15. Training With The Empress (1)

“Watch the 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.

— KRAK!

Its greatsword came crashing down right above my head, and the ice on the floor cracked apart like a spider’s web. I didn’t even have time to scream before I was tumbling across it.

Eve’s worried chat-log line kept scrolling up without pause, but I had no time to answer her either, so I twisted my body and dodged the next blow.

“Watch your opponent’s footwork carefully. Dodge as you did, with the blade already on its way, and you are too late.”

Footwork or whatever, I was too busy trying not to get cut in half.

“I’m a patient, you know!”

And that 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, I’d lain like a corpse for two whole days after the memory synchronization with Arden. There was no way my body would move the way I wanted it to. Even this much was me squeezing out every last drop.

“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, which 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 been rolling around with this damned ice puppet for hours, and I knew it in my bones. The blue butterfly perched on my shoulder was the only reason I wasn’t freezing to death inside this ice dome. It was almost certainly working as a kind of mana-powered heater, keeping my body temperature stable.

That was all well and good, but my stamina had hit its limit. After a hellish near-half-day of training, my concentration was scraping the bottom.

— KA-WHAM!

The greatsword came down above my head. I had no stamina left to dodge, so on pure instinct I raised my sword and blocked.

“Krgh…!”

I’d managed to block it, same as before. What I couldn’t manage was deflecting the brutal shock that came with it. A sharp vibration ran from my sword wrist all the way up to my shoulder, and it passed, entirely intact, into the blue butterfly perched so precariously there.

— Crrr—snk.

“…tch.”

There was a sound like glass shards breaking, and then a fine blue powder scattered from my shoulder. The instant the butterfly vanished, the murderous cold filling the ice dome slammed into my body. My skin stung with it, and the breath I drew felt like it was freezing solid inside my lungs.

“Get up.”

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

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

The sword stopped just above my head. Then Seraphina stepped over and placed a new blue butterfly on my shoulder, and hot mana surged through every vein in my body. The feeling of my frozen heart starting to beat again, of my stiff muscles loosening, was almost painfully comforting. Panting raggedly, I sprawled spread-eagled on the floor.

“Huff… huff….”

But the respite didn’t last. A shadow fell across me, and there was Seraphina, looking down at me with no expression at all.

“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 had held his own this long against actual combat swordsmanship, and against the magic of the Empire’s Knight Commander 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 the Frost Empress was as cold as her epithet. She dismissed my banter lightly and pointed 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 pointless. If anything, the gains had exceeded my expectations. What I’d been missing up until now wasn’t experience. It was the gap between the strategies in my head and this creaky carcass of a body, the fact that my hands and feet wouldn’t move the way I thought and wanted them to.

“Sister.”

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

“Could we possibly train somewhere a little… roomier, next time?”

I grinned and gestured at my bed and furniture, which were dripping water in steady streams.

With Seraphina gone and the ice dome melted away, my room was, quite literally, an indoor sea. I looked around at the wreckage and muttered blankly.

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

Just then, Elli came in carrying towels and a bucket, and she burst out in exasperation.

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

She smacked down hard on the soggy mattress, which drooped under all the water it had soaked up.

“Look at this! Look at it splash! It’s so squishy you could say you’ve invented the water bed!”

The fact that water beds had actually been invented on Earth surged up to my throat, but I didn’t let it out.

So Elli’s machine-gun nagging was hammering my right ear, and my trials didn’t end there.

From my left came Eve’s wailing. There wasn’t any actual sobbing to hear, of course, but tears were pouring from her eyes like a waterfall.

She was crouched in a corner of the bed, whining, not even bothering to wipe the 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 against my throbbing temples.

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

Leo sidled over.

“Doesn’t Elli seem a little different to you?”
“…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.”
“People are animals. We adapt to our 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, she ended up like that because of you. You should’ve suffered a bit for it.”
“Krhm.”

At my pointed jab, Leo cleared his throat and looked away. He couldn’t very well deny that he held the largest single share of responsibility for Elli’s villain-origin arc. So he tried to change the subject, asking 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 my nest soaked through and having to clean every last thing in it: once was enough for me too.

“How’s the assignment I gave you coming along?”
“Ah… you mean this?”

Leo held up his fingertips, which were blistered, popped and ragged, and 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 why.”
“I just want to know whether I’m slogging through this for nothing. Whether you’re making me do it just to torment me.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“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. It was a strange master-servant relationship, but at least in this moment, we were perfectly in sync.

But our peaceful moment didn’t last.

— Smack!

The sharp, juicy sound of a soaked towel slapping the floor cut through the silence.

“You’re laughing right now…?”

I turned my head, and there stood Elli in the form of a vengeful demon, a dripping mop and a bucket in her hands and a sickly blue glow beaming from 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, don’t you?!”
“Wh-what? Why me…?”
“Did you just say why? Don’t you know whose room got flooded? Are you going to move, or not?!”
“A-all right! I’m going, I’m going!”

Cowed by her energy, Leo timidly picked up a rag. Even I flinched at that thundering reprimand and clamped my mouth shut.

“And, Young Master.”

Her razor-sharp gaze turned to me next.

“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, but I didn’t dare go back in. If I did, I’d get a swat on the back for it. So I sighed and leaned against the wall by the corridor window.

But there was still an unresolved problem hovering over my head.

Eve was crouched in midair with her face buried in her knees. I glanced around, and the corridor was dead silent. Thanks to the spectacular flood in my room, the servants seemed to have prudently cleared out on their own. Anyone walking by would have seen me passionately addressing thin air and muttered that I’d lost my mind, but right now I didn’t have to worry about that.

I crossed my arms and spoke to Eve.

“Lift your head up.”

But Eve, apparently good and angry at her own incompetence, didn’t lift it. With no other choice, I sat down against the corridor wall and carried on as if talking 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 special custom character I’d poured every ounce of my heart and soul into. Of course, that probably wasn’t the point on which she was calling herself defective, but it didn’t matter to me.

“Listen up. Just making you took me seventy-two hours. Five of those went to picking your eye color alone, and getting the texture on that Constellation Dress right took two whole days.”

It was the moment a guy who’d never had a single relationship finally understood why women spent so much time picking out cosmetics. And 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 stuff’s secondary. I made you for exactly one reason.”

To be precise about it, 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 wasn’t any essential connection between her and that shell. But whatever. I said what I wanted to say.

“Because looking at you puts me in a good mood.”

Finally, Eve raised her head. I looked her dead in the eyes.

“Even at the most hellish grind spots, even in raids stacked with unfair garbage mechanics, looking at your face heals me. That’s why I took such care crafting you.”

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. Remember earlier, when you lost your composure?”

“Yeah. When your composure shattered and you started reeling, remember what shape my body was in?”

I remembered that moment clearly. When Eve was mentally shaken, the [Possession Stabilization] buff supporting my body wobbled 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.”

It was painfully cheesy, but for someone as emotion-driven as Eve, it was the kind of line that would strike straight to the heart.

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

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

Mercifully, Eve pulled herself together before I could curl all the way up like a dried squid. 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 said heart, but if it had perked her up…

“S… sure!”

Should I just let it slide?