Free Web NovelChapter 12: Turns Out Training Arcs Aren’t Skippable in Real Life
Elsa let us stew one more second in our humiliation — me flat on my back, drained to the bone, Alice half-bared and sprawled across me with my hand still resting exactly where it had no business being — then she reached into her bag, pulled out a folded set of clothes, and tossed it onto Alice’s back without even looking.
"Get dressed before you catch your death, Saint. We’ve seen enough for one day."
Alice got up, her cheeks a shade of red I’d never seen on her, clutched the bundle to her chest, and went to change a little way off, out of the crystals’ light. A plain dark tunic, the same cloth as mine, nothing of a Saint’s gown about it. She came back tugging at the hem, unable to meet my eyes.
I took the chance to catch my breath, and out of reflex, I called up my status. Just for the pleasure of it.
[ Level 19 ]
Two levels at once, off a single monster. I stayed there a moment staring at the number, and despite the skull that was pounding like an anvil, something warm climbed into my chest. I’d killed a boss. A real one. And the world had answered by hauling me up two rungs in the same breath, like a pat on the back.
Two free points were still waiting for me, inherited from the fight. After what that boss had nearly done to me, the choice was no choice at all.
[ Mana: 42 -> 44 ]
"You planning to admire your little blue windows much longer?"
Elsa’s voice caught me mid-glow, and all the warmth drained out of me at once.
"Up. You too. Plank, both of you. On your elbows, and I want to see a board, not a sack of grain."
"Elsa, I can barely—"
"Now."
We obeyed. Alice beside me, me already shaking after three seconds, my stomach knotted tight.
"My mana’s bone dry," I got out between breaths. "I’ve got a headache splitting my skull in two, I—"
"And what’s that to me?"
She’d said it evenly, without a trace of contempt, and that was exactly what made it terrifying. She crouched down in front of us, at our level, and watched us tremble the way you watch water come to a boil.
"Pathetic," she said at last. "I was sold heroes, and I end up with a little couple groping each other at the bottom of a hole."
Beside me, barely moving her lips, almost without realizing it, Alice murmured:
"...a little couple—"
The word didn’t get to finish. The sword came down a hair from her face, buried in the stone with a sharp crack that jolted my whole body. Alice froze, the breath knocked out of her, the metal humming inches from her cheek.
"SILENCE."
Elsa almost never raised her voice. It was always so much worse when she did.
"You were ridiculous down there. Both of you. And I’m the fool who thought I’d made soldiers of you." She wrenched the blade out of the floor. "So here’s how it’s going to be. From now on, the training doesn’t stop. From the moment you wake to the moment you sleep, you train. No breaks, no flirting in the dark."
She let the silence settle.
"Is that clear?"
"Yes!" we shouted with one voice.
"Good."
She dug into her bag again and threw two pickaxes at our feet, where they clattered and bounced against the stone.
"Wonderful. Now go mine me those damned crystals."
A demon, I thought, staring at the tools. They handed me over to a demon. I picked up my pickaxe and dragged myself upright, head spinning.
The first swing rang all the way up to my shoulder.
The crystals didn’t come loose on their own. You had to tear them out of the rock one at a time, strike, and strike again, until the blue vein gave and fell away in a rain of glowing shards. My palms, already raw from the day, started to burn within ten minutes. And while we sweated, Elsa talked.
"You. Hero." Leaning against the wall, arms crossed, she tracked me with her gaze. "You charged head-down at creatures you knew nothing about, and you got your hand eaten to the bone because you decided to play clever before you’d understood what you were dealing with. Tell me what you learned."
"That you never attack what you haven’t read first," I spat between swings.
"Louder." freёweɓnovel.com
"That you never attack what you haven’t read first!"
"Good." A pause. "Now, the big one. You bet everything on a single attack — the last one — and you emptied yourself to the marrow to land it. No mana, no strength, flat on your back on the stone, unable to lift a finger. If the Saint hadn’t stepped in to heal you, you’d have died there. She saved you, not you." She fixed me with a look. "A hero never lets himself end up like that. Never. And tell me something — if another enemy had shown up at that exact moment, who’d have defended you?"
