17. The Trial Of Arms (1)

The morning began like any other.

The moment I opened my eyes, I splashed some water on my face out of habit and headed out of my room, bound for the far west end of the manor, a separate training ground tucked away deep in the forest.

This had been Seraphina’s secret training spot ever since she was a child. The sight of a snapped wooden-sword fragment rolling across the ground pulled a snort of a laugh out of me. In the game, this place was a forgotten ruin shoved into a corner of the map, without a single event attached to it. I’d written it off as wasted data, a few broken practice dummies lying around at best.

To think this was the cradle that birthed the Empire’s strongest Knight Commander.

Sparring with Seraphina was, in the most literal sense, hell.

Eat breakfast, roll on the ground, dodge, get hit.

Eat lunch, roll on the ground, dodge, get hit.

Eat dinner, roll on the ground, dodge, get hit.

Those were two weeks so brutal I genuinely started wondering how one person could possibly get clobbered this much.

“Looks like a disaster zone.”

The reinforced, mana-treated marble floor was so split and gouged you’d be hard-pressed to find an unbroken patch left in it. Crater-like divots everywhere, jagged sword-cuts scarring the pillars, shards of ice that still hadn’t melted. All of it was proof, and byproduct, of how hard I’d genuinely worked these past two weeks of hellish training.

Whatever scraps of the Curse of Eternal Snow had been rusting my joints were gone now, driven out without a trace, evaporated under the sheer crushing tonnage of motion and sweat. Joints that used to grind and stick now ran as smooth as oiled machinery. Physically, there was nothing left wrong with the way I moved.

But I couldn’t let it go to my head.

Still feels heavy.

Arden had a lean build, but his whole body felt like it was strapped with sandbags from head to toe. On top of that, I still couldn’t sense the mana that suffused this world; never mind magic, even the most basic mana-reinforcement was beyond me. The three remaining curses were still wrapped tight around me.

But it didn’t matter.

Just as David had brought down Goliath with nothing but a sling, there was always a way to win under bad conditions.

I picked up one of the wooden swords scattered across the floor, the most intact-looking of the bunch. The rough grain of it sat snug and familiar against my palm. That it felt familiar at all struck me as absurd enough to laugh at. Maybe this was how a shut-in gamer turned into an actual swordsman.

“All right, then. Let’s get rolling around today too.”

I’d loosened up and was just about to cut the sword through the empty air.

“Wait.”

Seraphina, dressed in a one-piece with butterflies drawn here and there across the fabric, was standing at the entrance with her arms crossed.

This person really does love butterflies, huh.

She had never once arrived late before, and yet today she was running a little behind.

“What brings you so late?”

“Set down the sword.”

Seraphina walked over, plucked the wooden sword from my hand, and tossed it carelessly to the floor.

“A soldier headed to the battlefield does not drain his strength on the morning of. With your sorry stamina, breathing one extra time will profit you more than swinging that sword once.”

That was when it really hit me: today was the day of the first of the heir’s trials, the Trial of Arms.

“Normally you’re supposed to warm up before the main event, though.”

I rolled my stiff shoulders and grinned, then glanced over at the empty air. Floating there was Eve, who’d spent the last two weeks gathering and crunching every scrap of training data between Seraphina and me.

Eve had both fists clenched and was puffing little jets of breath out through her nose, her expression grave.

Eve broke into a confident smile.

I snorted out a laugh of my own and nodded. She was talking a big game now, but the last two weeks had been hell for her too.

Couldn’t get a single word out for the first three days.

Seraphina’s swordsmanship looked nothing like the game’s data; it was live-combat artistry that shifted with every breath, every glance, the smallest tremor of muscle. Even Eve, whose whole specialty was data analysis, had been knocked into computation overload, drifting at my side in stunned silence.

My own situation hadn’t been much different. I’d started out fairly confident in my pattern-reading, but once I was getting beaten senseless there was no room left in my head to analyze anything. Too desperate, too busy just dodging the blow in front of me. Which was exactly why I needed Eve’s analysis up and running as fast as possible.

The first time Eve managed to open her mouth was on day five.

