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BY the time I’d been wearing it for a year, I was able to remove the armlet. I was pretty happy. I felt like a prisoner who had finally reached the end of his sentence.
When I joyfully reported this achievement to my master, however, she said, “Really? Then I’ll give you a new one,” and made me wear an armlet that tripled my weight. Her love was heavy stuff—physically speaking, that is.
It took another year for me to be able to take off the new armlet, and this time, I kept quiet about it. I wouldn’t be able to handle an armlet that made me five times heavier. As it happened, Cassandra wore an armlet that made her ten times heavier. She said she couldn’t give it to me yet, but I was sure that if I ever put that thing on, I wouldn’t be able to survive my normal life.
As for our bouts, Cassandra was so quick that I could never avoid her attacks if I tried to follow them with my eyes. I had to move while sensing her presence. She also had a nasty special ability that allowed her to attack with as much force as possible without killing me. Naturally, because getting hit meant teetering on the brink of death, I was desperate to avoid her attacks. As a result, I developed a skill that let me avoid attacks by sensing them.
Actually, it wasn’t really a skill; it was more like my intuition just got a lot better. But my master referred to it as “grasping an intention,” which I suppose meant it was an actual skill. Once you grasped intentions, you could sense anyone or anything that was targeting you.
In other news, in the year after I had gained a resistance to poison, there had been a spate of failed assassination attempts in the castle, disguised as accidents. First came stray arrows, then it escalated to various other methods, like collapsed buildings and magical attacks, but I avoided every one of them. If those things could kill me, my master would’ve killed me a long time ago. Compared to dealing with attacks from Cassandra, or even a powerful monster, avoiding assassination was so easy I could probably have done it in my sleep. If anything, I felt that the assassins were going easier on me than my master.
At first, when I became her apprentice, I’d had the ulterior motive of using Cassandra’s name to protect myself from assassination, but I no longer had any intention of doing that. Or rather, I didn’t need to. Now that I had nothing to fear from assassins, there was no reason to use Cassandra’s name. And in fact, if I did mention her, I could clearly see people bothering me about it and saying things like, “Where did you meet her?” or, “Have you been slipping out of the castle every day?” or, “Stop eating monster meat,” or, “Stop that dangerous training,” and so on, so I kept quiet.
And one day, between the many near-death experiences I endured on a daily basis, my master announced that she would be leaving.
“Now that you have the fundamentals down,” she said, “continue your training on your own. The next time we meet, if I see you’ve been slacking off, I’ll kill you.” Then, she left.
She was kind of a nomad, traveling the world in search of powerful opponents, and she hadn’t ever been the type to settle down in one place. It was probably more unusual for her to have stayed in a single country for three years than for her to take off like this. And I knew her parting words were no metaphor—she’d actually kill me—so I continued my daily training.
Around that time, faking accidents must have gotten to be too much trouble, because the assassins began attacking me directly instead, no longer caring whatsoever how it looked. If I was walking outside on official business, an assassin would come at me with a sword; if I was standing around in the castle and chatting, an assassin would drop down from the ceiling; if I returned to my room, an assassin would be there waiting; and so on. Still, I could grasp their intentions, so I was able to sense them before they attacked, and they were weaker than monsters or my master, so it wasn’t a big deal—except for the time there was a complaint when I reflexively killed a wannabe assassin.
“Your Highness, to investigate who sent him, it really would have been best to capture him alive…” I was told.
When I answered, “I wasn’t trying to kill him, but he was too weak for me to capture alive,” it unnerved everyone around me. But compared to monsters and my master, normal humans were fragile, and they died easily.
I didn’t know if Gamarath had gotten wind of what I’d said, but after that, the assassins’ skill levels increased. There were also more of them at once. I was pretty strong, but things got tricky when multiple trained assassins came at me at the same time. I had generally fought monsters or my master one-on-one, so I didn’t have much experience with fighting multiple opponents. Of course, suffering a defeat was out of the question. God might forgive me, but my master certainly wouldn’t.