34. The Head's Training Ground (2)

I’d gone over 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 going over it had brought me to a conclusion: sword practice wasn’t the urgent thing. So what was I up to instead?

“Hraaaaagh!”

My sweat had soaked the floor of the underground training ground like a watered garden bed, my arms were shaking, and my lungs felt ready to burst. I had decided to turn myself into a workout-mad gym rat.

Of course, there were no barbells or dumbbells down here, the staples of any gym, but a real gym rat isn’t choosy about his equipment. Or so I’d heard.

“Hnnghh!”

I raised the huge iron shield from the weapon rack high above my head.

“One… two…!”

With my back stiff and straight, I sank my hips right down to the floor, again and again, until my thighs felt about to explode. When the squats were finished, I laid an iron lance across my shoulders and lunged to the far end of the training ground and back.

“Ninety… nine!”

My body was a wreck, but I still pushed on to a full hundred pushups. I did have to go down on my knees midway, but still.

Rubbing my arm, I eyed the sword stuck in the floor.

Aerondight.

The only way to get this sword was to clear the Demon Knight Commander — Kairon raid.

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

The difficulty was brutal, and even after a clear, whether the sword dropped was a separate matter.

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

A rarity like that had been casually thrown to me as a training tool and left stuck in the floor beside me. But there’s no free lunch in this world. A fine weapon doesn’t make a swordmaster out of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Then again, true masters don’t prefer rusty iron skewers either. They know how much gear matters better than anyone, right down to the marrow, and a master gets the weight of his weapon.

A famed sword doubles its master’s true strength.

However I looked at it, Aerondight was exquisite, without a flaw anywhere. The problem was that this body couldn’t handle even its weight.

I lifted it with both hands.

“Show me again.”

Eve cautiously opened a window with the sword’s details.

I lifted Aerondight off the floor again, and Eve showed me the status window.

“…Hahh.”

The sigh came out all on its own.

“…Quiet, you.”

Break over. My arms were still shaking, but I went back to my pushups.

“Thirty… one… nnghh…!”

As expected, my body didn’t obey. However strong your will, the human body is locked against the brake called pain, and my brain kept issuing the same command: Stop the exercise.

This isn’t working.

At this pace a whole year wouldn’t get me to Strength 50. It wouldn’t even get me to 30.

I don’t have time for this.

The Crown Prince of the Empire fails to assassinate his father, Theodore III. The Emperor, broken by the shock, becomes the Lord of Lamentation and razes the Empire to ash. I’d realized two months ago that this event was now only a year off, so I had roughly ten months and change left. And when it came, the Empire wouldn’t be the only one hurt. The Arne domain obviously would be too.

Move, damn arm!

The first objective I’d set myself was to become the heir before then, and use the strength of House Arne to stop the tragedy that would unfold in the Empire.

“Ugh, this is killing me.”

So the urgent priority was to drag this body into something like functional shape, as fast as humanly possible.

“The curses are dug in, that’s why I have to push harder.”

If I admit weakness because I’m weak, when do I ever get strong?

“If nothing else, my body’s got to get strong.”

Brave words, but the pain was no small thing. If only I couldn’t feel it at all, this would be so much easier.

Can’t feel pain?

A memory flickered through my brain like 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 that previous trial, when I’d been cornered 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.

Afterward every bone in my body was shattered and I ended up in a wheelchair, but still.

“If I remember correctly, there was a function called Pain Suppression. Right?”

The moment she heard the idea, Eve threw her arms into an X and cried out her absolute opposition.

“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 when I feel like it. So if you think it’s getting dangerous, you can just call it off. Right?”

I saw my opening and 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?”

It was half threat, half persuasion, and Eve bit her lip. She couldn’t argue with that, because time truly was short.

Eve sighed deeply and laid out her conditions.

“Okay, of course.”

“You bet!”

With that, Eve slipped right into me. A shiver ran up my spine, and the ache and exhaustion crushing my whole body vanished as if they’d been a lie. I felt as light as a feather.

Ding.

Her instructions came through the chat log instead of her voice, so I accepted her recommendation and pivoted to a focused leg routine.

And so the curtain rose on a crazed training regimen, all so that I could wield Aerondight.

One week on, the hellish routine was still grinding along.

Syncing every time would’ve made things much easier, but —

What’s more, Pain Suppression naturally lifted when the sync ended, so all the pain I’d been ignoring rolled back in, every last drop.

“…Aaargh.”

