35. The Head's Training Ground (3)

Down in the underground prison, time itself seemed to have been swallowed whole.

“Not even sunlight gets down here, so the only way I’ve got to mark off a day is that drop of water hanging off the tip of the stalactite on the ceiling.”

Plip.

It fell once a day, exactly. So when today’s drop broke loose, I picked up a stone and scratched one more tally into the wall.

Scrape.

That made ninety-one.

Three months already, living in this underground training ground.

A bushy beard had grown in thick on my face and my palms were covered in calluses. I was still skinny, sure, but no longer the wretched kind of skinny I’d been before.

Those three months had changed me considerably, but I wasn’t the only one they’d changed.

“Because it’s got romance to it.”

My days were simple. I worked out to build raw strength, ate Illusion Mushrooms, and trained against the illusion of Kairon. When I dropped from exhaustion the next day arrived, so I notched it on the wall and started moving again.

“The hero locked in a dungeon grows a bushy beard, carves the days on the wall, and engraves his vengeance… it’s a famous cliché, you know?”

“…The world?”

All through this conversation with Eve, I’d been hoisting and lowering an iron shield. I’d become a true gym rat, you could say.

“My triceps are eating good again today.”

Eve shuddered in disgust and shook her head violently.

The dark, dingy air of the underground training ground was having a pretty bad effect on Eve. But what was I supposed to do about it? The work had to be done.

“Hraaagh.”

True to the day’s routine, I laid the shield across my shoulders and started squatting. Three months ago I’d needed both hands and a lot of grunting to lift this 30-kilogram iron shield, and now I could wield it as lightly as an ordinary sword. If anything, I was almost disappointed there was nothing heavier to load on.

Never thought I’d live to see the day.

It was only possible because this was a game world, of course. Still, for a basement-bound gaming addict like me to end up thinking this way at all was honestly a marvel.

“Ninety… nine!”

With the shield still on my shoulders I cranked out the hundredth squat, sweat pattering down in fat drops. My breath had climbed all the way up into my throat, but the killing-me-now agony of before was gone. There was only the pleasant, taut burn of stretched muscle.

So this is how someone becomes a gym rat.

I closed my eyes and imagined Seraphina pouring ice magic down on me, and beside her, Valerian’s sword unleashing a slash that blazed with blue light. So I kicked the shield lying flat on the ground up into the air to block the ice, then snatched it out of the air and swung it through Valerian’s slash to cancel it out.

Eve was watching me with her lower lip pushed out, and she gave a sniff through her nose.

“What’s gotten into you this time?”

She crossed her arms, her face full of grievance, and machine-gunned her complaints at me.

She must have had a lot pent up, because all of it came bursting out.

“What’s Overclock?”

“You could just call it ‘fusing.’ Why slap such a grand name on it?”

There was a pretty thick streak of madness in her voice, so I decided to take a step back.

“We agreed we wouldn’t use that often anymore… you were the one who said we shouldn’t let me get hooked on Overclock.”

Fair enough. Just as she’d said, somewhere along the way I’d become enchanted by her Pain Suppression function.

This time I’d had to admit she was right, so I’d accepted the decision. But along the way, I’d picked up a new skill.

“This is out of the blue, but pop in here for a second.”

“Got something to show you,” I told her, scratching my head.

“Faster to show you than to explain in words.”

As if she’d been waiting for it, her form vanished and fused into me.

The moment she was inside, I tossed a fistful of Illusion Mushrooms into my mouth. She shrieked at me to spit them out, but I chewed and swallowed in silence.

“Quit fussing and just watch.”

A foul taste spread across my tongue, my brain went hazy, and my vision began to twist into shades of purple. The world spun round and round, and right at the moment my reason started to blur —

“No way!”

Eve cried out at the sight unfolding in front of me.

Kairon, Seraphina, Valerian, Lucius. The four of them were kneeling on one knee, in a row, before me, and not in their ordinary human forms. These were their Demon Knights–era forms, sheathed head to toe in black plate armor and giving off fighting aura like hellfire.

“W-what is all this? I didn’t manipulate anything!”

I held tight to my fraying consciousness and spoke.

“This whole time you’ve been manipulating my brainwaves to show me illusions, right? Well, about two months in, I got a feel for it.”
“A feel?”
“Mm. I could feel you sending signals into my brain. So I memorized the feeling and copied it.”

Put simply, my brain had mistaken what Eve was doing from inside my body for one of its own skills, and learned it.

“In a way, that’s not even wrong. It’s all happening in my body, after all.”
“Even so, for something like this to actually be possible…”

“I know. I’m a genius.”

I’d quietly hoped that eating Illusion Mushrooms until I was sick of them might get me Hallucination Resistance, since enemies who wield illusion magic aren’t exactly rare. I hadn’t gained Hallucination Resistance, though. I’d gained something even better.

“Now I can summon illusions at will too, while I’m hallucinating.”

Since then I’d been testing how far the ability went and how much of it I could control on my own. To cut to the conclusion —

“I can deploy them however I want now.”

