“Hurry up and drop out already,” I always said when he was no longer able to move.

The people around me seemed to think that I was seriously trying to drive Ares out of the academy. They were right about me being serious. Ares was my rival in becoming the Hero, so of course I would want to kick him down. But those other assholes weren’t even worth that treatment. I would never take someone seriously as a rival if they weren’t bothering to try. Meanwhile, Ares got back on his feet no matter how many times you knocked him down.

It was as if he was declaring to me that this was what it meant to strive to be a Hero.

Before I knew it, my eyes had started following Ares. Yet he never looked my way. He spent every minute honing his skills; if he had a spare moment, he would use it to pore over his textbooks, and any large chunks of time were funneled into practicing his swings. He literally had no time for anyone else.

When classes ended for the day, he would swing his sword behind the academy building. Each and every stroke was careful and precise, as if he was attempting to absorb everything we were taught in class into his skin.

I watched him go at it practically every day. Maybe I was trying to make certain that there was at least one other person walking through the same wilderness as me.

“What’s that commoner so desperate for?” the nobles around me said.

How was that even a question? We were fighting the Demon Lord. If he was prepared to take on the threat, of course he’d be desperate.

But even so, Ares’s work ethic was unusual. It never occurred to him to rest. He ran as if something was chasing him down.

There was no doubt in my mind that he had experienced something that spurred him to become the Hero. I had no idea what it was, and I wasn’t about to ask him.

Maybe that was the thing I lacked.

***

Some time after that, I started hearing rumors about Ares. Apparently, he had fallen for Maria Lauren from the priest class and confessed his love to her on multiple occasions.

That can’t be right.

I laughed it off. Sure, Maria was beautiful. Her skills as a priest were outstanding enough that she deserved to be called the Holy Maiden. I’d talked to her in the past because I was interested in her as a potential member for my own party, but she only ever spoke in flowery platitudes. I never got a handle on what she was really thinking.

She struck me as someone who was never sincere when she praised God. She could feel God’s presence, and because of that, she didn’t believe in Him at all. I couldn’t imagine Ares becoming infatuated with a girl like her.

A few months later, I heard Ares was learning magic from Solon Barclay.

“What an idiot. Does he really think a Hero can use magic?” my classmates said disparagingly.

They had a point—magic was a talent. You were either born with the ability or not. At the same time, there were folklore tales of Heroes who wielded magic. Maybe Ares took those stories seriously and was trying to learn magic. Which also suggested that the reason he’d approached Maria was so he could learn healing magic.

What a waste of his time. Ares was totally fooling himself.

The next thing I knew, I was taking the magic tomes in my house up to my room and reading them in secret. I couldn’t understand a word of them because they were written in the ancient script. But I chipped away at them with the help of a dictionary.

I was definitely no slouch when it came to academics. It was important for me to read widely and accumulate knowledge so I could run our fief one day. Magic tomes were a completely different beast, though. For one thing, they were unintelligible. Even if you could decipher the letters, the grammar was so different from our modern language that the sentences were nigh impossible to parse. I counted my lucky stars that I’d never enrolled in the mage class.

In the end, I quit trying to read the magic tomes after a month. It was too grueling a task. After all that careful work of translating the letters and comprehending the text, I would finally chant a spell and get no reaction whatsoever. Nothing in my environment changed. I found it impossible to continue.

How is Ares sticking with this?

It wasn’t the action of a sane man. You had to be off your rocker to learn magic without having the aptitude.

It’s got to be impossible for him, too.

Ares was generally clumsy. No way could someone like him learn magic from scratch, I told myself.

***

Some time after we started our third year at the academy, I heard rumors that Ares had learned how to use attack and healing magic.

“His spells aren’t anything special,” everyone sneered, but there was awe in their faces as well.

In truth, his spells weren’t that powerful. But he had managed to achieve something beyond my capabilities. It must have taken an unimaginable amount of effort.

