The Amber Sword Volume 2 Chapter 137
TL:
Chapter 137 – Gift
Brendel proclaimed himself as ‘Viscount Gunston’, a noble who traveled south from the north. The papers he had on him were given by the cripple Roen, and the craftsmanship on them was as perfect as the papers handed down straight from the capital’s parliament. Even the original Viscount Gunston would wonder if his papers were fake if he ever saw them.
When the riders’ leader received the papers and read them, he bowed politely and said: “My lord, my name is Colton. I will report to my superiors so they can arrange a meeting between you and Lord Trentheim. Would you allow one of my men to accompany you and let him direct you to the best inn in the city?”
Brendel nodded, and Colton quickly gave orders to his men to clean up the street, and got one of the younger riders to escort Brendel.
The capital of Trentheim was called Fohre. Its streets spread out like spiderwebs, narrow and many, and the roofs of the buildings were a spectacular crimson due to the red soil used. Colton’s subordinate lead them to an inn called The Brave Fist, a unique building that was high enough to allow its guests to look at the city’s grey outer walls.
With such close borders to the wilderness that was outside Mother’s Marsha protection, humans had to rely on the city walls to defend against magical creatures, beasts and demi-races.
Brendel and the others only had to wait a few hours after their meals at the inn before Baron Graudin’s invitation arrived. Although it was only a small group of Graudin’s men who escorted them, when they arrived at Graudin’s manor, he found two rows of elite soldiers standing at the gates. They wore heavy armor, equipped with lances, and were neatly lined up and without expressions on their faces.
[A grand entrance indeed. It looks like Graudin is trying to threaten me. It might even frighten a real viscount—]
The youth ignored them and walked past the gates. There was a massive man who immediately blocked his path and tried to grab his shoulders. However, before he could even touch Brendel a girl with fiery red hair grabbed his wrist and jerked it away. Her eyes looked like she was locking on to her prey.
“Get lost.” She said simply.
She took a step forward and rammed into him, causing him to crash into the wall of soldiers. There was immediate wailing after a loud crash.
“Cease your actions!” The soldiers were surprised and immediately tried to block Brendel from progressing any further, but they were hurled backwards by the youth the moment they touched him.
It was as if they were facing a dragon and not a refined noble.
[70 OZ in the strength stats. Even in king Ansen’s era, I would qualify for a spot in the kingdom’s cavalry. Just a little more and I can be in the elite group. In this era, I am even on par with a captain…]
Brendel continued to advance quickly, and there were constant metallic crashing noises as the soldiers were thrown at each other like bags of flour. He never looked back and finally stopped at the second gate.
It was shut tight. Perhaps the person who was meant to open it was lying on the ground, so he did not waste any time, and kicked down the door just like how he had done it countless times in the game.
The door crashed onto the ground with an impressive bang, and the empty hall was presented before Brendel.
============= Graudin’s POV ===============
“My god, this man is such a brute!”
Somewhere in the mansion behind an arch window, was a middle-aged man who was peeking through the curtains with piqued interest. Even though he sounded impressed, his eyes were cold and discerning. He was holding onto a goblet with bright red liquid in it. He shook his hand and allowed the viscous liquid to bob up and down.
Brendel would recognize that man in a heartbeat if he saw him. It was all too easy to recognize Graudin’s prominent eagle-like hook nose. His eye sockets were deeply inset and his skin was pale as though he was sick with malaise, giving him the uniquely sinister look which was prevalent within the Randner’s family. The only thing that seemed alive was his bushy moustache that ended in a curl.
“A youth of twenty years and barely qualifies as a Silver-rank fighter.” Graudin stroked his moustache: “What do you think?”
The lanky man behind him shook his head: “He did not use his full strength. That girl with red hair isn’t simple either. If we were to fight, the odds will be split in both ways. I do not suggest fighting.”
“Of course I won’t,” Graudin laid his goblet down onto the windowsill with some annoyance, causing it to gave out a light clink: “He must have some considerable backing if he dares to openly challenge me in my own territory. But even if I don’t find fault with this matter, I need to show him a lesson.”
