Chapter 19
Chapter 19
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 019
Chapter Title: The Strongest and Most Dangerous
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“No need to make such a fuss!”
Shan, who had been rejoicing at finally being able to wield aura, heard a curt reprimand pierce his ears.
“As I told you before, when the body repeatedly crosses its limits, aura naturally takes root! Think about how many times you used those elixirs that other knight families would begrudge employing even once a month—you're still late to the game! Even a monkey would have mastered aura by now!”
Sir Darkal unleashed his scolding in a sharp tone, and Shan pulled a sullen face but obediently nodded his head.
He wasn't especially sharp with money matters, but he knew full well how exorbitant the elixirs he had been chugging and soaking in had been.
“Anyway, your training with the tempering elixirs ends here!”
“...Really?”
“Yeah! Didn't you feel it yourself? Your physical abilities stopped improving a while back!”
Just as he said, Shan's body hadn't grown at all over the past few weeks, despite the horrific regimen.
As if this flesh was declaring that the strength, durability, and stamina it could handle stopped exactly here.
That was the reason the training over the last few weeks had felt especially grueling.
With no payoff from growth, it had come to feel like utterly pointless self-torture.
If he had been forced to keep it up for even a few more years—no, months—he surely would have lost his mind.
Or else fled into the night, unable to endure any longer.
“So from now on, just maintain yourself enough to keep your body from rusting! But the human body has this nasty habit of always trying to weaken, so if you slack off...”
“Yeehaw—!”
So elated, Shan cut off Sir Darkal's lecture with a whoop of joy.
That hellish training was finally over!
“Quiet! Don't get all carried away, you idiot!”
The old knight bellowed at the top of his lungs, only to hack and cough.
The winter air, growing chillier by the day, had jabbed at his worn-out lungs.
After steadying his breath for a good while, he spoke in a somewhat deflated voice.
“Anyway, you worked hard enough. Today’s a rest day, so don’t waste my time—get lost!”
His gruff manner remained utterly unchanged from half a year ago.
Shan bobbed his head at once and bounded off without even tidying the mangled scarecrow.
He was off to brag to Roden and the others that he could now wield aura.
The inner garden fell silent once more.
Sir Darkal reached out with a wrinkled hand to stroke the severed end of the scarecrow.
“Huh.”
A low, hearty chuckle escaped him for a moment—then laughter bubbled up uncontrollably from deep within, and the old knight cackled away.
Even as another cough burst forth, he kept on laughing.
“You actually pulled it off. Success! You mad bastard...!”
At first, it had all been to crush his spirit.
After all, both peerless geniuses and teenage boys tended to brim with absurdly bloated egos.
Mix the two together, and it was obvious—so to drill in the master-disciple hierarchy during training, he had imposed deliberately excessive demands.
Unlike ordinary knight aspirants, this one's combat prowess already surpassed Darkal's own; otherwise, he risked losing all authority.
Such brutally harsh knightly tempering could only be achieved through the master's forceful pressure.
Yet Shan had succeeded from day one, pushing his body to its absolute limits and exhausting every muscle.
Normally, even threats with a blade at their throat failed to overcome the pain.
Sir Darkal's second shock came three days later: when Shan began the next round of physical training, his body was already in perfect recovery.
Whether through healing miracles or elixir recovery, no human body was sturdy enough to fully revert to its original state in a mere three days.
Mental strain went without saying.
But Shan had not only fully recovered in three days—he had pushed himself to his limits again during what was meant to be a light second session for loosening up.
Truly abnormal levels of bodily control, endurance, and recovery.
Having confirmed every element, Sir Darkal immediately scrapped and rewrote the entire training plan.
Thus began the nightmare schedule of tormenting the body to the point of needing tempering elixirs every three days.
He barred anyone with prior knight training experience from revealing what normal regimens were like.
After all, if they learned that muscle-melting harshness happened only once a month, they would deem his current ordeal unfair.
From then on, it had been an endless string of blood-draining days.
Watching Shan waste away day by day, Sir Darkal had grown terribly anxious inside, though he never let it show.
Even a once-a-month limit-push schedule saw six out of ten drop out.
The odds of failure loomed large.
Was this what it felt like to hone a razor blade thinner and sharper without snapping it?
Don't break, just get a bit sharper...
How many times had he repeated that inwardly while driving that small frame to its brink?
In the process, Sir Darkal had been tempted countless times to ease the schedule just a little.
Even he was human; after half a year of direct instruction, the sight of his disciple suffering chipped away at his resolve.
A bit more time, and he might have caved.
But today, he had finally harvested the fruit.
Endless endurance, and the gamble paid off!
Aura is heavily influenced by the mind, by spirit...
Over long years of teaching knight aspirants, Sir Darkal had uncovered one astonishing secret.
