Swordsmanship Class
The practical training ground buzzed with noise. Sitting atop the stone slab held up by two people, I shouted in a booming voice.
“One!”
“We won’t be late again!”
“Two!”
“We won’t be late again!”
“One!”
“We won’t be late again!”
“Two!”
“We won’t be late again!”
Arin and Kana trembled as they barely managed to bend and straighten their legs, performing squats while holding the stone slab I sat on.
It was a rather mean thing to do to them, but this public punishment was unavoidable.
Of course, I had lowered the intensity according to their standards, so the slab Arin and Kana currently held weighed around 100kg. Adding my body weight to the prefabricated floor tile they had pulled up, the total came to roughly 150kg.
Kana lacked compared to Arin, but she still possessed enough strength to lift 70kg with ease, so this slab would at most feel slightly heavy to her.
In other words, it only looked heavy on the surface. It wasn’t actually that harsh of a punishment.
“We won’t be late again!”
“We won’t be late again!”
That was why, once the pair had performed roughly fifty squats, I stepped down from the slab.
“Good. That’s enough for today. Since this is the first time, I’ll overlook it, but there will be no next time. Understood?”
“Yes!!”
“Yessir!!”
Arin and Kana snapped to attention and answered my command. I returned the slab they had set down to its original place, then glanced back at the students, taking in their faces as I checked the clock.
They had arrived at 2:10, and the punishment had eaten up ten minutes. That left only one hour and forty minutes. We needed to begin the lesson at once.
I couldn’t afford to become a salary thief who did no work and simply collected pay.
“Very well. We will now begin the class… However, before we start, I will show you what you should aim for while attending my lessons.”
“Aim for?”
“What does she mean?”
“It definitely won’t be anything ordinary…”
I had asked Principal Mira to prepare this in the practical training ground yesterday just for this moment. It was time to put it to good use.
Muttering to myself, I left the students—who had begun murmuring again at my words—behind and walked toward the warehouse attached to the training ground.
When I opened the door, giant, old-style boulders filled the space. They had been prepared according to the exact number of students.
Each one looked about three meters in diameter. I casually rolled one out of the warehouse. The students’ faces hardened the moment they saw it.
“...No way. That thing?”
“Come on, it can’t be…”
“She must be joking, right?”
Most of the students muttered to themselves, desperately wanting to deny the reality before their eyes. But where do you think you’re looking? Face it directly, all of you.
I looked at their faces—the expressions of people standing at the edge of a cliff—smiled, and gave them a firm push.
“What you are to aim for right now is cutting this boulder. The goal is to slice it using pure technique, without any mana.”
“U-um…”
“What is it?”
One student cautiously raised a hand. When I turned, the boy showed me his sword and spoke.
“If I strike a boulder like that with a sword like this, the blade will get ruined.”
“Do not worry about that. I have prepared several thousand mass-produced swords. If you wish, I can ready tens of thousands more. Use those.”
“S-several thousand?!”
The male student’s eyes widened. The children around him looked relieved they would not have to damage their own weapons.
Yet their eyes remained full of worry about how they were supposed to cut the boulder at all. I tilted my head.
“It seems you children are misunderstanding something. I clearly stated that this boulder is your immediate goal. Meaning your final objective is not limited to this alone.”
“Ehh?!”
“That’s impossible!”
“Even cutting just the boulder is almost too much, Professor!”
The students screamed and half-collapsed at my words. Had they truly planned to be satisfied with only this?
I laughed at their ridiculous thinking, then drew a sword from my waist.
“This is something you must finish within one month, no matter what. Once you can cut this, the next step is boulders twice as large. After that, cliff faces. Then entire mountains. And finally, the deep sea itself. To think you intended to graduate my class at this level is utterly laughable.”
Swoosh———
After speaking, I swung the sword toward the boulder with almost no force. The sensation was like slicing through cotton candy. I sheathed the blade once more.
Only then did the boulder rumble and collapse, split into ten neat pieces. The students stared with eyes ready to pop out of their sockets. I nodded at the dazed group.
“What are you all standing around for? Fetch your own boulders and begin at once.”
At my icy tone, the students snapped back to their senses and rushed toward the warehouse.
There are more than enough swords, so swing them until you drop, you future slaves! Then I will correct every last flaw from start to finish!
“Huk… huuuk…”
Blisters had formed over the calluses on my hands, and my wrists throbbed from the numb shock. My once steady breathing had long since turned ragged, and my gym uniform clung to me, soaked with sweat that poured down like a waterfall.
