33. The Head's Training Ground (1)

“Your point is valid. To put an unverified problem on an exam is wrong.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And yet, that cannot be permitted.”

For a moment, I doubted my own ears.

Not “I cannot permit it”?

Maybe I was just being oversensitive to a single word’s difference. Still, it nagged at me that the absolute power of this house had reached for passive phrasing, cannot be permitted, instead of saying it outright.

There’s something here I don’t know.

I made a mental note to have another talk with Rose someday.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

“I’m told you summoned me.”

I opened with a few questions of my own, but in truth it was Kairon who had business with me.

“I’m told Seraphina has become your guardian.”

Was his intelligence network slower than I’d expected? That had been a long while ago now.

“Yes, things ended up that way.”

The succession of House Arne now came down to me and Valerian, most likely shaping into a two-candidate race from here on. Lucius had shut himself in his room ever since tasting bitter defeat in the first trial, the Trial of Arms.

Kairon kept the thread going on the subject of Seraphina.

“That child seems not to have wanted Valerian to become the heir. Then again, that boy has known nothing but the sword since he was small — he never learned how to handle people.”

“My sister told me. That she gave up the heir’s position when she left the house.”

“Yes, she swore an oath to me.”

Seraphina had left the house young, claimed her independence, and risen all the way to Knight Commander in the Empire, a feat built on nothing but raw, heaven-given sword talent. The byname Frost Empress hadn’t been pinned to her for nothing.

Had Seraphina made it to the Empire safely, by the way? I wondered whether she’d be glad to hear I’d passed the Trial of Wisdom.

“I will be plain. Withdraw from the candidate list.”

Seraphina’s pleasure aside, it seemed the head of the house didn’t want me to be the heir.

“No.”

I shot back without a moment’s hesitation.

“Why should I throw away a chance at wealth and glory?”

Even if this whole thing ultimately turned out to be defeat, I had no intention of stepping aside.

A challenge is always worth taking.

“Looking at it fairly, I’m the front-runner in this succession race.”

As I’d said earlier, Lucius had already given up.

“And Brother Valerian failed the Trial of Wisdom.”

I pulled out the parchment Rose had given me and held it up.

Whoosh.

The page unfurled, an absurdly long block of ornate writing flourishing across it.

I looked at Kairon with an expression that said Valerian doesn’t have one of these, does he, and spoke.

“The Trial of Arms is on hold, but I’m going to pass it eventually. Let’s just count it as cleared.”

“Quite the confidence.”

“Confidence is all I’ve got.”

Midway through the conversation, Kairon abruptly went back to his paperwork. Once again I sat there waiting on him. When he’d worked through a decent stack, he spoke.

“By your reasoning, then, only the last trial remains.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Then I will make another proposal.”

“Yes!”

So it turned out he’d been pretending to do paperwork while turning things over in his head.

Surprised that I’m further ahead than he thought?

I felt a warm little glow of vindication.

Hehe.

“Withdraw from the candidate list.”

“…Pardon?”

“There is no way you can pass the last trial.”

“…May I ask why?”

“That, I cannot tell you.”

Kairon pulled an old parchment from a drawer and handed it across to me. The summary of the succession trials was written on it.

“Seraphina will have told you. Pass all three — strength of arms, wisdom, and the last — and you obtain an absolute authority that not even the head of the house can touch.”

For the first time, a faint smile crossed Kairon’s face, and he added:

“I also failed at the last trial.”

That first smile of his carried a confession of his own defeat.

“No one in this house will ever pass the last trial. The same goes for Seraphina, whose qualification has been stripped.”

Kairon’s smile didn’t last long.

“I’m told that, after failing the Trial of Arms, Lucius’s will to challenge again has broken.”

“…Yes.”

“Your influence on Lucius’s collapse must be considerable.”

“Pardon? Mine?”

“What are you so surprised about? You must have suspected as much.”

Rising from his seat, Kairon walked off and came to a stop in front of a bare, unadorned wall.

“To Lucius, Valerian was a wall he could not climb. The boy was always tormented by an inferiority complex toward his older brother — but ironically, that inferiority complex was also the engine that drove him. The stubborn vow that someday he would catch up.”

