15. Training With The Empress (1)

“Watch your footwork carefully. Before there is swordsmanship, there is always footwork.”

I was in the middle of a sparring match with the ice knight Seraphina had conjured up.

— KRAK!

The ice knight’s greatsword came crashing down right over my head. The floor split into a spiderweb of cracks, and before I could even scream I went tumbling across it.

Eve’s worried message scrolled up the chat log without pause, but before I could even answer it, I twisted away from the next blow.

“Watch your opponent’s footwork carefully. Dodging mid-flight like that, after the blade’s already on its way, is too late.”

Footwork, sure. Right now I had my hands full just trying not to get cut in half.

“I’m a patient, you know!”

It wasn’t an excuse.

It hadn’t even been a week since I’d broken the Curse of Eternal Snow, and on top of that, the memory synchronization with Arden had left me lying like a corpse for two full days. There was no way my body would move the way I wanted it to. Even this much was me wringing out every last drop I had.

“Your enemies will not consider your condition.”

“You said this was training! This is an assassination attempt!”

“Dodge it and it is training. Take it and it is death.”

She crooked a finger, and the ice knight that had been standing perfectly still lunged at me again.

“Bear this in mind. That butterfly is a delicate construct sustained by my mana. It shatters on impact.”

She didn’t need to tell me. I’d spent hours rolling around with that damned ice puppet, and I knew it in my bones.

The only reason I wasn’t freezing to death inside the ice dome was the blue butterfly perched on my shoulder, almost certainly acting as a mana-powered heater to hold my body temperature steady. All well and good, except my stamina had bottomed out. After a hellish half-day of training, my focus was scraping the floor.

— KA-WHAM!

The greatsword came down over my head again. I had no stamina left to dodge, so on pure instinct I threw my sword up and blocked.

“Krgh…!”

I’d blocked it, same as before. What I couldn’t block was the brutal shock that rode in behind the parry. A sharp jolt tore from my sword-wrist all the way up to my shoulder, and it carried, undiminished, straight into the blue butterfly perched precariously there.

— Crrr—snk.

“…tch.”

A sound like shattering glass, and a fine blue powder scattered off my shoulder. The instant the butterfly vanished, the murderous cold packed into the ice dome slammed into me. My skin stung with it, and the breath I drew felt like it froze solid in my lungs.

“Get up.”

I heard Seraphina’s shout, but my body didn’t so much as twitch. The ice knight had closed the distance in a few long strides and was already raising its sword without mercy.

Eve threw herself at the blade to block it for me, but no such miracle came. She had no physical form, after all.

The ice knight’s sword stopped just above my head.

Then Seraphina crossed over and set a fresh blue butterfly on my shoulder. Hot mana surged through every vein in my body. The feel of my frozen heart kicking back into rhythm, my stiff muscles loosening, was almost painfully comforting. Chest heaving, I sprawled spread-eagle on the floor.

“Huff… huff….”

But the reprieve didn’t last long. A shadow fell over me, and Seraphina was looking down at me, her face expressionless.

“To nearly die from this much cold. How disappointing.”

“Personally, I’m rather proud of myself.”

I meant it. A guy who used to bang away at a keyboard in his bedroom, holding his own this long against real combat swordsmanship, and against the Empire’s Knight Commander’s magic at that. Wasn’t that practically a miracle?

“The first trial of the succession contest is ‘strength of arms,’ and the opponents are heroes of the past. If you struggle this much against a mere ice puppet of mine, how will you defeat their phantoms?”

But true to her epithet, the Frost Empress was cold. She brushed my banter aside and laid out the brutal reality.

“From now on, training will be daily.”

“…Yes.”

I nodded obediently. It had been hellish, but the suffering hadn’t been wasted. If anything, the payoff outstripped my expectations.

What I’d been missing all this time wasn’t experience. It was the gap between the strategies in my head and this creaky carcass of a body. In other words, my hands and feet just wouldn’t move the way I pictured them, the way I wanted.

