“There’s no need to make such a fuss!”

The curt rebuke struck Shan’s ears as he celebrated finally being able to wield spirit.

“As I’ve told you before, spirit comes naturally when you keep pushing your body past its limits! Considering how often you’ve used medicine that other knightly houses begrudge using even once a month, you’re late as it is! Even a monkey would have learned to wield spirit after all this!”

Shan looked crestfallen under Sir Darkal’s sharp scolding, but nodded obediently. He might not have had much of a head for money, but he knew how expensive the medicines he had been drinking and bathing in were.

“At any rate, that concludes your training with the conditioning elixir!”

“... Really?”

“Yes! Haven’t you felt it yourself? Your physical abilities stopped improving some time ago!”

As he said, despite the horrific conditioning, Shan’s body had barely improved over the past few weeks. It was as though this were the limit of the strength, durability, and stamina his body was allowed to possess.

That was what had made the past few weeks of training especially difficult. Without even the satisfaction of improvement, it had felt like nothing more than pointless self-abuse. A few more years—no, even a few more months—of that would surely have driven him mad. Either that, or he would have reached his breaking point and fled in the night.

“So from now on, you need only do enough to keep yourself from getting rusty! Mind you, the human body has a nasty habit of always trying to grow weaker, so if you spend all your time lazing about...”

“Woo-hoo!”

Shan was so delighted that he let out a cheer, cutting Sir Darkal’s lecture short. That hellish training was finally over!

“Quiet! Don’t get carried away, you idiot!”

The old knight’s bellowing dissolved into a fit of coughing. The increasingly cold winter air had stabbed into his aging lungs. After taking some time to catch his breath, he spoke in a rather feebler voice.

“Anyway, you’ve worked hard. Today is your day off, so stop wasting my time and get lost!”

His thoroughly brusque manner had not changed in half a year. Shan nodded at once and vanished without even clearing away the severed training dummy. He was off to boast to Roden and the others that he could now wield spirit.

Silence settled over the courtyard garden. Sir Darkal reached out a wrinkled hand and ran it over the dummy’s cut surface.

“Hah.”

His quiet chuckle soon gave way to laughter welling up from deep inside him. Even when another coughing fit seized him, the old knight could not stop laughing.

“He really did it. He actually did it! The mad little bastard...!”

At first, he had merely meant to take the boy down a peg. After all, both once-in-a-generation geniuses and teenage boys possessed boundlessly inflated egos. It was obvious what someone who combined the two would be like, so he had deliberately made unreasonable demands to establish their hierarchy firmly during training.

Unlike an ordinary aspiring knight, Shan already surpassed Darkal himself in combat ability. One wrong move, and he could lose his authority. The extraordinarily brutal conditioning of a knight was simply impossible without a master forcefully driving the pupil onward.

Yet on the very first day, Shan had pushed his body to its limits and exhausted every muscle. He had managed of his own accord what most people failed to do because they could not endure the pain, even when threatened and prodded with a blade.

Sir Darkal’s second surprise had come three days later, when Shan began conditioning again with his body already fully recovered. Whether treated with healing miracles or conditioning elixirs, the human body was not normally robust enough to return completely to normal in three days. And that was without even considering the mental toll.

But not only had Shan recovered completely in three days, he had succeeded in working his body to its limits again during a second session that Darkal had intended to make no more than a light warm-up. His bodily control, endurance, and even recuperative ability were downright abnormal.

Once Sir Darkal had confirmed all of this, he immediately revised his entire training plan and drew up a new one. Thus began the horrific schedule of working Shan’s body to the point of needing a conditioning elixir once every three days.

He forbade anyone who had undergone knight training from telling Shan what an ordinary regimen entailed. If the boy learned that conditioning so harsh it broke down his muscles was actually performed only once a month, he would feel that his own circumstances were unfair.

What followed had been a continuous, nerve-racking ordeal. Though he never showed it, Sir Darkal had been desperately anxious as he watched Shan grow more haggard by the day. Even a schedule that pushed the body to its limits once a month made five or six out of every ten trainees quit. The chances of failure were enormous.

