At the time, Wilhelm was yet to know that the sword in his hand would be bathed in blood.
When Wilhelm saw himself reflected in the light gleaming off the pristine steel blade, what had he thought?
One day, still in a vortex of thought, unable to come up with an answer, his feet took him to the usual place.
His steps grew heavy, for he was filled with gloom at how he would face the girl waiting for him.
Perhaps it was the first time in his life that he had worried his head about such a thing.
Had he not continued swinging a sword without needing to think?
Just when he had resolved to give such a nasty reply…
“—Wilhelm.”
…the girl, there in place ahead of him, looked back with a small smile as she called his name.
—Suddenly, his soul shuddered.
His feet halted, and he could not help feeling nauseous.
Suddenly, Wilhelm was assailed by a realization that seemed to crush his body.
When he sought to cast everything aside with such a conclusion, that he had swung the sword without a thought, a variety of things he’d stopped thinking about and set aside suddenly spewed forth.
He didn’t understand the reason. The trigger wasn’t set in stone. That moment, the bulwark he had raised so long ago had abruptly reached its limit.
Why did he swing the sword?
Why had he started to swing the sword?
He yearned for the glimmer of the sword, the strength, the purity of living by the blade.
There was that, too. There was that also, but surely, it had begun somewhere else.
“I have to do what my older brothers can’t.”
It was because swinging a sword was a field largely neglected by his older brothers.
Yet even so, it was because his brothers sought to protect their family in their own way that he, so useless to them, sought his own, different way to defend them.
Was that not why he was captivated by the strength and glimmer of a blade?
“Do you like flowers now?”
“…I do not hate them.”
“Why do you swing the sword?”
“It is all I… I could think of no other way to protect others.”
Ever since, the previous ritualistic exchange of words ceased to be.
In place, he thought that their topics shifted around quite a bit. Before he realized it, he was heading there not with the aim of swinging a sword, but to meet Theresia.
In a place where he should have been swinging his sword without a thought, his head somehow came to find that insufficient, and topics shifted to places away from the sword.
Until then, his fighting style had been to charge single-handedly into the enemy formation and take as many heads as he could, but somewhere along the line, that changed to him running around with a focus on diminishing harm to his allies any way he could.
The sight of him prioritizing his companions’ safety over slaying the enemy naturally resulted in a change in how others saw him.
Old war comrades that had stuck with Wilhelm since his bad-behavior days were both delighted at the change in him and conflicted by it…
…for the number of people who spoke to him and that he spoke to both increased.
Previously unheard-of calls for his promotion to knight arose, and he spent only a small amount of time weighing the matter before accepting.
Deep down, he, too, found having such prestige better than not.
“There were calls for my promotion, so I became a knight.”
“I see. Congratulations. That makes you one step closer to your dream, doesn’t it?”
“Dream?”
“You took up the sword to protect people, didn’t you? And a knight is someone who protects others.”
He felt that, among the things he wanted to protect, her smiling face stood out.
4
More time passed.
Having become a knight, and coming into contact with more people within the army, the information reaching his ears naturally increased.
The deeply bogged-down civil war continued, with an advance on one front matched by retreat from the next. Wilhelm, too, experienced not only victorious battles but defeats as well.
Along the way, he spent his days continuing to struggle to protect those within reach of his sword, while bitterly regretting those things that were beyond his reach.
It was by happenstance he heard that the fires of war had shifted to the land of the House of Trias.
That fact casually reached Wilhelm’s ears from a newfound companion inside the army. Namely, that the civil war that had begun in the kingdom’s east had broadened, reaching all the way to the Trias domain in the north.
There was no order given.
So long as a knight did not forget the position allotted to him, it was impermissible for him to act on his own. But to Wilhelm, embracing once more his feelings from the time he first grasped a sword, such things meant nothing.
By the time he rushed to his beloved homeland, the advancing enemy army had already turned it into a sea of flame.
When the scenery that he had abandoned over five years before faded before the reality of more familiar sights, Wilhelm drew his blade, raised his voice, and dashed into the bloody mists.
He cut down his foes, trod over their corpses, and shouted until his throat grew parched as he bathed in blood spatter.
The enemy’s numbers were overwhelming. There were no reinforcements, and it was a land weak in fighting strength to begin with.
Until that point, he had meant to fight in battle on his strength alone, but he learned the price, taking one wound and then another—becoming unable to move.
Collapsing atop a pile of corpses, crushed before the numbers of the enemy force that still showed no signs of running dry, Wilhelm understood that death was coming before his eyes.
The beloved sword that had long been with him fell by the wayside, for his fingertips were too numb and lifeless to hold it aloft.
With his eyes closed, he looked back at half his life, during which he had done nothing but swing a sword.
It was a lonely life—a life with nothing.
