Not Enough Effort!! Not Enough!!
“Is this how you do it?”
Unlike the other students still fumbling awkwardly into position, Elga stood before Kyle and dropped into a squat with remarkable ease and natural form.
“Hmm. Could you try widening your stance a little more than that?”
“Wider… Kyle. Is there a particular reason the feet need to be wider?”
“If your hips get pinched, it puts too much strain on the knees, and your lower back can round. With squats, bad form can wreck your knees or back.”
Knees and lower backs were the kind of places that almost never fully recovered—once injured, they were a nightmare. Hurting them while working out of all things? There was hardly anything more frustrating.
Even among the John Nassen, the moment anyone felt pain in their back or knees during training, they stopped immediately. You could train any time, any day—but get injured, and everything became impossible.
Questions like that… excellent, my lady.
Following instructions was good, but wanting to know the why was even better. Asking and learning locked it deeper into memory, and memory always paid off somehow. The simple fact that she was showing real enthusiasm for training was enough for Kyle to offer genuine praise.
“Good, Lady Elga. Now from there, slowly. Keep your back from rounding.”
“I feel like my form looks weird… i-it’s a little harder than I expected.”
“No, no. You’re doing perfectly fine right now.”
A squat done with bad form was worse than not doing it at all. Proper posture was the foundation of every kind of training, but squats demanded it more than anything. Hip and knee angles were critical; constant correction was required while performing them.
Most people—Kyle included—struggled hard at the beginning. Form had to be adjusted little by little to match each person’s unique body structure. Even in a place packed with experts like the John Nassen household, blindly copying someone else could lead to disaster.
Still, she really does look like she’s trained before. Form’s better than I expected, and she doesn’t seem tired at all.
If this had been her first time squatting, her thighs would already be trembling. Even one clean descent and rise would have looked like a struggle. Yet Elga was handling it without any of that. The difference was night and day compared to the noble young ladies ahead of them, laughing and chatting with zero intention of actually training.
So this was the baseline competence of a grand duchy’s daughter!
Silently applauding, Kyle urged her to try a little more.
“…Ngh.”
Had she suddenly pushed too hard? Elga’s expression tightened for a second, and her body tilted backward. There was a mat underneath, but taking a full impact was never ideal. Kyle caught her in an instant and eased her carefully down onto the floor.
“Are you all right? Does something hurt?”
“No, Kyle. It’s not that. My strength just gave out all of a sudden.”
“No pain in the knees or lower back? Feel carefully. Just in case…”
As a trainer, had he gotten too greedy? He should have kept checking how far his client could actually go. Because she was so different from the other young ladies, he had gotten overly excited.
“I’m sorry, Lady Elga. I should have been monitoring you the whole time.”
“You were watching the whole time. Me collapsing from exhaustion was just force majeure.”
As she spoke, Elga quietly reached a hand toward her knee.
“Is your knee bothering you?!”
“Hm? No. It just feels a little stiff…”
Kyle’s face went rigid. He seized her leg at once and began examining the knee with extreme care, firing off questions.
“How does it feel? Does it hurt? Even a little—you have to tell me so I know.”
“It’s fine. Yes, even when you do that, it’s perfectly all right.”
Watching Kyle fuss so earnestly over her condition, Elga confirmed once again that her prediction had been correct.
As I thought. This was the answer.
This tone of voice, these eyes, this behavior—everything about him was new. His entire body radiated apology and concern. It was nothing like the way Kyle had looked at her until now.
“That’s a relief. At least the knee seems completely fine.”
“Um, Kyle. More than the knee… my calf feels a little tight.”
“Your calf? Hmm, looking at it, the muscle might be a bit startled.”
He was nothing like those people who pressed their lips to the back of her hand with greasy eyes. Kyle wasn’t looking at “the young lady of Litorio.” He was looking at Elga. The man who normally treated her as a noble daughter was, for this moment at least, doing something entirely different.
As I thought…
As I thought, I want this man. I want him by my side. There are absurdly many rivals, but I want to beat every last one of them and claim him properly. It’s not simply because he’s a John Nassen, or because he can be useful to me. That’s not all of it.
If he’s near, I feel like I could lean on him anytime. I could close my eyes and sleep beside him without a care in the world and nothing would happen.
I need this person. I want this man. I want to have Kyle.
“I’ll just loosen the muscle for you quickly. And a little later we should do some stretching as well…”
Whatever he was so worried about, Kyle massaged her calf with careful hands. She almost wished he would show even a hint of ulterior motive, but there wasn’t a trace. That was so grateful, so new, and so pleasant that Elga smiled.
She carefully stretched out a hand. Just a little farther and she could take hold of him. But she deliberately stopped short of contact. Yes—not yet.
Her own hesitation had left her a step behind, unfortunately. She felt a moment of discouragement, then drew fresh courage from Kyle’s words. If she had fallen behind, then she simply had to work harder and overtake them!
In the grand duchy’s succession struggle, erase my second older brother.
According to the rumors, he was showing gradual signs of recovery. He still had plenty of supporters. Waiting until he returned would make things difficult. The fortunate part was that he had not yet officially come back. And in the meantime, there were any number of openings she could exploit.