The kneeling Kairon, Seraphina, Valerian, and Lucius rose to their feet, joined hands around me, and began to spin in a circle.

“Check it out — cool, right?”

When their ganggangsullae finally wound down¹, Eve slipped back out of my body, took her own form again, and spoke.

“I wanted to perfect it first and surprise you.”

Instead of replying, Eve showed me a single message.

The world itself was certifying my growth. I took it as proof that I’d gotten stronger, and the thought put me in a good mood.

“It’s all thanks to you, you know?”

At that, Eve let out a peal of laughter and —

Now that her mood was back up, it was time to play the real game.

Aerondight.

The hell I’d been through because of this heavy chunk of iron.

“Phew.”

I drew one big breath and clamped my grip around the hilt.

I’d asked Eve not to tell me my current Strength stat. If I failed I’d just start exercising again, no harm done, and I didn’t want to grind out workouts just to close a number gap.

My heart was pounding. I felt it thump and forced strength into my arms.

Shrring.

“…Huh?”

It was light.

It was so absurdly light that a half-laugh escaped me without my meaning it. Three months ago this sword had taken both hands and gritted effort to lift, and now it sat in my grip lighter than a wooden practice sword.

Ding—!

A crisp chime sounded, and the system window flickered up before my eyes.

At the same moment, a faint blue light rose from the blade.

“…One damn hard sword to lift, honestly.”

This, at last, was the moment Aerondight acknowledged me as its master.

Eve was even more thrilled at my success than I was, bouncing up and down as if all that sulking had never happened.

They say the surest sign you’ve had a successful life is having a friend who genuinely celebrates your successes.

For the first time, I felt I understood at least a sliver of what that saying meant.

But I forced down the giddiness, gripped the sword properly, and steadied my stance.

“No time to celebrate. This is just the beginning.”

“Sure, a forge hotter than lava and the finest hammer are important to a blacksmith. But you know what matters even more?”

I started walking slowly, the sword still in my hand, and the countless sword marks crowding the dark walls of the training ground came into view, traces left by Kairon and by every head of House Arne for centuries.

“What I use them to forge — that comes down to my skill.”

The equipment was up to spec, so now it was time to fill in the skill to make use of it.

“This place isn’t simply Kairon’s training ground.”

The sword strokes carved into the walls, the boulders, and the floor held the very essence of the swordsmanship the heads of House Arne had spent their lives refining. To put it in a single line —

“It’s the finest secret-arts manual there is.”

Eve’s growing knack for reading me lightened the workload.

I rested my hand against the wall and pulled one corner of my mouth into a slanted grin.

“Let’s copy down every last one of them.”

Whisk—!

Aerondight’s blade carved through empty air.

It wasn’t simply a slash. I was tracing the sword marks left in the wall, branding each trajectory into my brain through dozens, then hundreds of mindless, brute-force repetitions.

Eve corrected my form even further through Overclock. Pain Suppression I left off, because I wanted to know how far the me gripping the sword could push his own limits.

Until Eve declared the match perfect. Until the muscles remembered and the motion was carved into the bone. I didn’t let a single movement slide, and I swung the sword.

One hundred, one hundred one, one hundred two…

As soon as I’d barely mastered one sword mark, I moved on to the next.

Treating Eve in earnest as my teacher, I followed her instruction in silence. The upward cut of the second head of the house, the thrust of the fifth, all the way to the footwork of the current head, Kairon. Centuries of Arne swordsmanship were pouring into this miserable body of mine.

Under the guidance of the strictest teacher of all.

.

.

.

And just like that, another month passed.

How was the world outside going? Had Valerian passed the Trial of Wisdom? Was Seraphina, who’d returned to the Empire, safe? What if the Crown Prince’s coming-of-age ceremony had been moved up, and the continent was already a sea of fire?

A queue of anxieties tried to chain themselves one after another, but I shook my head.

Scrape.

I had long since cut down all such idle thoughts with the tip of my sword. What mattered right now was nothing more than getting over the towering wall in front of me.

I swallowed the last remaining Illusion Mushroom.

Krrrang—!

A wooden sword and a real blade crashed together, scattering sparks. Strikes that at first had blown me away without so much as grazing me, I now took without staggering. The next I deflected, and the one after that I countered.

Clang! Cla-clang!

My muscles screamed and sweat blurred my eyes, but I couldn’t stop. This sensation. The thrilling sensation of Arne swordsmanship, refined across centuries, being reproduced at the tips of my own fingers.

Until the boundary between reality and hallucination collapsed and only the sensation riding the tip of my sword stayed vivid, I became one single swordsman and swung my blade like a man possessed.

And then, at last.

Whish—!

My sword cut through the air.

I’d hit him. I was sure of it. But in that breath of a moment when the illusion should have wavered and scattered away —

Tk.

A sword caught mine, and it was no hazy illusion. It had the weight of a real blade, heavy, solid, undeniably there.

“You handle my sword as if you were its true master.”

In the place where the illusion had lifted, the real Kairon was looking down at me.