Was this what it felt like to keep honing an impossibly thin, keen razor? Please don’t break. Just grow a little sharper... How many times had he repeated that silent plea while pushing that small body to its limits?

Throughout the process, Sir Darkal had repeatedly been tempted to ease the schedule just a little. He was human, too. Watching the suffering of a pupil he had personally taught for half a year could not help but soften his heart. Given a little more time, he probably would have yielded.

But today, at last, his efforts had borne fruit. After enduring and enduring, his gamble had paid off!

‘Spirit is greatly influenced by the mind—by one’s heart...’

Over his long years of teaching aspiring knights, Sir Darkal had discovered a remarkable secret. Those who awakened their spirit sooner, under harsher conditions, possessed stronger spirit on average. Since the strength of spirit was difficult to measure and varied greatly between individuals, this was secret knowledge few possessed. Perhaps only a handful of knightly houses with long histories knew of it.

In truth, the strength of one’s spirit was not all that important in physical combat. Drawing that power into the material world required the stamina of the body. Overly weak spirit was a problem, of course, but even a knight with spirit mighty enough to cleave a mountain in one blow would collapse from exhaustion before managing to exercise that power.

In the realms of the mind and the supernatural, however, spiritual might was extraordinarily effective. Knights with powerful spirit were highly resistant to all manner of magical abilities. That was why knights could slay monsters such as basilisks, which turned living creatures to stone with a mere look.

‘This spirit was forged through a full half year of grueling training that broke his body down every three days. Unless his spiritual aptitude is exceptionally poor, he should rank among the foremost knights in all of history.’

The Altoan boy he had trained was a weapon of war seemingly crafted by the Goddess herself. He possessed agility that challenged the limits of humanity, control more precise than the finest machine, and senses and combat intelligence that seemed to read his opponents’ minds.

Once his body had fully matured, that monster would be able to defeat anyone. What he needed was a way to counter nonphysical attacks. A soul so mighty that no foul magic, no curse, no evil power of monsters could penetrate it... Surely a truly supreme knight was one who could overcome even tricks that keen eyes and an agile body could not evade!

Like an artist who had created a sculpture to his satisfaction, Sir Darkal smiled, the expression filling his wrinkled face.

* * *

When Shan announced that he could wield spirit, the Wievers mansion erupted into commotion. Roden was the first to come running. He scooped Shan up and spun him around.

“You finally did it! Congratulations!”

Shan complained that he was getting dizzy, but could not keep a broad smile from spreading across his face. Gaining spirit was wonderful, of course, but what truly delighted him was that he could finally stop that wretched conditioning.

After showing off his spirit to several servants he was friendly with, including the cook and the maid who cleaned his room, Shan went to tell his patron, Kalion Wievers.

“Half a year, was it? Certainly quite fast.”

The old merchant merely nodded as he answered, but could not keep the corners of his mouth from rising. As Shan’s patron, he too had been given some explanation by Sir Darkal of the reasons behind the harsh conditioning.

The day after turning the mansion upside down, Shan met Sir Darkal in the courtyard garden as usual. Today’s combat lesson concerned the very thing he had longed for: spirit.

“What do you think spirit is?”

“The ability to cut and thrust harder and block better.”

“You have no shame about spouting idiocy that shows you know nothing. Excellent! Very good indeed!”

Despite his brusque sarcasm, a satisfied smile spread over Sir Darkal’s face. He seemed almost tipsy with excitement, as though he had had a drink.

“Simply put, spirit is the power to expend mental and physical stamina to produce the result you desire! There’s no need to know any more than that. In fact, you’re better off not knowing! You needn’t set limits for yourself!”

With that declaration, Sir Darkal drove the wooden stick in his hand into the ground. The branch should have splintered against the hard, frozen earth, but instead sank deep into it as though into mud.

