I Became the First Prince: Legend of Sword's Song
chapter-109

Who Dares to Discuss Qualifications? (3)

“Did I provoke you?”

“Shut up. I’m not asking you for the throne,” came the third prince’s tense voice, a voice that pretended to be relaxed. He raised his sword before him, shaking as if in a seizure.

“Your Highness!? Be careful!”

“Highness!”

Urgent warnings flooded my way, but I didn’t raise a single eyebrow. I had freed myself from all oppression. I was a hero who had reached perfection when I had ascended to the level of Sword Master. I took out my anger on the third prince, who had stolen my true body.

“Huh!?” the third prince groaned in confusion as he took on a firm stance.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. There was my body!

My body, which I had failed to awaken. Here it was, with that enormous energy that I had accumulated throughout my life. And it had awoken.

This meant that an entity unknown to me must have taken over.

It wasn’t that idiot, Adrian. He was far too stupid to wake my body up by himself. His soul was too boring. I looked around and noticed the dead and shriveled bodies.

It was a trace of the powerful gluttony of the magical sword.

I glared at my body again.

It was revealed in all its fearsome might and probably infested by a being who took over the bodies of others and fed on their energies.

Wow… Twilight trembled in my grasp. The power and momentum streaming from my body shook the hall. No reaction came from the unknown being that had occupied my body.

The predacious entity which had expelled such great energy and glutted itself on blood acted as if it was a normal sword now. As if it did not exist.

“If you don’t want to reveal yourself, we will have to do this the hard way.”

I reached out my hand and grabbed at my body, still in the hardened hands of the third prince.

Well, I tried to take it, but I couldn’t.

‘Quazzik!’ a terrible cold suddenly burst from it. I instinctively withdrew my hand. My high-quality leather combat glove was white with frost.

‘Quap!’ the glove tore apart when I squeezed my hand into a fist. I shook my hand, trying to dispel the dark chill that had invaded my body. If I had been just a second slower, my hand would have frozen, and my eyes would have misted up.

I knew all too well why I had been blasted with frost. It happened when someone who was not the owner of my body touched it. It also meant that my body now had a master.

“See!? It cannot be touched by the unworthy, by someone with no qualifications to touch it,” a puffy voice cried out. I turned my head and looked on as the first laughed at me, his face cheerful.

“Because only those chosen by the great spirits of our ancestors can touch this blade. Only those of the true dragon,” Gillian said, “and the spirits of the ancestors chose me.”

It seemed that he held a sense of accomplishment, believing that the sword had chosen him.

I clucked my tongue and said, “You’re stupid.”

“What?” he asked as he frowned at me.

“Do you really think you’ve been chosen as the sword’s wielder?”

“It looks unbelievable, but yeah, I was,” he said as he laughed at me. His was a type of laughter that revealed a smug assurance of victory.

Seeing a guy such as him, I also began laughing.

“You are not the chosen owner.”

He was chosen, but he was not chosen to be an owner.

He had been chosen as a slave. No, he didn’t even deserve to be called a slave.

“You are just a sacrifice.”

It was merely the greedy instincts of the magic sword: To select prey to soothe its centuries-long hunger. In fact, Gillian had been aging rapidly from the very moment that he had stopped slaughtering. Wrinkles unseen in young men had set in along his mouth, and his skin had become flabby. If he couldn’t find someone to take over the sword, he would soon become completely drained, becoming nothing more than a desiccated mummy. His moment of destruction was already approaching, and only he seemed unaware of this fact.

“No matter how much you talk, nothing changes,” the third prince said.

I hadn’t been able to wake up my body, the sword, even when I had held it. This could be seen as a sign of being ill-suited for the throne, but I had not denied my father. The third prince, however, did.

“From now on, I will lead this country!” he declared, stating that he was the only king.

It was so familiar to me: The ignorance of fools and the vanity of the inept. They were all as moths around a flame, and holding onto a deadly magic sword due to being blinded by your past greed is no different.

And the end wouldn’t be different, either. All moths fly into the fire.

I sighed.

“Since this will be the second one in so short a time, my karma must really be great,” I sarcastically mumbled. Although none of it was intentional, I had hurt two descendants of my friend Gruhorn, after promising that I would look after his bloodline.

My heart was heavy. The power of my sword sapped Gillian even more. Still, he did not shake off that pressure, nor did he deny it. He held on and lifted my true body into the air.

“Your Highness!? The second prince’s rescue is done!” Arwen informed me, just in time.

All the injured had been evacuated. From now on, I could run wild.

“It is my time!” the foolish blood descendant of Leonberger cried and then looked around as he ground his teeth.

All who now remained were my knights, the kingdom’s champion Nogisa, as well as the top-ranked palace knights. And there was the king and queen.

“It doesn’t matter. Your Majesty is left here with me,” the third prince said as he quickly corrected his expression. “I will cut the necks of Your Majesty and my brothers here in the palace, and I will find and destroy all of Leonberger’s flesh before this night is over.”

The light shone brighter in Gillian’s eyes as he gibbered and laughed as if it was great fun for him to think of such slaughter. “And I will be the king of this country!”

And at that moment, a tremendous surge of energy flowed from his body.

“Behold!”

A mighty energy, close to that of a Sword Master.

“This is the power of the Dragon Slayer! See me! Feel me! And praise me!” the third prince cried out, his tone so intense.