"No one," I admitted.
"No one. A reserve. You always keep a reserve. The fight you think is over is the one that kills you."
I clenched my teeth and swung harder. She was right about all of it, and that was unbearable.
[ +1 Strength ]
The window opened and closed without my stopping. That was new — earning muscle without killing a single thing, just by driving a pickaxe into the dark. Elsa had already taught me that on the road: her training raised the body, not the levels. The body answered to sweat. And it was answering.
Then she turned her head toward Alice, and the tone shifted.
"As for you, Saint. Let’s talk about your mistakes."
Alice lifted her head, her pickaxe held mid-air.
"You have a skill that protects you. A shield. And you let your companion put his life on the line for you, over and over, without ever saying a word about it." Elsa’s voice was low, cutting. "He threw himself under acid for you, he bled, he burned his back to the flesh protecting you from a danger you knew didn’t exist. And you let him."
My swing stopped halfway.
"And that’s the lesser of it. The worse one is the reverse. You’re the healer. You’re the breath that keeps him standing. A healer never throws herself onto the front line, do you hear me? Never. If he falls, you raise him. But if you fall, you both fall. By throwing yourself in front of him, you didn’t save one hero — you nearly doomed two."
Alice opened her mouth. Something hardened in her red eyes, and I saw her draw breath to answer, to defend herself—
Elsa was at the far end of the cave. And the next instant, she was in front of Alice. Not a step, not a sound, nothing but that impossible shift, too fast for my exhausted eyes to so much as follow, her face ten centimeters from Alice’s, her stare gone suddenly black with fury.
"I didn’t ask for an answer." Her voice had dropped a register, colder still. "Just understand your mistake."
Alice closed her mouth. Nodded, slowly. And Elsa walked off as if nothing had happened, went back to her wall, picked her list right back up.
She kept it up like that for hours. Naming our faults one after another, mine, Alice’s, down to the smallest — a foot set wrong, a glance held too long, a half-second of hesitation at one precise instant of the fight — as if, in a single trip down a dungeon, we’d managed to commit hundreds. And every time, you had to answer, own the mistake out loud, before she moved on to the next. My arms turned in empty circles, my voice wore thin, and she let nothing go.
It was in that monotonous din, my skull throbbing, my arm rising and falling on its own, that the thought caught up with me. She had a shield.
I watched Alice out of the corner of my eye, bent over her vein of crystal, her white palms already striped with red. All that time. The slime that dropped from the ceiling, my back eaten to the flesh, the whole night spent grinding my teeth while her Garden stitched me back together — and she’d had, coiled somewhere inside her, a protection that would have stopped all of it. She’d never been in any danger at all.
She could at least have told me, I thought, looking at her.
And almost in the same breath, the rest came on its own. But she’s like that. She always had been. Twisting things to her own advantage the moment they had anything to do with me — I’d given up fighting it years ago. A girl who let herself into an apartment that wasn’t hers at midnight and decided it was home. Who never asked. Who arranged the world to suit her, and smiled at you while she did it.
A smile rose to my lips despite the pickaxe, despite the headache, despite all of it. I looked away and struck the next crystal.
Time, for its part, began to dissolve.
I’d be incapable of saying how many days that hell went on. The cave had no sun, no night, nothing but the blue glow of the crystals that never changed. We mined until our arms quit, we collapsed wherever we stood, and before sleep had even done its work, Elsa’s boot would drag us out of the void. Sleep, by her reckoning, was a luxury heroes as mediocre as us hadn’t earned.
The moment our bodies truly gave out, Elsa came herself. Not a word. She’d tip our heads back and make us drink from her own flask, mouthful after mouthful, until we could stand again, then she’d let us go and walk off calling us good-for-nothings. I couldn’t reconcile the two. The demon who broke us, and the hand that held the back of our necks so we wouldn’t die of thirst.