“Now do the same! Thrust with the determination to pierce it no matter what—even if the ground were made of steel!”

Letting the shouting wash over him, Shan quietly looked between his own stick and the ground. He would pierce it without fail, even if the ground were iron rather than soil... Repeating this to himself, he drove the stick down with all his strength. It slid into the earth just as Sir Darkal’s had.

A dizzying wave of weakness swept over him. In an instant, he felt as drained as if he had been running for hours, and his knees buckled beneath him. The sudden expenditure of stamina made him retch. He had felt something similar the first time he used spirit, but this was several times more intense.

“Ugh...”

“Well? Exhausting, isn’t it?”

The old knight cackled as though he had expected this.

“From now on, you will train to control your spirit. You can think of it as training to hone your mind! You can only call yourself a proper knight once you can choose whether to put spirit into an action, and how much to use if you do!”

Spirit was fundamentally the power of the mind, so the more desperately one wanted something, the stronger the spirit one could bring forth. But great power came with great expenditure of stamina. Putting enough spirit to cut iron into a stroke meant to sever straw would only waste most of that power. A knight therefore had to maintain composure at all times, expending precisely as much spirit as necessary.

‘Composure...?’

Sir Darkal, who was forever exploding into shouts, seemed a far cry from composed. As Shan privately puzzled over this, the old knight continued his explanation in his distinctive gravelly voice, liberally peppering it with insults.

“Especially when you get worked up in battle, you’ll tend to throw spirit around needlessly. Do that, and no matter how skilled you are, you’ll soon collapse from exhaustion! A moron like that is worth less than a competent mercenary!”

His words brought back the battle Shan had witnessed half a year earlier. There had been a knight who swung his sword and carved through the enemies around him in moments, only to exhaust himself and be dragged away in a net... To avoid ending up like that, he certainly needed to practice rationing his spirit diligently. Shan committed Sir Darkal’s training instructions firmly to memory.

Fortunately, spirit training was so easy compared with his earlier physical conditioning that it almost felt trivial. All he had to do was use a wooden stick to cut through other sticks, leather, cloth, and bundles of straw lying nearby. The crucial point was that whatever he cut, he had to cut exactly halfway through it. This was to instill in his body a sense of how much effect a given amount of spirit produced.

There was one thing about the training he did not understand, however: the concept of “expending mental energy.” He had clearly been told that mental energy recovered more slowly than physical stamina. Yet although he had repeatedly exhausted his body during practice, he never felt mentally spent while his body was still fine. When he mentioned this, Sir Darkal barked at him to stop worrying about that nonsense and get on with his training.

Fortunately, Shan’s innate precision seemed to operate in the mental realm as well as the physical. For the first few days, he struggled with the wholly unfamiliar sensation, but by the third day he could gauge his stamina expenditure to some extent. By the end of the first week, he could finely control his spirit with wooden sticks, iron rods, blunt swords, and sharpened swords alike.

After that, he learned various applications: making his thrusts and cuts deliver an impact that knocked an opponent back like a hammer blow rather than piercing or severing them, and adding force to his push off the ground to charge or leap in an instant. He also trained to sense the strength of the spirit imbued in an opponent’s attacks and either receive or counter them.

After a month, once he had mastered all of this, Sir Darkal finally announced the end of his knight training.

“You’re still an utter idiot with a great deal to learn, but I don’t believe there’s anything more I need to teach you for now! Here, take this!”

The writing on the fine, high-quality paper was scrawled in cursive, but thanks to his academic lessons, Shan could more or less make it out.

Darkal of House Cordo, as his instructor, hereby guarantees that the bearer of this document, Shan the Altoan, unquestionably possesses the martial prowess and education befitting a knight...

His lessons over the past half year allowed him to understand what this paper meant. If Shan were to become a terrible villain, the mere existence of this document would surely drag Sir Darkal’s honor into the dirt.

He had spent so much of their time together being cursed at and working his body to exhaustion that they had scarcely formed any personal bond. Yet for some reason, Shan found it difficult to look at the bald old man before him, and lowered his head.