The same thing went for the sword. Ares was clearly surpassing everyone besides me in the warrior class at around this point. Although his level of improvement frankly didn’t match his effort, he was still powerful in his own right.

Even after three years, Ares kept challenging me to mock battles.

He stood before me, both hands on the hilt of his sword. The tip slanted up toward my face. There was nothing excessive about his stance, and his grip was moderately relaxed.

This particular stance was basic, but it was generally the most reliable in a one-on-one duel. Since he wasn’t showing any openings, I adjusted my upper body and held my sword with one hand, pointing it at Ares. By this point, I didn’t have the luxury to adopt an improper stance against him.

We held our stances as we searched each other for opportunities to strike. The air was tense; all of a sudden, Ares lowered his body and thrust his sword toward me. His movements were seamless and minimal, leaving nothing for me to exploit. It could have been a feint or a proper attack.

I jumped to the side and made a swipe at his flank, only for him to instantly revert to his original stance and block my attack. Of course, I wasn’t done there—I kept pelting him with slashes. I incorporated feints in my barrage, but Ares parried everything with perfect precision and efficiency.

What a world of difference. Ares had improved the most out of everyone in the warrior class. Maybe that was only obvious considering where he’d started, but it did give meaning to him joining the academy.

Compared with him, what did I gain from being here? I did my daily practice, but that was it. If I was aiming higher, shouldn’t I have gone off the beaten track instead of taking the easy route at school? I could have fought on the front lines with my uncle, for instance. There was so much I could have learned from heading to war. And if I couldn’t go to the front lines, slaying monsters within the kingdom was always an option for me. That would have sharpened my skills and let me contribute to the country at the same time.

Despite my moniker as the Sword Saint, I’d taken the conventional route of attending Falm Academy. For all my pride about how I was the only one thinking about our country, maybe I wasn’t actually thinking about anything but myself.

For some reason, as I watched Ares desperately block my strikes, regret bogged my mind.

I can’t lose to him, at the very least. That’s the one thing I won’t allow.

I read Ares’s next move. He was saving his strength to perform a counter after blocking my next blow. I made a show of backing off a step. Seizing the opportunity, he zipped right up to me and delivered an overhand slice. But that was just what I’d anticipated. I swerved to the side and struck Ares’s torso at the same moment his attack missed.

I felt the weight of the blow. Two years ago, this would have been enough to knock him off his feet. But this time, Ares remained standing. His stance hadn’t even faltered. Although he was grimacing in pain, he still had it in him to fight.

I went on to crush him after that, but Ares never conceded defeat. I knocked him down at multiple points, but he always got back to his feet. By now, nobody laughed or called him an idiot.

A Hero was somebody who made the impossible possible. Maybe I was simply sticking to what I was capable of, and nothing more.

***

At the end of summer, I received a notice of my uncle’s death. He had died fighting a demon at the border.

He was a strong and stouthearted person. I’d always been convinced that no mere monster would ever do him in.

My cousin was stoic even in the face of her father’s death. “It is the warrior’s way to perish on the battlefield. It is what he wanted,” she said.

So then why did my father, the head of the house, decide to prioritize his own life instead of fighting? Why was I, the Sword Saint, absent from the field?

Gazing at my cousin, I was keenly aware of my powerlessness.

The death of a frontline commander was as clear a sign as any that the war was worsening.

“You need to drop out as a Hero candidate,” my father told me.

His reasoning was that it was dangerous—a count could not afford to lose his heir to the monsters. A very characteristic reason indeed. But what did that mean for the country?

What would happen to the world? Weren’t nobles supposed to protect others? What did my uncle die for?

I went to see Ares. It was our first time having an actual conversation.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be the Hero instead.”

He listened to my worries and came to this clean and crisp answer. He hadn’t changed one bit from when we first entered the academy.

But his response made me realize something: I’d come to Ares because subconsciously, I’d wanted to foist the role of Hero on him. My resolve was so feeble that my father telling me to stop was enough to make me waver.

I was pathetic.