A Knight Hates Spell-Slingers (3)
Whoosh! Whump—!
"……."
The sword-faculty cadets were at their iron-rope jumping again today, as hard as ever, and as ever some of them had already been knocked flat by the rope while others panted, stamina spent. Blank-faced, they watched the training their instructor was putting himself through.
No. Was that training, or something closer to torture?
It was an unreal sight. You could look straight at it and still not believe it.
"Hey, young master. Do knights normally train like that?"
"Don't be sarcastic. Use my name, mercenary."
"Hah. Look who's being sarcastic."
"You started it."
The young man and the boy were at it again.
They were the same age, but one was a mercenary's disciple who had grown up rough, and the other a noble's son raised, by comparison, gently, so the one who looked older was Garand. Arno de Offen actually envied that manly face beside his own, which still looked like a child's, but he refused to let it show and snapped back.
"Don't ask the obvious. What knight would do training that insane?"
"He's doing it right now."
"Which is why I can hardly believe it, the whole time I'm watching."
"…Fair."
An eighty-kilogram iron bar seated in a steel club, swung without a moment's hesitation. Tell anyone else and they would not believe you. The sight was that hard to credit.
Creak! Crrreak!
Every time the instructor swung the bar with the rod locked into it, an ominous shriek rose out of his body. It sounded like bone breaking, but listen closely and it was not. That was muscle tearing. Muscle screaming.
"Ugh!"
The groan came not from the instructor's mouth, but from theirs. They had been through that pain, so it escaped on its own. It was one of the things you met if you stacked systematic training from childhood in the hope of growing strong: the pain of muscle tearing. Calling it an injury was no exaggeration. It was nothing short of horrific.
"That hurts. Kunta hates hurting."
The boy with the clumsy tongue and the foreign face shuddered. Kunta stood a full head taller than even the already tall Garand. There was something guileless about him—less simple than untouched—and because that purity was real, his feelings came out all the more honest. He knew that tearing sound, that act of ripping muscle, was pain past imagining.
Hurts like madness…. No. You can't even explain it just by saying it hurts.
Your insides felt as if they were burning away. It felt like a knife mincing flesh. The worse the tear, the worse it got, until the pain was nothing a person could endure. It ought to have been unbearable.
"Instructor, that not hurt?"
"It hurts. Bearable, though."
"…Instructor, strange."
"What's strange about it? Any knight can do this much."
"……Lie."
"Hoh. Didn't buy it."
A lie so thin that even a guileless barbarian would not step on it. He had meant to try the line once. Unfortunately, Kunta backed away from him. Not that he stopped watching the training through to the end.
Boom.
"Hoo!"
He set the steel club down, and the ground shivered. Propping it carelessly against something nearby, he gave his sweat-soaked body a light wipe with a towel and went straight for his personal jump rope: an iron rope "a little" heavier than the cadets' ten kilograms. Fifty kilograms. The handles were dumbbells, twenty kilograms apiece. He had wanted the rope itself heavier, but past a point it grew too thick to turn, and ten kilograms was the limit. A pity. Still, if you had no teeth you chewed with your gums. Lee Han forced himself to be satisfied with a different kind of weight and jumped the iron rope as it was.
Whip, whip, whip, whip!
Slow, but steady. He filled in the count one by one, muscle rolling and bunching under the skin. Now and then a mistake cracked the rope against his hide with a smack, and he ignored the pain and kept going.
Thud! Thooom! Thud—!
Every time he jumped, the floor heaved until the people watching could barely keep their feet. What was that? They stared, unable to hide the shock on their faces.
"You're not doing it? How long are you planning to slack?"
"I-Instructor, in that state, do you still have the breath to talk?"
"Even if I don't, I make breath to scold the ones slacking."
"…We are not slacking."
"Everyone says that with their mouth."
"Damn…!"
The young master and the rest started the iron ropes again. This insane rope. One of these days they were going to snap the thing in half for good.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
With a venom that was no longer new, they turned the ropes at a speed far slower than his—a pace endlessly distant from the man who spun a rope incomparably heavier than theirs as if it were nothing.
"…How much stronger are you trying to get?"
"At least always stronger than you."
"……."
It did not sound like a lie, and that only made the cadets more afraid.
Lee Han was not ashamed to train in front of other people. If anything, giving orders and only watching made him more uncomfortable, not less. You ought to be able to do yourself whatever you ordered someone else to do, and doing it harder—more viciously—would spur the rest of them, wouldn't it?
Once this is done, I should wrestle that Kunta.
That one was something else. When it came to bare-handed fighting, he was more skilled than anyone. Probably the strongest of the cadets with empty hands, which only made him better. Lee Han had needed a partner for grappling anyway, and here one was. His win rate was higher, but only because he led in raw strength. In the completeness of technique, Kunta was the better of the two.