He lowered the curtains and turned around: “What of the task that I instructed you to do?”
“The men have been sent out. If there are no problems, they would be back this very evening.” The man bowed slightly.
“Good.” Graudin threw his goblet away with a fling on his hand, and it landed next to a dead woman. The red liquid immediately splashed everywhere, causing a foul stench to spread throughout the room. The dull-brown carpet slowly turned to a red hue once again.
“This matter is requested by my father. Make sure everything is perfect.”
Graudin wondered when his damned father would choose his successor. What disappointed him was how his father became sharper every year, or he would have poisoned all his brothers to their deaths.
[A bunch of fools blocking my path.] (TL: I made a pretty huge mistake. It’s not duke Randner, it’s count Randner. I’ll make sure to change it one day.)
============= Brendel’s POV ============
The grand hall was decorated with a crystal chandelier, an excessive luxury with intricate craftsmanship. There were sigils within the crystals, indicating that it was an magic artifact. The design dated to the early era of king Ansen, and was crafted to tell the story of the Treatise of the Holy Men, depicting one hundred and eighty star consellations of the Gods.
Brendel and Graudin met under that artifact, separated by a long rectangular table on each end. The supposedly empty hall was soon filled with people. Besides Graudin’s knights, there were many local nobles who were also invited to the meeting.
[Looks like his real followers are not here.]
Brendel was certain that Graudin’s confidants were not in the room after studying everyone. Trentheim’s territory was not considered large, but there were at least twenty-odd districts ruled by Graudin’s loyal retainers.
After the superficial pleasantries were exchanged, the baron formerly announced the banquet’s opening, in the name of welcoming ‘Viscount Gunston’.
The food that the servants brought had a wide variety but they were wasted on Brendel’s men. Having a meal in the heart of the enemy’s territory was too stifling for them. Amandina’s heart was racing all the time, frowning at the table as she looked across at the two exceptions.
Brendel and Romaine were sampling each dish with delight.
Baron Graudin noticed Amandina’s expression and spoke after a moment of thinking: “What’s wrong, does my lady feel that there’s something not satisfactory to your taste?”
The grand hall was suddenly silenced.
Amandina secretly panicked but she raised her head and nodded:
“My Lord Brendel and Lady Romaine are too polite and would not speak badly of this banquet. However as their retainer, I would have to protest at your treatment. Do you view us as nobles below your rank?—”
The other nobles went still.
[Good job! You saw through that bastard’s ploy.]
Brendel secretly raised both of his thumbs up at Amandina’s impressive remark. It was truly a slap to Graudin’s face and he was unable to find a retort at her criticism. One could hardly imagine a city’s lord to quarrel with someone’s subordinate, and a woman at that.
But Graudin merely smiled at her remark, before he cast his slightly clouded eyeballs at Brendel. The latter also gazed back at him without any fear. He was acting as an arrogant noble who did not care who or what was in front of him, even more so than the typical young nobles in the kingdom.
“Viscount Gunston.” Graudin said after a pause. He had a warm smile.
“Baron Graudin.” Brendel nodded.
“Since Lord Gunston came from the north, does the weather in the south cause any discomfort to you?”
“As a knight of the kingdom, there is no difference whether the weather changes or not. The frail idiots who can’t even withstand such changes are not worth being called as nobles in my eyes.” Brendel’s mouth fired back with conceit, and he wondered for a moment if he was actually a talented noble in the arts of arrogance.
The air in the grand hall continued became even more unbearable. This was another attempt to slap Graudin’s face, and the nobles wondered who exactly the youth was.
“A young man like yourself should not bring us old bones into the discussion. If you find that the food is not to your taste, I have a gift prepared for you as an apology.” Graudin’s smile was ever polite and even appeared sincere.
[Gift? What the fuck is he up to?]
Brendel narrowed his eyes. He was trying to get the idiot to back down and get him to let them leave. It was more important to get his own territory, and coming back to pick a fight with him could come later.
April 28, 2017 @ 1:39 pm
Congrats for the new site
Btw ….its that word…?
April 28, 2017 @ 1:41 pm
It’s really nice. I like the changes you’ve made.
