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 didn’t trust my own ears.

Not “I cannot permit it”?

Maybe I was just being touchy over a single word, but still. The absolute power of this house had reached for a passive, cannot be permitted, and it snagged on me.

There’s something here I don’t know.

So I made a mental note to talk to Rose again someday, and went back to the matter at hand.

“I’m told you summoned me.”

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

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

Was his intelligence network slower than I’d thought? That had happened ages ago.

“Yes, things ended up that way.”

The succession of House Arne now came down to Valerian and me, and a two-way race looked like the likeliest shape from here, because Lucius had holed up in his room ever since his bitter defeat at the first trial, the Trial of Arms.

Kairon stayed 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 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, made her own way, and climbed all the way to Knight Commander in the Empire, and she’d done it on nothing but natural talent with the sword. The byname Frost Empress hadn’t been pinned on her for nothing.

By the way, had she reached the Empire safely? I wondered if she’d be pleased to hear I’d passed the Trial of Wisdom.

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

Her pleasure aside, the head of the house clearly didn’t want me as his heir.

“No.”

I shot it back without a moment’s hesitation.

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

Even if all this ended in defeat, I had no intention of stepping aside.

A challenge is always worth taking.

“When you get right down to it, I’m the front-runner in this succession race.”

Like I said, Lucius had already given up.

“And Brother Valerian failed the Trial of Wisdom.”

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

Whoosh.

It unrolled, and a ridiculously long block of ornate script flourished across the page. I gave Kairon a look that said Valerian doesn’t have one of these, does he, and went on.

“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.”

Mid-conversation, Kairon abruptly went back to his paperwork, so once again I sat there and waited. Only when he’d cleared a decent stack did he speak.

“By your reasoning, then, only the last trial remains.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Then I will make another proposal.”
“Yes!”

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

Surprised that I’m further ahead than he thought?

A warm little glow of vindication spread through me.

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 took an old parchment out of a drawer and handed it across to me. On it was a summary of the succession trials.

“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 failed the last trial myself.”

So what that first smile of his carried was the 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.”

The smile didn’t last long.

“I’m told Lucius’s will to try again broke when he failed the Trial of Arms.”
“…Yes.”
“You must have had a great deal to do with Lucius’s collapse.”
“Pardon? Me?”
“Why so surprised? You suspected as much yourself.”

Kairon rose from his seat, 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.”

He had a point. The bitterness of being forever second could sometimes be the strongest fuel there was.

“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.

Okay, 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 touched a few spots on the wall in front of him, and then

Kuh-ku-gung—!

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

“We’ll finish this conversation there.”

The passage ended at the edge of a cliff, and there Kairon came to a halt.

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

My questions were still piling up when Kairon ran his eyes over my body, and a moment later a pure white light wrapped my entire frame.

“That will do.”

I knew at once that it was a healing spell.

I got up out of 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.

That was my one faint complaint, but mostly I was just grateful to be free of the wheelchair.

“Let’s go.”

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

“What?!”

I stood there stunned for a second, then snapped out of it, crawled to the edge, and looked down. There he was, standing on a jutting outcrop of rock too small for even two men to stand on.

“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 bringing a sword wherever I went, but

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 stone was so hard that getting the blade in took everything I had.

I’m sorry.

The blade was getting chewed up right before my eyes.

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

I inched down step by miserable step, and hit a few existential lulls along the way.

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

But I couldn’t turn back now anyway. The top was dizzyingly far away, and so was the bottom.

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 the decorum a man owes the head of the house and flopped flat on the floor of the cavern, because my legs were trembling too badly to stand.

“The head of the house cannot so much as train without minding who is watching.”

Kairon paid my rude posture no attention whatsoever and ran his hand along the wall of the underground chamber. Still flat on my back, I rolled my head to one side and looked. Decades’ worth of sword strokes were carved all over that wall 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 he’d said it, Kairon set off walking again, and reluctantly I had to follow. Luckily he stopped not far on, at a weapon rack holding several different kinds of weapons.

Clink.

All of a sudden he drew the longsword at his hip, scabbard and all, and threw it toward me. I caught it without thinking, and even the weight of it was on another level.

If blacksmiths saw this sword being handled like this, they’d foam at the mouth and pass out.

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

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

Having thrown me his own sword, Kairon took a wooden practice sword from 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!

The heirloom of the house clashed with an ordinary wooden sword. I was the one bringing mine up from below to block, and Kairon was the one bringing his down on me.

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

Pwang—!

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

Is that really just a wooden sword?

Whatever he was doing, the wood was holding firm against Aerondight’s wicked edge, and his pressure came down on me like a mountain set on crushing me.

“You would lead House Arne with skill this paltry? Your daydreams go too far.”

I’m an intelligence build, dammit!

I wanted to scream it, but bracing against that wooden sword 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 off for a beat, then drove the wooden sword down onto Aerondight’s blade once more.

Krang!

“Khh-uhk…!”

My whole body couldn’t take that monstrous strength. I was flung backward and went rolling across the ground, and though dirt flew into my mouth, I didn’t even have 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 my solar plexus as I lay sprawled there.

“But let the ground he stands on be flipped over — that, he cannot endure.”

That made no sense.

Ground being flipped over?

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

“Get up.”

“…”

Krang!

The wooden sword slammed savagely into the ground where I’d just been lying, and the mark it left sat precisely where my solar plexus had been. If I hadn’t rolled out of the way, 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 on top of it all came Kairon’s intermittent “Again.”

I lost count of how many times I rolled and how many blows landed. When I came back to myself I was sprawled out wide once more, with 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. I felt like I could go back to my room, 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 it with a jolt, sure I must have misheard, and Kairon answered indifferently, without so much as a drop of sweat on his face.

“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 my mouth worked 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.”

He gazed at me for a long moment, stunned and still as I was, then turned on his heel and headed back toward the cliff.

“I look forward to your return.”

And off he drifted, 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 the underground training ground had only me left in it. 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. My whole body felt like it 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.”