Just as he said, the bitterness of being a perennial number two could sometimes be the most powerful fuel of all.

“But you are different.”

“How am I different?”

“To Lucius, you were a comfort, a reassurance. No matter how badly he lost to Valerian, at the very least he was better than the cri**led runt — and that superiority was what propped up his pride.”

Cri**led runt? That’s a low blow, even for him.

Yes, Arden’s body was a tangled mess of curses picked up from who-knows-where; his physique was weaker than an average commoner’s, and he couldn’t even channel mana properly. Sure.

I cleared my throat and spoke.

“Then be a little kinder to him.”

“That is what I intend to do.”

“Pardon?”

Kairon pressed a few spots on the wall in front of him.

Kuh-ku-gung—!

The wall vanished as if it had never been there, and a passageway opened, leading off somewhere into the distance.

“We’ll continue the rest of this conversation there.”

When the passageway ended at the edge of a cliff, Kairon came to a halt.

What kind of momentous talk needs to happen this far in?

Just as my questions kept piling up, Kairon ran his eyes over my body, and a moment later a pure white light enveloped my entire frame.

“There. Done.”

I sensed at once that what he’d cast was a healing spell.

I rose from the wheelchair and worked my limbs in every direction.

A spell at this level had to be top-grade work.

Could’ve done that a lot sooner.

I had a faint sliver of complaint, but mostly I was just grateful to be free of the wheelchair.

“Let’s go.”

The words had barely left his mouth before Kairon leapt off the cliff.

“What?!”

For a second I stood there stunned, then snapped back to myself and crawled to the edge to look down.

There stood Kairon, balanced on a jutting outcrop of rock. The outcrop was barely large enough to hold two men at most.

“You want me to climb down there?”

Kairon was already shrinking into a distant dot.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me. You have got to be kidding.”

.

.

.

“Aaaaagh!”

Seraphina had drilled into me the habit of carrying a sword wherever I went.

I had no idea it would come this much in handy.

Hanging upside down on the cliff face, I stretched my arm out as far as it would go and drove the sword into the rock. The cliff stone was rock-hard, and sinking the blade in took everything I had.

I’m sorry.

The blade was getting chewed up in real time.

How the hell am I supposed to climb back up, even if I make it down?

Inching down step by miserable step, I hit a few existential lulls.

Can’t be helped — my own fault for being dirt-weak.

But it wasn’t as if I could turn back now. The top was dizzyingly far, and the bottom just as dizzyingly far.

Arden, I am dragging you up to the moon if it’s the last thing I do.

No matter what!

.

.

.

I threw away every last shred of decorum a man’s supposed to show before the head of the house and flopped flat-out on the floor of the cavern. My legs trembled so badly there was no chance of standing.

“Being head of the house, one cannot even train without minding everyone’s eyes.”

Paying no attention whatsoever to my rude posture, Kairon ran his hand along the wall of the underground chamber.

Still flat on my back, I rolled my head to one side and looked at the wall. Across its surface were dozens of years’ worth of sword strokes, carved everywhere in a tangled mess.

“A man who has decided to keep a sword in his hand for life cannot be denied a place where he can swing it freely, even once.”

The moment those words were spoken, Kairon set off walking again, and reluctantly I had to follow. Fortunately, he stopped not too far on.

Not far along stood a weapon rack, a stand holding several different kinds of weapons.

Clink.

Without warning he drew the longsword at his hip, scabbard and all, and threw it toward me. I caught the sword on reflex, and even its weight was on another level.

If the smiths who forged this saw it being handled like this, they’d be foaming at the mouth.

This sword, commonly known as Aerondight¹, sat on the Kairon Raid reward list, and even there it was a drop with abysmally low odds.

“If you will not give up the heir’s position, then I have no choice but to change my approach.”

Having tossed me his own sword, Kairon picked a wooden practice sword off the rack and leveled its tip at me.

“H-head of the house? In case you’ve forgotten, I might look fine but I’m actually still a patient. I almost had a heart attack on the way down that cliff.”

