her look like the young girl she was, for once.

But after a couple of days, she slowly returned to her usual self.

“Let’s do our best. Think of how you can surprise Teacher when he comes back!”

“Hm!”

“I won’t hold back on training you, either!”

“Just the way I like it.”

Fran’s determination was the real deal. In fact, I scolded her a few times for being too enthusiastic.

Every time I returned from Alessa, I found her armor heavily damaged, and that wasn’t all. The sword I got her would be broken and she’d be in the middle of healing her wounds.

Time after time, she was beaten by a powerful monster. Time after time, she decided not to retreat and challenged it again. Fran restlessly repeated this cycle.

But I knew she wasn’t going to slow down even if I asked, and I didn’t have the right to tell her to stop. Fran was already a mature adventurer. She could make her own decisions and live with the consequences. Even if that meant getting injured or dying during training. I’ve put myself through some crazy training before, so I know how hard it would’ve been to talk her out of it.

The best I could do was visit the Garden more often to make sure that Fran didn’t die in the middle of training. But something about Fran and Jet changed after the first month. The spirit in their eyes was fading.

Their eating habits had changed, too. They’d had this thing called curry—this brown sauce served on a bed of rice—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But they started having it less frequently. They started having it once a day, then once every three days, until eventually they stopped having it altogether.

The dish was apparently Fran’s favorite, but getting the ingredients together and cooking it was difficult. In her case, she could cook it but lacked the ingredients. I ended up getting her the curry spices from Alessa. She then sprinkled it atop of some meat and called it a day.

If Fran had had an infinite amount of curry, she probably could’ve gotten a lot more out of her training.

“Let’s see if you can dodge this one.”

“Ha! Huh!”

“Good! That’s the way to do it! Read the enemy’s intentions and don’t let them bait you!”

“Hm!’

Fran’s movements got faster and sharper by the day. I lashed my whip at her with an uncaring face, but I was breaking out in a cold sweat on the inside. The time was coming when she’d finally land a hit on me in a weapons-only match—a match where I should’ve had the advantage.

There wasn’t much of a gap between our weapon mastery Skills. Actually, Fran had the upper hand as far as Skill level was concerned. My advantage came from experience. But Fran was closing that gap at a rapid pace.

I wanted to take all the credit and say that her improvements were all thanks to our sparring matches, but those weren’t the only training methods that Fran employed. Fighting monsters was another such exercise. She’d take on a D-Threat and fight it only using Sword Arts. Sometimes she’d restrict herself to only using spells. As for me, I just hung around as insurance.

What I found most interesting was how she’d look like she was spacing out…and then quickly move. You’d think she was getting some outside advice and acting on it somehow, but I didn’t sense anyone around that she could talk to.

Fran told me that it was the spirit of the sword, but I didn’t sense any spirits around, either. She said it with a straight face, so I thought she might be training her joke-telling skills along with everything else. Maybe she had adjusted her movements after reviewing everything in her mind. I just didn’t know what she was talking about.

“There goes your sword again.”

“Hm…”

Her weapon was the biggest problem.

Fran had several weapons stowed away in Pocket Dimension, some of them even enchanted swords. None of them could hold up to her strength. Even the strongest of the bunch, the Enchanted Phantom Augite Blade, broke within the first two weeks.

I would sell the materials Fran had gathered in Alessa to buy new swords for her, but none of them made the cut. Fortunately, it all worked out because restricting herself to fighting with weaker swords made for good training. But she was having a hard time until Aristea showed up.

Aristea the Godsmith came to the Demon Wolf’s Garden in winter, when it started snowing. We didn’t notice her arrival at the pedestal because of her powerful stealth manatech, though. I almost had a heart attack. Can you imagine? The woman was more powerful than she let on, and she has a stock of powerful weapons to boot. I thought she was part of Raydoss’ special forces. I was about ready to throw down. 

Apparently, she felt the same way about me. We would’ve started killing each other if Fran hadn’t stepped in.

We became fast friends once we started talking, though. She’s a good person.

Aristea crafted a sword made of refined enchanted steel for Fran in less than a week. She really was a Godsmith. I ended up asking her if she could make me a whip, too. She said she would do it if she had the materials, so I’ll probably be busy gathering them next year.

Anyway, she isn’t here right now because I asked if she would take on a request for me. Not the whip, though. Something else. She’d had the same idea and accepted it immediately.

Fran’s training days continued. Jet lost his right leg and right eye after pushing it too hard one day. This happened a few days after that.

“Tsch! There!”

“Urgh…ha!”

“I can’t believe it…!”

Fran had deflected my Whip Arts with her Sword Arts and weaved right through my offense. But this was still within my expectations.

I pulled back my whip and kicked her. Fran would probably dodge it, but I just needed a split second to bring my whip back to me.

What she did next exceeded my expectations. She dodged my kick ever-so-slightly faster than I thought she would. She was only a few fractions of a second faster than my projections, but the fact remained that she had surpassed them.

And then, faster than my whip could deflect her blade, Fran stabbed me. Probably a Dagger Art. Her control was fantastic, minimizing the recovery time and gaps in her sword art. She seamlessly blended Sword Mastery and Sword Arts, and had perfect spatial awareness of her surroundings. Bringing it all together was lightning-fast decision-making. All of it came together to make her offense unblockable.

“That was perfect! You finally got the drop on me.”

“Hm! But I’m not finished yet.”

I giggled. “Of course not. Let’s go again.”

“Hm.”

Fran is going to be absurdly powerful one day. I couldn’t wait until her training ended.

A month passed. Jet kept fighting despite losing an eye and a leg, and he managed to achieve a surprising evolution. This took place several days after that.

“What’s wrong, Fran? Aren’t you supposed to be training?”

Fran was up early that day. She was sitting next to the pedestal, knees pulled up to her chest. Beside her, Jet was heeling with polite expectancy.

I asked her why she seemed so happy. The answer surprised me.

“Hm. Teacher’s coming back.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“Teacher said he’d be back in 150 days. Today’s the 150th day.”

“What about the sword spirit you were talking about?’

I couldn’t hear it, but Fran really was hearing the voice of a sword spirit. I couldn’t believe it at first, but I was compelled to after seeing how fast she progressed by taking her advice. She said the spirit’s name was P.A.—short for Public Announcement—a strange name for a spirit.

The spirit didn’t answer all of her questions, but she gave reports on Teacher’s condition, the progress of his restoration, and combat advice.

“She doesn’t know how long it’s going to take exactly but it should be soon. It might be two hours or two days.”

“Two days?”

“Hm.” Fran nodded before returning her gaze to the pedestal.

“You’re going to wait…?”

“Hm.” She looked at me like I had asked an obvious question. She really was going to wait for Teacher to come back.

“I-I guess I’ll wait with you…”

Hurry back, Teacher!