34. The Head's Training Ground (2)

I’d replayed that last fight in my head dozens of times.

Calling it a “fight” is generous — I just got the crap beaten out of me.

Still, all that replaying had brought me to a single conclusion. Sword training wasn’t the urgent part.

So what was I doing instead?

“Hraaaaagh!”

Sweat had soaked the floor of the underground training ground like water poured over a garden bed. My arms shook; my lungs heaved like they were about to burst.

I’d decided to become a workout-obsessed gym rat.

Granted, this underground chamber had none of the barbells or dumbbells that are any gym’s bread and butter. But a real gym rat doesn’t get picky about his equipment. Or so I’d heard.

“Hnnghh!”

I hauled the massive iron shield off the weapon rack and pressed it high over my head.

“One… two…!”

Back ramrod-straight, I sank my hips all the way to the floor. Over and over, until it felt like my thighs would detonate.

Squats done, I shouldered an iron lance and lunged the length of the training ground and back again.

“Ninety… nine!”

Body in tatters, I ground out a full hundred pushups. I had to drop to my knees partway through, but I got there.

I kneaded my arm and looked at the sword planted in the floor.

Aerondight.

Getting this sword meant clearing the Demon Knight Commander — Kairon raid.

The user clear-rate on that raid was under 5%.

The difficulty was hellish, and even if you did clear it, whether the sword actually dropped as a reward was a whole separate gamble.

And here it is, being treated like an ordinary wooden practice blade.

And something that rare had been handed to me as a casual training aid, left stuck in the floor at my side.

But there’s no free lunch in this world. Handing someone a fine weapon doesn’t magically turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry into a swordmaster.

That said, it’s not as if true masters prefer rusty iron skewers either. They know the value of their gear better than anyone, right down to the marrow.

A master understands the weight of his weapon.

A famed sword doubles its master’s true strength.

By any measure, Aerondight was an exquisite blade, without a single flaw to be found in it.

The problem was that this body couldn’t even handle the sword’s weight.

I lifted Aerondight in both hands.

“Show me again.”

Eve cautiously pulled up a window showing Aerondight’s full details.

I lifted Aerondight off the floor again.

Eve brought up the status window.

“…Hahh.”

A sigh slipped out on its own.

“…Quiet, you.”

Break time was over.

Arms still shaking, I went back to my pushups.

“Thirty… one… nnghh…!”

My body wasn’t listening, of course. However strong the will, the human body stays locked tight behind the brake called pain. My brain kept issuing the same command: Stop the exercise.

This isn’t working.

At this pace, a year of this wouldn’t get me to Strength 50. I wouldn’t even crack 30.

I don’t have time for this.

The Crown Prince of the Empire fails to assassinate his father, Theodore III. Broken by the shock, the Emperor becomes the Lord of Lamentation and razes the Empire to ash. Two months back, I’d realized this catastrophe was now only a year out, which left me, give or take, ten months and change. And when that day came, the fallout would hit not just the Empire but the Arne domain too, plain as day.

Move, damn arm!

Become the heir before then, and use House Arne’s strength to head off the tragedy bearing down on the Empire. That was the first goal I’d set for myself.

“Ugh, this is killing me.”

For any of that, the urgent priority was to drag this body into something resembling working shape, as fast as humanly possible.

“It’s because the curses are dug in that I have to push harder.”

If I cave just because I’m weak, when am I ever going to get strong?

“At least my body has to get strong.”

Brave words, but the pain was no joke.

If only I couldn’t feel pain at all. That would’ve made things so much easier.

Can’t feel pain?

Just then a memory flashed across my brain like a bolt of lightning.

I turned my head and looked at Eve.

“Eve.”

“Want to try that thing again — the one we did before?”

“The thing from the Trial of Arms.”

In the last trial, backed into a corner against the Fallen Hero, Eve had fused with me.

Thanks to that, I’d been able to land one solid hit on the Fallen Hero with a strength that broke past my limits.

The aftermath was every bone in my body shattering and a one-way trip to a wheelchair, but still.

“If memory serves, there was a function called Pain Suppression. Right?”

The instant she heard the idea, Eve threw her arms into an X and cried out her flat refusal.

“No, hear me out. You know what they say — too much of a good thing. As long as I don’t get greedy, it’s fine.”

“Look, it’s not like I can do it on my own whenever I feel like it. So if you judge that it’s getting dangerous, you just call it off. Right?”

Spotting my opening, I launched into a rapid-fire pitch.

“Either way, if I can’t hit the stats, in ten months we all go down in flames together. Would you rather collapse during a workout, or get eaten by a demon later?”

Half threat, half persuasion, and Eve bit her lip. She had no comeback for that. Time really was running short.

Eve heaved a deep sigh and laid out her terms.

“Okay, of course.”

“You bet!”

And with that, Eve slipped right into me.

A shiver ran up my spine, and the muscle ache and exhaustion crushing every inch of me vanished as if it had all been a lie. My body felt light as a feather.

Ding.

Instead of her voice, her instructions came up in the chat log.

I took her recommendation and pivoted into a focused leg routine.

And so the curtain rose on a crazed training regimen, all in the name of someday wielding Aerondight.

A week into the hellish routine, and it was still grinding on.

Syncing with Eve every time would’ve made this far easier. But there was a catch.