Crack!

A sword passed down as the heirloom of the house clashed with an ordinary wooden one. I was the one bringing my blade up from below to block; Kairon was the one bringing his down on me.

“You’ve got the breath to flap your mouth, so you must be perfectly fine.”

Pwang—!

Mid-clash, Kairon kicked off the ground. Dirt skidded backwards as the force bearing down on me doubled.

Is that really just a wooden sword?

Whatever he was doing, the wooden sword was holding firm against Aerondight’s wicked edge. Kairon’s pressure bore down on me like a mountain out to crush me.

“To lead House Arne with skill of this caliber — your daydreaming is excessive.”

I’m an intelligence build, dammit!

I wanted to scream it, but bracing against the wooden sword’s pressure left me no breath even to open my mouth.

“Humans endure quite well even when they slam into a high wall. Of course they do — where is the human being who has ever grown without slamming into their limits?”

Kairon eased the pressure for a beat, then drove the wooden sword down onto Aerondight’s blade once more.

Krang!

“Khh-uhk…!”

My whole body couldn’t bear that monstrous strength. I was flung backwards, rolling across the ground. Dirt flew into my mouth, but I lacked even the strength to spit it out.

“No matter how high the wall a man has to climb, it is in his nature to endure on sheer stubbornness alone.”

He aimed the tip of the wooden sword at the solar plexus of my prone, sprawled-out body.

“But the ground he had been standing on being flipped over — that, he cannot endure.”

The words made no sense.

Ground being flipped over?

It sounded like some kind of philosophical metaphor, but with my breath choked so far up my throat, I had no room to fire one back.

“Get up.”

“…”

Krang!

The wooden sword slammed savagely into the patch of ground I’d just been lying on, its impact driven precisely where my solar plexus had been. If I hadn’t rolled clear, that blow would have been genuinely dangerous.

“Are you trying to kill me?!”

“You’re not officially the heir yet — in theory, it’s possible.”

Crack!

At some point, the pain in my legs had gone away. No, let me correct that. I’d been hit so many times in so many other places that my legs simply didn’t register anymore.

“Uggh!”

“Again.”

Crack!

“Augh!”

The *Crack!*s and the *Augh!*s laid themselves down like a backing track, and over it all came Kairon’s intermittent “Again.” I lost count of how many times I rolled, of how many blows landed.

When I came back to myself, I was once more sprawled out wide, the chill of the cold stone floor soaking into my whole body.

“…Is that… it?”

At my hoarse voice, Kairon lowered the wooden sword and nodded.

“That’s it for today.”

Relief welled up from somewhere deep inside me. If I went back to my room, I felt like I could collapse into bed and sleep for days.

But Kairon’s next words snapped my eyes wide open.

“When you can carry the full weight of that sword on your own, I will come to see you again.”

“…Pardon?”

I asked back, jolted, sure I must have misheard.

To which Kairon replied, his face not bearing so much as a drop of sweat, indifferent.

“Didn’t you tell me so yourself? That I should be a little kinder.”

“Th-that wasn’t…”

That’s not what I meant, you know.

And since when does anyone show kindness by assaulting their own son like this?

As I worked my mouth in stunned protest, Kairon clicked his tongue.

“Already forgotten? Next time I had better not strike your head. Seems to have done something to your memory.”

Kairon gazed at me, stunned and frozen, for a long moment, then turned on his heel and headed back toward the cliff.

“I look forward to your return.”

He drifted away with all the ease of a tutor handing out homework. In the now-empty underground training ground, only his voice lingered, echoing.

— If you ever find the training too much, you may turn back whenever you wish.

— But you will leave the heir’s qualification behind when you go.

Now only I was left in the underground training ground. I stared blankly up at the ceiling, then closed my fist around Aerondight, still planted in the floor beside me.

“No.”

I was not all right. It felt like my whole body was about to fall apart.

Even so, I used the sword as a crutch, forced strength into my shaking legs, and staggered to my feet.

“Just you wait.”

I ground my teeth at the empty air.

“I am… I really am going to become the heir, whatever it takes.”