— Thwack!

I got hit on the left side of my ribs.

— BAM!

A vertical strike came down and slammed me square on the crown of the head.

Thanks to Eve’s misfired call-outs, I’d taken double the beating I would have otherwise.

“Don’t stop.”

But I didn’t reprimand Eve for the bad intel. Back during the ice-knight drills, I’d already grown certain of one thing: Eve’s potential outstripped mine, grizzled veteran though I was.

My evasion was the domain of memorization, knowledge etched into my brain by thousands of deaths. Eve’s guidance, by contrast, was the domain of thorough analysis, reading the play of muscle and the flow of mana in real time.

Against a monster with locked patterns, my memory’ll win out.

But against something like Seraphina, a living monster who switched her plays by the second, Eve’s growth was the single most important variable.

The first week was, in the most literal sense, a disaster. By the second week, things had started to roughly fall into place.

I fell in behind Seraphina as she set off, leaving the ruined training ground at my back.

“Let’s go.”

Today, we would clear the first trial.

The place we arrived at was deep beneath the manor’s main building, the [First Underground Training Hall], down in its very deepest part.

The air was damp and cold, blue torchlight flickering along the walls. At the end of the corridor stood a heavy, formidable steel door that looked like no sound could ever escape it. Above it hung a plaque inscribed Sanctum of Struggle.

“You’ve come.”

The hulking old man guarding the entrance bowed his head. Muscle hard as stone, scars covering every inch of him. In his younger days he had been the Knight Commander of House Arne: Bato. He was well past the age when he should have retired, yet here he still stood on active duty, a tough old man. That Bato had been named examiner meant the weight of this trial was anything but light.

“I’d heard rumors that you were on the mend… but truly seeing you standing here on both feet, healthy as can be — I could die without regret now.”

But the moment that same man laid eyes on me, he scrubbed at the corners of his eyes with a rough hand. He must have truly cherished Arden; his tears refused to stop for a good while. In all the time since I’d been possessed into Arden’s body, a reaction like this was a first.

I was a touch startled, but I took his hand and answered.

“If you die, Sir Bato, who will protect House Arne? Please, even in jest, refrain from saying such things. I’m not fully recovered yet, so words like that send a sharp pang through my heart.”

“Hah, yes, of course. We can’t have Young Master Arden falling ill again, after all.”

At my joke, Bato laughed heartily. The Bato I remembered was a man who would one day don thorn-studded armor and butcher players by the dozen. But in the human Bato standing in front of me now, I couldn’t find a single trace of that ominous edge.

This man, too, ends up turning into a demon, huh.

As I swallowed back the bitterness, Bato adjusted the lay of my clothes for me and asked, worry in his voice,

“That said, Young Master — will you be all right? This is an underground hall; the air’s cold. Should I have an extra coat brought? Or shall I have a chair fetched, so you can sit?”

Bato carried on as if he’d completely forgotten I’d declared myself a candidate for the heir’s position. But I never got the chance to reply.

“Sir Bato. Arden, too, stands here in the full capacity of a candidate.”

Seraphina, beside me, had cut in.

“He is not the weakling who’ll keel over from a touch of cold wind. You are as overprotective now as you ever were.”

At that, Bato turned his head sharply and fixed Seraphina with a stern expression. The kindly-grandfather face was nowhere to be seen now; what remained was the face of an old knight brimming with hurt.

“It is you, my lady, who go too far!”

“…What is that supposed to mean?”

“How long ago did you return to this house, and yet you couldn’t spare a single word for this old man? Am I really expected to learn of my lady’s return through the servants’ whispers?”

“Th-that was… circumstances were moving so quickly that….”

The mighty Seraphina herself faltered, her voice trailing off. But Bato’s barrage of grievances was only just getting warmed up.

“How cold of you. When you were a child you’d cling to the hem of my cloak, calling out ‘Uncle Bato, Uncle Bato’ and follow me right up to the door of the privy… and now that you’ve gotten a taste of the Empire’s water, this old man is beneath your notice, is that it?”

“S-stop it!”

Seraphina’s face turned the color of a ripe tomato.

