"The last training, then."
Delam murmured it while looking at the forest before him.
He had received a good many trainings up to now.
How to slip covertly into a barbarian settlement.
How to detect enemies who were in hiding.
Even how to subdue an opponent quietly.
The same went for the tactical portion.
Methods for roughly estimating a total headcount from a mere glance at the enemy's formation and column length.
Methods for predicting the volume of supplies inside a warehouse from its size, the signs preceding enemy earthworks, and so on.
But the training period was a mere three days.
Which was why the teaching side had no great expectations either.
If a man could do everything after learning it once, would that be a man?
So this training amounted to an [introduction].
To say: the Special Duty Corps' missions include these things, so choose your specialty and press on and practice without end.
In fact each squad had its area of specialization, and once you entered that squad you took advanced instruction all over again from the beginning.
'So the records themselves don't especially mean anything, but......'
But even that had its degree.
Take, for instance, the search training for finding hidden enemies.
For others it took around twenty minutes to find them all.
And the time Delam took?
A mere fifteen seconds.
Practice be damned, it was a record to make eyes roll back.
And this hadn't been just the once, either.
Every training conducted over the three days, all of them, in first place.
And passed boasting overwhelming times at that.
Murmur, murmur.
That was precisely why the testing ground was swarming right now.
They were all other Special Duty men.
'Because in the Special Duty Corps a comrade's skill matters most.'
Normally the Special Duty Corps went out on missions in squads.
The average number in a squad was eight.
The fewer the number, the more each individual's ability mattered.
And if one comrade of inadequate ability got mixed in?
Naturally the rate of coming back alive dropped exponentially.
Whereas conversely, if a squadmate of outstanding skill was mixed in—
'The probability of survival rises by leaps.'
In that sense, Delam was an absolutely necessary comrade.
They'd heard, of course, that Delam wanted reconnaissance and covert entry.
But even love can be moved, so with a bit of good coaxing, a specialty was nothing!
Which was why they were all drooling.
Trying to drag him into their own squads.
'The stares sting.'
Click.
Delam snorted a laugh and opened the locket.
By now it was half a habit.
Opening the locket before something important, or before finishing such a thing off, had become for Delam something like a rite.
Above the locket his mother's portrait came into view.
Mother... my mother, whom I can no longer even remember.
Her warmth, her scent, her voice — all of it faint.
Like the many comrades who had died long ago.
"Hoooo."
Delam closed his eyes and breathed in.
As always the clean, cool fragrance wound deep into his lungs.
But there was something strange about it.
'Hm?'
Unlike usual, he could sense one more scent.
The thick smell, so to speak, of a forest covered in dawn dew.
The smell of autumn passing and winter crossed over, of heaped-up fallen leaves rotting down until only bare leaf veins are left to carry the trace.
It was the dense scent of earth.
"Trooper Delam, is there some problem?"
"No, sir, none."
Still, it was probably nothing.
Delam shut the locket and went into the forest.
The last of the three days' training.
Because it was the turn of the so-called [hide-and-seek].
The training method was simple.
Thirty minutes from now, the vice-commander would come looking for Delam.
Delam only had to hide well and not be found before then.
The passing time for the training was five minutes.
The forest being small to begin with, holding out beyond that was difficult.
'Let's have a look......'
Delam swept his eyes over the surroundings quickly.
An artificially made forest.
Naturally there was nowhere like a cave to hide in, and even if there had been, it would certainly be a trap, so going in was all the more forbidden.
'Then, well, nothing for it but to make one myself.'
The plan was simple.
The area was small but the grass grew thick, so he would dig shallowly into the ground and cover the top well with the grass he'd dug out.
An improvised hide, to put it simply.
It was a method that looked flimsy in the extreme.
But when the time given is short.
And when there is nowhere to hide, there is nothing to match it.
From hearing to smell, touch, and sight.
Because a forest was a place that made a person's senses confused.
