Rough but regular breathing.
Someone was training at the Frost Proving Ground.
The Frost Proving Ground was a place for training and conditioning, available for use at any time.
Soldiers who wanted to train on their own initiative could use the Frost Proving Ground at any hour.
But not once.
Not once had there been a soldier who came out and trained before Kai.
Carrying his curiosity with him, Kai stepped inside the Frost Proving Ground.
And.
HUFF! HUFF! HUFF!
He was able to see Adrian doing physical conditioning.
Adrian's upper body, his shirt cast off.
Solid muscle had taken up residence there at some point.
Perhaps that was why.
The dawn chill, which did not disgrace the word bitter.
And yet it was not overcoming Adrian's heat.
'Today as well...'
It was already the tenth day.
Naturally Kai had heard the rumours too.
The rumour that Adrian had changed.
The soldiers of the county and even the maids of the Lord's castle spoke of nothing but Adrian, so it was impossible not to know.
And since Adrian all but lived at the Frost Proving Ground, they crossed paths every day.
But Kai had not paid it much mind.
He had simply thought it would be brief regardless.
When one day passed, he did not pay it mind.
When two days passed, he did not pay it mind.
By the time three days had passed, he thought Adrian would give up soon.
Four days passed and a slight stirring rose in him.
Only after five and six days did he briefly think, could it be...?
Past seven, when it became eight, he acknowledged there was a mind here that meant to change.
But he thought that was all.
When it became nine days, he deliberately shut his attention off.
And today, the tenth day.
HUFF! HUFF! HUFF!
Adrian was, without fail, conditioning his body at the Frost Proving Ground.
At this point, Kai had no choice but to change his thinking.
Of course ten days is not such a long time.
It was nowhere near long enough to judge that a person had changed.
But physical conditioning like that was not something anyone could do.
Bluntly put, never mind ten days — a single day is punishing.
Kai too was not idle about physical conditioning.
But he had no confidence he could go that far.
Because that was conditioning that soared far past the limits a human body possesses.
Granted, there was that uncanny degree of recovery.
He wondered how Adrian could possibly have recovery like that, but... even so.
That merely restores the body.
Driving the muscle to its limit?
In the end, that is 'will and mental fortitude.'
Without will and mental fortitude as the foundation, having a troll's recovery would mean nothing at all.
And outstanding recovery means the damage is correspondingly light.
It means that without a considerably strong stimulus you cannot even condition yourself.
Which is why that is, in the most literal sense, physical conditioning that is impossible unless the mind rules the body.
Conditioning possible only by surpassing the body's limits through mental fortitude alone.
But that is easy to say and enormously hard to do.
Mental fortitude with no outer shell of stamina behind it.
Because that amounts to less than a single sheet of paper.
And Adrian had kept up conditioning like that for ten days.
With a wastrel's body, he had done conditioning that surpassed his limits every single day for ten days.
The soldiers of the county castle no longer thought of Adrian as the Count's wastrel.
The maids of the Lord's castle no longer thought of Adrian as the Count's wastrel either.
At present, only the 'residents' of the county, who did not know of this change, still thought of Adrian as the Count's wastrel.
Which meant, in other words—
That Kai too was accepting it.
That Adrian had changed.
That this was not simply a temporary effort.
And yet, the look in Kai's eyes as they turned toward Adrian.
"......"
The 'distrust and suspicion' held inside them still would not be shaken off.
***
◆Y-you are out of your mind, plain and simple!!!!
A message full of fuss surfaced before my eyes.
When I flung the barbell I was holding to the floor, an enormous tremor went up with a THUD!
For a moment the soldiers' attention concentrated on me.
But I had no presence of mind to care about that.
The ruptured muscle would not let me so much as twitch a finger; by now even breathing was punishing.
My body dropped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
◆You may use the skill 'Regeneration [C+]' to regenerate the ruptured muscle.
◆Required nutrient - Protein.
◆Consume protein to regenerate the ruptured muscle?
The instant I thought acceptance, squelch, squelch-squelch!
The muscles of my whole body churned and began regenerating the ruptured fibres.
Muscles reassembling denser and more tightly packed than before.
"Krrgh...!"
It genuinely felt as though my whole body were tearing apart.
Something about the way it worked meant the intensity of the exercise increased exponentially as the days went on.
Naturally, since the stronger the muscle fibre grew the greater the intensity needed to damage it — but the pain that came with it increased exponentially as well.
This time I seemed to have properly wrecked myself, because the regeneration would not readily take.
It seemed damage had been dealt that exceeded the grade of my regeneration ability.
Before long, it looked as though I would need to hunt Ice Trolls and secure additional genetic factors.
I lay sprawled on the floor and waited for my body to regenerate.
And then, all at once.
The sight of Kai instructing the soldiers' training at one side of the proving ground came into view.
Kai had always been like that.