I nodded in agreement with Eve’s remark.

“Ahem! Why must you dredge up such ancient stories! I am now a duly serving Knight Commander —”

“Knight Commander, my foot. To these eyes you are still that five-year-old little lady bawling over a scraped knee. You and I are going to have a sit-down talk later. I’ve a long list of things I’m sore about.”

“…Fine. Fine. Just — please, close your mouth.”

Seraphina hung her head in deep embarrassment, and only then did Bato twitch his mustache in apparent satisfaction. I watched the comic double-act between the two of them and felt a laugh bubble up.

But my laughter didn’t last long.

“Did you come down here to chatter?”

Valerian, who must have arrived earlier, came strolling out slowly from behind Bato. He looked at his elder sister Seraphina and said,

“You — who ran off to the Empire — come crawling back just to play wet-nurse?”

By now, the news that Seraphina had returned from the Empire to become my guardian was common knowledge across the manor. There’d been no real way to hide it in the first place.

Not after the room got flooded out like that.

Seraphina took the blatant insult thrown her way with composure.

“I am merely fulfilling my duty as a guardian. It is no concern of yours.”

“Hah. Duty, is it.”

Valerian let out a derisive snort and stepped into my path. The look he gave me as he stared down was thick with contempt.

“Don’t get any ideas, Arden. Hiding behind a runaway and borrowing her power to swagger around — this is as far as it goes for you. Once you walk through that door, no one will be able to help you.”

He jerked his chin toward the firmly shut steel door.

“A boy who can’t do a single thing on his own — let’s see just how long he lasts in there.”

Back when we’d played chess, the mood between us had been a good one; now here was Valerian, slipped right back into the arrogant character I’d first known. I shoved aside the bitterness twinging in my chest for no good reason and answered.

“Don’t worry. I’m not about to collapse out of nowhere like last time.”

Just as Valerian’s brow furrowed in response, Bato’s enormous body wedged itself between our locked eyes.

“Two grown Young Masters quarreling like this — it’s unseemly. That overflowing fighting spirit, save it for inside, not for each other.”

Bato’s mediation took the edge off the rising tension. Then he began laying out the rules of the trial in a deep, weighty bass that suited his enormous frame.

“This place is where the souls of our house’s heroes through the ages lie sleeping.”

Eve, somewhere off her rocker, smacked her lips. I pretended very hard not to hear.

“The rules are simple. The challenger enters that door alone. Once inside, a magic circle set in the center of the chamber will respond to the challenger’s mana and manifest the apparition of one of our past heroes.”

In the name of fairness, Seraphina hadn’t shared a single scrap of information about any of this with me beforehand. Which meant I was hearing it all for the first time too.

“So we don’t know which one will show up?”

At my question, Bato nodded.

“That is correct. It might be the founding head of the house, or it might be some long-forgotten ancestor. In a place where life and death hang in the balance, luck plays no small role on the battlefield.”

I clicked my tongue inwardly.

A random draw.

And a gacha system where pulling the rare one was not a good thing, at that. I couldn’t believe a gacha like this even existed.

“Young Master Valerian has already passed this trial in the past, so today he will be in attendance as a witness.”

“You’re saying every candidate has to be present whenever another one challenges the trial?”

“Just so. While you may not be able to see the death-struggle on the other side of the door directly, witnessing the moment when a rival overcomes the trial and walks back out — that alone is enough to guard against one’s own complacency and fan one’s own fighting spirit. It is one of House Arne’s oldest traditions.”

Bato ran his hand down the surface of the steel door and continued.

“Of course, we cannot lay on a gathering like this on any given day. So every trial date is fixed in consultation with the candidate who declares his intent to challenge, on a day when all rivals are able to attend.”

Which meant someone had set the date, and the rest of us had been hauled in to attend. Not me, though. The date had been fixed before I ever declared my candidacy for the heir’s position.

— Thud, thud.

The closer the footsteps came, the more the air of the underground hall filled with the faint, blood-tinged killing intent he was giving off.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

The eyes of Lucius, walking out of the darkness, glittered with poison.