It had been just over an hour since the absurdly hellish race began, and the cadets had separated into three groups.
There was the lower group, still struggling up the middle of the mountain; the middle group, which had only just reached the vicinity of the summit; and the leading group, hot on Anna Camil’s heels.
“Th-This is exhausting.”
Anna Camil, the promising daughter of Baron Camil, had already touched the monument at the summit and was on her way back down.
Her speed had fallen to roughly half of what it had been at the start.
Her family’s secret Footwork Technique allowed her to achieve exceptional speed, but endurance was another matter entirely.
She had even begun taking occasional breaks because she could not catch her breath.
Even so, there was no denying that she remained overwhelmingly in first place.
The freshmen still struggling uphill watched her descending in the opposite direction with envious eyes.
‘That’s right. As long as I finish first, it doesn’t matter.’
She reassured herself that she could afford to relax slightly after seeing the condition of the other freshmen.
Then someone charging uphill at an astonishing speed caught her eye.
At first glance, he was charging so recklessly that she almost mistook him for a wild boar.
A handsome beggar(?).
It was Ruben.
“Aaaaaaaaagh!”
Why in the world was he screaming like that while running?
More importantly, how had he managed to maintain his speed while climbing with such an exhausting running style?
While Anna distributed her energy with maximum efficiency and moved forward with light, graceful steps, that beggar seemed to have thrown efficiency to the dogs and was charging ahead while pushing every muscle in his body to its absolute limit.
‘He’ll collapse from exhaustion soon.’
Just as Anna predicted, the beggar who had been maintaining his furious charge suddenly stopped dead.
His eyes rolled back, showing only the whites, and he collapsed on the spot.
Several kindhearted freshmen began approaching him with worried expressions, intending to help him.
Then the beggar’s eyes abruptly snapped open again.
He sprang back to his feet, let out a monstrous roar, and charged forward.
“Graaaaaagh!”
He ran as though nothing had happened.
No, he was moving even faster than before.
The sight was less reminiscent of a human being and more like a rabid wild animal.
Was that handsome beggar screaming at the top of his lungs really another freshman?
Had he been raised by wild boars?
He could speak, right?
Anna Camil watched his back disappear toward the summit with considerable shock.
“I have to attend the same Academy as someone like that? Disgusting.”
She clicked her tongue once, then resumed running at high speed.
‘I’m so hungry I could die.’
I had lost count of how many times I had fainted and revived.
Every time I recovered, all my stamina returned, but stamina was not the real problem.
The sheer number of calories I was burning was enormous.
This phenomenon, where I became stronger every time I broke through the limits of my physical abilities, was completely beyond human norms.
Naturally, it consumed an equally absurd amount of energy.
As a result, an overwhelming hunger was tormenting me.
I had already touched the monument at the summit and was now descending.
The hunger kept making me dizzy.
I was so desperate to eat something that I thought I might die.
“Meat··· I need meat. Soup too··· warm bread···.”
Born as the youngest son of a count, I had gone through both my lives without ever truly knowing hunger.
It was a sensation I had neither known nor needed to know.
Perhaps that was why the hunger gnawing at my entire body now felt unbearably painful.
On top of that, my lungs, heart, and muscles, which continued to suffer under my ridiculous willpower, were singing an unending requiem of agony.
This was hell.
“Haa··· haa···.”
How long had I been running while thinking that?
The steep downward slope gradually became gentler, and the Academy’s auditorium finally came into view in the distance.
At the same moment, a scent seized my nose.
Food!
“Fooooooood!”
Strength automatically returned to my legs, which had begun slowing down.
After countless level-ups(?) had made my body significantly stronger, I was capable of producing astonishing speed.
Once again, I began running like the wind.
“Give me fooooooood!”
I could no longer see anything else.
Like a zombie that would charge into a fire in pursuit of human flesh, my mind was filled entirely with thoughts of food.
As I ran like a lunatic, I noticed a blonde girl moving ahead of me with light, nimble steps.
Normally, I might have thought, ‘Oh, she must be fairly skilled. She’s fast,’ and admired her.
But right now···.
“Out of the way! All the food is miiiiine!”
