4
Isaac had never been a fan of spring.
All it meant was that the weather got a little nicer and the temperature went up. The air grew dusty and nasty, and it was a glaringly half-assed season; not summer, but not winter, either.
He also didn’t really know why the town had started to get strangely giddy. Well, in terms of accounting periods or school, it was when the new school year began, and he understood why that would make for a restless atmosphere. Still, it wasn’t as if it held any advantages for Isaac; if he’d had to say, it was solidly in the “pain in the butt” category.
When he was a kid, and throughout his school years, spring had been nothing more than an irritation, a season in which he fought unnecessary fights. Once he’d started earning paychecks, it had gotten a little better, but that was because he was now free to distance himself from the giddy people.
In any case, Isaac had never been a fan of spring.
Although, spring here seemed a bit different from what he was used to.
In this world, where it got colder than it did back in Japan, winter had been pretty harsh. Of course, neither the unending snow nor the frozen woods had posed any obstacle for Isaac and the other Adventurers, but this hadn’t been true for the People of the Earth.
In terms of the old Japan, Maihama, where Isaac had been staying on and off since February, was located in Chiba. That meant that, although it hadn’t been buried under heavy snows, it had been covered in a blanket of the stuff for a full two months, and he’d heard there had been over forty centimeters of ice on the ponds.
For people without the Adventurers’ equipment, it had been a season where activity was limited.
Eastal, the League of Free Cities, which covered the eastern part of Yamato, wasn’t a poor organization. In addition, at this point, it was the recipient of various blessings from new Adventurer technology. However, as might be expected, compared with what it was in spring or autumn, the yields of all sorts of things fell in winter. It wasn’t as bad as the snow country, but even in Maihama, meals tended to deteriorate into plain fare built around preserved food. Spring wasn’t just the dusty, half-assed season known as “spring”; it was the season that meant winter was over.
As a Japanese person who’d been able to wander around in a down jacket, then duck into a roadside family restaurant and eat whatever he wanted when he got hungry, Isaac felt a little bad: Sorry, people. Go as nuts as you want.
As Isaac thought about useless things like that, he was leaning against the trunk of a great tree on top of a hill, out in the April wind, taking a break.
This was the suburbs, about thirty minutes’ run from the city of Maihama.
Strictly speaking, this area wasn’t within Maihama city limits, but the villages near the city were so close their borders almost touched, and pastoral fields spread around them.
In response to a request, not from the Round Table Council, but from Shiroe, Isaac, and the Knights of the Black Sword had come here to train the Glass Greaves, the chivalric order attached to the duchy of Maihama.
However, his guild members hadn’t let Isaac participate in actually training the knights—they’d told him it would set a bad example—so he had too much time on his hands. That said, he couldn’t just ditch the whole thing, and so here he was, gazing down at the military drills from the top of the hill and biting back yawns.
The hill was circular, with a radius of one kilometer or so, and there was a mixed forest about the size of a small schoolyard in its slightly elevated center. This forest spread behind Isaac’s back. It wasn’t so thick it obstructed the view, and even if there were animals of some sort in it, they would be only wild dogs or foxes or weasels.
The slope Isaac surveyed was thickly covered with spring grass, its green as bright as if it had been washed, and a company was racing up it. It was a group of Glass Greaves led by three members of Isaac’s Knights of the Black Sword. There were probably about forty of them in all.
Even if this was a military drill, working with large groups was inefficient.
They’d split the knights into five groups, and about three companies were around this hill. As far as he knew, they were running around and around the hill’s base and practicing charging, with a grove of trees as their partner. Isaac hadn’t been born and raised in Theldesia, and he certainly wasn’t a knight, so he had no idea; when they’d told him that this was a knights’ drill, all he’d done was think, Huh. Is that right?
Young spring grass was surprisingly succulent.
