"Stand over there."
The place the senior instructor brought him to was a drill yard.
A reasonably fine one, built for the instructors alone.
Delam went to the spot indicated and stood.
But he didn't merely stand there blankly.
He moved his feet and kicked aside the pebbles nearby.
Elements that would get in the way of training.
Instructors weren't anybody impressive, for all that.
They were simply a few veterans picked out of the soldiery and trained up.
Which meant they were not fundamentally different from ordinary soldiers, and like ordinary soldiers they hated doing individual training.
Which was why the drill yard was in this state.
A strange light entered the senior instructor's eyes.
Checking the ground was the first thing anyone ought to do before training.
But wasn't the boy a conscript?
There was no way he'd ever done such a thing before.
"Do you know why I called you out separately?"
"I do not, sir."
"From this point I am going to teach you spearmanship."
"Thank you, sir."
The senior instructor looked at Delam again.
Normally, in a situation like this, all sorts of remarks came out.
Why are you teaching me, what should I do, and so on.
But the boy had none of that whatsoever.
No fluster, no tension; he answered exactly what was asked and nothing more.
The attitude a soldier was required to have.
As a superior, he couldn't help being satisfied.
"Good! For five days from today you will learn spearmanship from me. It is simple. I demonstrate, you copy."
"Yes, sir."
"The spear art's name is the Imperial Spear, Twelve Forms. It is not a high-grade art, but for a soldier to be taught it he must earn fourth-grade merit. It is an art a trainee could never learn, so take it as an honor and concentrate."
"I will bear that in mind, sir."
The lesson began that way.
The senior instructor demonstrated first, and Delam copied.
The senior instructor watched Delam with a hawk's eye.
The word [senior] was attached, but an instructor was an instructor.
Which meant that, like every instructor Delam had seen this past week, if he got it wrong the club came out before the words did.
Hit a man and he'll manage it.
That was the training camp's — and the instructors' — educational philosophy.
"......"
"Hah! Haaah!"
The problem was that there was going to be no occasion for it.
The Imperial Spear, composed of twelve forms in total.
Compared to the secret spear arts of the nobility it was lacking, true.
But that didn't mean it had been thrown together carelessly.
It was the result of officers of knight rank, men who had mastered mana, gathering to study how they might pack the whole essence of spearmanship into it.
In short, it meant learning the thing in a day or two was impossible.
Which was why the senior instructor had said five days.
But Delam was another matter.
A single demonstration.
And with that alone he had acquired it perfectly.
The first six forms he could understand.
They were the basics, teaching how to thrust and how to strike.
But the latter six forms were not.
Defense, evasion, and parrying and counterattack.
To pull off feats like that with a long spear shaft required an understanding of each individual form as a matter of course... and he had it.
'Tremendous talent!'
The senior instructor found himself breaking into a cold sweat.
The boy was a mere conscript.
Even so, from the moment the knight Obern had ordered him to teach the boy separately, he'd anticipated the fellow would be something out of the ordinary.
But surely this was going too far!
Barely thirty minutes since the lesson began.
The Imperial Spear, Twelve Forms, which had moved a little awkwardly at first.
Now linked together fluidly and tore the empty air apart.
'Is such a thing truly possible?'
He hadn't become a knight, but the senior instructor was a mana user as well.
And in the years it had taken him to reach middle age he had taught a great many trainees.
In the course of it he had seen no end of geniuses.
But not one of them had ever managed this.
A genius among geniuses!
The senior instructor had at last come to know the [real thing].
"Stop! Stop for a moment."
"Yes, sir."
"Y-you follow it better than I expected. In that case, do you know this? That the Imperial Spear, Twelve Forms, is in fact a single linked sequence from the first form to the twelfth."
"Ah, I did get a vague sense of that."
"...Then do it once."
Delam took up the spear again and unfolded the Imperial Spear, Twelve Forms.
Unlike before, it did not break off in pieces.
From the first form to the twelfth, top to bottom, it wound and flowed like water, connecting smoothly and becoming a single technique.
The very essence of the Imperial Spear, Twelve Forms!
And that was when it happened.
Around the moment he unfolded the seventh form, the consecutive thrust—
All at once a chilling sound rang out across the drill yard.
SWHAAACK!
"Wh-what was that!"
The senior instructor cried out in shock.
It had unmistakably burst from the tip of Delam's spear.
And it wasn't only the sound that shocked him.
Without realizing it, the senior instructor had retreated a step.
An instinctive backward step.
Because for an instant he'd felt as if his heart had been run through.
"How did you just do that?"
"Uh......"
The senior instructor asked urgently.
But Delam, always so clear-cut, hesitated for some reason.
His face said, am I allowed to say this...
"It's, ah, it's an insane thing to say, but may I?"
"You may."
"The wind... told me."
