Chapter 6

I could tell that this boy genuinely aspired to become the Hero. I’d never seen anyone else like him. I’d asked so many promising-looking people before whether they were trying to become the Hero, and they always gave the same answer. “Isn’t it guaranteed to be you, Leon?” they’d say, batting their lashes at me. Why would they suck up to me? The Hero was not guaranteed to be any particular person. Anyone with the determination to save the world could have aspired to it. But what if the nobility and knighthood didn’t have their eyes on that goal? They were supposed to fight to protect the citizens, dammit. I was going to be the Hero, of course. I was going to save the world. I was going to become king and bring happiness to the people. But I couldn’t walk that path alone. I needed to hone myself by competing against many people with the same goal. Were they telling me to do it by myself? To walk the wilderness alone? Why did they have no drive, no ambition? How was I supposed to reckon with the fact that the only person who showed up in the wilderness was a commoner of all people? I could hear them sneering at the commoner when he spoke of becoming a Hero. Don’t laugh, I thought. What right did they have to scorn him when they were unwilling to do it themselves? Falm Academy was supposed to be a training facility for Heroes. Anyone who enrolled here was meant to be an aspiring Hero. Yet they kept their eyes off the goal and even had the audacity to laugh at someone who did want to be a Hero. Ares did not so much as flinch when I laid a hand on my sword. He was the real deal. But I couldn’t just come out and admit that. Because I was a noble and he was a commoner. Class began, and when the teacher announced that we would be doing mock sword battles, Ares challenged me to a bout. My classmates tried to stop him, saying, “The nerve of a commoner to challenge Leon to a fight,” but I accepted the invitation. My reasoning was simple. If not for Ares, I wouldn’t have had anyone else to spar with. I couldn’t say whether the others were being deferential, or if it was because they were reluctant to match up against someone out of their league, but regardless, nobody threw the gauntlet at me. Fighting a teacher was my only other option. And so the battle began. Ares held his sword directly in front of himself, the tip slanting up toward my eyes. His grip was too strong, and the sloppiness was evident in his form. The class burst out laughing when they saw it. I suspected that he had never received formal training. He was similar to an adventurer or mercenary with practical experience. I could tell that his skills were nothing to write home about at this point. I used a single-handed grip, not bothering with any kind of stance. By relaxing my body, I could keep my movements nice and light, promptly responding to my opponent’s moves. With a “Hyaah!” Ares took a step forward, swinging his sword. He used big movements for his lead-in, and there was plenty of distance between us. I didn’t even need to use my sword to block him. With the slightest possible movement, I dodged his attack by a razor-thin margin, then tapped Ares’s head lightly with my sword. “That’s one hit. Can you go on?” I said to him. “Of course!” Ares jumped back and immediately readjusted his stance. This time, he came at me in earnest. When he entered my range, I made as if to slice upward from a low position. This was a feint. Ares fell for it, taking up an exaggerated defensive stance. Seeing my opening, I put my second hand on my sword and struck Ares’s shoulder from above instead. Thwack. A dull sensation traveled through my arm. We were using blunt, wooden swords, but I imagined it had to sting for my opponent. “Urk!” With a cry of anguish, Ares fell to his knees. “Ooooh!” The crowd gushed in admiration. My technique had been simple, but the onlookers knew it took a lot of training and skill to move seamlessly. “Can you still go on?” I asked Ares, who was grimacing as he pressed his left hand against his right shoulder. There was hardly a pause before he replied, “I can.” That was fine by me. It would make good practice for the people in the priest class. Having learned from the previous two rounds, Ares tried very hard to keep his movements to a minimum. Once more, he entered my range, but this time, it was Ares who took the initiative. His motions were sluggish because of the damage he had already taken—I didn’t even have to do anything. So when Ares tried to swing his sword, I struck him in the chest, where he was wide-open. With a grunt as if all the air had escaped his lungs, Ares fell to the ground. It was over. I might have broken his arm, but that wasn’t too big of a problem when there were a bunch of people around wanting to test out their healing magic. “Hurry up and drop out already,” I said to him. Ares looked back at me. His eyes showed no sign of disheartenment. Ares challenged me to mock battles after that, too. To be perfectly frank, he was the weakest in our class, what with his self-taught form and tendency to move more than he needed to. But I did sense a certain intensity from him that I didn’t get from the other students. Maybe it was because he had real combat experience. I never knew what move he was going to pull. In a sword fight, he would