I shook my head.

“That’s not the power of the sword.”

It was rather the energy of life, existing naturally within each being from birth.

It’s possible that, if you devoted yourself over time, you might have risen on your own, I thought with some bitterness.

He could have enjoyed human life itself, over decades and even up to a hundred years.

It was just Gillian’s final flame, his life-stuff burning up all at once.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and countless thoughts came and went in and out of my head.

The stupid and foolish third son of the royal family: Considering his true nature and abilities, only his greed proves exceptional. My father and other brother are true: I will finally ascend to the throne. Even having such a sword speaks of the glory of the kingdom, but now this boy’s instincts are being dominated by his spirit.

I opened my eyes.

I saw the third prince. Sudden aging was occurring as his face so rapidly withered until it resembled the face of someone I knew. I turned my head, and there was the king.

His old face looked surprisingly identical to that of his crazy son.

“The empire tried to break the spirit of the kingdom by adding clauses and articles to the treaty from time to time.”

The conversation I had with the Marquis of Bielefeld came to my mind.

“All of the successors to the throne were to undertake a compulsory five-year education at the Imperial Academy in the Empire before they turned thirteen. Countless other unreasonable demands were made, and His Majesty refused to accept any of them. In return, the knights and nobles loyal to His Majesty went missing or were interrogated. Among them was Her Majesty the Third Queen, birth mother of His Majesty the Second Prince, and Her Majesty the Second Queen, birth mother of the other princes.”

The tale the marquis told me concerned a monarch of a small country.

“It was not that they pushed on and on, but it was the powerless King of Leonberg that didn’t back down.”

The king was said to have endured to the very end while being driven to the edge of a cliff.

I barely understood it, his tenacity in the face of a foregone defeat.

And now I had to strike my sword at the little prince in front of his old father.

For the first time, the sorrows and woe of the man, crushed under the weight of the crown and wearing the ill-fitting garb of a king, touched my soul.

‘Gwhoo-wooh-wooh’ I fixed my sword before me in a two-handed grip. And I saw poor Gillian.

I had brought my energy to its peak. The energy blossoming from the third prince’s body also became ever-greater.

He laughed at me, and said, “I hated you from the beginning.”

“I also hated you.”

“That’s great!”

The third prince raised his sword and charged at me. The magic sword was now rapidly consuming the prince’s remaining vitality, and it spewed out frost as if it was huffing and puffing.

As I looked at it, I recited a brief poem in my mind. It was part of the legend of the Dragon Slayer that Gillian so longed for.

‘Krambral!’ Twilight cried as it also sang out the myth of the true dragon.

The verse became power, and it broke into the world with destruction.

As if to thaw the foe, Twilight cut through the spreading cold air and made contact with the body of poor Gillian beyond the frost.

The third prince stopped in mid-stride, without lowering his raised sword.

“Ah…?” he groaned as his gaze turned to his arms.

‘Dluk, tluk!’ both his arms, severed at the elbows, flopped to the floor. His hands still grasped the black hilt of the sword.

“Aalals? Uhhh..?” the third prince stupidly moaned as he sank to the ground. Decades he had never lived weighed heavily on his face. Gillian stared at his withered and husk-like forearms: So dry were they that they would not bleed.

As I took it all in, I remembered the moment when I had first met the third prince. The little prince had approached me, concealing his intent to step over his brother and so make his name. Now that I think about it, it had merely been the competitive spirit and drive of a child.

“But now, I do not like what you did.”

I raised my sword.

Those deprived of life by [Power of Gluttony] experience terrible pain before they die.

I will end his pain with my own hand.

‘Zchuuk,’ a small noise came from somewhere, and an arrow pierced the forehead of the third prince.

And there stood the king, bow in hand.

The king who had punished a traitor, the father who had killed his son, stood there.

So said the king: “Burn the traitor’s corpse. Recover the dead knights and soldiers.”

He tried to hide the grief that had welled up in and around his eyes by acting as the grim monarch with his mouth. And I saw him for the first time.

I saw the soul of a real king, not the soul I had believed possessed only modest power.

He had to lose what was his before he refused to back down.

And now the soul of that poor man who had to even lose his son was finally bared before my eyes.

The king looked at me.

‘Jirkf, jirkf,’ came the sound of his leather boots as he walked.

And as he came before me, he bowed his head. The king took the sword out of the grasp of the third prince’s withered forearms.

He suddenly offered the sword to me and said, “Yours.”

That single word meant so much to me.

Funny enough — I couldn’t accept the sword.

For the first time, I realized the true weight of succession to the throne, which I had once supposed was just a bonus that came along with the reclamation of my true body.

It seemed it wasn’t just the king who fought on and pressed forward, regardless of the consequences.

Did I truly once discuss the king’s qualifications with an arrogant gaze?

“Receive.” The king pushed the sword back at me. I carefully reached out with both hands and accepted it.

The king turned about, summoned his knights, and told them to leave the hall.

The queen came to me and hugged me tightly.

“Do not curse His Majesty for the fact that he is a father who sheds neither blood nor tears,” her grief-filled voice rang through my ears. “His Majesty simply does not want his son, who will ascend the throne, to bear the burden of taking his brother’s life.”

I was left speechless and could not give any answer.

All I could do was watch the king and queen from behind as they left. Wow…

In that instant, my true body in my hands cried out, and someone talked to me.