A Knight Begins Anew (2)
The sword faculty had been on break of late. The ball was hardly over before the instructor went and spent his leave.
"Going to kill someone for a bit— no. Got an errand. You lot'll have to train on your own."
"...Pardon?"
"I left a training schedule. Follow that and you'll be fine. And while I'm gone, no need to come to the Academy. I'll mark you all present."
"......?"
"Right. See you in eight days."
They were fairly sure they had heard something deeply unwholesome, but they made a careful point of pretending they hadn't. Listen properly, and the only reward would be ugly dreams.
And so the sword faculty stumbled, half by accident, into a holiday—except the training ground refused to empty. Whoosh. Whoooosh. Strangely enough, every last student had gathered there. The instructor was gone. The students were not. They showed up at the usual hour of their own accord and drove themselves through drills on the faculty grounds. Ask why anyone would come to the Academy with no instructor waiting, and they would probably have answered like this: because training came with results.
Merely carrying out the assignments he had set each of them had been enough to make them grow, and the satisfaction, the thrill of it, was so large that laziness had nowhere to stand. This was the season when growth came fastest. The instructor had once looked at them with a pointless envy—you're young, so of course you shoot up—and they were proving he had not been wrong.
The noble girls known as the chicks could now manage simple joint locks and striking. They sparred among themselves, and knight-candidate students far stronger than they were willing to cross hands with them. They had picked up simple weapon work as well, throwing and the short staff, and the instructor's verdict—that learn it properly and they could put down an ordinary grown man alone—kept them from hesitating to sweat today. Noble young ladies were not, as a rule, glad of sweat. After half a year of watching their own bodies grow healthy, even that no longer gave them pause.
"I asked a knight of our house for a spar, and he was astonished. Said my skill was excellent."
"Hehe. Me too. Mother, though, nearly fainted."
"Well, of course she did. But you can't stop, can you?"
"I feel the same."
Health was part of it. So was the fact that effort returned results in proportion, and that was what kept driving the girls. They were not yet at the level of hunting monsters, but they had begun to set a goal: someday, one monster brought down.
The bears, by contrast, had not centered their work on technique so much as on the body, and it showed. They had thickened all over—forearms grown stout, shoulders spread, thighs turned as solid as a horse's. The instructor had ordered that every one of them be able to use Diamond Body before graduation. Learn that alone, he had said, and you would not die easily out in the world. It was an assignment they could not skip.
Of course, the method was vicious.
"Th-this can't be right...?"
"We don't have a choice."
"Instructor said this is the fastest way. So endure it."
"D-damn it!"
Every day they struck their own bodies with clubs, or with heavy towels soaked through, or they asked someone else to beat them without mercy from head to heel, and they forged themselves that way. It hurt. Still, the crude method produced outrageous efficiency, and so they swallowed their tears. Had there been no results, it might have been different. Their bodies changed day after day, and even pain left them no choice. Work at it steadily, miss not a single day, and the results had no choice but to follow. The ones who had been insulted as the weakest of the weak, as weeds, were unmistakably growing stronger. They could not stop. No one walks away from a drug called growth.
Set against them were the young masters. Their births were different to begin with, and it was no exaggeration to say that Fighting Art put them on another level from the rest. The assignment they had received was almost plain: basic strength and endurance, posture correction, and more sparring. They had also spent a little time as the instructor's sandbags. Their training could not have been more ordinary.
The results that ordinary method delivered were not ordinary at all.
"I-I sparred with a knight of my house, and I won..."
"I-I can hardly believe it, but I—of Mordred—received an offer to join a knight order. Ha..."
"Wh-what?"
Hadn't the instructor said it at the start? That their fundamentals were lacking? Fill in only the parts that were somewhat short, he had told them, and they would grow several times stronger.
He had been right.
After more than half a year of the regimen he had written for them, there came a moment when they were, quite suddenly, several times stronger—strong enough to draw invitations from prestigious knight orders. For them it was something out of a dream. More than six in ten of the young masters now held offers from one order or another, and since becoming knights had been their purpose from the beginning, they could have quit the Academy on the spot and enlisted. They had enrolled in the first place to enter those prestigious orders. The purpose was fulfilled. There was no further need to attend.
It ought to have been so.
"Then why refuse the offer? What a waste."
"You're one to talk, Number Twelve..."
"D-do we call each other that even when it's just us?"
Unexpectedly, not one of those who had received an offer had left. At first they had been glad. It would have been a lie to say they had not wanted to join a knight order that very day. But the more time passed and the cooler their heads became, the more clearly they remembered that enlisting now would be a blunder.
"We're still nowhere near enough."
They knew the truth of it. Enrollment was only a word. In the end they would begin not as proper knights, but as Quasi-Knights, and the training there would not be free as it was now. It would have to be bent to the shape of the order.
What they want is the us of the future, not the us standing here now.
Training probably wouldn't be this free, either.
...We might even go backward.