Just really wanted that “Night Mode”, it made it easier for me to read, not too granting in my eyes.
Please, incorporate it in this site, I’m sure many would’ve agree with me.
April 28, 2017 @ 1:46 pm
That particular function is out of my league unless I study coding for a few weeks, so I need someone to feed me the codes.
April 28, 2017 @ 2:36 pm
I’m pretty sure someone would do so if you ask, lol.
April 28, 2017 @ 4:20 pm
If you’re on PC and using Chrome as your browser, you can download an extension called ‘Invert Page Colors’ with a click you could invert a webpage colors and making it easy to read at night.
Do ever you find that even at night mode the black background is bright as fuck? Worry no more! download this little program called Dimmer v1.0! this little guy can break the minimum brightness your PC have.
April 28, 2017 @ 1:51 pm
Gratz for the new site and thanks for the chapter !!! btw iยดm no designer or something but the “W” in the logo is hard to notice, not fluid if you like and i would try other colors too ๐
April 28, 2017 @ 1:52 pm
i mean you could show use logos with different colors ….
April 28, 2017 @ 1:54 pm
and a Edit button please i always need to repair what i type rofl
April 28, 2017 @ 2:06 pm
I’ll see if I can change the color of the logo with a sharper red.
April 28, 2017 @ 1:55 pm
Seems like you did pretty everything well on the site.
If you minify the javascript & css, will it break the site? You’re using Super Cache, but I prefer Cache Enabler, much simpler and better I think but to each his own.
I ran your site through some test, and it’s pretty much fine.
If you’re confident, you can rip off the external css a & script request and host it internally. It’ll just shave off minimal ms since your site won’t be waiting for response from external site.
Second, you must compress your images, it’s the main cause of slowing down your site. Use a plugin like Optimus Image Optimizer or something. Do this and your site will be faster cause your image size will be smaller.
Third, if you want, use CDN. It’ll make your site much faster for the rest of the world.
Otherwise, just compress the image.
April 28, 2017 @ 2:04 pm
What are all those terms you just said lol >_<... But okay, Optimus image optimizer. I can try and see if enabling cloudflare works for the CDN thingy, saw it on the dreamhost panel. The rest about css is kind of out of my hands, I have no idea what things link to what since I'm using plugins to handle stuff.
April 28, 2017 @ 1:57 pm
nice website.
it’s just that I had taken a liking to have a picture on top of the page.. now it’s only on the main page, not on the chapter page.
but overall nice design !
April 28, 2017 @ 2:14 pm
Thanksfor the chapter, i like the new website. ๐
April 28, 2017 @ 2:14 pm
Nice website ๐
And thank you for translating this great novel. ๐
Feedback:
– I think it would be great if there could be a way to add a night mode to the background with black background
and the font colour in gray or something like that.
April 28, 2017 @ 2:22 pm
Imo font is little too small ;p Evrything else is ok, i prefer disqus though (no f1 sect and all)
April 28, 2017 @ 2:28 pm
By full time do you meaning spending all your time translating instead of trying to find art based work after you graduate? Using Patreon for money?
I would not reccomend that. I think you should look for a job in some company or another. Graphics design or something?
It will be 100 times easier to find a job as a gradute then in 2 years with the experience of “translating a web comic and drawing fan art.
A year or two with a proper company surronded by peers will be very helpful. Even if you decide to go with self employment later.
April 28, 2017 @ 2:57 pm
Honestly based on what my art teachers explained, what the employers look at are my portfolio and the speed of how fast I can churn out work (the personality to work with others is important too). Work experience might be a bonus, but it doesn’t really matter if you don’t meet a minimum standard in the first place. I guess if I go full time on practicing my foundations for 3 months or so, I can see myself gaining a chance for employment. Then it would be another few years of hard work and I might get considerably accomplished.
But on this patreon route, I have set up my time linearly so I can advance properly. TAS is actually fantastic material for drawing stuff. The card-based system is like Magic the Gathering or Legend of the Cryptids. Brendel’s system is like graphics UI (imagine guild wars 2 UI for skill buttons). The world is also environment based and it’s kind of a world design. I can even go webmanga style. Lots of stuff is relevant in the industry. Even anime character design like Granblue Fantasy can be done with TAS.
