Conditioning began in earnest.
Acquiring technique can be stacked on afterward, once conditioning is the ground beneath it, and still not be too late.
However fine a technique a man holds, it means nothing at all if the base to express it has not been built.
In that sense the standard of conditioning Ethan demanded was high, and so the intensity of the training was no joke either.
Ask whether that meant working the body into ruin, though, and the answer was no.
'Because there's no point.'
He was not going to do anything as stupid as copying some hoary hungry-spirit method wholesale.
'Cardiopulmonary endurance first.'
HIT (High Intensity Training).
By Ethan's own direct experience, it was the training method with the highest return over a short span.
Only, it was a hellish method by the same measure.
Even athletes who had devoted their whole lives to sport could not find their footing once they entered a HIT program.
The reason was simple.
'Because you have to drive your conditioning to the limit.'
How good your natural conditioning was had nothing to do with it.
The crux of HIT lay in the heart rate.
90 percent of maximum heart rate.
Whether a man's conditioning was good or poor, HIT was the program that tested the limits of what he himself had.
A method of a different order from simply running 100 meters or shifting heavy weight.
A method that puts you face to face with pain.
'And yet......'
Hugo was holding up better than expected.
Ethan looked at him with fresh eyes.
For all his animal movement, Hugo grew like a plant, lush and fast.
Give him enough nourishment and put him through training and he developed by the day.
'I thought this frame of mine was no ordinary thing either......'
Ethan's own talent, inheriting the blood of Blante, the great sword clan, did not lag behind, but set purely on the spring in the body, it did not bear comparison with Hugo.
'He has one definite strength.'
There seemed to be a reason he had ended up at the protagonist's side.
'But cutting corners isn't allowed.'
Hugo was quietly rationing his conditioning.
He had worked out that burning all of it here would make the rest of the training very hard going.
'Cutting corners where I can see you.'
Ethan's eyes narrowed.
He might fool other people's eyes, but he could not fool Ethan's.
'Maybe it's time I ran too.'
Ethan loosened up lightly.
Until very recently he had boasted a frame so massive he could not hold it up himself; now Ethan's body was considerably lean.
With the body fat all gone and nothing but muscle left, Ethan's body was like a well-whetted sword.
Loosened up at last, Ethan kicked off the ground.
Tap-tap!
In an instant Ethan had caught up to the running Hugo.
"Hey. Hugo."
"......Huff, huff, eep?!"
Hugo shrieked at the sight of Ethan suddenly alongside him.
"Y-young master?"
"Oho, the bastard answers me, does he? Did you hear my words with the back of your ear? I told you to run until your heart bursts and you croak. And here you are, looking at me and answering?"
Ethan ran murderous eyes over Hugo.
Hugo felt gooseflesh climbing him from the legs up.
'Make an excuse here and I die.'
He felt it instinctively.
Hugo raised his speed.
In an instant the distance between him and Ethan opened.
"There, see. You can do it, and all that whining."
Ethan snorted a laugh and closed on him again.
In Ethan's hand a rough whip lay coiled.
"It'll hurt a good deal if I get your back."
Ethan's sinister voice went in through Hugo's ear and Hugo's face filled with terror.
The best moment for testing a man's limits is the moment he feels his life threatened.
Hugo's speed climbed further.
Now it was all Ethan could do to keep up.
But Ethan set his teeth too.
'I can't let it show here.'
He could not afford to look like he was struggling.
This was only training. Fall behind here and he could never plant that sense of authority in Hugo.
And right behind it was the regular subjugation, which men went out to with their lives on the table.
He had never been through one, but a subjugation would not differ greatly from war.
'Hugo is soft.'
Hugo was soft-hearted and tender by nature.
To control a man like that and make him grow, he needed a pillar to lean on in his own mind.
And the surest method was authority.
The hierarchy his bloodline gave him was not enough.
Which is why Ethan never once let fatigue show in front of Hugo.
Thud-thump, thud-thump.
The sound of his heart began to beat as though it would burst his eardrums.
Hugo, unlike a moment earlier, was breathing roughly too.
"Drop the pace!"
At Ethan's shout, Hugo's speed came down markedly.
"This pace for 30 seconds."
Hugo could not answer; he was too busy hauling breath.
"Not answering?"
At the bleak note in Ethan's voice, Hugo panicked and shouted.
"Understood."
"Right. 30 seconds is up!"
"I-it does not feel like it's up yet......"
"Are you talking back to me?"
"N-no!"
Hugo shut his mouth and started running again.
FWISH!
Then came a murderous sound of air being split.
Hugo raised his speed on instinct, and behind him dust rose with the crack of something lashing the ground.
The whip Ethan had swung.
'H-he's out of his mind.'
That had been swung in earnest. Take one square on and it would not end at mere body aches.
Terror filled Hugo's face. Watching him, Ethan smiled wickedly.
"Won't you run faster?"
Hugo's feet went faster again.
'G-goddamn it...... At first I thought I had come to heaven, and it was hell.'
Good food, and a warm place to sleep.
And a life without the servants who tormented him had been like a dream to Hugo.
The training was hard, but bearable, and his body grew lighter by the day, which kept him motivated.
But as the intensity of the training climbed and climbed, thoughts like that began to be erased.
This training in particular was genuinely hellish.
