In the original novel, the Blante clan did not carry much weight.
No, it was more accurate to call it slight.
Rated generously, exactly the standing of a mid-boss.
Hooks scattered here and there through the story's flow, a related character turning up now and then. That much.
And then a tangle of circumstances mesh together and the continent's foremost great sword clan falls.
The crumbs that came loose in that chaos became the protagonist's nourishment.
'Not watching that happen.'
Waking up in a mangy body was absurd enough, and now he was supposed to sit and watch the protagonist hog every windfall for himself?
He had not the faintest intention of it.
Until recently Ethan had done nothing that would catch the clan head's eye.
What he had done these past few days amounted to nothing at all beyond running the training ground over and over.
Train, eat, sleep, shit.
An endless repetition of those four.
Ryu Tae-sin, a fighter to the bone, simply could not leave the thick roll of fat wrapped around Ethan's middle alone.
It went well past an eyesore.
Nothing was going to settle him until he had scrubbed at least some of this lump of fat away.
So he pushed every other plan back.
There were few plans he could execute right away in any case.
Selection and focus.
He had judged that the first thing to be done was weight loss.
He had dropped a great deal, but the formal dress still bound him uncomfortably tight.
"Wonder why he's called me in out of nowhere."
He turned it over and over, but no answer came.
"Who can say. Might he not have called you in to scold you over this affair?"
Nade answered with a bright smile.
Something about it rubbed him the wrong way, but the situation was too ambiguous to let it show.
'I'm curious, though.'
At this point in the story.
Measured by the sword alone, one of the few you could count on one hand.
One of the continent's absolutes.
The master of that celebrated great sword clan.
Ryu Tae-sin had been recognized as one of the strongest in the world and strapped a championship belt around his waist, and to him a being called an absolute of this world was a curiosity.
'What kind of man is he, I wonder.'
Since it had come to this, Ethan intended to satisfy his personal curiosity.
"All right. Let's set off right away."
"Then I shall make ready."
***
The distance between the annex and the main house was not great.
It was closer than he had expected, which struck him as odd, but on reflection the siting seemed sound.
If it were set too far off, there would be no way to watch whether the confinement was being properly kept.
Well, it suited him.
As things stood, Ethan welcomed the confinement.
It fed him, housed him, and handed him an environment where he could train, did it not?
"These looks are murderous."
Ethan whistled.
The instant he set foot in the main house, countless stares drove into him like thorns, enough to make his skin sting.
It was amusing.
He had not guessed his standing was this much gutter trash.
And he was one of the clan's trueborn, at that.
Unfriendly stares were familiar to him.
He had taken looks like these as a matter of course while crossing the world as a fighter.
Stares alone would have been a mercy. Ryu Tae-sin had been showered with every kind of jeer.
It was not that he failed to understand it.
Because in his fighting days every last thing Ryu Tae-sin said had been rough.
And he had proved every one of those words in the ring.
The rough talk had not been meant to belittle his opponents, of course, but there was no helping how trivial they were.
And when someone in that situation provoked him, or announced he would break him and take the belt, he could not let it pass.
So when he fought abroad and his opponent was a native of that country, the jeering got far worse.
But Ryu Tae-sin enjoyed situations like that, if anything.
The moment a downpour of jeers turned to dead silence at a knockout.
What he felt now was very much like that.
'Why don't you all relax those faces?'
Those faces were scheduled to change before long anyway.
Ethan let a smile sit at his mouth instead.
An expression that could not have been more at ease.
The faces of the knights and the servants twisted slightly.
But Ethan did not care.
He understood his own situation better than any of them.
However much he was cursed as a wastrel and pointed at, Ethan's blood belonged to the Blante clan.
And these people belonged to the Blante clan.
The gap in station between them was not something they could presume to cross.
And so Ethan's stride was endlessly unhurried.
Then someone stepped out and blocked his way.
"What's the pig bastard doing here?"
A man with his arms folded, regarding Ethan with an unfriendly stare.
His face had not yet shed its boyishness, but his body was honed like a well-whetted blade.
A man who was the exact opposite of thick-bellied Ethan looked him over with a savage expression.
'Who's this.'
Ethan tilted his head and studied the man in front of him.
In the original novel there had been next to no physical description of the side characters.
What little there was had been concentrated on the female characters, so Ethan had trouble working out who this one was.
"Who are you?"
"......What did you say?"
The man had evidently not expected that answer; for a moment his face went blank.
"......Are you insulting me? You dare, a pig bastard like you?"
The man's face flushed red.
He was shaking with humiliation, unable to hide his anger.
Ethan, for his part, was dumbfounded.
"No, so who are you? You start shit out of nowhere, and what am I supposed to do about it?"
Ethan, whose patience did not have a high ceiling, openly took the contrary tack.
The other party had eaten his manners with a bowl of rice to begin with, had he not?
Ethan felt no need to watch his mouth in a situation like this.
As things heated up, Nade came forward.
"Young Master Karon, my apologies. Young Master Ethan is at present......"
Nade tried to mediate, but Karon shoved him aside.
"You stay out of it. And you, a wastrel who makes a career of smearing ink on the clan's name, you dare insult me?!"
Karon's voice climbed.
Ethan chewed on the name Karon for a moment.
Something felt like it was about to surface......
