[37] A Bridge That Cannot Be Crossed (4)
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The teachers were in a state of panic.
It was the first time in the advanced class that the difficulty of the Bridge That Cannot Be Crossed had been raised to level 10.
"Teacher! Over there!"
One of the teachers pointed.
Shirone and Mark were charging into the center of the tangled, three-dimensional iron bars.
"Damn it! How reckless!"
Those directly involved judged the same: continue the test.
Their obsession with promotion was commendable, but from the teachers' perspective it looked like suicide.
'This is a massive trap. How do you even get out of this?'
Even with lives on the line, Shirone focused only on how to cross the bridge.
The structure formed by the bending bars advanced in waves—endless, surging formations like the sea.
'Standing still won't help; the trap just keeps coming.'
So the key was to break through the waves in the shortest possible time and somehow reach the other side.
The first wave lashed out like a whip as the bars bent, and Mark, having dodged it easily, felt a boost of confidence.
'If it's only this much…'
No matter how high the difficulty, only first place could guarantee promotion.
'The higher the danger, the more it distinguishes. Maybe that's for the best.'
Mark's competitiveness shone even here.
'No—this is bad!'
Shirone, however, was calculating not only the immediate danger but the disasters that would come later.
From observing the wave's origin, a level 10 obstacle wasn't something you could escape by dodging each piece as it arrived.
If you didn't analyze the first, second, third—really five or more—waves and act on that analysis, you'd eventually be herded into a dead end.
"What is that?"
As expected, Mark froze the moment he avoided the first trap.
A vertical wave was followed by a double horizontal one; then a triple horizontal line rippled in like a tide.
Judging by the bars' advance, a mistimed beat would be bone-breaking.
'No. He can't dodge that.'
Watching from above the third trap, Shirone dove toward Mark, whose spine looked moments from snapping.
"Ugh!"
Just before Mark was caught, students who had imagined a grisly end squeezed their eyes shut.
No scream came. When they opened their eyes again, Shirone had wrapped his arms around Mark's waist and, chaining a teleport, was pulling them out of the trap.
"Shirone!"
Saving Mark was brave, but at first glance it seemed reckless.
Besides—wasn't this a test?
"What the hell? Being good has to have limits."
"Where do you get that? Someone's about to die—of course you help."
"Of course? Could you do that?"
"You jerk! Why would you put me in that position?"
While the students argued, only Iruki wore a knowing smile.
'It's not like that, you idiots…'
The traps stretched to the edge of sight, and watching them made Shirone's chest tighten.
When the net-shaped trap approached, his head went pale for the first time since the test began.
'How on earth do you dodge that?'
A huge trap spanning twenty square meters drew near; he felt like a fly waiting for a swatter.
"Ahh! Save me!"
Mark began to thrash.
Once his courage had been broken, there was no way he could recover during the test.
He was going to die here.
So many traps were coming that the certainty felt absolute, and their forms grew ever more grotesque.
"Stay still!"
Shirone racked his brains for a breakthrough, but teleportation was useless against a massive barrier with no space to escape.
'No— that's not it. They wouldn't build a trap you literally couldn't escape from.'
A flash of insight struck.
'That's it!'
As Mark screamed, "We're all going to die!" Shirone cast teleportation, and Iruki sprang up shouting.
"That's it!"
Opting to retreat with teleportation, Shirone created distance faster than the net could close.
He'd been so fixated on getting across that he'd forgotten the space behind him was open.
'Back up, secure enough distance, then leap clear over the whole net—that's simple.'
Timing it perfectly, Shirone rose on a diagonal and the net's outer frame grazed his toes by a hair.
'At least I got through. But…'
Level 10 didn't relent.
As Shirone climbed, the whole set of bars shifted upward in response, and the next trap surged in.
"Why would he do something so reckless? If Mark is eliminated, he automatically gets promoted," Seriel cried, exasperated.
"He wouldn't make that choice. That's not who he is," Amy said.
"I know he's kind, but there's no need to be THAT kind. I can't prove it, but Mark hired people to sabotage others—dirty tactics."
"Shirone doesn't want first place."
He wasn't competing to grab a number from someone else.
"He wants to pass the promotion exam and become a higher level on his own terms. He knows promotion is meaningless if he can't accept it himself."
Amy understood Shirone completely, and that made her feel all the more sorrow.