Along with that conclusion came a momentary sight—and along the way, one face after another flashed before him. He remembered them one by one: his parents, his two older brothers, the bad friends he had hung out with in the domain, his comrades and superiors from the royal army—and finally, that of Theresia, with flowers behind her.
“I don’t want to die…”
It should have been his true hope to live by the sword and die by the sword. But faced with the actual result of his way of life, devoting everything to steel, Wilhelm, with the end he should have desired before his eyes, was stricken with an unbearable feeling of loneliness.
The enemy soldier that had cut down so many of his comrades would not honor the final words he had let slip. Inhumanly large in body, they mercilessly swung their great sword down at Wilhelm—
“”
—He would eternally remember the beauty of the slash that lashed out.
A storm of swords blew, and in course, the demi-human’s limbs, head, and torso were cleanly severed.
A great uproar spread among the enemy force, but the racing silver flash was faster, easily inflicting death in large quantities.
Splattered blood rose up, the death cries did not cease, and the demi-humans’ lives were shaved away.
The all-too-vivid slashes did not register even with those struck by them, managing no expression as their lives were snuffed out.
Whether such acts were cruelty or mercy, no one knew.
As to what was known, there was but a single thing—
—Surely he could not reach that realm of the blade in a lifetime, or even eternity.
He had lived by swinging a blade, devoting the majority of his not-overly-long life to that purpose. And because of that, it was Wilhelm who could keenly comprehend the heig
hts of the swordsmanship repeated over and over before his very eyes.
So, too, the fact that it was a realm he, a man of no talent, could never reach.
If Wilhelm had created a valley of bloody mist in his homeland, it was truly a sea of blood that spread before his eyes. The literal mountain of corpses piled atop one another had no comparison.
The silver flash did not cease its dance until every demi-human invading the Trias lands had ceased breathing.
Having witnessed the overwhelming slaughter to the end, he was carried out by late-arriving comrades from the royal army. They shouted various things and tended to his wounds, but Wilhelm never took his eyes off the sight.
Finally, the slender long sword wavered, and the sword fighter finally walked off.
Wilhelm shuddered when he realized that the sword fighter had not been bathed in a single drop of spattered blood.
He reached out with his hand but could not reach the back moving away.
Most likely, the distance between them was not a physical one alone.
It was when he returned to the royal capital that he heard the true name of the one bearing the alias of Sword Saint.
It was around the same time that the name of the Sword Saint began to reverberate in every land in the stead of Wilhelm the Sword Devil.
Sword Saint—once upon a time, that was the legendary being who had cut down the Witch bringing calamity to the world.
To that day, the men beloved by the sword god were of the blood of that single family, and it was through that direct bloodline that one generation’s superman was born after another.
The name of the Sword Saint of that generation had never been public even once—so, too, until that time.
5
It was several days later that his battle wounds had healed and he made his way to the usual place.
Gripping the hilt of his beloved sword, Wilhelm quietly trod the soil as he headed for the flower garden.
He was certain she would be there.
And in accordance with his firm belief, Theresia was sitting in that place, no different from before.
“……”
Before she could look back, Wilhelm drew his sword and leaped at her.
Just before the semicircular cut would have split the girl’s head—she caught the tip of his sword with two fingertips, bringing it to a halt.
A sound of wonder caught in Wilhelm’s throat as a malevolent smile came over his lips. “Humiliating.”
“…Is that so?”
“Were you laughing at me?”
“……”
“Go ahead and laugh, Theresia…no, Sword Saint—Theresia van Astrea!!”
With all his might, he raised his sword high and sliced at her again, but she evaded by a single hair in an undisturbed motion.
A moment after the dance of her red hair stole his eyes, his feet were swept from under him, unable to break the fall as he was cruelly sent crashing down.
Even without a sword in her hand, the Sword Devil’s blade could not reach the Sword Saint.
An impregnable wall, a preposterous difference was now evident between them.
“I will not be coming here anymore.”
Several times more, Wilhelm went slicing after her, and each time, he was struck by a counterattack and beaten to the ground.
At some point, his beloved blade was snatched from him, and as it rested in her hand, he was beaten by the hilt until he was unable to move.
So far. So very weak. He could not reach. It was not enough.
“Don’t hold a sword with…that face…”
“I do, for I am the Sword Saint. I did not understand the reason why I was, but I understand now.”
“Reason, you say…!”
“You swing the sword to protect others. I think I can do that, too.”
It was Wilhelm who had given Theresia, the girl who loved flowers, who could find no meaning in gripping a sword, that reason—all the more because she was stronger than anyone, the furthest beyond the reach of anyone’s sword.
“W-wait, Theresia…”
“……”
“I’ll take your sword from you. As if I care about your blessing or your role. Don’t underestimate swinging the sword…or the beauty of the blade, Sword Saint…!”
The woman did not stop. Her back grew distant.
All that was left behind was a lone, foolish devil, speaking of the sword to her, who was loved by the sword.