"The wind? Ha, ha."
The senior instructor let out a dry laugh.
He'd lost count of how many times he'd been shocked today.
Delam asked, curious.
"Sir, do you happen to know what it was?"
"No. Only that every genius I've known does the same thing. They pull off some difficult technique easily and then spout nonsense exactly like that."
"That the wind told them?"
"As if! The nonsense you just spouted stands alone even among them."
"My apologies."
"Let us end today's training here. Go and rest......"
The senior instructor turned away as if he'd said all there was to say.
For all the crispness of the motion, his retreating back somehow looked smaller.
"Ah, sir."
"What is it?"
"Might I stay and practice here a while longer before I go back? Something's on the edge of coming to me."
"...Do as you like."
"Thank you, sir."
Delam grinned and raised the spear.
Like a child who had found something interesting.
After that, the sound of ripping air rang through the drill yard all day.
Skipping lunch, right up until dusk came down.
***
'Insane! What was that?'
When he'd unfolded the thrust among the Imperial Spear's twelve forms.
The instructor had been shocked, but the truth was the most shocked party was Delam.
Before regressing, there had been many knights who swung a sword better than Delam.
There had been many knights who handled a spear more skillfully than Delam.
The same went for blunt weapons, for strikes, for bows, for shields, for whips.
But handling every one of those weapons at a master's level?
That was one man alone in the whole Empire — no, the whole continent.
Which was to say, Delam.
Which was why people called Delam this.
Lord of every weapon... [Weapon Master]!
Naturally, the spear was no exception.
Meaning he could unfold something like the Imperial Spear, Twelve Forms with his eyes shut.
The slight fumbling at the start was simply from how long it had been.
And even that stuck to his fingertips neatly after a few swings.
'But what in the hell was that......'
The thrust he'd made earlier, though, was different.
He hadn't loaded it with mana; he had merely unfolded the Imperial Spear, Twelve Forms — a low-grade spear art — going through the motions for form's sake.
And yet the power packed into the spear was beyond imagination.
For a moment it shot out fast enough to be lost from sight.
'No, it wasn't simply fast.'
More than that, it was too light — that was the way to put it.
There was no resistance at his fingertips at all, as though friction had gone to zero.
He hadn't said the wind told him for nothing.
'Tremendous!'
Delam clicked his tongue inwardly.
Load mana into this on top of that, and who could dodge it?
Strong and fast both — a killing blow in the truest sense.
But the most astonishing part lay elsewhere.
Namely, that it was a [phenomenon he did not know].
As Supreme Commander of the Empire, and as the Weapon Master.
Delam had studied every weapon art there was and reached mastery in all of them.
And yet he had never heard or seen the faintest word of a technique like this.
Utterly unknown power, in other words.
Those who reached the heights understood one thing.
That the unknown is precisely fear.
Which was why knights did not throw around their [secret arts].
They used them only when certain they could kill the opponent.
Because a thing that is known can be prepared for.
And a thing that can be prepared for is no longer frightening.
'But this... how do I do it?'
That was where the problem lay.
He had used it himself, and he couldn't reproduce it.
So from here he intended to find out.
Repetition, and inquiry.
That was one of the things Delam did best.
SHK-SHK-SHIK!
FA-FA-FA-FAT!
Alone in the drill yard, Delam swung his spear.
Not merely the twelve forms — every spear art he knew.
From a mercenary's to a great house's, they unspooled like thread off a reel.
Thrust, cut, block, evade.
Mighty, covert, uncanny, and bewildering.
It took no time at all for the wide drill yard to be blanketed in the shadows of the spear.
His mana was still insufficient, but the knowledge and experience remained intact.
Thanks to which he could put on a spectacle that made the skin prickle.
The purpose was one thing.
To reproduce the thrust he had shown a moment ago!
'Huh?'
How much time passed like that?
Delam abruptly felt his body blow wide open.
A single strand of wind rose and whirled him from crown to sole.
And in doing so it opened everything that had been blocked.
At the same time he felt an infinite freedom.
If a human could fly the sky like a bird, would it feel like this?
-This way.
Nor was that the end of the strange events.
Someone's whisper reached him.
It was not a voice with substance.
Nor the sort that rings directly in the skull, like a transmission spell.
It was more an inner voice.
As though he were connected to some existence deep inside his own body.
That existence was speaking.
Saying: here is where the tip of your spear must go.
Delam gladly answered its guidance.
SWHAAACK.
Crisp!
The spear pierced the practice dummy with tremendous ease.
He had succeeded in reproducing it.
But the sound that followed was rather disappointing.
A mere crisp, and that was it?
"...That's insane."
And yet Delam murmured it while looking at the dummy.
The dummy had been fitted with an iron helmet, like a real enemy.
And its head had vanished without a sound.