Chapter 13: Rain Over Broken Graves

The clouds hung low enough to crush the land beneath them. Along the coast, the air in Velen carried too much moisture, and even ordinary rainstorms came with a suffocating weight.

Across the wilderness, ancient trees that had grown unchecked for ages twisted beneath the roaring wind and dim light, their branches writhing like dancing demons.

But scenery never held as much meaning as the feelings inside a man.

Under that sky black as wet iron, a young man rode one horse while leading another, trotting freely along the rough road with a grin that refused to fade.

Lannor hummed some tuneless nonsense even he did not recognize, swaying naturally with Pope’s gait atop the saddle.

When a man felt good enough, any song became a good song.

To an outsider, he looked as though he had been born on horseback like a Haklander nomad. Even the finest riders alive would struggle to believe a youth who had ridden barely a month could possess such rhythm in the saddle.

Breathing alongside the horse. Adjusting posture instinctively with every shift in the mare’s balance. Feeling the movement beneath him before it even happened.

Regional racing champions might spend their entire lives reaching this level.

And this monstrous learning speed, enough to trample ordinary human capability into the mud, was merely Mentos functioning under restricted processing capacity.

Designing training regimens. Monitoring physical condition down to individual muscle bundles. Quantifying every result.

Under the Commonwealth of Man Education Act, a Biological Intelligence Core could not directly interfere with bodily movement until the user possessed university-level knowledge authorization.

In other words, the Intelligence Core could not control the body.

Yet even within those restrictions, Lannor rarely repeated a bad habit more than five times.

That alone continuously pushed his skills toward a higher level.

He complained constantly about Mentos’ rigid operational logic, especially whenever the thing flooded his brain with training visualizations until his skull felt ready to explode like a bottle of cola stuffed with candy.