'And this time I've got something to rely on, too.'
Do you remember Delam feeling the [wind] at the training camp?
From that point on, much about Delam had changed.
His body grew lighter and turned faster.
He became free, as though riding the wind.
And in the course of it Delam had realized something.
That a third energy — different from mana, neither aura nor divine power.
Lay sleeping inside his own body.
And a while ago another change had occurred.
It was during the fight with the barbarian warrior.
Before the very face of death the energy had at last stirred—
And Delam had loaded it into his spear and shot it out.
That was precisely the [Soundless Thrust].
It was tremendous progress.
He had precisely recognized an energy he'd only vaguely thought [might be there].
And gone one step further and become able to use it.
Delam gave the energy the name [wind].
'The name's a bit much... but I'm the only one who knows it anyway.'
He was aware it was a childish designation.
But there was nothing that fit quite so exactly either.
The [wind]'s ability was simple.
It let him handle wind in the literal sense.
At about the level of creating a light breeze or moving grains of sand piled on the ground.
An ability of not the slightest use in combat.
But apply it, and it changed 180 degrees.
The Soundless Thrust was one of those applications.
Open a wind road along a particular path through empty air, and shove the spear into it.
Then all resistance vanished from the spear blade.
The dead barbarian warrior demonstrated the result well enough.
'A tremendous power.'
The problem was he had no idea why he possessed it.
Had the God of Radiance quietly slipped it in while regressing him?
Well — having made him bust his ass all over again when he'd been about to rest......
If the god had a conscience, a gift on this order was the least he could do.
But however he looked at it, that seemed not to be it.
To begin with it wasn't even certain the God of Radiance had regressed him.
'No idea.'
At any rate, Delam had studied the [wind] from his sickbed.
And as a result had realized its range of application was boundless.
Reducing the sound of his body as he moved, for instance.
Or blocking off his own presence and scent.
Sound, presence, scent in particular.
These three accounted for nearly 80 percent of concealment.
So even if Delam's camouflage technique was somewhat crude, with the [wind] running, the vice-commander finding him would be no easy thing.
'Twenty minutes of hiding ought to do it?'
Thinking that, Delam took out a small shovel.
And presently, having settled on a spot, he drove the shovel in.
Thd, thd.
"Huh?"
The sensation coming through his hands was strange.
Because the earth dug well — far too well.
Ordinarily in undergrowth like this, the fine roots of the grass were driven deep into the earth, so digging was not easy.
Above all, since the work was making a hide, keeping damage to the surroundings minimal was crucial.
Which made it a task that could only take a long time.
And yet—
'This is exactly like... the earth is stepping aside for me on its own.'
But there was no way of that.
Delam dug hard, wondering whether this ground was unusual.
Down to roughly a depth that would submerge half his body.
Then he lay flat and camouflaged himself well with grass from the lower body up.
Having first, of course, disposed of the earth artfully.
Throw a green cloth over it on top of that and it was done.
Last of all he drew his breathing out long and closed his eyes.
Blocking off even variables that might arise.
But because of that, he did not know.
-......?
Waddle, waddle.
That a single mole was passing by beside him.
An excessively plump mole, at that.
***
The knights' private drill yard.
A knight ought by rights to stake his life on training.
But unexpectedly, the drill yard was empty.
The reason was one thing.
It was to keep secrets.
Normally a knight was of noble birth.
Naturally, each house had its own swordsmanship handed down.
And to train that openly in the drill yard?
That was the same as boasting up and down the neighborhood for someone to come break it.
Whoom—! Whoom—!
But there are always people who pay such things no mind.
Namely the woman knight, Rubian Vistache.
Rubian valued physical training more than anyone, and so she spent the greater part of her daily schedule in the drill yard like this.
Today was the same.
She had come out from dawn and taken up a training greatsword.
Then a thousand downward strokes.
Once this was over came cuts, then thrusts.