There was a point where my mana had been at zero for hours, and my body simply refused to move. The floor pitched under me, a high whine drilled into my ears. And Elsa, behind me: "Again." I had nothing left. And yet the arm rose. And fell. And rose again. Somewhere deep down, the body had decided to keep going without waiting on permission from the empty well.
[ New Skill Acquired ]
> [ Second Wind - Lv. 1 ] (passive) — The body keeps moving once the mana has run dry. Pushes back exhaustion and dulls the backlash, long enough to hold on a little more.
I didn’t even stop to read it through. It was exactly what I’d been missing. Where Override wrung an instant out of the flesh, this was lower, deeper: the ability to function on empty, when everything else had abandoned me.
[ Skill Evolution ]
[ Override - Lv. 1 ] -> [ Override - Lv. 2 ] (active)
[ +1 Strength ]
[ +1 Vitality ]
The windows fell like that, spaced out, doled by the suffering. One evening — or what passed for one — another came to join them, born of nothing but days spent sleeping three hours and staying upright regardless.
[ New Skill Acquired ]
> [ Trained Body - Lv. 1 ] (passive) — A body broken in to sustained effort. Lowers fatigue and hardens the frame’s resilience.
Alice held on too. More than I’d have believed. Her Saint’s hands, made for blessing and healing, blistered and split, and she gritted her teeth without complaining once for herself.
Once for herself, yes. Because for me, it was another matter. The day I went down for good, forehead against the stone, unable to get up no matter how many Second Winds I had in me, she was the one who cracked.
"That’s enough!" She’d sprung up, voice slicing, planted between Elsa and me. "Can’t you see he can’t go on? Look at him! You’re going to kill him, is that what you want?"
She’d never raised her voice for her own bleeding hands. But let anything touch me, and all her restraint shattered.
Elsa considered her for a long moment, impassive. "You’re complaining, Saint." And without another word, she scooped up an armful of raw crystals and loaded it onto Alice’s back until she buckled under the weight. "You’ll mine with that until you understand that your opinion doesn’t interest me."
Alice said nothing. She took up her pickaxe again, her back bent under the load, and — I saw it — she set herself right beside me, close enough that each time Elsa turned away, her hand could brush mine and pour a second of Garden of Salvation into it. Quietly. For me, again.
And that was when I noticed the strangest thing in the whole ordeal. When we truly hit bottom, Elsa unfailingly found a reason to look away. To go inspect some far wall. To turn her back just long enough. And in those seconds, Alice would lay her hands over mine, murmur her spell, and the flesh would close, and a little of the exhaustion would slide off my mind with it. I ended up certain she was doing it on purpose. That she was granting us that stolen reprieve while refusing to look like she’d granted anything at all.
A demon, I thought once more, my breath short. Then, without meaning to, the thought came out of my mouth: "A demon. A goddamn demon."
Elsa, three meters off, heard me. She came over slowly, crouched down to my level, and there was nothing hostile in her face.
"No," she said gently. "Unfortunately for you, I’m only human. The real demons, you’ll meet soon enough, out there in the west. And the day you see them, you’ll thank me for having been this merciful." She straightened. "So shut up, and mine."
I mined.
[ +1 Strength ]
[ +1 Vitality ]
Somewhere in that fog of pain and crystal dust, two last windows slid in front of my eyes, almost like a reward for refusing to die.
[ Skill Evolution ]
[ Resolve - Lv. 2 ] -> [ Resolve - Lv. 3 ] (passive)
[ Skill Evolution ]
[ Override - Lv. 2 ] -> [ Override - Lv. 3 ] (active)
And then, one day, it was over. Elsa swept the cave with her gaze, gave a single nod, opened her magic bag, and swallowed up the mountain of crystals we’d torn out of the rock.
"That’ll do. We’ve got what we need."
For one second, I thought she was going to let us breathe.
"We head for the nearest town," she announced, climbing the slope toward the light. "But we leave the cart."
I stopped dead. "We... leave it?"