throw kicks or even toss away his weapon and attempt to grab me. The students criticized him for pulling tricks. “Vulgar cur,” they would call him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He had the determination to do whatever it took to win. But guts alone didn’t win fights. The difference in our sword abilities was too vast for him to surpass. Whenever he came at me, I beat him to a pulp. “Hurry up and drop out already,” I always said when he was no longer able to move. The people around me seemed to think that I was seriously trying to drive Ares out of the academy. They were right about me being serious. Ares was my rival in becoming the Hero, so of course I would want to kick him down. But those other assholes weren’t even worth that treatment. I would never take someone seriously as a rival if they weren’t bothering to try. Meanwhile, Ares got back on his feet no matter how many times you knocked him down. It was as if he was declaring to me that this was what it meant to strive to be a Hero. Before I knew it, my eyes had started following Ares. Yet he never looked my way. He spent every minute honing his skills; if he had a spare moment, he would use it to pore over his textbooks, and any large chunks of time were funneled into practicing his swings. He literally had no time for anyone else. When classes ended for the day, he would swing his sword behind the academy building. Each and every stroke was careful and precise, as if he was attempting to absorb everything we were taught in class into his skin. I watched him go at it practically every day. Maybe I was trying to make certain that there was at least one other person walking through the same wilderness as me. “What’s that commoner so desperate for?” the nobles around me said. How was that even a question? We were fighting the Demon Lord. If he was prepared to take on the threat, of course he’d be desperate. But even so, Ares’s work ethic was unusual. It never occurred to him to rest. He ran as if something was chasing him down. There was no doubt in my mind that he had experienced something that spurred him to become the Hero. I had no idea what it was, and I wasn’t about to ask him. Maybe that was the thing I lacked. Some time after that, I started hearing rumors about Ares. Apparently, he had fallen for Maria Lauren from the priest class and confessed his love to her on multiple occasions. That can’t be right. I laughed it off. Sure, Maria was beautiful. Her skills as a priest were outstanding enough that she deserved to be called the Holy Maiden. I’d talked to her in the past because I was interested in her as a potential member for my own party, but she only ever spoke in flowery platitudes. I never got a handle on what she was really thinking. She struck me as someone who was never sincere when she praised God. She could feel God’s presence, and because of that, she didn’t believe in Him at all. I couldn’t imagine Ares becoming infatuated with a girl like her. A few months later, I heard Ares was learning magic from Solon Barclay. “What an idiot. Does he really think a Hero can use magic?” my classmates said disparagingly. They had a point—magic was a talent. You were either born with the ability or not. At the same time, there were folklore tales of Heroes who wielded magic. Maybe Ares took those stories seriously and was trying to learn magic. Which also suggested that the reason he’d approached Maria was so he could learn healing magic. What a waste of his time. Ares was totally fooling himself. The next thing I knew, I was taking the magic tomes in my house up to my room and reading them in secret. I couldn’t understand a word of them because they were written in the ancient script. But I chipped away at them with the help of a dictionary. I was definitely no slouch when it came to academics. It was important for me to read widely and accumulate knowledge so I could run our fief one day. Magic tomes were a completely different beast, though. For one thing, they were unintelligible. Even if you could decipher the letters, the grammar was so different from our modern language that the sentences were nigh impossible to parse. I counted my lucky stars that I’d never enrolled in the mage class. In the end, I quit trying to read the magic tomes after a month. It was too grueling a task. After all that careful work of translating the letters and comprehending the text, I would finally chant a spell and get no reaction whatsoever. Nothing in my environment changed. I found it impossible to continue. How is Ares sticking with this? It wasn’t the action of a sane man. You had to be off your rocker to learn magic without having the aptitude. It’s got to be impossible for him, too. Ares was generally clumsy. No way could someone like him learn magic from scratch, I told myself. Some time after we started our third year at the academy, I heard rumors that Ares had learned how to use attack and healing magic. “His spells aren’t anything special,” everyone sneered, but there was awe in their faces as well. In truth, his spells weren’t that powerful. But he had managed to achieve something beyond my capabilities. It must have taken an unimaginable amount of effort. The same thing went for the sword. Ares was clearly surpassing everyone besides me in the warrior class at