17. The Trial Of Arms (1)

It was a morning no different from any other. I opened my eyes, splashed some water on my face out of habit, and left my room for the far west end of the manor, where a separate training ground lay hidden in thick forest.

This had been Seraphina’s secret practice spot ever since she was a child. A snapped piece of wooden sword was rolling around on the ground, and the sight of it got a snort out of me. In the game, this place had been a forgotten ruin stuck in a corner of the map, with no event attached to it at all, and I’d written it off as wasted data. A few broken wooden dummies at best.

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

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

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 days were so brutal that I honestly wondered how one person could get clobbered this much.

“Looks like a disaster zone.”

The floor was marble, reinforced and treated with mana, yet it was so split and gouged that you’d struggle to find an unbroken patch. There were crater-like divots everywhere, jagged sword cuts in the pillars, and shards of ice that still hadn’t melted. All of it was the byproduct of two weeks of hellish training, and the proof that I’d really put in the work.

Whatever scraps of the Curse of Eternal Snow had been rusting my joints were gone without a trace, evaporated under the sheer crushing tonnage of activity and sweat. Joints that used to grind now ran as smooth as oiled machinery, so physically speaking, there was no longer anything wrong with the way I moved.

But I couldn’t let myself get the wrong idea.

Still feels heavy.

Arden had a lean build, yet his whole body felt strapped with sandbags from head to toe. I still couldn’t feel this world’s mana either, so never mind magic, even the most basic mana-reinforcement was beyond me. And the three remaining curses were still wrapped tight around me.

But it didn’t matter. David had brought down Goliath with nothing but a sling, and there was always a way to win under bad conditions.

I picked up the most intact-looking of the wooden swords rolling around the floor. The rough grain sat snug against my palm and felt familiar, and the very fact that it felt familiar was so absurd it made me laugh. Maybe this was how a shut-in gamer turned into an actual swordsman.

“All right, then. Time to roll around some more.”

I’d loosened up a little and was about to swing through empty air when —

“Wait.”

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

This person really does love butterflies, huh.

She had never once been late before, yet today she was a little behind.

“You’re late today. That’s a first.”
“Set down the sword.”

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

“A soldier going to battle does not spend his strength that same morning. With your sorry stamina, one more breath will do you more good than one swing of that sword.”

That was when it really hit me. Today was the first gate 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, grinned, and looked at the empty air. Eve was floating there, having spent the last two weeks gathering and processing every scrap of training data between me and Seraphina.

Both her fists were clenched, and she was puffing little jets of breath through her nose with a grave expression.

Then she broke into a confident smile.

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

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

Seraphina’s swordsmanship was nothing like the game’s data. It was a live-combat style that shifted with the breath, the gaze, the smallest tremor of muscle. Even Eve, whose specialty was data analysis, had been knocked into computation overload, and she’d drifted around at my side struck mute, like she’d swallowed honey.

I hadn’t been much better off. I’d started out fairly confident in my pattern-reading, but once you’re getting beaten senseless there’s no room left to analyze anything. You’re too desperate just to dodge the blow in front of you. That was exactly why I needed Eve’s analysis up and running as soon as possible.

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

— Thwack!

I got hit on the left side of my ribs.

— BAM!

A vertical strike slammed square into the crown of my head.

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

“Don’t stop.”

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

My evasion was the realm of memorization, knowledge etched into the brain by thousands of deaths. Eve’s guidance was the realm of thorough analysis, reading the play of muscles 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 most important variable.

The first week was a mess, in the most literal sense. By the second, things had started to roughly line up.

Seraphina walked ahead, and I fell in behind her, leaving the ruined training ground at my back.

“Let’s go.”

Today, we would clear the first trial.

We ended up deep beneath the manor’s main building, in the very deepest part of it, at the [First Underground Training Hall]. The air was damp and cold, and blue torchlight flickered along the walls. At the end of the corridor stood a heavy, formidable steel door that looked like no sound could ever escape it, and the plaque above it read Sanctum of Struggle.

“You’ve come.”

The hulking old man guarding the entrance bowed his head. His muscle was hard as stone, and scars covered every inch of him. This was Bato, in his younger days the Knight Commander of House Arne. He should’ve retired already at his age, yet this tough old man was still on active duty, and the fact that he was the 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.”

Yet that same man only had to lay eyes on me to start scrubbing at the corners of his eyes with a rough hand. He must have truly cherished Arden, because his tears wouldn’t stop for some time.

Since I’d been possessed into Arden, this kind of reaction 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 would one day don thorn-studded armor and butcher players by the dozen. But I could find no trace of that ominous edge in the human Bato standing in front of me now.

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, with 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?”

He was carrying on as if he’d completely forgotten that I’d declared myself a candidate for the heir’s position.

Before I could even reply —

“Sir Bato. Arden, too, stands here as a candidate in his own right.”

Seraphina, beside me, had cut in.

“He is not some weakling who will keel over at a touch of cold wind. You are as overprotective now as you ever were.”

At that, Bato turned his head sharply and gave her a stern look. The kindly grandfather was nowhere to be seen. 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?”
“You’ve been back in this house how long now, and 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 started.

“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!”

Her face turned the color of a ripe tomato.

I nodded in agreement.

“Ahem! Why must you dredge up such ancient history! I am now a proper 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.”

She hung her head deep in embarrassment, and only then did Bato twitch his mustache in apparent satisfaction.

Watching the two of them do their comic double act, I felt a laugh bubble up. But it didn’t last long.

“Did you come down here to chatter?”

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

“You ran off to the Empire, and now you come crawling back just to play wet-nurse?”

By now the whole manor knew that Seraphina had returned from the Empire and become my guardian. 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 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, and 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.”

The mood had been a good one when we’d played chess, yet here he was, back to the arrogant character I’d first known. I shoved aside the bitterness twinging in my heart 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, Bato’s enormous body wedged itself between our locked eyes.

“Two grown Young Masters quarreling like this — it’s unseemly. That overflowing fighting spirit, don’t spend it on each other. Save it.”

That took the edge off the rising tension. He then began explaining the rules of the trial in a deep, weighty bass that suited his enormous frame.

“This 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.”

On the grounds of fairness, Seraphina hadn’t shared a single piece of information about any of this beforehand, so it was the first I was hearing of it too.

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

Bato nodded.

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

I clicked my tongue inwardly. A random draw. And a gacha system where pulling the rare one was not a good thing. I couldn’t believe a gacha like this even existed.

“Young Master Valerian has already passed this trial, so today he will be in attendance as a witness.”
“You’re saying every rival has to show up whenever a candidate takes the trial?”
“Just so. You may not be able to see the death-struggle on the other side of the door directly, but to witness the moment 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 hold a gathering like this every 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 had been summoned by force. It hadn’t been me, because this 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.

“Kept you waiting a long time, didn’t I.”

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