Those who awakened aura more swiftly, in harsher conditions, possessed stronger aura on average.
Aura's strength was hard to quantify precisely due to vast personal variance—a closely guarded lore known to few.
Likely only a handful of storied knight houses knew it.
In truth, raw aura strength mattered little in physical combat.
Manifesting it in the material world required a physical foundation of stamina.
Aura too weak was trouble, but even a knight wielding mountain-cleaving might would collapse from exhaustion before unleashing it.
Yet in the realms of spirit and mystery, immense spiritual potency yielded tremendous effects.
Knights with strong aura resisted all manner of magical abilities.
That was why they could subdue horrors like basilisks that turned beings to stone with a glance.
This aura, forged through a half-year gauntlet of body-melting every three days. Unless his spiritual talent is utterly abysmal, he'd rank at the forefront of all knights in history.
The Altoin boy he had raised was a war machine straight from the Goddess's forge.
Agility defying human limits, control more precise than the finest clockwork, senses that read foes' innards, and battle intellect to match.
Once his body matured properly, he could defeat anyone—a monster who needed only countermeasures against non-physical assaults.
A soul mighty enough to repel any foul magic, curse, or monstrous power...
Overcoming even the inescapable with keen eyes and lithe form—that was the true strongest knight!
Like an artist beholding a satisfying sculpture, Sir Darkal's wrinkled face bloomed into a full smile.
When Shan announced he could wield aura, the Webers mansion erupted in chaos.
Roden was first on the scene, scooping Shan up and spinning him around gleefully.
“You finally did it! Congratulations!”
Shan grumbled about the dizziness but couldn't stifle the grin spreading across his face.
The aura was great, but the real joy was finally ditching that endless torment.
After bragging to the cook and a few friendly servants who tidied his room, Shan went to inform his patron, Kallion Webers.
“Half a year? Impressively quick.”
The old merchant merely nodded, but he couldn't hide the upturned corners of his mouth.
As sponsor, he had received some word from Sir Darkal about the brutal training's rationale.
The day after turning the mansion upside down, Shan met Sir Darkal in the inner garden as usual.
Today's combat lesson was on the long-awaited aura.
“What do you think aura is?”
“The power to cut and thrust stronger, and block better.”
“Boldly spouting utter ignorance. Perfect! Excellent!”
Despite the snide barbs, satisfaction radiated from Sir Darkal's face.
He looked positively giddy, as if he had downed a cup of wine.
“Aura, put simply, is the power to produce your desired outcome by expending mental and physical stamina! You don't need to know more—in fact, it's better if you don't! That way, you won't impose needless limits on yourself!”
With that shout, Sir Darkal slammed his wooden stick into the ground.
The branch, which should have splintered against the frozen earth, sank in as if into soft mud.
“Do the same! Thrust with the resolve to pierce through no matter what—even if the ground is forged of steel!”
Ignoring the barked orders, Shan silently alternated his gaze between his own stick and the ground.
Pierce for sure. Even if the earth is iron, not soil...
Chanting inwardly, he drove the stick down with all his might—and it burrowed in just like Sir Darkal's had.
Along with it came a dizzying wave of exhaustion.
Shan felt as if he had sprinted for hours; his strength fled him in an instant, and he dropped to his knees right there.
The abrupt stamina drain brought on waves of dry heaving.
He had felt something similar his first time wielding aura, but this was several times more intense.
“Ugh...”
“How's that? Tough, eh?”
The old knight, as if he had anticipated it, let out a hearty chuckle.
“Your training from here is aura control. Think of it as mental discipline! Whether to infuse an action with aura, and if so, how much—that mastery makes a true knight!”
Aura stemmed from the mind's power; the more desperately one desired something, the stronger the aura it produced.
But great power demanded great stamina expenditure.
Loading a grass stalk with steel-cleaving aura wasted most of one's strength, so knights had to maintain mental composure to expend only what was needed.
Composure...?
Sir Darkal, forever bellowing and ranting, seemed worlds away from composed.
As Shan puzzled inwardly, the old knight pressed on with his gravelly explanation, laced with curses.
“Especially in battle—get excited, and you'll waste aura left and right. Even top skill won't save you from tiring out and collapsing! Idiots like that aren't worth a skilled mercenary!”
Those words called to mind the war Shan had witnessed half a year prior.
The knight slashing through foes in a frenzy, only to exhaust himself and get hauled off in a net...
To avoid that fate, he needed to diligently train aura apportionment.
Shan etched Sir Darkal's training methods firmly into his mind.
Fortunately, aura practice felt trivially easy compared to the prior physical grind.
Just slash at nearby sticks, leather hides, cloth bundles, straw sheaves, and the like with a wooden stick.
The key was cutting each target precisely halfway.