Joining at once would feel good, and then for a long while they would scrape along at the bottom while even the way they trained was controlled. That was not the direction they wanted, not while they were still growing. Even if they did enlist, the right time was after they had the skill to plant their feet in a knight order all at once.
For instance—
"We'd need at least the skill of the Trio."
"...That's a long way up."
The Trio of the sword faculty. Reach their level, and even inside a knight order one could stand without shame. So the thing to do now was not to celebrate a piece of luck already in hand, but to keep forging themselves under the instructor. It would take time. They would be repaid. They had the conviction that tomorrow's self could be a little better than today's.
And so the students, busy living out their youth-academy story, poured sweat for a today better than yesterday.
In the opposite direction, there was a boy living out a misery serial all by himself.
"Huh? Why is everyone here?"
"Assistant Instructor Damian?"
"...Diligent, aren't you. A rare cancellation, and you don't even rest."
Damian Paulet. Same as any other day: sunken eyes, a face packed with fatigue, and a look of pure disgust turned on the rest of them. If someone handed him eight whole days of holiday, then without question—
"If it were me, I'd have slept five hours a day..."
"N-not eight?"
"...Eight hours? ......Can a person sleep that much?"
No one answered.
"...If I could sleep even two hours a day, I'd be happy. ...Well. There was a time I slept eight. Memories..."
Look at him sometimes, and he seemed the most pitiful of all. At the beginning he had only seemed arrogant and senseless. Now he did every task in the instructor's place. The very reason the instructor could take eight days off was that he had lent Damian out to the other instructors and professors. How cruel.
"...Don't look at me like that. Once you get used to it, it's manageable."
"It really doesn't look that way..."
"......"
"I-if you're that wretched, wave a carrot. I'll help a little..."
"...Damn it!"
Pitied, Damian crumpled into a tearful scowl. He was not a man to be treated as pitiable!
This was all—!
"Because of that damned beast..."
"...Might I ask who that beast is?"
"Who else but that man!"
"Ah... watch your mouth, Assistant Damian. If the wrong person hears, it could be serious."
"I trust you won't carry this sort of thing to that beast. You haven't fallen so far as to sell out a classmate, have you?"
"Well. That's true."
"That's why I'm saying it. That beast—no, that savage—just thinking of what he did to me, the rage just—!"
Grief seemed to have burst in him. He looked ready to lay the gossip out properly. It is a law that when the man himself is not in the room, people will curse even a king. Pendragon was no exception, and Damian, with everything he had—
Something brutal clamped around his ankle.
"......Huh?"
For a moment Damian could not accept the situation. Something savage had seized his ankle out of nowhere. One thing was certain: if that something added only a little more force, the ankle would burst like a water balloon. His face locked stiff.
As if to prove that beyond the worst there is always something worse, the color fled his face at speed. A familiar voice. No—it could only be the whisper of the evil spirit he was afraid would crawl into his dreams. He wanted to deny that this was real.
Whoosh—
The next instant he was forced to know that it was. His ankle felt as if it had become a fish's tail, and his vision turned over. Sky and ground traded places. His head was driven to the earth, his ankle left dangling in that grip, and he could not even struggle. He saw it: the sickening face of the beast.
"I-Instructor...! Wh-why are you coming out of the ground?!"
"Dug a tunnel. From the house to here."
"...Wh-why?"
"Body was stiff, so I loosened up a little. What about it."
"......As I understand it, the distance from your house to the Academy is some dozens of kilometers?"
"And?"
"...I-I'm going insane."
The conversation did not connect. Blood was gathering in his head, and still the absurdity was so complete that no words would come. The man who had returned to the Academy after eight days seemed to have a great deal he wanted to say to him. Especially—
"More to the point, assistant. Nothing you want to say to me?"
"...Yes?"
"Look at this idiot. Gone vacant while I wasn't watching? Caught running your mouth and still acting bold, huh?"
"Ah......"
The situation had been so unreal that Damian briefly forgot what insane thing he had just done. Then, all at once, he went silent. Countless possibilities unfolded in his mind—the number of cases in which this beast of an instructor might forgive him.
But—
"...You won't let me off even if I beg, will you?"
"Nope."
"......I knew it."
No matter how he turned it over, all he could see was a miserable fate with no answer in it. The silence did not last long. Damian knew the instructor far too well. He set his face into the detached calm of a monk who had achieved release.
—It wasn't a bad life.
He gave a splendid, empty laugh.
"...This brat plays dead at the drop of a hat."
He wasn't a possum. Lee Han looked at the boy who had laughed and fainted, and set him down without ceremony. No point holding him up and starting rumors.
"H-he's not dead, is he?"
"...He's not dead."
See? Already that kind of misunderstanding.
"Instructor, when on earth did you— no, more than that, how did you come out of the ground..."
Fortunately, Damian's presence vanished quickly. Before the impact of a man who had arrived by digging up through the earth, a fainted assistant did not even enter the eye.
And to disciples reacting like that—
"Want to step inside?"
"...Yes?"
"It's pretty wide in there."
"......"
Was it only their imagination that it sounded, somehow sweetly, like Shall I bury you?