Rubian, training a long while, abruptly looked up at the sky.
Time seemed not to be passing; that was already several times today.
As it happened the sun was hung at its midpoint.
'It should be over by about now?'
The Special Duty Corps' training ran three days.
The final third day generally ended around midday.
Barring anything out of the ordinary, the last training should be wrapping up soon.
Wipe, wipe.
Rubian dabbed the sweat away thoroughly with a cloth.
She buried her nose in her arm and sniffed, but all that came was fragrance.
Satisfied, Rubian left the tent.
"Hmm-hmm~"
She was even humming, which was unlike her.
A few knight-order colleagues who saw her face from far off and started over went so far as to quietly back away again.
Because usually, when Rubian was abnormal like that — when you wondered whether she'd eaten something bad — an incident invariably broke out.
According to legend, [that day] had been like this too.
That is, Rubian's cheating ex-fiancé.
The day she stood the man on the dueling platform under the pretext of a spar and pounded him like mincing meat until he was half dead.
'A cute fellow.'
But Rubian, entirely ignorant of that fact, smiled.
The boy she had picked up on the battlefield.
He was young, but the more she recalled him the more she liked him.
Not as a man, of course.
To be that knightly without being of a great house!
It was purely respect as one who bore a sword.
"Hm? What is everyone doing?"
The Special Duty Corps' training site, arrived at thus.
And there was something strange about it.
The small forest at the edge of the encampment that was the final testing stage.
The Special Duty men were gathered thickly in front of it.
"Ah, Sir Knight."
"Is the boy's training not yet finished?"
"He, ah, he's completed everything and is in the middle of the last concealment test."
"Concealment training, is it... is that not the training where a trooper hides in the forest and another Special Duty man finds him?"
"That's correct."
It was training Rubian knew well.
Since each of the Special Duty Corps' trainings was assembled to be quite useful, knights too were encouraged to take the instruction where possible.
Being human weapons possessed of mana, of course, they took it at a difficulty of another dimension from what a common soldier received.
At any rate the basic framework was the same.
'The best record was ten minutes, was it?'
The forest was a bare hundred meters by a hundred.
Trees and undergrowth were packed in densely, but with an area that small, sweep it in earnest and there was nothing you couldn't find.
So why were they gathered like this?
"Surely not......?"
"Yes... we haven't found him yet."
"How long since he entered the forest?"
"Two hours......"
"Did you search yourself?"
"I did."
"And you, the Special Duty Corps' vice-commander, could not find him?"
"......"
"I am not sure whether I ought to be worrying about the future of the Special Duty Corps and the kingdom's army, or admiring that boy's remarkableness."
At the barbed remark the vice-commander's face reddened.
Now she understood why the Special Duty men were all gathered before the forest.
They'd searched and searched and couldn't find him, so he'd called them all in.
Simply telling him to come out would be easy, but his pride wouldn't allow it, so the plan was to sweep the place clean with sheer numbers.
"How would it be to look again with me for now?"
"Understood."
Rubian entered the forest together with the vice-commander.
And inwardly she marveled.
Others couldn't hold out for ten minutes, and here was two hours!
However she looked at it, an impossible figure.
The truth was, at that level, suspicion would have been reasonable.
[This fellow — hasn't he left the forest?] and so on.
But it didn't seem like something Delam would do.
Leading his comrades out of that death trap, sacrificing himself in their place.
Overcoming the barbarian warrior, volunteering for the Special Duty Corps!
The boy had always been fair and square.
'For now......'
Rubian drew up her mana.
Intermediate-grade mana seethed and her senses sharpened.
It was a little underhanded, but she had to hurry.
To celebrate Delam completing his training, Rubian had gone so far as to prepare a respectable meal in her own private tent.
And what was she to do if it went cold?
So she had to find him as fast as possible.
She would feed the boy her home cooking without fail.
And piping hot, at that!
Rubian's eyes took on a heat.