She looked like nothing more than a competitor trying to steal my food.
With what little reason I had left completely gone, I charged like a beast and overtook her.
“W-Wait! Who are you?!”
“Fooooood!”
The girl reached out in an attempt to grab me, but she could not keep up with the speed of my charge.
With my competitor gone, all that remained was to enter the doors ahead.
Just a little farther.
Then I could eat.
I could finally eat!
The side doors of the auditorium we had left through that morning were almost within reach.
“B···Bob?”
Anna Camil stared in disbelief.
In her exhausted state, the mad beggar’s desperate screams for food had sounded like a name.
Bob.
That lunatic beggar’s name was Bob?
Anna had been certain that she would take first place in the first entrance test.
Yet the lead had been stolen from her in spectacular fashion.
And by a beast of a man with the hopelessly ordinary name ‘Bob,’ no less.
‘Father. I’m sorry.’
She desperately wanted to catch up to Bob immediately, but her legs had already reached their limit and refused to obey.
Barely suppressing her tears, she forced herself onward without collapsing.
And Anna Camil was not the only person Ruben shocked that day.
“Good heavens.”
Ribart, the Head Professor of swordsmanship who had been drinking tea in the Dean’s office earlier, could not hide his astonishment.
A young man dressed in clothes that had been reduced to rags was staggering around with wild eyes while demanding food.
Covered from head to toe in dirt and looking like a zombie, he was Ruben Seirin.
He had been reduced to such a miserable state that even his own family might have failed to recognize him.
Ribart had only managed to identify him thanks to his unusually keen eye.
But Ruben’s appearance, which resembled that of human refuse, was not what shocked him.
How could the frail youngest son of the Seirin family have passed the entrance examination?
And not merely passed it—
How had he finished first?
“Aaagh! Food! Give me food! I’m starving!”
“Urgh···. What kind of strength does this bastard have?!”
“Is he insane?!”
Three senior cadets were trying to hold him back, yet they were visibly being pushed by his raw strength.
He still possessed this much stamina after five hours of mountain climbing.
He had enough speed to overtake every other freshman and return in first place.
‘Did he use magic?’
Ribart’s prejudice—that the Seirin family might be intelligent but was utterly pathetic physically—made it difficult for him to acknowledge Ruben.
If the boy had relied on magic to pass the Willpower Test, then he would not last long here anyway.
“He seems extremely hungry. Give him something to eat first.”
For the moment, Ribart decided to placate Ruben, who was demanding food like a madman.
Soon, food began being served at a single place in the banquet area prepared inside the auditorium.
And thus began a furious display of gluttony.
Ruben shoved every dish served to him straight into his mouth as though he had been possessed by a starving ghost.
It hardly looked as though he were eating.
He seemed to be absorbing the food.
He even devoured piping-hot soup and stew so aggressively that people began worrying he might start chewing on the tableware next.
“A complete lunatic enrolled this year.”
“He must have grown up starving. He’s practically a beggar.”
Ruben’s table manners made it difficult to regard him as a noble··· or even as a human being.
The senior cadets therefore decided that he was probably some poorly raised orphan, beggar, or former street vagrant.
Then Anna Camil, the second freshman to return, entered the auditorium.
Looking as though she might burst into tears if someone so much as touched her, she deliberately chose a seat far away from Ruben.
For the moment, she wanted nothing to do with him.
As time passed, more normal(?) freshmen began arriving one after another and taking their seats.
Some found their attention drawn to Anna Camil’s beauty.
Others found themselves unable to look away from Ruben’s appalling display of eating.
“What the hell is that bastard?”
Among those freshmen was a large young man who had finished within the top five.
He regarded Ruben’s deranged meal with unmistakable hostility.
He was Pan Slipel, son of House Slipel, a family renowned for the finest spear arts in the Empire, and he was considered the most gifted Martial Talent among this year’s incoming Lion Heart students.
The reason Ruben irritated him was simple.
He could not stand the fact that some skinny bastard who looked like a beggar had taken first place.
‘If it had been Anna Camil, that would have been different···.’
Pan subtly glanced toward Anna, who was sitting some distance away with her shoulders drooping.