As the brigade’s name—the Glass Greaves—indicated, the knights wore metal armor supplied to them by the Cowen dukedom, which meant they were pretty heavy. That lot was running up the green, grassy slope toward him, spurred on by their instructors. Many of them got tripped up by the wet grass under their feet and fell clumsily. By the time they were thirty minutes into the drill, that neatly maintained silver armor had been smeared with grass and mud.
Still, the Glass Greaves jumped back up without complaint, then launched themselves into ferocious sprints, heading back to their places in the ranks.
The three Adventurers running at the head of the pack—Kouboumaru, Efuri, and Lee Jent—were bellowing at them: “C’mon, c’mon! Whaddaya call those wussy arm swings?!” “Let’s hear some noise, scumbags!”
Uptight losers, Isaac thought, but what he didn’t know was that he’d been taken off the training because his hot-blooded, sports-oriented, Spartan coaching had been too much for the People of the Earth to handle, and even his subordinates had been massively turned off by it.
While he sat there in the bright, clear sunlight, watching the scene as if it were somebody else’s problem, all the things he was thinking were fairly rude: Man, those idiots are hardheads. Do they actually have brains in there? Nah, guess not; all our members are dumb. Seriously, there’s just no helping these guys. That said, even as he got disgusted with them, he was smiling a little. Isaac didn’t hate these idiots. He was actually really fond of them. If he’d hated them, there was no way he would have been the leader of a messy guild like this one, even for a second.
“Stop, stop!”
“Thirty-minute break!”
“Go rest, you gutless, empty-headed pansies!”
The instructors were yelling from about a hundred meters away. No matter what they said, it was blindingly obvious they were enjoying themselves. The three of them glanced at Isaac, whispered among themselves for a little, then ducked their heads, nodding to him. Apparently, they had nothing that needed to be reported. They’d been told to conduct the training any way they wanted, so Isaac just waved back at them.
He thought they’d probably do a good job.
Actually, what had surprised him were the People of the Earth.
The dukedom’s chivalric order, the Glass Greaves, were the House of Cowen’s knights’ brigade, and they guarded Maihama. Since the brigade belonged to the House of Cowen, the de facto leader of Eastal, it was made up of People of the Earth elites. That was what Isaac had been told beforehand.
That was by People of the Earth standards, though. The group’s levels were only around 25. He’d thought there was no way they’d be tough. Well, he still thought that: They weren’t strong.
And yet they weren’t as weak as he’d thought they’d be, either.
The Glass Greaves had guts.
Just now, they’d managed a two-hour run in that armor.
Of course, to a level-90 Adventurer, that would have been no more than a morning stroll. Actually, in a world where the concept of “levels” existed, it might not have been anything that praiseworthy. However, even as the group got all sweaty and muddy and was yelled at by Isaac and the others, who were outsiders, and even though the training was harder than anything they’d done before, no one complained. He was forced to admit they were really putting their hearts into it.
Once back at their lodgings, out of the Glass Greaves’ hearing, Isaac’s companions had praised them, too. It probably meant that, in the two months since they’d begun this drill, the Knights of the Black Sword and the Glass Greaves had started to understand each other.
Out of the five groups, one of the remaining two was on leave in the city, and the last one was currently fighting monsters in the Dovature Badlands. They’d broken up into small teams and were hunting high-level monsters under the leadership of the Knights of the Black Sword. This was what was known as “power leveling.”
The growth speed of People of the Earth was far lower than that of Adventurers. According to reports, it was only about one-fifth as fast. Even with that disadvantage, however, if they defeated monsters more than twenty levels above them in rapid succession, their levels would zoom up at a speed that seemed like a joke to People of the Earth common sense.
Of course, if they just left them to their own devices after raising their levels, they wouldn’t know how to use that combat power, and that was bound to cause trouble. Since that was the case, they put them through physically punishing drills like this one after power leveling and made them fight mock battles until they passed out, forcing them to get used to their heightened physical performance. This routine was the level-boosting drill the Knights of the Black Sword had been conducting for the past two months.
Isaac opened his eyes a crack.
Then he closed them again.
He thought he’d heard something. It was probably just his imagination.
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