Afterward, the two would never meet there again.
6
The Sword Devil vanished from the royal army; in his place, the name of the Sword Saint spread within it.
A knight worth a thousand men—with hard fighting by Theresia, the embodiment of those words, the civil war tilted in their favor. Though a single person, her martial feats were beyond the realm of any individual, and the alias of Sword Saint resounded—even the demi-humans versed in the old legends despaired.
It took two years after the Sword Saint emerged on the battlefield for the civil war to end.
The Demi-human Alliance lost those who carried it upon their shoulders, and when peace talks were carried out somewhere between the current leaders on both sides, it announced that at minimum, the fight between those bearing swords had come to an end.
Blessed by the end of the long-running civil war, the royal capital gently opened up and began to flower.
A ceremony had been planned where a powerful, beautiful Sword Saint would be granted several medals. People throughout the kingdom traveled to the capital to glimpse the sight of Theresia, the red-haired Sword Saint—the hero whose passion had single-handedly brought the long suffering from wild war to an end.
—It was then that the Sword Devil unexpectedly descended, as if to slice that passion asunder.
The soldiers on guard became agitated from the incredible antagonism rising from a man with a naked blade in his hand. But it was none other than the Sword Saint, the flower of the ceremony, who checked them and advanced to the fore.
Each turned their sword toward the other, almost as if walking onto a prearranged stage.
When her long, red hair fluttered in the wind, none failed to hold their breath at the sight of her facing the intruder. It was difficult to find words for an appearance with such refined beauty, yet so at one with the blade.
The malevolent antagonism of the individual facing the Sword Saint was the polar opposite. Both the brown mantle over him and the skin underneath were filthy all over from rainwater and caked mud. Even the sword in his hand was meager compared to the ceremonial holy blade the Sword Saint held in hers. The blade of the well-made sword was crooked, with reddish-brown rust all over it.
Though the king was seated on the same stage they were on, he halted the knights attempting to go to the Sword Saint’s aid. When the Sword Saint stepped forward and her swordplay glimmered, all pulled their chins back, and none raised a voice, watching in silence.
At the beginning, no doubt many found the two figures having vanished from their sight.
Blade recoiled from blade again and again; high-pitched sounds shot past the spectators.
There was a chain of glimmers and sounds of steel as the two figures danced upon the stage at a dizzying speed.
Soon, those witnessing the spectacle had lost their voices, their hearts going to and fro, overwhelmed with a vast sense of admiration.
They battled with incredible force, switching where they stood, from the ground to the walls to the very air as the swordplay of the two sword fighters blurred. Some even realized that the sight had brought them to tears.
But as they listened to the orchestra of echoing steel, they instinctively shuddered, intoxicated by the sublime sight.
They thought, is this really a realm that people can reach?
Can the beauty of the sword truly instill such deep feelings in others?
Their swordplay intermingled, with locked swords, flashing tips, and repeated recoils.
And fina
lly…
“”
…the discolored blade snapped in half, its tip sent flying, spinning round and round in the air.
Then, the hand in which rested the Sword Saint’s ceremonial sword—
“Victory…”
“……”
“Victory…is mine.”
The holy sword audibly dropped to the ground, and the broken sword’s warped tip came to rest just short of the Sword Saint’s throat.
The spectacle made time stop, and all knew.
The Sword Saint had lost.
“You’re weaker than me, so you have no reason to wield a sword.”
“If not me…then who?”
“I’ll carry on your reason for swinging a sword. You just need to become…my reason to swing one.”
He lifted up the hood of his outer garment. The sullen face of Wilhelm glared at Theresia from under the dark, filthy cloth.
Theresia shook her head a little at Wilhelm’s behavior.
“You are a terrible person. You’ve made a person’s determination, resolve, everything all go to waste.”
“I’ll carry on everything that’s gone to waste. You can forget about gripping a sword and just take it… Yes, that’s it. You can raise flowers and live in peace and quiet behind me.”
“Protected by your sword?”
“That’s right.”
“You’ll protect me?”
“That’s right.”
Theresia placed her hand against the flat of the sword thrust toward her, taking a step forward.
The two faced each other, close enough to feel each other’s breath.
Tears welled in Theresia’s damp eyes, but they only conveyed her little smile as they fell.
“Do you like flowers?”
“I stopped hating them.”
“Why do you swing the sword?”
“To protect you.”
The distance closed as their faces drew close; finally, it vanished.
When she drew back from the touch of their lips, Theresia’s cheeks were red. She gently stared at Wilhelm as she asked, “Do you love me?”
He averted his face and bluntly stated, “—You know I do.”
Just then, the people enthralled by the dancing of swords regained their senses, and a great throng of guards pressed close. Wilhelm’s shoulders sank when he saw familiar faces among the soldiers rushing over.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 7 Page 17