“... Thank you, Master.”

“You’re not a little girl! Don’t use that sniveling voice with me! It’s revolting!”

He truly was the same to the very end.

* * *

A few days after Sir Darkal left, Kalion invited Shan to a meal to discuss what he would do next. With even the servants dismissed, only the three of them sat together as Kalion began in a low voice.

“I’ve learned something about your enemy.”

Shan always thought this, but whenever there was no one of higher standing nearby, Kalion truly looked like a powerful man. From that deep, low voice to his solemn expression, it was easy to see whom Roden took after when he played the knight so convincingly.

“My enemy?”

“Yes. You said it was the Steel Lion Legion that destroyed your village, didn’t you?”

That was what the testimony of Kov, the Altoan mercenary who had joined him on the troll hunt, indicated. Having heard this through Roden, Kalion had used his information network as a merchant to discover who had recently employed them.

“According to news I received recently, their current employer is Count Valik.”

Beside him, Roden looked startled by Kalion’s answer.

“Wait a moment. Wasn’t he the one...?”

“Yes. The territory where this civil war in Libert began belongs to his faction.”

The lands around Willow Village, where Shan had lived, were ruled by Baron Mahsel, a vassal of Count Valik. In other words, Count Valik had staged the incident himself, unleashing mercenaries to slaughter the people of his own domain. All to gain the justification of having been attacked first.

“So blinded by power that he butchered the very people he was supposed to protect. This is exactly why nobles...”

Roden sighed at the utterly horrific truth. Kalion glanced sidelong at his son, then turned back to Shan.

“If you wish to avenge yourself, I would recommend joining Duke Morayen’s faction as a mercenary. After all, there’s no better place than a battlefield for a warrior to make a name for himself quickly.”

If he entered the war as a mercenary, building a reputation would surely be easier than turning his hand over. Sir Darkal had openly declared that Shan could now kill several ordinary knights in moments, even if they attacked him together.

No one in Libert would offer knighthood to a mere Altoan, however strong he might be. But if he distinguished himself there and returned to Pendia, someone was bound to take an interest in a boy mercenary with knights’ heads dangling from him.

Yet Shan shook his head, rejecting Kalion’s proposal.

“Well, to be honest, I don’t really think of him as my enemy. And I’ve already had enough revenge.”

Those mercenaries had killed Priest Ador and probably Selina as well, but killing them had brought that matter to something of a close. He did not feel inclined to plunge into a war just to avenge himself on the person who had given the orders from above. He had no particular objection to joining a battle and killing enemies, but he had something else planned.

“Instead, I’m thinking of exploring the Demonlands.”

“... Isn’t that too dangerous?”

“So is a battlefield. I have to take risks if I want to make a name for myself, don’t I?”

The Demonlands east of the Kingdom of Pendia were a land of danger, but also of opportunity. Merely hunting powerful monsters and collecting materials from their bodies was enough to make a fortune and earn renown. If he happened to recover a relic of the old Alto Empire, its value would be almost beyond imagining. Compared with a war between humans, it was a more dangerous choice, but one that promised greater rewards.

Shan pointed at Roden beside him and added,

“More importantly, Roden can’t come with me to a battlefield.”

“... Me?”

Roden, who had been quietly chewing his food as he listened to their conversation, blinked.

“Wait, you know I’m studying to take over Father’s trading company, don’t you?”

“But you still haven’t put down your weapons. I need you, Roden. You’re my first squire, after all.”

Shan poked his friend’s thick forearm with a finger. Over the past half year, even as he devoted himself to the trading company’s business, Roden had kept training enough to maintain his muscle. Had that not been the case, Shan would not have tried to bring him along. Dragging someone whose passion for the warrior’s path had faded back into it would only be dangerous.

Hearing his own earlier words turned back on him, Roden looked incredulous, then shook his head.

“Honestly, when you put it like that, how am I supposed to say no...?”

The two of them burst out laughing at the same time.