He gave the county's soldiers their instruction and training 'himself.'
At first I found it strange too.
Why would a noble knight do work like that?
But going through my allied forces days I came to understand.
That it was originally a knight's duty.
A knight is a title and a post.
The supreme military authority was the Lord, but in a state of war a knight becomes operations commander and directs most military operations.
Therefore 'Head Knight' means supreme military commander.
Directing operations and training the soldiers are likewise his role.
But as men called commanders generally are, they tend to be heavy in the seat.
Things like training the soldiers?
They dump it on the so-called underlings.
But Kai was not like that.
To my memory, Kai never once did.
He did not pass off his own responsibility and duty.
A man thoroughgoing in the 'knighthood' of fulfilling the responsibility he had taken on.
Though he fell to become the Legion Commander of Frost, the Kai of his human days was a man you could call the model of a knight.
Look at him even now.
Kai was wearing armour made of 'metal.'
He's a knight, so of course he'd wear metal armour, you say?
Not a chance.
The weight of iron armour is around 40kg.
In the case of full plate armour, double that, around 80kg.
There is no lunatic who walks around in that ordinarily.
Above all, this is the northern Snowy Mountain.
Do you know what happens if you wear metal armour in an environment where brutal cold continues through every season of the year?
Your skin tears.
That is not simply a figure of speech.
Metal exposed to cold absorbs the chill quickly, and when it touches bare flesh the skin freezes rapidly and tears.
Which is why the soldiers of the county castle wear 'leather armour.'
Wearing metal armour in this cold is an act of suicide.
And the reason Kai can be perfectly fine even so is—
'He's protecting his body with Aura.'
And all day long, at that.
'That lunatic.'
There really was no other word for him but lunatic.
Even the reasons he goes that far were a sight, and what were they again?
First, because that is what it is to be a 'knight,' apparently.
That one must be fully prepared to fight at any time and any place.
And the second was in the name of training.
'He said he could keep training Aura steadily even in ordinary times.'
Kai did not take the armour off even at mealtimes.
What's more, his mindset is that rest is a form of training too.
In that sense Kai was a man for whom every single moment, and past that his very existence, was training and conditioning.
The most insane man I saw across the whole of my previous life.
Enough to make you think you have to be that insane to make yourself a Lich.
They say genius cannot beat the one who works, the one who works cannot beat the one who enjoys, and the one who enjoys cannot beat the one who is insane.
Kai was a genius and an insane man at once.
And to kill a Kai like that?
I cannot stand still either.
I have to go insane along with him.
◆Muscle fibre tissue has left human limits behind!
◆Muscle fibre is newly reassembled!
◆Strength stat rises by +4!!
Shoving an entrail lunch box into my mouth, I added still more weight to the barbell.
***
After finishing the soldiers' basic military drills.
The training that followed was 'physical conditioning.'
It was training in which not only the soldiers but Kai himself took part.
Even a knight who handles Aura must not be idle about physical conditioning.
Because the efficiency of Aura changes according to the state of the body that forms its base.
For a knight the body is the base and the foundation.
However outstanding the swordsmanship and however genius the talent, without a solid foundation to support it, it is useless.
With talent alone one amounts to no more than second-rate.
Kai carried out physical conditioning together with the soldiers.
Barring some particular reason, that was Kai's daily routine and his training.
"All of you. Match your breathing and run."
With Kai at the head, the soldiers began running as one.
At first they all kept up well.
But gradually there appeared those who could not keep pace.
Even so, Kai did not press them.
Even among the same soldiers, stamina differs from man to man.
When the stamina each possesses differs, forcing identical training on them is not right.
Physical conditioning is not a competition.
You drive yourself to the limit of what you personally can do, and keep doing it steadily every day, and that is all.
Grasping your own limit in that process, and building the grit and persistence to surpass that limit, is what real training and conditioning are.
Mental fortitude with no outer shell of stamina behind it is less than a sheet of paper, but stamina with its mental fortitude collapsed is likewise nothing but a hollow shell.
"Haah...! Haah...!"
"I-I can't do any more...!"
After about an hour, soldiers who gave up began to appear.
By around two hours, most of the soldiers were exhausted and had collapsed.
What remained now were only the centurion ranks and the instructors.
But they too did not get past three hours.
There were a few who passed three hours as well, but there was no great difference.
Only then did Kai raise his pace and his speed further.
Now it was time to test Kai's own limits.
"Whoa...!"
"He really is incredible..."
When he raised his speed, gasps burst out among the soldiers.
Naturally, since he was raising his speed further after running for some three hours alongside them.
Which is why, at a glance—
It was admiration directed at Kai.
But Kai could tell.
That those gasps and that admiration were not directed at him.
Kai's head turned slowly backward.
The view as he looked back.
Someone was following close on Kai's heels.
"HUFF! HUFF! HUFF!"
......It was Adrian.