The Amber Sword

Chapter 3 – Freya’s calvary army

The bar owner fell into silence after hearing Freya’s answer, and she saw an unconvinced expression on his face. She looked around the street and discovered that the people had the same attitude as the bar’s owner. Her heart tightened and she gripped her sword hilt, wanting to and swing it onto the ground to release the tension in her.

“Freya’s friend had said that Fortress Riedon was going to fall, and everyone here would not believe something like this before tonight. I don’t believe it either, but the truth is right before us. Freya is Bucce’s militia and I think she has a way out of this.” Sue suddenly spoke at this moment.

Everyone paused, and even Freya looked at the girl. Freya cast a grateful glance at her.

“… I actually don’t have the means to avoid Madara.” Freya thought for a while and spoke honestly, but everyone was momentarily stunned from her words. She continued speaking.

“But, I know someone who might have this ability.”

“You mean you are not even sure whether that person can avoid Madara?” Someone asked.

Freya nodded, and immediately saw many of them shrugged. These mercenaries did not put their hope onto a girl like her, even adopting a joking attitude towards her response, as they found her to be considerably charming.

“Yes. I did already say that all the nobles’ attentions were taken away by that young man. The market basically had no defense and they easily succeeded in the task. These mercenaries are considerably formidable, able to become soldiers of the kingdom’s frontline army.”

The princess nodded. Aouine’s frontline armies were different from the others. There were a few designated armies such as the Imperial Guards, Silver Wing Legion, as well as Seifer’s 11th calvary corps. The regular soldiers maintained its strength at the Iron-ranked status, and were a few cuts above the White-mane army.

As for the other regular regiments, their abilities were even lesser, and their battle prowess were no different from the nobles’ private army.

With Oberbeck’s description, the half-elf princess understood the strength of the mercenaries who were with Freya.

“What happened next?”

“The things that happened next is the most interesting portion. After Miss Freya lead the calvary to rejoin that amazing young man…… It’s a story where they vanquished Madara’s army wherever they went.” Oberbeck was usually stoic, but when he recalled the memory of Brendel led the army charging into Madara’s troops, his eyebrows danced.

“That amazing young man.” The princess said.

Oberbeck coughed twice as he noted his mistake.

But the girl did not mind and she looked at the time. “I still have a little time left, Lord Oberbeck, please continue with the next section of your story.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

TL: There has been some comments about the story’s directions, and I just want to give you my take on it. This series breaks a lot of the CN tropes, especially those that are prevalent in Xianxia and Wuxia series. It’s refreshing to me in that sense.

Understandably there are some criticism on the stereotypical characters like Freya and villains, or expressing disapproval on Romaine’s one-screw-less attitude, but at least there’s a decent backstory as to why the characters turn out that way. And most important of all, there is character growth which is seriously lacking in most CN series, and I appreciate that a lot.

Freya has taken a leaf out of Brendel’s book and put more thought into her actions instead of acting the way she did for the previous volume, and we can see that change without Brendel being there by her side. That’s pretty big, otherwise if Brendel did not influence her, it will be a progression of where she loses everyone because of her careless actions > becomes cold and stoic > becomes that future goddess of war.

As for the princess + Earl, that’s obviously foreshadowing. Brendel will kick ass and eventually meet the princess, and he might throw a pokeball at her, I dunno.

As for the change in writing style…

The POV changes are sort of nice in a narrative way in my opinion, but the thing that is problematic about this approach; the TL time in between the chapters is taking far too long and disrupts it in a negative way, and the author introduced some of the elements in a pretty convoluted manner, and my TL time to edit these issues isn’t a lot or frequent.

I just want to say that, give it another 50 chapters, then re-read the starting of volume 2 before judging this writing style. At the end of the day, if you do re-read this series, this approach might be more lasting than just simply “Brendel’s adventures”.