Still, I couldn’t write off entire days, so when my arms refused I did squats, and when my legs gave out I did planks. An infinite carousel of suffering.

And this was a secret training ground deep underground, so Elli or Leo couldn’t exactly come bring me a meal. My stomach was glued to my spine, and a new flavor of pain was making my life hell.

Beside the blackish mold on the damp stone walls, the only edible thing nearby was a purple-spotted mushroom.

In-game it only ever clogged your inventory, junk loot among junk loot, but for me, right now, it was the only food there was.

“At this rate I won’t die working out — I’ll starve to death.”

Hunger isn’t a domain you can just endure through. So I closed my fingers around the dirt-dusted Illusion Mushroom and made my decision.

“Eve. Come in for a minute.”

“No. That’s not what this is about.”

I waggled the mushroom at her with 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 thought for a moment before she answered.

So in theory, at least, it was possible. Beyond that lay the territory of my imagination.

“This mushroom’s side effect is hallucinations, so if I eat it, my brain’s going to start hallucinating, right?”

“Okay, so just like you hack the nerve cells in my muscles so I don’t feel pain, can’t you hack the nerves in my brain while it’s hallucinating?”

“Curious? Then come in.”

Resigned, Eve slipped in. The moment she did —

— I tossed the mushroom in my hand into my mouth.

The taste was foul and bitter and my head swam, yet even that tasted delicious. My vision gradually blurred, and the world took on a dreamlike purple stain. I forcibly held on to my fading consciousness and clamped both hands around the grip of Aerondight, still planted in the floor.

Vrrrrrnnng—!

The purple mist gradually lifted, and the world put itself back together. The dungeon walls, with their damp moss and their reek of mold, crumbled away, and a wide sparring arena took shape, under lamps bright enough to dazzle.

“Whew, it worked.”

“Couldn’t have planned it without you.”

The idea was to use the mushroom’s hallucination side effect as a virtual reality simulator I could customize to my own taste. So the moment I ate it, I’d sent Eve the image drawn in my mind via chat, and just like that, an ornate sparring arena was conjured before my eyes.

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

I turned my gaze to the expressionless man at the center of the arena, a wooden practice sword in his hand. I knew he was a fake, yet the hair stood up all over my body, because he carried the same crushing presence as the real one.

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

“Again.”

At that one word, a laugh escaped me out of sheer disbelief.

Tatt—!

I drew my sword and lunged at the illusion. This was different from a week ago. Last time I’d been stuck on the defensive and barely keeping up, so this time I tried to seize the initiative with the first strike.

Krrang!

His wooden sword came up vertically and caught mine.

“Kkh-!”

A shock that felt like it would pulverize my wrist coursed through my arm. I was the attacker, yet I was the one screaming. The recoil was like hitting the side of an enormous boulder, and Kairon hadn’t moved an inch. If anything, he twisted his wrist the barest fraction, and the force I’d loaded into my blade flooded back in reverse and bore down on me.

Crrrk.

“Monotonous.”

The illusion of Kairon murmured it in a voice without emotion. Then he twisted his wooden sword, deflected mine off course, and drove the point straight into the opening at my side.

Whump!

It felt like my flank had been blown apart, and I tumbled backwards. In reality, that would’ve shattered three or four ribs.

“Pthhh, pthh!”

Rolling head over heels, I steadily spat out the dirt pouring into my mouth, while scrapes and welts of clotted blood piled up all over my body.

“Again.”

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

“It was the same when I trained with Seraphina, but his human-era version’s harder than the demonified one.”

At my muttering, Eve responded with what sounded like a sigh.

The Demon Knight Commander — Kairon was, without question, several times stronger than the current Kairon. In destructive power, range and stamina, there was no comparison. But that one was a boss the game had made. Hit a specific HP threshold and he’d use a specific skill; dodge left and he’d strike right. A fixed strategy existed for him.

But Human — Kairon was different at every instant: the angle of his foot, the minute timing of his shoulder’s tilt, even the spacing between his breaths. Those were variables I couldn’t predict, an instinctive sense seared into his body by decades of treading battlefields.

“So this is why they say humans are scarier than demons.”

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

“Ow!”

While I was lost in idle thoughts, Kairon’s wooden sword cracked me on the head and slammed me onto my backside, but —

“Bwahaha! I could do this all day!”

I was actually delighted. I was finally getting some meaningful sword training, after all.

And so it began: when I was lucid, the hellish strength routine, and when I wasn’t, infinite sparring against the illusion.