The Forgotten One (4)
“I’m talking about teaching you the sword.”
“What is it this time? Out of nowhere.”
“When your master speaks, you listen in silence.”
One day, while learning the sword from the Helmet Knight.
The Helmet Knight ran his hand along the hilt of his blade and said, “It feels as though I’m telling you the story of my own life. A strange feeling.”
“Telling the story of your life?”
“I’ve been swinging a sword for nearly three hundred years, you know? I told you I would teach you the essence of those three centuries, but when I said it I was only half joking. And yet…”
“And yet?”
“And yet, once I started, it actually worked. Watching you learn puts me in an odd mood. When I see you swinging the sword the way I do…”
The Helmet Knight laughed.
“It’s as if I’m looking at my past self. I thought I had already forgotten. I thought I would never remember. But watching you, it comes back to me.”
Who I was.
How I lived.
What kind of sword I swung.
“Anyway, you damn brat.”
The Helmet Knight clicked his tongue.
“You make a man greedy. You won’t let him let go of his lingering regrets. Really, you damn brat.”
“You want me to teach you spear arts? Me?”
“Yes. You.”
Looking down at Najin, who knelt on one knee and gazed up at him, Blue Spear blinked. With a distinctly flustered expression, he opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again.
“Najin, was it? My diary says you and I have met twice or so. Did the past me, by any chance, tell you I would teach you the spear?”
“No. He never said anything of the sort.”
“Then why?”
“Does one need a reason to seek instruction?”
Najin smiled as if there were nothing strange about it at all.
“Besides, you said it yourself. That this spear art must not be allowed to fade into oblivion. That the history of an entire nation rests on the tip of the spear you wield…”
And so, Najin continued,
“Hearing those words, I simply felt it would be a shame. Just as you said, it is a spear art too precious to leave forgotten.”
“Have you seen me wield the spear?”
“It’s your daily routine, isn’t it? You swing the spear for nearly ten hours a day—how could I not have seen it?”
“And so you want me to teach you?”
Najin nodded. Blue Spear did not look particularly pleased. Rather, he wore a troubled expression as he spoke.
“I’m grateful for the thought, but… I don’t think I have anything I can teach another person. How am I supposed to teach what even I no longer remember?”
“That part is fine.”
Najin put on a supremely confident smile—an expression he had borrowed from Merlin. Watching that face, Merlin muttered under her breath, “You look so damn smug!”
“I’ve always been good at learning even when no one is trying to teach me. Teach me one thing and I grasp ten. Sometimes I figure it out on my own without being taught anything at all.”
What kind of nonsense is that?
With that look on his face, Blue Spear regarded Najin, then began his daily routine with a dubious expression. It did not take long for him to understand exactly what Najin had meant.
Whoosh!
The moment he saw the trajectory drawn by the spear Najin swung, he had no choice but to understand—whether he wanted to or not.
“No… how?”
Eyes wide, mouth hanging open, Blue Spear stared at Najin. Looking at the astonished Blue Spear, Najin smiled and spun the shaft of the spear.
“I told you, didn’t I?”
I’m rather good at learning.
2.
There is a famous saying among swordsmen.
A swordsman speaks with the sword.
Bards often render that saying as something like, “First-rate swordsmen understand one another’s hearts simply by clashing blades, without exchanging a single word.” In Najin’s opinion, that was complete nonsense.
How are you supposed to know without speaking? To pull that off you would need to be a mage who had learned mind-reading, not a swordsman. Whether such magic even existed was another question.
—No such thing exists. If it did, I’d want to learn it myself.
Since the great mage said it did not exist, it probably did not.
At any rate, while he dismissed the idea of reading hearts through the sword as nonsense, he had no intention of denying the expression “a swordsman speaks with the sword” itself.
Even if it fell short of the heart, there were things one could show another by swinging a blade. In large ways through swordsmanship, in small ways through the habits of the swing.
For instance, by using a particular sword style one could declare, “This is the sword I learned, and I am so-and-so’s disciple.” Through the way one stepped and the habits of the grip, one could speak of the life one had led.
A swordsman who had spent long years on the battlefield tended to swing with concise, short, efficiency-first habits.
A swordsman who had lived in harsh terrain such as snowy mountains tended to emphasize footwork and to swing with careful regard for the ground.
In this way a sword carried the life its wielder had lived—and this was not true of swordsmen alone. It applied to every martial artist who had long handled a single weapon, whether spear or bow.
And right now Najin was looking at one such martial artist.
The knight of Rondinel, Blue Spear.
He had already been a transcendent before Rondinel fell three hundred years ago, so his age had to be well over four hundred. In other words, a martial artist who had swung a spear for at least four centuries stood before Najin’s eyes.
Whoosh.
The shaft cut the wind. The tip coiled the air and produced a bone-chilling sound. Eyes wide open, Najin engraved every motion into his pupils.
Even if he loses his memories every day…
The habits etched into the body, the motions repeated day after day—those, Blue Spear had said, he never forgot. Of course Blue Spear himself did not know what meaning each motion held or what principle was contained within it.
That point.
That very point was what Najin focused on.
In the movements Blue Spear displayed unconsciously, Najin strove to find the principles. He tried to read the history of Rondinel that must be held at the tip of that spear. Even for Najin, whose eyes were exceptional, it was no easy task.
After all, Blue Spear had once been a transcendent.
Reading a transcendent’s movements was extremely difficult even for Najin. No matter how many times he watched, far from finding principles or history, simply keeping up with the movements was already a struggle.
—You do realize how absurd it is for a kid who isn’t even a transcendent to be able to follow a transcendent’s movements, right?
Muttering that, Merlin soon shook her head. No matter how astonishing something was, after seeing it repeated a few times one simply came to accept it as normal.