And the moment a sync ended, Pain Suppression lifted right along with it. Which meant every last drop of pain I’d been ignoring came rolling back in at once.

“…Aaargh.”

Even so, I couldn’t afford to write off whole days, so when my arms refused to move I did squats, and when my legs gave out I switched to planks. An endless carousel of suffering.

On top of that, this was a secret training ground buried deep underground. Not somewhere Elli or Leo could swing by with a meal.

Which is to say my stomach was glued to my spine, and a brand-new flavor of pain was making my life hell.

The only edible thing anywhere nearby, aside from the blackish mold on the damp stone walls, was a mushroom flecked with purple spots.

In-game, picking it up only ever clogged your inventory, junk loot among junk loot. Right now, though, it was my only food.

“If I stay like this, I won’t die of overtraining — I’ll die of starvation.”

Hunger wasn’t something I could just grit my teeth and wait out.

So I closed my fingers around the dirt-dusted Illusion Mushroom and made up my mind.

“Eve. Come in for a minute.”

“No. That’s not what this is about.”

I waggled the mushroom in my hand and gave her a meaningful smile.

“Didn’t you tell me you connect to my nervous system to block pain?”

“Doesn’t that also mean you can manipulate nerve signals?”

Eve mulled it over for a moment, then answered.

In theory, at least, it was possible. From there on out, it was the territory of my imagination.

“The side effect of this mushroom is hallucinations, so if I eat it, my brain falls into a hallucinated state.”

“Right, so — just like you hack the nerve cells in my muscles to make me not feel pain, can’t you hack the nerves of my brain while it’s in a hallucinated state?”

“Curious? Then come in.”

Resigned, Eve slipped into me.

The instant she did,

I popped the mushroom in my hand into my mouth.

A foul, bitter taste and a swimming dizziness washed over me, and even that felt delicious.

My vision slowly blurred, and the world stained itself a dreamlike shade of purple.

I clung by force to my fading consciousness and wrapped both hands tight around the grip of Aerondight, still planted in the floor.

Vrrrrrnnng—!

The purple mist gradually lifted, and the world reassembled itself.

The walls of the underground dungeon, slick with damp moss and reeking of mold, crumbled away, and in their place rose a wide sparring arena, lit by lamps bright enough to dazzle the eyes.

“Whew, it worked.”

“Couldn’t have pulled it off without you.”

What I’d hit on was using the mushroom’s hallucination side effect as a virtual-reality simulator I could tune to my own taste.

So the instant I ate the mushroom, I fired Eve the image I’d been building in my mind over chat.

And just like that, an ornate sparring arena took shape before my eyes.

“Of course, the arena itself isn’t the point.”

I turned my gaze to the man standing expressionless at the center of the arena, a wooden practice sword in his hand.

I knew perfectly well he was a fake, and still every hair on my body stood on end. He carried the exact same crushing presence as the real thing.

The illusion of Kairon opened his mouth and looked at me.

“Again.”

The instant that single word landed, a laugh of sheer disbelief escaped me.

Tatt—!

I drew my sword and lunged at the illusion.

This was different from a week ago.

Where last time I’d been driven onto the defensive and barely able to keep up, this time I went for the initiative with the opening strike.

Krrang!

His wooden sword came up vertically and caught mine.

“Kkh-!”

A shock that felt like it would pulverize my wrist tore up my arm.

I was the one attacking, and yet I was the one screaming.

It kicked back like I’d slammed my blade into the flank of a giant boulder. Kairon, meanwhile, hadn’t shifted an inch. If anything, he twisted the wrist holding his wooden sword by the barest fraction, and all the force I’d loaded into my blade came flooding back in reverse, bearing down on me.

Crrrk.

“Monotonous.”

The illusion of Kairon murmured, his voice empty of feeling.

He angled his wooden sword to knock mine off line, then drove the point straight into the gap at my side.

Whump!

A shock like my flank had been blown apart sent me tumbling backward. In reality, it would’ve shattered three or four of my ribs.

“Pthhh, pthh!”

Tumbling head over heels, I kept spitting out the dirt pouring into my mouth. Rolling this way and that, scrapes and welts of clotted blood piled up all over my body.

“Again.”

I spat out blood-flecked saliva and reset my stance.

“The training with Seraphina was the same, but his human-era version is harder than the demonified one.”

At my muttering, Eve answered with something like a sigh.

The Demon Knight Commander — Kairon was, without question, several times stronger than this version. There was no comparison in raw destructive power, in reach, in stamina.

But that one was a boss the game had built.

Hit a certain HP threshold and he’d fire a certain skill; dodge left and he’d strike right. He had a fixed, solvable pattern.

But Human — Kairon was another beast entirely. The angle at which he planted his foot, the minute timing in the tilt of his shoulder, even the spacing between his breaths: no two instants were ever the same. Variables I couldn’t predict. The instinct seared into his body by decades of treading battlefields.

“So that’s why humans are scarier than demons.”

There’s a reason Satan would be out of a job.

“Ow!”

While I was off woolgathering, Kairon’s wooden sword cracked me across the head and dropped me flat onto my backside.

“Bwahaha! I could do this all day!”

And the thing was, I was genuinely delighted. I was finally getting in some real sword training, after all.

And so my days split in two. When I was lucid, the hellish strength routine; when I wasn’t, the endless sparring against the illusion.