Besides that, there was Arno for sword sparring, and Garand for the spear. He wanted a bout with Roen as well. That one dodges me. Subtle about it, but he does. Probably afraid that if they fought, he would end up showing what he really felt. Strange one. Well. I can roughly tell what he's worried about. More than that, he had a hunch, and a hunch made it hard to force the matter. The incurable sickness peculiar to men who come back from war. He could feel it off him. …A regressor has a regressor's own troubles, I suppose. Lee Han had no intention of poking at it by force. It was not someone else's illness.
Then—
"I-Instructor."
"…Hm? Something to say, Chick Cadet Number Two?"
"It's Irene, Instructor. And before that, why am I number two? Not number one!"
She was the girl next door, and the first of the cadets he had gotten to know, so of course she was arguing about why she was not number one. He could hardly admit he had called her number two because she was Surveillance Target Number Two, so he reached for a suitable excuse.
"And who told you to fail the stamina standard that often? You ought to be the youngest chick, but since we know each other I made you number two. Be grateful."
He decided to be shameless about it.
"…Hitting people with facts is mean, Instructor."
"What's mean, and what's too much, is your stamina, Cadet Irene."
"Hngh…"
Irene Windler. The sword faculty's only mage cadet.
The first time the others saw her, countless male cadets had flushed and hurried to look anywhere else. Was her beauty not like a fairy's? Long golden hair like drawn gold thread, eyes like blue gems set in place, and skin as white and unblemished as porcelain. It could well stand beside the beauty of the fairies, that mystery-race. She was a mage who carried a special Mystery besides. More than enough to steal the male cadets' hearts at a stroke.
…And yet, now.
It's not easy, being that uncoordinated.
These days they looked at her with worry more than a blush, the way you watch an ocean sunfish—one of those creatures that seems ready to die if the world so much as brushes it.
It was a shock, I'll give it that.
Even the noble young ladies whose arms and legs were thin as twigs had managed a hundred jumps the first time and then stood there panting. Irene had not. A person collapses after three? She had jumped the rope a grand total of three times, poured sweat like rain, and gasped for breath. It had not even been a heavy rope. A truly light one. Even so she had jumped it like a marionette. How could arms and legs all move on their own? At that level you started to suspect some defect in the human body.
Wondering if she might be hiding an illness, he had shown her to the priest in the recovery room, and the priest had spoken with a face that could not believe what it was seeing.
"I-it just seems like she has a seriously severe lack of stamina? What is this? How have you been living day to day, to have this little stamina? Even a mage ought to have basic strength, and yet this…"
Only later did he hear that Irene used magic for every part of daily life. Her talent overflowed so far that she could use the basic spell Telekinesis in place of her hands and feet.
"Since when, exactly, have you been living like that?"
"Th-that would be from when I could use magic?"
"And when was that."
"…Twelve."
"……."
She had spent a full seven years living like a patient who never left the bed, so of course her stamina was weaker than a three-month-old baby's. The chick cadet business had been nothing but a joke, and her body was weak on the level of an actual chick.
She was number one, all right.
…From the back.
"Hoo. Cadet Irene, weaker than our chicks. The diet going better these days, the way I told you?"
"A-as you said, I'm eating lots of meat and vegetables."
"Good. A cadet shouldn't be fretting about health right now. Eat whatever there is. First you put some meat on you, and then you can do something. Five meals a day at the minimum."
"…Yes."
"You hear me? This is about staying alive. Survival! You want to live, then eat more!"
"……Yes."
An answer without any confidence in it. Uneasy. Deeply uneasy.
And sure enough—
"You're living with the magic held back as much as you can?"
"Th-that's…"
"…Please. At least don't use magic on the way to class. I'm saying it for your sake."
"……Yes."
…When was this chick going to get stronger than a chicken? No—before that, would the day ever come when she had a human being's stamina?
So the rofan heroines weren't tripping for no reason. Bodies this frail get hurt all the time.
The romance-fantasy heroine package. Trip at nothing, get hurt at nothing, and in the end take sick and waste away. But weakness always had a reason.
Lee Han looked at her with pity, and Irene flinched, embarrassed for no good reason.
"Good thing you know enough to be ashamed, Arin. I still find you shameful."
Shut up, you! I know I'm embarrassing!
She had only used it because magic was too convenient. Who could have known she would weaken to a patient's level? Looked at one way, choosing the sword faculty had been a stroke of genius. Otherwise she would someday have become a sunfish that died from stepping on gravel.
I can do ten jumps now, at least!
"…That's a boast."
The ghost girl's cutting scold. Irene flushed with the shame of it and tried to shake the feeling off, and he asked.
"So why did you speak to me? Something you need to say?"
"Ah, right!"
She had lost her original purpose in all the other talk. Startled, she hurried to open her mouth.
"I-it's nothing else, Instructor. I think a nuisance is coming to class today. I wanted to apologize in advance for that…"
"A nuisance. Hm. You mean that?"
"…Yes?"
"That. That thing."
"……."
Irene turned her head, just a little. There stood the person Lee Han had referred to as so much miscellaneous scrap, and before she knew it the word was out of her.
"Ah! You're right. That."
She had just called Odwal Bernard, professor of the magic faculty, that.