“How on earth…”
Blue Spear was the same.
“Hah, well now.”
The first time Najin imitated a motion, Blue Spear had stared with eyes bulging and mouth agape in astonishment. But once the same thing happened several times, he too simply accepted it and continued swinging his spear.
“….”
Najin wordlessly concentrated on Blue Spear’s movements.
He knew it was difficult. But if asked whether that meant he could not do it, the answer was no. He already had a similar experience under his belt.
Alderan Basaglia’s Triumphant Sword.
Traveling with the Helmet Knight for several months, Najin had finally succeeded in learning the Triumphant Sword. He could not reproduce it perfectly, but theoretically it was complete. An eight-star Sword Master named Gerd had evaluated it as “excellent,” so there was no room for doubt.
With tenacity, Najin observed Blue Spear.
And as the sun was setting, Najin obtained a single insight.
3.
“This part here.”
Referring to the very first portion of the sequence Blue Spear was performing, Najin took his stance.
“Could you show it to me slowly once?”
“Of course.”
Blue Spear swung the spear at a leisurely pace. The long shaft cut the air with a whoosh.
“Ah.”
As if something had clicked, Najin let out a short sound of realization.
He immediately imitated Blue Spear’s motion. The motion itself was similar, yet the sound was slightly different.
Swish!
It was not merely the sound of a faster swing. Though his incomplete form made the tip waver a little, the momentum at the instant the spear cut through the air was different from Blue Spear’s.
“…!”
Blue Spear’s eyes flew wide.
“Just now—how?”
“This first motion.”
Najin adjusted his grip on the spear as he spoke.
“The second motion feels like bringing that initial swing down in a cut, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right. And?”
“Right now we’re separating each motion and swinging them one by one, but once you actually enter combat there’s no need for them to be separated, is there? So if you assume you’re connecting them into a single continuous motion and swing the spear that way—putting a little more power in at this point, like this…”
Whoosh, swish!
“Wouldn’t it flow a little more naturally?”
“Indeed… just a moment…”
Blue Spear imitated Najin’s motion.
Unlike Najin, who had swung from an unstable stance, Blue Spear’s form was perfect. He actively incorporated the theory Najin had proposed.
From one strike into the next.
Unbroken, as if linking the flow together, naturally.
The moment he swung the spear that way, Blue Spear knew by instinct. This was the answer. The instant he thought of swinging it so, his body moved of its own accord even without conscious direction—as if it were a motion he had repeated countless times.
Crack!
As he swung, a sound like something splitting rang out. Until now the strikes had only left thin traces in the sand, but the blow Blue Spear delivered now carved deep into it.
Deep enough that even the blowing wind would not easily erase it.
“Oh.”
Najin gave a short murmur of admiration and clapped.
Blue Spear remained frozen in the posture of the swing, eyes wide. The corners of his mouth trembled.
“How did you…?”
“Before I came looking for you, I met a knight from Rondinel. Kirchhoff—you know him, don’t you?”
“I know him. The last knight of Rondinel…”
“I’ve seen Sir Kirchhoff’s sword a few times. I was digging through those memories, and it turned out to resemble your spear arts somewhat.”
Kirchhoff’s sword and Blue Spear’s spear.
The weapons were different, and the motions were different as well. Yet Najin felt that their roots were similar, and that the goals they pursued were not greatly divergent.
“I simply pointed out the differences by comparing your spear with Sir Kirchhoff’s sword, but…”
Glancing at the deep furrow left in the sand along the trajectory Blue Spear had carved, Najin nodded.
“It seems that was the correct answer after all.”
Saying so, Najin smiled—but Blue Spear could not smile.
The astonishment of having gained a new insight.
The sense of achievement that today—this day belonging to a man who lost his memories—had become something special rather than one of the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of meaningless days he must have repeated.
Countless other emotions mixed into Blue Spear’s expression; it was not something that could be captured in a single word. Yet there was one emotion that wiped all the others away.
“….”
Blue Spear looked up at the sky. The sun had set; night had come to the desert. Then he looked at the hourglass. The sand had almost all fallen; only a handful remained.
“Ah…”
Blue Spear groaned.
The sense of fulfillment he had felt only moments before was stained with disappointment, fear, and regret. No matter how remarkable an insight he had gained, once the night passed he would forget it.
Pat.
As the last handful of sand fell toward the ground, Blue Spear’s head began to droop as well. Just as he was about to lower it completely—
“Blue Spear.”
Najin called him to a halt.
Blue Spear raised his head. In front of him, Najin imitated the strike Blue Spear had just demonstrated. Why he was showing him that—Blue Spear understood the intent at once.
Incomplete and still immature though it was,
the movement Najin displayed was a clear clue. If tomorrow’s self, having lost his memories, saw that movement, he would be able to unleash the same strike as now.
“...Hah.”
The moment he understood that intent, Blue Spear laughed.
“Hah, well now.”
He laughed as if he could not believe it.
“Truly… I don’t know how to put this into words.”
The end of the hourglass was approaching.
In the moment when death drew near, instead of fearing it as he always had, Blue Spear burst out laughing. He laughed heartily and drove the shaft of his spear into the sand.
“Najin?”
Blue Spear lost his memories every day.
To him each day was not a continuous life but a severed, isolated, separate day. That was why Blue Spear had been a mayfly. A mayfly who feared his own death and extinction.
But right now Blue Spear was no mayfly.
He had realized that the present self could pass something on to tomorrow’s self. Even if he lost his memories, today and tomorrow would not be severed, separate days. He was certain that tomorrow would become the “next day” that continued from today.
“I will see you tomorrow.”
Blue Spear entrusted a letter to Najin.
It was a letter addressed to tomorrow’s self.