Clang——
It was already the twelfth sword whose edge had completely chipped and been discarded onto the ground. Yet even after swinging a full twelve blades, the boulder before her eyes showed nothing but faint scratch marks. Arin let out a deep sigh.
She had expected Professor Aria’s class to be difficult, but she never imagined it would be this brutal, spartan style of training from the very first day.
“I wonder if Kana and the others are going through the same thing…”
The one silver lining was that she was not alone. Kana right beside her and every other student nearby wore similar exhausted faces, unable to leave even a proper mark on their boulders.
But the relief that others struggled just as much lasted only a moment. Arin drew her thirteenth sword and glared at the boulder in front of her.
“I can’t remain on the same level as everyone else…”
It was not arrogance. She was not looking down on them. For Arin, standing on the same line as others simply meant she had not put in more effort than they had. So she gritted her teeth and gripped the hilt tighter.
With both heavenly talent and effort so fierce it left others speechless, Arin had built her current self. The desire to step one pace further ahead than anyone else burned inside her.
Using that desire to push down the pain in her hands, Arin recalled the sword strike Professor Aria had demonstrated earlier.
Legs tense, waist twists, shoulders rotate, and the power flows all the way to the fingertips…
She gathered every muscle in her body and focused it into a single point. It was the very foundation of martial arts.
Of course, Professor Aria had swung her blade with one hand, while Arin used both hands on her sword, but the principle remained the same.
In fact, doing it this way might even be easier for Arin. There was no need to adjust the direction of force transmission by swinging an already raised arm.
Arin slowly mirrored each part of the movement with her own body.
“Legs, waist, shoulders, and finally… arm!!”
She tensed her muscles slowly, then unleashed them in a single explosive acceleration. Her overworked muscles screamed in protest, but Arin clenched her teeth, endured the pain, and swung.
Thud———!!!
“Kugh?!”
The impact was incomparably fiercer than anything before. Arin dropped her sword and tumbled backward.
She stared at the blade that had flown and landed beside her, then realized the cause of her failure from the lingering vibration in her arm.
Because she had drawn out far more focused power than usual, the rebound force had been equally strong. Her already strained arm simply could not withstand it.
“Damn it…”
Was it too presumptuous to think she could copy it after seeing it only once?
Arin blamed her own arrogance as she retrieved her sword and stood up. Trying to perfectly imitate Professor Aria’s form—which clearly came from an immense amount of training—after seeing it only once could only be called arrogant.
Professor Aria had made it look as easy as breathing. She must have devoted an unimaginable amount of time and effort to reach that level.
Just as Arin raised her sword again, determined to keep trying until she succeeded, someone caught her hand.
“Your posture was perfect, but you lacked speed and confidence. I will assist you.”
“P-Professor?”
The owner of the hand was none other than Professor Aria, her rose-red hair swaying. Arin flinched and instinctively tried to pull away, but the hand already caught in that grip did not budge.
Rather than resist, Arin recalled the words she had just heard and murmured to herself.
Your posture was perfect.
Professor Aria had said so.
Arin barely managed to suppress the smile threatening to rise to her lips as she entrusted her body to Professor Aria’s guiding hand.
“Now, lift it firmly and stare directly at your target. Think of it like the jump rope you did as a child. The moment you hesitate even slightly, you will fail to cut that boulder.”
“Yes!”
“A good answer. Then perform it exactly as you did before.”
“Understood!”
Professor Aria released her hand. Arin took a steadying breath, locked her eyes on the boulder, and repeated the exact same posture from earlier.
She twisted her muscles in sequence from lower body to upper body, then released the power at her fingertips in an instant. With perfect accuracy and no deviation, Arin swung her sword while staring at the boulder until the final moment.
At that instant, Professor Aria’s hand pushed against her back.
“Uwaa?!”
The sudden third-party force shattered her balance. Arin half-collapsed forward.
Slash——
She almost shouted at Professor Aria for pushing her, but the sensation that reached her fingertips was not pain. It was something entirely different. The sound was different too. Arin’s eyes flew wide open as she stared at the boulder before her.
Only seconds ago it had been covered in nothing but scratches. It had been an impenetrable wall of despair she could not cut at all.
Yet now.
“I… I cut it?”
Where Arin looked, the boulder lay split cleanly in two, fallen to either side.
An unbelievable sight. Arin fumbled with her sword, desperately trying to recapture the fleeting sensation from that moment. From behind her, Professor Aria smiled brightly.
“On the first day, our first successful student has already appeared. Congratulations, Arin.”
Those joyful words rang out.