This ingrained the effects produced by varying aura intensities.
One baffling aspect, though, was the notion of “mental expenditure.”
Mental stamina recovered slower than physical, yet despite exhausting himself physically countless times, Shan never felt mentally drained when his body was fine.
When he mentioned it, Sir Darkal barked to ignore such nonsense and focus on training.
Thankfully, Shan's innate precision applied as much to the mental realm as the physical.
The first few days were a haze of unfamiliar sensations, but by the third, he could gauge stamina costs; by week's end, he finely tuned aura across wooden sticks, iron rods, blunt blades, and edged swords.
Afterward came varied applications.
Not just cuts and thrusts to slice and pierce, but impacts like hammer blows to repel foes; kicks off the ground to boost explosive dashes or leaps.
Sensing and parrying—or countering—the aura potency in enemy strikes came as a bonus.
A month later, with it all mastered, Sir Darkal declared the knight lessons concluded.
“You're still a hopeless idiot with much to learn, but I've nothing more to teach! Here—take this!”
The fine parchment bore scribbled cursive, but thanks to half a year's theory lessons, Shan could make it out.
It certified that Altoin Shan possessed martial prowess and refinement befitting a knight, vouched by his instructor, Darkal of the Kordo house...
The past half-year's education let him grasp the document's weight.
Should Shan turn monstrous villain, its mere existence would sully Sir Darkal's honor irreparably.
Despite endless abuse and torment yielding scant personal bond, Shan found it hard to meet the bald old man's eyes and bowed his head.
“...Thank you, Master.”
“Don't whine like some girl—it's gross!”
Consistent to the bitter end.
A few days after Sir Darkal departed, Shan received a dinner invitation from Kallion.
To discuss his path forward.
With even the servants dismissed, the three sat alone as Kallion spoke gravely.
“I've learned the identity of your foes.”
As always, without higher-ups around, he exuded true heavyweight aura.
From that low, thick voice to his stern expression—now Shan saw whom Roden took after in his knightly posturing.
“My foes?”
“Indeed. The Steel Lion Legion razed your village, correct?”
So testified the Altoin mercenary Kob, from their shared troll hunt.
Kallion, hearing via Roden, had leveraged his merchant network to uncover their recent employer.
“Word just came: their current patron is Count Varik.”
Roden, seated beside, blurted in shock.
“Wait—that's the guy who...?”
“Yes. The territory sparking Libert's civil war belongs to his faction.”
The lands near Shan's Willow Village fell under Baron Mahsel's rule, and Mahsel was Varik's vassal.
Varik had loosed mercenaries into his own domain for a staged massacre.
Solely to claim he had been attacked first.
“Blinded by power, butchering the very folk he's meant to protect... Nobles, honestly...”
Roden sighed at the horrific truth.
Kallion shot his son a sidelong glance before turning to Shan.
“If you seek vengeance, I recommend signing on as a mercenary with Duke Morayen's camp. For a warrior to gain renown swiftly, nothing beats the battlefield.”
Mercenary work in war was child's play for building fame.
Sir Darkal had declared that the current Shan could slaughter packs of knights in seconds.
Libert wouldn't knight an Altoin, no matter his strength—but dazzling feats there, then back to Pendia? Surely some lord would eye the boy mercenary festooned with knightly heads.
Yet Shan shook his head, declining Kallion's offer.
“Hm, honestly? I don't feel much like they're true enemies anymore. I've avenged plenty already.”
The mercenaries had slain Priest Ador—and likely Selina too—but slaying them had tied off that thread.
No drive remained to hurl himself into war for vengeance against their commander.
He held no aversion to battlefield slaughter, but Shan had other designs.
“Better to explore the Demon Realm.”
“...Isn't that overly dangerous?”
“War's no different. Fame demands risk, right?”
Pendia's eastern Demon Realm was perilous soil, yet also ripe with opportunity.
Hunting its mighty monsters for parts alone could yield fortunes and glory; an ancient Alto relic? Value beyond reckoning.
Greater risks than human wars, but grander rewards.
Shan gestured to Roden beside him.
“Most of all, you can't join me on a battlefield.”
“...Me?”
Roden, quietly chewing his food through their talk, blinked.
“No, you know I'm studying to inherit Father's firm?”
“Yet you haven't set your weapons aside. I need you, Roden. My first squire.”
Shan prodded his friend's burly arm.
Over the past half-year, Roden had thrown himself into caravan work yet never neglected training enough to lose his muscle.
Had he, Shan wouldn't have roped him in—dragging a man whose warrior fire had cooled would just invite peril.
Turning Roden's old words back on him, the youth made an exasperated face, then shook his head.
“Sheesh, you put it like that, and I can't say no...”
The two burst into laughter as one.