“Sister.”

I called out to Seraphina just as she was about to leave.

“Could we possibly do training in a slightly… wider space, next time?”

I grinned and waved a hand at my bed and furniture, all of it dripping steady streams of water.

After Seraphina left and the ice dome melted away, my room was, quite literally, an indoor sea. I looked around at the wreckage and muttered, half-dazed,

“…What on earth am I supposed to do with this?”

Just then Elli came in carrying towels and a bucket and burst out, exasperated,

“…What do you mean what?! It all has to be replaced, every last bit of it!”

She slapped a hand down hard on the soggy mattress, sagging now under all the water it had drunk up.

“Look at this! The way the water splashes! It’s so squishy you could call it a brand-new water bed invention!”

The fact that water beds really had been invented back on Earth came surging up my throat, but I swallowed it.

So Elli’s machine-gun scolding hammered away at my right ear. But my trials didn’t end there.

From my left came Eve’s wailing. There was no actual sound of crying, of course, but tears poured from her eyes like a waterfall.

She was hunched in a corner of the bed, whimpering without even bothering to wipe the flowing tears away.

“Sir, Young Master! Stop standing there in a daze and go change into dry clothes already, would you?!”

“And these bed sheets are silk, on top of everything else, so they don’t even dry properly!”

From the right, a maid’s scolding. From the left, the wails of a state-of-the-art AI. I pressed hard at my throbbing temples.

…Honestly, fighting that ice knight just now might have been easier on my nerves.

Leo sidled over and said,

“Has Elli changed a little, do you think?”

“…I guess so.”

“When she first arrived I thought she was this naive country bumpk— I mean, country girl, but lately, how do I put it, she’s getting kind of vicious.”

“Humans are creatures that adapt to their environment.”

I shrugged.

“Roll a person around in extreme conditions long enough, and even a rabbit will bite a hunting dog. And actually, when you get down to it, the reason she ended up like that is you. You should have suffered a little more for it.”

“Krhm.”

At my pointed jab, Leo cleared his throat and looked away. He could hardly deny that he held the lion’s share of responsibility for Elli’s villain-origin arc.

Trying to change the subject, Leo asked carefully,

“By the way — why is your room in this state?”

“As you can see, I did a little splashing about.”

“If you go splashing about a second time, you’ll probably get a full day’s lecture from Elli.”

“That’s exactly why I won’t be doing it in my room anymore.”

Getting your nest soaked through and having to scrub every last thing clean? Once was plenty for me too.

“How’s the assignment I gave you coming along?”

“Ah… you mean this?”

Leo held up his fingertips, blistered and popped and ragged. I couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

“You’re doing well, I see.”

“Doing well? I’m losing my mind. Why on earth are you making me do this?”

“I told you not to ask the reason.”

“I just want to know whether I’m slogging through this for nothing. Whether you’re making me do it just to torment me.”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah?”

“What?”

We stared at each other for a beat, then both burst out laughing. The man who had once tried to kill me, and me, the man who’d let him live. A strange master-and-servant relationship, but in this moment at least, we were perfectly in sync.

But our peaceful moment didn’t last long.

— Smack!

The sharp, wet smack of a soaked towel hitting the floor cut through the quiet.

“You’re laughing right now…?”

I turned my head to find Elli looming there like a vengeful demon. In both hands she gripped a dripping mop and a bucket, and a sickly blue glow beamed out of her eyes.

“While somebody is breaking her back scrubbing the floor, the two of you who actually caused this mess are having a grand old time, are you? I can’t believe this!”

“I didn’t cause the mess, though…”

“Quiet! Save your excuses for after the cleaning’s done!”

She jerked her chin at Leo.

“Senior Traitor! Quit lounging around over there and grab a rag now! You’ve got to earn your keep, haven’t you!”

“Wh-what? Why me…?”