Right on time, the Three Heroes of the Coalition have come to the Empire. First meet that man, open a channel for talks with the Coalition’s moderate faction, then figure out where Litorio should focus its efforts and act.
Just then, while diligently kneading her calf, Kyle’s mouth produced a rather interesting topic.
“You’ll hear about it soon enough, Lady Elga, but those hardliner bastards from the Coalition headed south. Somewhere in the southern Empire—independent lords? The place with all the islands? Yeah, that way. Ha, seriously… it’s so frustrating. How do you even lose them? Just rip through those monsters and chase them down.”
Rip through monsters? Was that even possible? It didn’t sound possible.
Ah, no—that wasn’t the important part. South. The south was important. The independent lords settled in the southern Empire, overflowing with islands. She would need to get there faster than anyone and dig up every scrap of information.
Honestly, a lot of doubts surfaced. Was it really okay to do this?
He had already proposed a “some” relationship to Tisha, and now he was creating this ambiguous atmosphere with Elga. Strictly speaking, he and Tisha weren’t actual lovers yet, so maybe it was fine—but he had never intended to get deeply entangled with Elga, so the hesitation was considerable.
Yet watching Elga approach so actively, he simply couldn’t push her away. She kept trying hard to broadcast I’m a bad woman!, but she wasn’t bad at all. It was only an act—something she did so that no one would dare look down on her.
On top of that, her claim of having done physical training wasn’t a lie; it was real. When someone asked him to teach them how to train, how was he supposed to coldly refuse?
Despite being the young lady of a grand duchy, Elga had followed every bodyweight exercise without trouble. He could feel the effort she had poured into it, and a John Nassen was helpless against that kind of effort. Before he knew it, he was working out together with Elga.
This is seriously bad. I never planned on going this far.
He had only ever thought of Elga as a partner, or at most a collaborator. And it hadn’t been just him—she had seemed to want the same thing. She didn’t want to remain merely the young lady of the Litorio Grand Duchy; she wanted to become the head of the family. If her brother had fallen because of the John Nassen, then she intended to rise because of the John Nassen.
Knowing that, he had cooperated willingly, and they had continued their give-and-take. Just this time he had received a rather sweet reward—the expansion of the indoor training hall. But as lovers? Well… he wasn’t sure. To be more honest, it felt a little uncomfortable.
He was already extremely close with Tisha, the imperial princess kept charging at him demanding marriage, and if Elga formally joined the fray as well, the road ahead looked extraordinarily rough.
Distance myself now? Cut it off coldly?
He thought it, then immediately answered himself with a simple, “Yeah, right.” Coldly speaking, he himself was the one who had provided the cause. With both Tisha and Elga, he had stepped in right when they were ready to approach. If he pulled away now, would the heroines just nod and give up? Not a chance.
“Yep. Your karma ^^ Deal with it yourself.”
He recalled a line he had written once upon a time. He never thought he would actually accumulate that much karma. He never thought he would have to endure it.
“Thank you for today, Kyle. Can you help me next time as well?”
“…Yes. Next time we’ll even cover the machines, Lady Elga. Ah, and also!”
Even in the middle of that, the John Nassen will asserted itself without any sense of timing—rattling off things like, “When you get back, do another round of stretching, and when you wake up in the morning your body might feel a little sore, so a light jog to loosen up is best!”
Come to think of it, earlier too—I caught her body so naturally, massaged the muscle, all of that.
What had he been thinking at the time? Need he even say it? Pure worry for the body. Not worry for the woman named Elga, but worry for the client’s physical condition. Knees getting hurt would be a disaster. Back getting hurt was unacceptable. And so on.
If he had felt even the normal feelings a man ought to feel, that would have been one thing. Then he could have gone crazy and declared, “This body wants a harem! It can’t be helped. This isn’t my will! To the harem we go!!” But the only thought that rose was, “If she gets hurt, how is she supposed to train?!”
Heaving a sigh, Kyle returned to his room and immediately hung from the bar he had installed by the door. He set his form, kept the momentum to almost nothing, and began doing pull-ups. When worries appeared, nothing beat sweating hard enough that they simply stopped rising.
After a long stretch of pull-ups, Kyle’s expression suddenly lit with realization.
“…Ah, right.”
He had almost forgotten. Dropping from the bar, he sat at his desk, picked up the pen lying on top, and began writing a letter home.
They had said it would be better not to tell the Emperor, but he truly couldn’t do that. The moment someone later demanded, “Youngest, why didn’t you say anything?” he would have no answer. On the other hand, if the John Nassen people came flooding in, their poor Emperor would break into a cold sweat…
The Emperor had promised to entrust management of the Academy gym to him. He could treat this as a very small token of thanks.
Scratch. Scratch-scratch—
The contents of the letter Kyle sent home were extremely simple.
There’s something a little worrying going on, but please don’t make too big a deal of it.
Your youngest will handle it on his own, so everyone there can rest easy.
And if things don’t go as planned, I’ll contact you separately.
— Kyle
“…Hmm.”
Still, better to take out a little insurance, he thought, and added that final line at the end.