Whenever he tried to ration a little conditioning for what came after, Ethan noticed it like a ghost, as he had just now, and drove him to his limit.
Breath came up to the very top of his throat and a bitter pain stung at the back of it.
'I-I think I'm going to die.'
But Ethan, who was something like a god of death, was coming after him, swinging a whip at random.
He did not want to be caught by that fiend.
"Aaaagh!"
Hugo let out a scream and tore off running.
***
'Truly remarkable growth.'
Nade, who had been watching the two train in silence, felt a small admiration.
He had been half in doubt at first.
The Blante clan, a great sword clan, had training methods of its own.
It held its place at the summit by a systematic, high-intensity method that followed a long tradition.
But Ethan had stepped outside that tradition and begun training of his own devising.
Nade had been skeptical to begin with, and the more he watched, the more astonishing its effect proved.
'It is partly the original talent coming into flower, no doubt......'
Allowing for that, it was still astonishing growth.
Nade, who had reached the realm of Master, was feeling in his own body how systematic and how meticulous Ethan's method was.
There is no right answer in training.
Growth belongs, in the end, to talent.
A true powerhouse is born at the end of countless real engagements.
Not one of those statements was wrong.
But all of them were armchair theory, and nothing more.
No small number of apprentice knights ruined their bodies with wrong training, and there were warriors who gave up before ever meeting the wall called talent.
Soldiers who lost their lives in a single real engagement, let alone countless ones, were so plentiful you tripped over them.
In the end, the real thing required preparation to match.
In that sense, Ethan's method was astonishing indeed.
'Enough that I should like to invite him as a clan instructor.'
But that would never happen.
Nade let out a breath.
Ethan had instructor's talent to overflowing, and his talent as a fighter and his leadership of men did not lag behind it.
'This subjugation. I believe an anomaly is coming.'
He had that feeling.
***
Rumor came around.
That Ethan had recruited a servant as one of the members of his subjugation party.
And that even among the servants he had picked the scrawny, worthless one.
Inside the clan the sniping did not let up.
'Could it be that beating Young Master Karon was chance after all?'
'Surely not? There were so many witnesses.'
'Then has he no eye for people? To pick, of all things, an idiot like that.'
'Certainly looks that way......'
But Ethan paid no attention to the world's judgment.
To put it exactly, he had no capacity to spare for minding what other people thought.
'I think I'm going to die.'
The high-intensity training was agony for Ethan himself as well.
'What would normally take days to recover from, I recover from in one.'
Ethan's body held endless potential.
However roughly the hammer came down, the body did not break; it hardened.
Because he could feel that, Ethan did not stop.
And it was not only Ethan who was growing.
'He's keeping up well.'
Hugo too was growing at a tremendous rate, unwilling to fall behind.
The amount he ate after training was tremendous as well. Hugo polished off the food of 10 grown men without strain.
The daily lives of Ethan and Hugo were repetitive.
Train, eat, shit, sleep, train again.
There was nothing else.
'Time to start preparing for the real thing...... but before that.'
It was about time to make ready to gather men.
With only Hugo and Ethan, producing a result would be difficult.
'I don't need large numbers.'
Ethan's objective was fixed in any case.
'No use for the small stuff. One big thing is plenty.'
And the incidental gains that came with it.
"Hugo. Conditioning work stops as of now."
"......Is that true?"
Hugo looked at Ethan with eyes that could not easily credit it.
Meeting that insolent look, Ethan lifted a corner of his mouth.
"Why? You want more?"
"No."
Hugo shook his head hard.
'This clears the baseline.'
Hugo's scrawny body had got its health back. No, more than that; fine, close-packed muscle covered him from end to end.
And for all that, there was no fat on him. He was sleek.
"Now we prepare for the real thing."
At that, Hugo looked at Ethan with eyes that said the moment had come.
Hugo knew too.
Why Ethan had brought him in.
The regular subjugation.
The Blante clan's standing event, and its display of itself.
The season when a crouching lion could legitimately show its strength, and the chance for the heirs to show their capability and settle their standing.
All of it was gathered into this subjugation.
Ethan had chosen Hugo as his first card.
'I don't understand it.'
That he, a mere servant, should be brought into a subjugation.
Hugo turned it over himself and still could not understand.
But he did not doubt.
'I am growing.'
Short of being a fool, he could not have missed it.
Ethan's training was agony, but the results were definite.
He had always been confident with his body. But now it was as though he had become another person.
And all of this had happened over a short span.
'I have seen Young Master Morun.'
A man of sturdy build whom even a glance marked as suited to knighthood.
A man like that would be able to do the work if he inherited the clan.
'Even so, he does not reach Young Master Ethan.'
Ethan had a weight of presence about him that took hold of men.
Hugo, with his short schooling, could still feel that Ethan was superior to Morun.
'But however superior a man is, does it not mean nothing if he cannot prove it?'
Which is why Hugo understood it even less.
Why had he, of all people, been chosen?
Would it not have been a better choice to take knights or soldiers already finished to some degree and build the party out of them?
"What's that peculiar face for?"
Ethan spoke to Hugo, who had sunk into thought.
"Don't waste energy worrying."
"......Yes."
Feeling as though his thoughts had been read, Hugo bowed his head.
"You don't worry about a thing, just do as you're told. Then I'll show you something entertaining."
Ethan's expression was full of confidence.