“Did you just say why? Don’t you know whose room this flood is in? Are you going to move it, or not?!”

“A-all right! I’m going, I’m going!”

Cowed by the sheer force of her, Leo meekly picked up a rag. Even I flinched at Elli’s thundering reprimand and clamped my mouth shut.

“And, Young Master.”

Her razor-sharp gaze turned next to me.

“Y-yes?”

“Young Master, out.”

“Huh?”

“If you stand there you’ll just be in the way of the cleaning. You’ll kick up dust, so go take a walk or something! We’ll get this all sorted out!”

“I can help too.”

Slam.

Out in the hallway, I stared blankly at my own firmly-shut bedroom door.

“Isn’t this insubordination?”

From inside came the racket of Elli’s furious cleaning and Leo’s screams, and I didn’t dare go back in. Step through that door and I’d catch a swat across the back. I sighed and leaned against the wall beside the corridor window.

But there was still an unsolved problem hanging over my head.

Eve was crouched in midair, face buried in her knees.

I glanced around. The corridor was dead silent. Thanks to the spectacular flood that had broken out in my room, the servants seemed to have wisely cleared out on their own. If anyone had passed by, they’d have seen me earnestly addressing thin air and decided I’d lost my mind, but right now that wasn’t a worry.

I crossed my arms and said to Eve,

“Lift your head up.”

Eve, evidently good and angry at her own incompetence, kept her head down. With no other choice, I slid down against the corridor wall and went on talking as if to myself.

“If you’re a defective product, then what does that make me — the guy who stayed up all night crafting you?”

Eve was the most lovingly crafted aesthetic creation in the history of my gaming life. Her appearance was a custom character I’d poured every ounce of my heart and soul into. The thing she was calling herself a defective product over was probably something else entirely, but that didn’t matter to me.

“Listen carefully. The time I spent making you alone is seventy-two hours. Of that, I spent five hours just picking the color of your eyes, and getting the texture on that Constellation Dress right took two whole days.”

That was the moment a guy who’d never once been in a relationship finally understood why women spend so much time picking out cosmetics.

I could say it with complete confidence. The character I’d made was the most beautiful in this game… no, in this whole world.

“Performance? Function? That kind of thing’s secondary. The reason I made you is exactly one thing.”

Strictly speaking, she was just a separate soul that had taken up residence in the ‘shell’ of my custom character. Like me, she was simply in a possessed state, and I knew there was no essential connection between us. But whatever. I said what I wanted to say.

“Because looking at you makes me feel good.”

Eve finally raised her head. I looked her dead in the eyes and said,

“Even in hellish grind-spot hunting grounds, even in raids stacked against you with unfair garbage mechanics, looking at your face heals me. That’s why I crafted you with such care.”

This was a gamer’s honest truth. A high-performance item? Sure, those matter. But the value of an absolute-favorite character carved perfectly to your own taste can’t be converted into a number.

“And — you, do you remember earlier, when your composure broke?”

“That’s right. When your composure shattered and you started reeling — do you remember what state my body was in?”

I remembered that moment clearly. When Eve’s mind was rattled, the [Possession Stabilization] buff propping up my body wobbled right along with her.

“Do you want me to get toyed with by Seraphina’s ice puppets again?”

“Then you have to plant your feet and hold steady. Got it?”

I pointed a finger at my own chest.

“You’re the anchor holding onto my heart.”

Painfully cheesy, sure, but for someone as emotion-driven as Eve, it was exactly the kind of line to land straight in the heart.

…Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, though. I might die of cringe.

As a side effect, my own hands and feet were starting to curl up on themselves.

Mercifully, before I could curl all the way up like a dried squid, Eve pulled herself together. Just like that she was her spirited self again, as if nothing had happened. She balled up her small fist, pressed it against her own chest, and declared,

I’d never actually said heart… but if it had perked her up.

“S… sure!”

Maybe we’ll get through this after all?