"Ah! So you're my little brother?"
A supporting character with no great weight, so it had not come to him at once.
"......What?"
Karon seemed unable to get a proper grip on what was happening, so Ethan nailed the situation shut.
"I'm saying that for a little brother, you've eaten your manners with a bowl of rice. Is there a defect in that skull of yours? If so, I could understand it."
It was a way of speaking close to Ethan's own true character.
And of course Ryu Tae-sin's character had been a long way from gentle itself.
So with the two of them merged, there was nothing more to be said.
On top of that, it was Karon who had picked the fight.
Ethan had not a fingernail's worth of intention to endure it.
It had been exactly the same when he was a fighter.
When an opponent said something provocative, nothing settled Ryu Tae-sin until he had returned it double.
That rough conduct had built him a considerable body of anti-fans, but conversely there were just as many who loved that unflinching star quality.
Ethan said it with his eyes glaring, and Karon stood blank a moment before bursting into a hollow laugh.
"......Haha. Right. I had it wrong."
Karon stopped laughing and pulled off a glove.
And in the instant he moved to throw that glove at Ethan.
Ethan's massive body spun around.
Rotation loaded onto all that mass, and the force landed square on Karon's jaw.
CRACK—!
A spinning backfist, landed perfectly.
Ethan had known it instinctively.
The method of attack that made the fullest use of this heavy mass.
And as for anyone who could withstand a spinning backfist driven home properly with that mass behind it...... so far as Ethan knew, there was none.
Thump.
Karon's body crumpled to the floor.
However much a man trained his body, he could not train his jaw.
When impact goes into the jaw the brain shakes with it, and a person's body can no longer hold its balance.
Karon went face down on the floor in that brief moment, and for an instant silence settled over everything.
"......Ah, sorry. It happened before I knew it."
Feeling the silence, Ethan belatedly tried to patch the situation over.
The conditioned-reflex part was true, in fact.
In the instant Karon moved to throw the glove, Ethan had buried a counter in him out of sheer habit, without meaning to.
Using the spinning backfist had not been a conscious choice either.
Ryu Tae-sin's instincts had simply shown him the optimal attack this merely heavy body could manage.
'......This has turned into a headache.'
Ethan let out a sigh. He had not started this to end up here.
'A bastard with no weight to him acts up, and this is the mess that comes of it.'
Irritation at Karon, who had picked a fight out of nowhere, surged up in him.
His head tangled briefly, but Ethan shook it off at once.
'Not going to worry about it.'
Start worrying about trifles like this and he would never get a hand on the events ahead.
Besides......
'I'm a wastrel bastard to begin with, aren't I?'
So what if he went a little further off the rails from here.
Regret over what had already happened came too late.
"Young Master Karon!"
The knights nearby belatedly ran to Karon and began helping him up.
"Nade. Let's go."
Feeling the need to get clear, Ethan called Nade and started away.
No reason to get his feet tied up here for nothing.
'At worst it ends in a reprimand, I suppose.'
With everything he had already done, he was braced for an earful.
And he had judged that a few more small incidents on the pile would change nothing.
'......So it was not chance.'
Nade looked at Ethan with fresh eyes.
The counter he had met in the tavern that day.
He had not thought it chance even then, but seeing Karon put down now, he was certain again.
Karon was a mana user formally appointed by the clan.
He had only just crossed the threshold, but between one who had awakened mana and one who had not lay the difference between heaven and earth.
Karon was sixteen.
Given that the average age for entering as a mana user was in the twenties, Karon's achievement stood at an astonishing level.
'Were this not the Blante clan, that is.'
Karon, like Ethan, was a trueborn of the Blante clan.
Having inherited the blood of the continent's foremost great sword clan, he was never going to be impressed by the level of the world's prodigies.
Which was why Karon felt a constant anxiety.
And in the middle of it he had found the one being who could relieve his unease.
Ethan.
The wastrel they called the clan's disgrace.
An idiot who, far from awakening mana, feared the sword and could not even swing one.
A lazy nature and a vicious temper. Talent scraping the bottom.
For relieving Karon's anxiety and raising his self-regard, there was nothing like Ethan.
From then on Karon had tormented Ethan at regular intervals.
And the level of it climbed steadily.
However notorious a wastrel Ethan was, so long as he came up short on force there was nothing he could do.
Pressing him with authority was impossible, since they were equally trueborn, and the Blante clan revered strength.
Not one person in the clan would take Ethan's side.
Because Ethan's very existence was a nuisance to the clan.
And yet today the food chain that had looked unchangeable collapsed.
It had not been a formal duel, and Karon had been off his guard, true. But Karon was a mana user and Ethan was an ordinary person.
And still it was Karon who went down.
'The anomaly has come earlier than I expected.'
He had anticipated it to a degree.
The attack he had met in the tavern had been threatening enough to give even Nade a moment of vertigo.
'What on earth happened to him?'
Too much had changed in too little time. As though he had become another person.
'Blante blood never goes away, does it?'
This was the Ethan whose talent for using his body was so poor that people spoke of him as cursed by the sword.
And now some event had made that talent blossom?
Was it the blood of a great sword clan, acknowledged by all?
'Heh heh.'
Nade let a smile settle on his face.
It was a good thing.
Because competition among the heirs would only make Blante stronger.