As for graphics design like logos and typography, to be honest that’s really graphics-design based and I will agree that you need experience in this field. What I learned in art school was drawing humans and environments lol. I even learned adobe illustrator and did animation like this. The stuff I did learn in Zbrush and maya is really basic and even that requires fundamentals in anatomy, so I don’t intend to go 3D here.
April 29, 2017 @ 10:05 am
I recommend that you get all the work you’ve done up until now and try to put a CV & portfolio together with that. Then look around for jobs/companies you are interested in. And then see what you think CV/portfolio is missing. For example different types of art.
I think you’ll find that getting your CV/portfolio into a state when you would be willing to send it to company will take more effort than you think. So it’s better to do it as early as possible. Plus you could ask your art teachers to have a look at it.
That’s a far more constructive thing do as opposed to doing “drawing practice” without having a concrete idea of what you want to accomplish except “get better”.
Looking for a job, putting yourself out there and doing interviews is a scary thing. It’s very easy to find excuses to keep putting that off for another day. It’s something I’m dealing with right now since I’m planning to move and get a job in Australia so I have a lot of things I can say.
Of course, this is all my personal opinion and I don’t have any experience in art let alone have a career in it. So not everything I say will apply to you and your situation.
April 29, 2017 @ 12:38 pm
It’s a funny story but I got up one day from chair in my old company, gave a month’s notice to the boss, then went to my local art school to pursue it as a career. But TAS is also something that I had spent hundreds of hours in and I don’t really want to give up on it either. If this series wasn’t in my life, then I would have sent out my resume months ago. Coding the new website from scratch is to see whether I can sustain this series full time. Believe me when I say life is too short to think about excuses and I’m also in a hurry to improve myself asap.
However, that’s a really great idea about asking my teachers on portfolio. Right now I’m concentrating on fundamentals for my art, but I’ll draw up some relevant stuff and let them review as a portfolio. I feel that would be a good idea to prepare myself but I’ll see if the community is as interested as I am for TAS.
April 28, 2017 @ 3:17 pm
I read on a tablet and I can no longer zoom in, is there anything you can do about that? The right border takes up 1/3rd of the reading space if you can’t zoom to mitigate it.
April 28, 2017 @ 3:30 pm
Erm, do you mean the side widget is interfering with your reading when you zoom in?
Edit: I tried finding ways to make the sidebar smaller but I’m not sure how to. Is there text scaling on your tablet? Because my phone works with accessibility > text scaling.
April 28, 2017 @ 3:34 pm
I’m a big fan of minimalistic design, so I think you did a pretty good job on your site, SilentWolfie. However, if you don’t mind my saying so, I recommend changing your body text font to a nice sans-serif font – for example, Roboto or Open Sans – and maybe also increasing the body font size a tad. It’s all about the smooth reading experience, after all.
My thanks to you. I’ve been silently enjoying your translation of this novel for quite a while!
April 28, 2017 @ 3:45 pm
The headers are actually Open Sans. The reason why I went serif for the body text is because there were studies done and they claimed that sans-serif is harder to read for more people. I’ll have to poll the people on the font size though. It’s currently at 16 pixels.
April 28, 2017 @ 4:11 pm
Now that you mention it, yeah, I see your headers are Open Sans. Speaking of the header, I think your logo could use a bit more contrast with it; the red fades a little into gray header. It looks quite nice on the homepage, but could use a bit more “pop” on chapter pages.
I think I know the studies you mentioned, but I still recommend sans-serif for web publication – I believe the idea is that we’re trained to follow serifs in print (which is why the recommendation is typically to go serif for print body text), but in web they have a slight tendency to swim together. I have found myself squinting a little while reading (though I will admit that it could be my own expectations at play).
April 28, 2017 @ 4:16 pm
That logo is sort of a joke because I wanted to write HUSH in it but I changed my mind and made it into something else. I’ll change the logo in a few days :~_~
I’ll also do a poll on the font type tomorrow to see what works best for the readers.
