1-5 Training
“Hey, are you alright? Hang in there!”
Richard called out to Louis, who had collapsed. They were running laps around the garden as part of their basic training. Several days had passed since this training began.
The garden, being part of a duke’s estate, was vast. They were running around the perimeter of a forest large enough to encompass a small village, tasked with completing ten laps. Moreover, they were forced to carry sandbags calculated to be just barely manageable in weight.
Naturally, those lacking in stamina inevitably fell behind. At this age, there wasn’t much physical difference between boys and girls, but the overweight Louis ended up slowing everyone down.
“…Richard…I can’t do it…I really can’t keep up…”
Louis was on his hands and knees, breathing in gasps and crying.
“You idiot, Louis! Are you planning to give up here? That damn woman won’t hesitate to kill you, you know? She’s a devil. The kind that makes other devils run away barefoot! She thinks of our lives as nothing more than a side dish for her dinner!”
“But I’m just holding everyone back…”
Originally, Richard disliked weaklings like Louis. Back at the orphanage, they were on such bad terms that Richard would punch Louis in passing. However, here they faced the duke’s daughter who ruled them through fear and violence.
The troublemakers from the orphanage had naturally banded together in the face of Selina, their tyrannical overlord.
And now, that terrifying ruler was slowly approaching Richard and the others.
“Oh my. Did I schedule a nap time for this hour? Tell me, Richard?”
Selina wore a snake-like smile, as if toying with her prey.
“Sir, Louis has reached his limit, Sir,”
Richard pleaded, trying to elicit even a shred of mercy.
“Oh, is that so? Well, that’s fine. Let him sleep. We mustn’t overexert ourselves. However, while Louis is sleeping, the other children will have to keep running non stop, won’t they?”
Of course, Selina possessed no sense of mercy.
(Damn it, she really is a devil in human skin. She must have forgotten her human heart in her mother’s womb.)
Richard cursed in his mind. The fact that he no longer said such things to her face could be seen as an improvement. The burn scars on his body, inflicted by Selina’s magic, had matured him.
“Sir, I have a request, Sir.”
“What is it? I’m not God, you know. I don’t grant wishes.”
“Sir, I propose that I carry Louis on my back while running, Sir.”
Selina’s eyes widened, then she smiled with amusement.
“What a splendid proposal, Richard. Very well, I’ll accept it. Make sure you carry Louis’s sandbag too, alright?”
“No, Richard. Even with your strength, that’s impossible,”
Louis tried to stop Richard, struggling to stand up, but his knees buckled under the weight of the sandbag.
“Shut up! You’re my luggage now. Luggage doesn’t talk!”
Richard forcibly hoisted Louis onto his back and grabbed a sandbag in each hand.
He tried to start running slowly. However, even for the strong Richard, running while carrying a person and two sandbags was challenging. His legs wouldn’t move as he wanted.
“Oh my, I don’t recall telling you to take a stroll. If you don’t run, it won’t count as a lap, you know?”
Selina seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself.
(Damn it, I’ll kill that woman someday!)
Richard mentally punched Selina multiple times, but reality remained unchanged.
He tried to move his legs faster, but it felt like his feet were sinking into the ground, immobile.
(Is this the extent of my strength?!)
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Just as Richard lamented his lack of power, Oscar and Emma, who were also running in the garden, approached. They each took one of the sandbags Richard was carrying under his arms. Although Oscar and Emma now each carried two sandbags, they managed to keep running without stopping.
Isabel and Alice also came up behind Richard, extending their hands to support Louis, showing their willingness to run together.
Encouraged by this unexpected support from his comrades, Richard began to run with renewed vigor.
While it wasn’t surprising for Emma and Alice, Oscar and Isabel weren’t the type to do such things. At the orphanage, they had mocked the incapable children and thoroughly eliminated those who got in their way.
In fact, when they first saw Richard’s actions, these two had sneered.
“What an idiot,” they thought. “It’s foolish to attempt the impossible.”
Yet, contrary to these thoughts, they had extended a helping hand to the pair.
“We’ve joined the ranks of fools,” they self-deprecatingly mused.
The duke’s servants, watching the orphans from afar, were moved. They had previously derided Selina’s candidate servants as dirty orphans and questioned the purpose of Selina’s mysterious training.
However, faced with the beautiful actions of the orphans supporting each other, they arbitrarily concluded, “Lady Selina is truly reforming these lowly orphans from the heart!”
Meanwhile, Selina was deep in thought.
She hadn’t heard about this kind of scenario from the retired butler, she pondered.
Selina hadn’t realized, but she had gone a bit… no, quite overboard. If that butler had been overseeing Selina’s education, he would have surely admonished her:
“My lady, that is excessive. Even we were not that harsh.”
In reality, they should have given appropriate rewards and encouraged a sense of competition among the trainees. However, Selina had pushed them relentlessly without any rewards, causing the servants to strengthen their bonds as comrades rather than develop a competitive spirit.
But Selina was oblivious to this, so she struggled to decide how to handle the situation.
(What should I do? Should I subject them to even worse treatment?) she wondered.
The orphans continued to overcome the unreasonable training through their unity.
What awaited them next was a hellish obstacle course, but they tackled each challenge one by one, steadily overcoming them while looking out for each other.
“Well done, Louis! Just one more level! Once you’re over that, it’s all downhill from there!”
When Louis, who had been afraid of heights and struggled with the log ladder, finally conquered the highest level and began descending on the other side, everyone rejoiced as if it were their own achievement.
The orphans were undoubtedly growing both mentally and physically.
While this was, in a way, what Selina had intended, it was quite far from the method of raising assassins.
Selina’s training methods were so extreme that rather than cultivating insidious assassins, she was nurturing upright individuals equipped with effort, friendship, and perseverance.
TLNOTE : While waiting, I implore you dear readers to read other masterpiece novels that also written by the same author :
- When the Monster Meat I Ate Led Me to the Throne
- Who killed the Hero?
- The Suspects of Necromancy
- The Exiled Merchant Saves the World with the Power of Gold (translated by my friend meerkat)
Also check out my friend Localizermeerkat for more LN translations!
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