“Lara,” Ferd replied.
“Ah...” Sazaki has been full of smiles, but the moment he heard that name, he got a strange, defeated expression and scratched the back of his head. “Seems like my journey ends here. I wish you luck.” Sazaki shook his head and suddenly returned to a bright expression.
“What are you talking about? You haven’t taken a single step yet,” Elrica interjected with a glare.
“You’ve met her for some reason or another, right?” Ferd asked.
“Well, yeah, but...” Sazaki scratched his head again in response. The woman called Lara was the cause of his evasiveness. “I’ve set things up so when I die, my inheritance will go to Lara and our son. And you know, I was trying to show off, so I feel embarrassed now.” Sazaki hung his head, wondering what to do.
“Ah, I see.” Ferd had an indescribable expression.
Lara was Sazaki’s wife and they even had a child together, but their relationship had maintained a reasonable distance for seventy years now. Sazaki seemed to be embarrassed because he’d arranged for what few belongings he had to be sent to her after his death, so he was worried about how he’d face her now.
“Well...I had been thinking about going to see Lara soon, so this is perfect timing. I think I’ll go get ready for the journey, then. I need to tell my disciples too.” Though worried, in the end Sazaki chose to join them on their journey and leisurely stood up. The Blademaster had been sitting on the ground with a bottle of alcohol in one hand this entire time.
“Huh?!” Carl, the rookie swordsman who’d just started at the Clovis School, was looking at something truly unbelievable.
“Oh, you’re here, greenhorn Carl.” Sazaki, the homeless, was actually walking on his own two feet.
“Has the alcohol finally broken your head?!”
“Everyone always says something like that whenever they see me just walking around normally.”
Carl had just shouted something incredibly rude, but most people who knew Sazaki would have the same reaction. Sazaki had actually had conversations like this many times, going back years. When he’d abstained from alcohol for a time during the great war, there had been an uproar, with people assuming that humanity had finally lost and that the end of the world had come.
“I’ve decided to head out on a journey for a bit. Okay, now you’ve been informed.”
“Wait a second! I’ll go get you a drink right away, so don’t die before then!” Apparently, Sazaki’s sudden declaration made Carl believe that Sazaki wasn’t acting weird because of too much alcohol, but rather because of a lack of it.
“Listen here, greenhorn. I decided to go see my friends and acquaintances. I might be going pretty far, so I won’t be back for three years or so.”
“What?!”
Normally, Sazaki would just laugh and tell Carl to hurry up and go buy him the drink, but strangely enough, he told the boy his plans with a straight face. But Carl couldn’t help but be surprised that this homeless old man had suddenly said he was going on a journey, and that he wouldn’t be back for another three years, no less.
“You’ll just die right away!”
“Moron. You think someone who’s been lying around town all year round would die just from going on a trip?”
“Well...I guess you have a point.” Carl was trying to bring Sazaki back to his senses, but now that Sazaki mentioned it, Carl remembered that the old man was in incredibly good health, except when he was drunk, at least. “But why so suddenly?”
“Well, I won’t die from going on a journey, but now that I’m an old man, there are a lot of people I’d like to see one last time.”
“Right, I suppose that’s true for the elderly...” Carl was convinced once he heard the reason behind Sazaki’s journey, since he was talking like a proper elderly person, but he was a bit lost for words. Carl was still a boy, so he felt lonely at the sudden departure of Sazaki, who’d helped him out in all kinds of ways.
“Relax, I’ve decided that I’ll die surrounded by the alcohol here, so I’ll be back.”
“Shouldn’t you choose to be with your grandchild or something?!”
Sazaki was such a hopeless drunk that he knocked Carl’s loneliness away in the most unexpected of ways.
“So, I’m leaving town. Don’t forget why you’re trying to get stronger.”
“I get it already! I’ll become a reliable brother for my younger siblings! That’s fine, right?!”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Don’t drop dead during your journey, old maaan!”
“Who do you think you’re talking to, little greenhorn?”
After doing nothing more than one-sidedly informing Carl of his plans, Sazaki turned on his heel and left, grinning at the boy’s jeering goodbye. The boisterous boy and the hopeless drunkard of an old man—melancholy didn’t suit this strange teacher-student pair, nor would it have suited their farewell.
However, Sazaki had one more disciple in this town.
“Oooooh!”
“Haaaaah!”
The violent shouts of men training with wooden swords roared throughout the Clovis School dojo. The dojo covered a large area, with both the inside and outside of the wooden building being used as training grounds, suggesting that the school was getting preferential treatment from the town’s lord.
A great man sat far inside the building. His muscles toned despite his over sixty years of age, this man was the teacher of all the others, who trained here so diligently. He was Clovis, a man who had kept cutting and cutting. He’d been apparently busy the past few days, often leaving the best students in charge of the dojo and visiting the lord’s mansion. According to rumors, he’d captured and killed some criminals, earning praise for his great actions.
He really is incredible. He keeps saying that he’s inferior to his teacher and his fellow pupils, but he must be being humble. One of the students, a really skilled one for his age, shuddered at the fierce majesty Clovis exuded despite just sitting there.
A lot of mystery surrounded Clovis. Although he stated that there were others more skilled than him, no one knew anything about those alleged people, so most just assumed that he was being humble. And yet, his words were the truth. Clovis was weaker than his teacher and fellow disciples, even some of the more junior ones. However, he was the most successful of them all in the eyes of the public.
“Focus.”
“Y-Yes, sir!”
He rebuked a young man whose mind seemed to be wandering during training. Clovis had many students across the world and could spot the ones who weren’t concentrating even in the middle of tens of people practicing fervently. It was thanks to his excellent leadership and observation skills that he could pass on his techniques properly. Considering that some of his fellow disciples had left their teacher and created their own schools but were having trouble passing their techniques on to their successors, Clovis’s talent was hard to come by. Many people believed that the teacher who’d trained Clovis had to be a respectable person, but...he was actually just a homeless man known as the Blademaster.
Clovis had also been busy the past few days taking care of Carl, his newest junior disciple, and dealing with the aftermath of the incident with the profane sword users. It was unusual for his teacher, Sazaki, to be visiting his dojo during a busy night, but the bigger problem was the people accompanying him.
O-Oh no, oh shit... Clovis, a great man of advanced age, muttered in his mind with the same type of language he’d used in his youth.