"You’re still far too weak to have earned the right to ride." She shot me that little smile I’d learned to dread. "You’ll go on foot. And you’ll run."
So we ran.
Daylight hit me like a slap when we came out of the mine, and open air, after days underground, felt almost unreal. But I didn’t get the chance to enjoy it. Elsa set the pace, and the pace forgave nothing. We ran along the packed-earth road under the sun until my lungs were on fire, and every time I slowed, she was there at my back, reminding me that death, for its part, never slowed down to wait for me.
[ +1 Agility ]
The body answered. That was the maddening part. A week earlier, that run would have killed me outright. Now I held. I was coughing up my lungs, my legs were screaming, but I held, and each stride seemed to dig a little deeper into what I could endure.
[ +1 Agility ]
[ Skill Evolution ]
[ Trained Body - Lv. 1 ] -> [ Trained Body - Lv. 2 ] (passive)
Between two hills, I thought back to the hundreds of Chapters I’d written, up there, in another life, bolted to a chair. My heroes trained in a single sentence. Three months later, he had become the strongest. One line, a jump through time, and there it was — power delivered to your door. I’d never known, never wanted to know, what filled the white space between two paragraphs. Now I knew. It was this, bleeding hands and a woman screaming at your back to keep you from going down. And the worst part was that it worked.
Once, on a climb harder than the rest, I saw Alice falter beside me, her breath ragged, about to drop a knee to the ground. Without thinking, I caught her by the arm and pulled her up, and she steadied herself against me, and we took the slope like that, each carrying the other. We said nothing — we had no breath left for it. But at one point, out of the corner of my eye, I saw she was smiling — a real one, this time, tired and fierce at once — and I understood we were getting through it. Together.
We finally stopped on a ridge, doubled over, and I used the pause to take stock of what that hell had made of me.
[ STATUS ]
Name: Kuro Shiragi
Race: Human
Class: Hero of the Infinite
Level: 19
[ Stats ] ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
Strength: 42 | Vitality: 43 | Agility: 53 | Mana: 44 | Intelligence: 44 | Perception: 36
[ Skills ]
[ Divine Blessing - Lv. 1 ] (passive) | [ Infinite Evolution - Lv. MAX ] (passive) | [ Eye of Infinity - Lv. 2 ] (active) | [ Drowned Widow’s Dance - Lv. 3 ] (active) | [ Override - Lv. 3 ] (active) | [ Resolve - Lv. 3 ] (passive) | [ Dash - Lv. 1 ] (active) | [ Second Wind - Lv. 1 ] (passive) | [ Trained Body - Lv. 2 ] (passive)
I read the lines twice over. Everything had climbed, everywhere, and even at the end of my rope, caked in dust and dried sweat, a part of me already wanted to go again. Alice was right, I thought. It’s almost frightening how badly it makes you want to do it again.
It was late in the day, with the sun starting to redden, that the road crested one last hill and the town came into view below.
It had none of the capital’s grandeur. It was smaller, humbler, tucked into the hollow of a valley — but it was alive. Russet-tiled roofs tumbling down to a low wall, chimneys that gave off no smoke, and rune-lanterns winking on one by one in the dusk, a soft, muffled blue. Lower down, on a square, a little tram slid along on no rails, carried by the same crackling halo as the train I’d glimpsed from the palace balcony weeks earlier. Signs drifted above the shopfronts, and even from up here the wind carried the smell of warm bread and cold metal. After the dark of the mine and the empty road, that flood of color caught me by the throat without warning.
Elsa stopped beside us, took in the town for a moment, then said, almost offhand:
"Right. You survived." She rolled her shoulders. "For that, you’ve earned a few days’ rest. A real bed, a real meal, enough to get back on your feet before what comes next."
I thought I’d misheard. "...Rest? You know that word?"
"Make the most of it, hero." The corner of her mouth lifted. "Because it’s the last time in a good while I’ll hear you complain about it."
And as we started down toward the blue lights of the town, Alice slipped her hand into mine, the way she always did, and for the first time in days, I let my shoulders drop.