April 28, 2017 @ 4:23 pm
Wait, it says “PORN”?? Hahaha, I didn’t even notice until you mentioned that it was a joke!
Perhaps one could argue that the Amber Sword is competency porn… heh.
April 28, 2017 @ 3:36 pm
Thanks for the chapter!!
And congrats to your new site. I am still not accustom to it though.
April 28, 2017 @ 4:10 pm
Congrats to your new site and thanks for the chapter!
The font is kind of hard to read especially at night. aside from that everything is cool.
April 28, 2017 @ 4:15 pm
Thank you
April 28, 2017 @ 4:38 pm
I like the patreon icon but it would be nice to have a patreon goal meter or even a ” $700/$1500″ with each update. It’s satisfying to see it go up and it also encourages donations.
For patreon rewards you could offer to draw a TAS fanart of their choice to post on the site or early access to unedited chapters.
April 28, 2017 @ 4:50 pm
Thanks!
April 28, 2017 @ 6:34 pm
This site looks more professional, but less comfy ๐ฎ might be due to the change in colors.
April 28, 2017 @ 7:59 pm
The new website looks great, and I love the prev/next chapter link. Now I can reread chapters more easily.
Just to let you know, the prev chapter link should point left and next chapter link should point right. A ToC link is missing. I wish the ToC also display the title of the chapter too. Maybe add a check box to display chapter title, with it being set false as default for the complainers.
April 28, 2017 @ 8:41 pm
I literally took one look at the logo, saw what it said… and immediately just gasped
it is… hilarious
April 28, 2017 @ 8:51 pm
Oh and forgot to mention, I’m pretty certain it’s spelled as Viscount, not Vicount.
April 29, 2017 @ 12:15 am
Thanks for the correction!
April 28, 2017 @ 9:09 pm
โMy Lord Brendel and her Lady Romain-
In this line, I’m quite certain you do not use ‘her Lady’ because the her refers to…who? Instead it should be “My Lord Brendel and Lady Romaine”.
April 28, 2017 @ 9:15 pm
Logo is fine but a little difficult to make out in the top corner (it kind of just looks like a red paw there to me anyways)
And are those letters on the paw?
P-O-R-N
Might just be my imagination?
April 28, 2017 @ 9:41 pm
“This is pertaining site/time management.”
So, do you read “My Girlfriend is a Zombie”, specifically the translation by the “Gifting The World With Translations” site? If you do you may have seen the option (is that what it’s called?) where the readers actively help with editing. Instead of writing it in the comments you just mark the presumed to be wrong text, press ctrl+enter and it sends it to the writer/translator which can then easily go back and correct it, if he/she so chooses.
No, I have no idea how it works, sorry. I just thought that, if implemented correctly it can lessen your workload a bit, thereby saving time, and that people smarter than me can actually help you in installing(?) it.
…then again it may just make things worse… huh.
Anyway, thanks for the chapter!
April 28, 2017 @ 10:33 pm
Btw, why Gunston and not Gaston?
April 29, 2017 @ 12:08 am
Oh nice suggestion. Sometimes I can’t get the right name the first time. Yeah Gaston is much better.
April 29, 2017 @ 1:21 am
There may be many reasons:
-His father could be a weapon collector.
-Maybe his name got a ton of fire power.
-He could use his name to shoot people down.
-(insert half baked joke related gun and maybe ton)
Just joking ๐
April 29, 2017 @ 1:13 am
It feels more like:
Brendel narrowed his eyes. He was trying to get the idiot to fight back and get don’t let them leave. It was more important to pick a fight with the Pig than get his own territory, and coming back latter.
If he actually is able to get away in less than 3 chapters I will be surprised XD
Thanks for the translation!
April 29, 2017 @ 2:23 am
It’s really a f*cked up gift…
That damn sh*tty Graudin!
April 29, 2017 @ 3:28 am
Thanks for thr chapter!
April 29, 2017 @ 4:57 am
Thanks for the chapter.
April 29, 2017 @ 9:28 am
would like to have the font size to be bigger like in your previous site… at least the font color isn’t clashing with the background color