around this point. Although his level of improvement frankly didn’t match his effort, he was still powerful in his own right. Even after three years, Ares kept challenging me to mock battles. He stood before me, both hands on the hilt of his sword. The tip slanted up toward my face. There was nothing excessive about his stance, and his grip was moderately relaxed. This particular stance was basic, but it was generally the most reliable in a one-on-one duel. Since he wasn’t showing any openings, I adjusted my upper body and held my sword with one hand, pointing it at Ares. By this point, I didn’t have the luxury to adopt an improper stance against him. We held our stances as we searched each other for opportunities to strike. The air was tense; all of a sudden, Ares lowered his body and thrust his sword toward me. His movements were seamless and minimal, leaving nothing for me to exploit. It could have been a feint or a proper attack. I jumped to the side and made a swipe at his flank, only for him to instantly revert to his original stance and block my attack. Of course, I wasn’t done there—I kept pelting him with slashes. I incorporated feints in my barrage, but Ares parried everything with perfect precision and efficiency. What a world of difference. Ares had improved the most out of everyone in the warrior class. Maybe that was only obvious considering where he’d started, but it did give meaning to him joining the academy. Compared with him, what did I gain from being here? I did my daily practice, but that was it. If I was aiming higher, shouldn’t I have gone off the beaten track instead of taking the easy route at school? I could have fought on the front lines with my uncle, for instance. There was so much I could have learned from heading to war. And if I couldn’t go to the front lines, slaying monsters within the kingdom was always an option for me. That would have sharpened my skills and let me contribute to the country at the same time. Despite my moniker as the Sword Saint, I’d taken the conventional route of attending Falm Academy. For all my pride about how I was the only one thinking about our country, maybe I wasn’t actually thinking about anything but myself. For some reason, as I watched Ares desperately block my strikes, regret bogged my mind. I can’t lose to him, at the very least. That’s the one thing I won’t allow. I read Ares’s next move. He was saving his strength to perform a counter after blocking my next blow. I made a show of backing off a step. Seizing the opportunity, he zipped right up to me and delivered an overhand slice. But that was just what I’d anticipated. I swerved to the side and struck Ares’s torso at the same moment his attack missed. I felt the weight of the blow. Two years ago, this would have been enough to knock him off his feet. But this time, Ares remained standing. His stance hadn’t even faltered. Although he was grimacing in pain, he still had it in him to fight. I went on to crush him after that, but Ares never conceded defeat. I knocked him down at multiple points, but he always got back to his feet. By now, nobody laughed or called him an idiot. A Hero was somebody who made the impossible possible. Maybe I was simply sticking to what I was capable of, and nothing more. At the end of summer, I received a notice of my uncle’s death. He had died fighting a demon at the border. He was a strong and stouthearted person. I’d always been convinced that no mere monster would ever do him in. My cousin was stoic even in the face of her father’s death. “It is the warrior’s way to perish on the battlefield. It is what he wanted,” she said. So then why did my father, the head of the house, decide to prioritize his own life instead of fighting? Why was I, the Sword Saint, absent from the field? Gazing at my cousin, I was keenly aware of my powerlessness. The death of a frontline commander was as clear a sign as any that the war was worsening. “You need to drop out as a Hero candidate,” my father told me. His reasoning was that it was dangerous—a count could not afford to lose his heir to the monsters. A very characteristic reason indeed. But what did that mean for the country? What would happen to the world? Weren’t nobles supposed to protect others? What did my uncle die for? I went to see Ares. It was our first time having an actual conversation. “Don’t worry. I’ll be the Hero instead.” He listened to my worries and came to this clean and crisp answer. He hadn’t changed one bit from when we first entered the academy. But his response made me realize something: I’d come to Ares because subconsciously, I’d wanted to foist the role of Hero on him. My resolve was so feeble that my father telling me to stop was enough to make me waver. I was pathetic. I’d always known that Ares would make a better Hero than me, but I’d insisted on going through the motions anyway. I kept walking through that wilderness all by myself. Now I understood. He was what a person should be. It wasn’t about whether one could or couldn’t accomplish the task; it was about what you had to do. I wondered if I should abide by that philosophy, too. Maybe I should continue to fight and struggle, even if I lost in the end. Even if I couldn’t become the Hero, I would pour all my effort into saving the world. A Hero needs friends, after all.