As befitted the daughter of House Camil, she possessed fairy-like beauty, and she seemed to shine even while looking miserable.
‘She’d make an acceptable bride for me. Hmm.’
His face reddened for no particular reason as he reached for the bread that had finally been served in front of him.
At that moment—
“That’s mine!”
A filthy hand suddenly appeared and snatched away Pan Slipel’s bread.
Watching Ruben, whose eyes had completely lost focus, crush the bread into his mouth made Pan’s own eyes twitch with rage.
“You little bastard!”
“Remain seated, freshman. No fighting of any kind is permitted here.”
Just as the enraged Pan raised his fist toward Ruben, Ribart stepped in front of him.
Faced with the stern gaze of a Sword Master, Pan had no choice but to suppress his anger.
“Tch!”
Ruben, meanwhile, was so absorbed in eating that he did not seem to notice any of it.
Unable to stand watching him any longer, Pan Slipel moved to another seat.
‘Bastard. One day, I’m going to beat you into the ground.’
Meanwhile, Tyr finished in seventy-seventh place, safely within the top one hundred.
Considering that he had started significantly later than Ruben, it was an extraordinary display of physical ability.
“Um, Young Master? Do you recognize me?”
Ruben was still stuffing food into his mouth when Tyr arrived.
Only then did he finally recognize Tyr and wave.
It seemed that his reason had returned after devouring roughly five servings of food.
“Oh, Tyr. You made it?”
“How could you leave me behind like that?! I was worried!”
“I’m fine, I’m fine. More importantly, you finished seventy-seventh? As expected of Tyr. Reliable performance.”
“I could normally have finished in the top ten.”
The number 77 had been stamped onto the back of Tyr’s hand, revealing his ranking.
Perhaps seeing his own ranking openly displayed made him curious.
His gaze naturally drifted toward the back of Ruben’s hand.
“F-First place?!”
“It just happened that way. I got so hungry while running that I thought I was going to die. So I came back a little faster.”
What, did needing to relieve himself mean he could run at the speed of light too?
If Anna Camil had heard him, she might have grabbed him by the collar and thrown him straight into the floor.
Yet Ruben made the statement as though it were perfectly ordinary.
The endlessly loyal Tyr merely looked at him in admiration.
“You’ve really become strong, Young Master!”
“Yeah! And I think I can become even stronger now!”
“Of course! You can do it, Young Master!”
“Khahahaha!”
Ruben looked like a filthy beggar.
Tyr gazed at that filthy beggar with open admiration.
The expressions of the freshmen and senior cadets forced to witness the two of them making a spectacle of themselves turned noticeably cold.
After finishing my meal, taking a shower, and lying down on my dormitory bed, I felt as though I had entered heaven.
The first day’s entrance examination had been so excessive that there was no further schedule for the day.
All that remained was the assignment of the dormitory rooms where we would live for the next three years.
As the son of a count, I was naturally assigned quarters together with my attendant, Tyr.
Of course, it would have been inappropriate for a grown noble to literally share a single room with his servant, so the quarters were actually divided into a large main room and a smaller adjoining room.
“Ah, that was a good meal.”
I patted my stomach with a satisfied smile.
I might have eaten better than I ever had in my life.
I had certainly eaten more.
I had been so close to fainting from hunger earlier that I had not counted, but I had probably eaten enough for seven or eight people by myself.
And yet, I did not feel particularly bloated or uncomfortably full.
Apparently, my transformed body required an enormous amount of energy.
“Hehe.”
But what truly delighted me was that the flowers I had stolen from Britz had produced an utterly absurd miracle.
As long as I broke through my body’s limits—
In other words, as long as I pushed myself through enough exhaustion and pain—
I could continue becoming stronger.
For a weakling like me, it was a dreamlike ability.
‘For the first day, things went pretty smoothly.’
Completely unintentionally, I had even taken first place in the entrance examination.
It was not a bad start.
Of course, considering all the different looks directed at me after I finished first, perhaps it was not entirely a good thing either.
“Hmm. Well, they’re all just youngsters anyway.”
I was already itching with anticipation for my Academy life to begin in earnest tomorrow.