'But this time he's unlucky. It's too dangerous. We should stop the test here.'
At level 10, no one in Class Four could cross the Bridge That Cannot Be Crossed.
Shirone was still holding on, but in Amy's experience the traps they'd passed so far had only been about level six at most.
"Arghhh!"
Mark's eyes rolled back, foam appearing at his mouth as he screamed, and he finally fainted.
Shirone's focus only sharpened.
At some point he had even forgotten his own existence; teachers who had been stomping their feet and students who'd been hysterical fell silent.
Even Alpheas was repeatedly astonished, his gaze fixed on Shirone's dazzling movements.
'Crisis draws out potential. But everyone has their breaking point. How is he still holding on?'
Could he really keep going?
The Bridge That Cannot Be Crossed was now hurtling along at two hundred kilometers per hour.
A normal student would be overwhelmed by speed alone and lose consciousness.
And yet Shirone flashed through the pitch-black lattice of bars like lightning.
'From the start, there might never have been a limit.'
Even riding an upward trend, a person can't soar forever because humans eventually become satisfied.
Magic is no different.
Is it only skill or talent that keeps mages from becoming the best? When someone reaches a certain state, the ceiling of self-satisfaction acts on human psychology like an insurmountable barrier.
'Shirone, are you chasing infinity with a human body?'
It seemed he had no vessel to begin with.
With no standard for satisfaction, his mind could handle ever-increasing difficulty.
Shirone, likely in a trance, might not remember this moment.
But Etella, the youngest bishop of the Karsis Monastery, watching today, seemed unlikely to ever forget what she saw.
'He's finding escape routes in real time from infinitesimally small possibilities.'
What kind of mind could do that?
'Even great masters can only maintain that mental strength in a trance-like state.'
The structure had moved into an even more complex phase and was twisting into something bizarre.
It had become a chaotic trap with no perceivable rules.
'It needs to be split even finer.'
As the waves shortened so that he couldn't avoid them unless he moved within a meter, Shirone's leap distance shortened.
If you couldn't dodge one and then calculate the next, you had to analyze everything from the start and dive in.
Left, right, left, left, right, left…
Shirone imprinted the ringed, overlapping traps on his mind and recalled the pattern.
He teleported; flashes zigzagged through and pierced the structure, but this time identical traps rushed in vertically.
There wasn't even time to compute the pattern.
'Denser!'
Time was chopped even thinner; the teleportation flash arced and bent downward in a parabola.
With teachers and students mouths agape, Iruki narrowed one eye and shouted.
"Rainbow Drop! So he really reached that!"
The wavering flash moved like an eel, swimming through the circle's center.
Rainbow Drop is an advanced teleportation technique only attainable at the seniors' level.
The advanced-class students couldn't grasp how the flash curved to let Shirone escape.
"Is that actually possible? How can teleportation curve? Light only moves in straight lines."
Iruki tapped his head and said, "Simple principle. Differentiate a circle and you get an infinite number of straight lines. He split the teleportation into intervals about one-thousandth the usual."
"One-thousandth? A human can do that?"
"Even if the calculation is impossible, he can imagine it sensorially. His power leans toward omnipotence rather than omniscience. In short, he's a genius of the opposite sort to me."
The students turned away as if to ignore Iruki's words.
'You guys love your geniuses. For a Class Five student, too.'
Meanwhile, the Bridge That Cannot Be Crossed reached its top speed.
The bars' afterimages lengthened until anyone not used to them could no longer make out the structure.
Shirone moving through those afterimages had surpassed technique and reached art.
Everyone watched, stunned, as he split a straight beam of light into countless shards and used them to trace a curved trajectory.
"Could it really... work?"
Only thirty meters remained to the bridge's endpoint.
Now even the students set aside everything else and silently hoped for Shirone's success.
For the first time in the school's history, an advanced-class student might master the Bridge That Cannot Be Crossed.
"Principal! Over there!"
When someone pointed to the bridge's destination, every teacher watching went pale.
What had to come had finally come.
From the arrival point the bars began to twist like flaming hair, building a massive three-dimensional structure.
"It's a Dragon Maze! That's impossible! Disable the mechanism, quick!"
The Dragon Maze is a trap that appears only once at level 10; it was named because the completed form resembles a dragon's face.
Though the exterior may look similar each time, the internal structure changes whenever it forms, and the total length of bars used can reach a staggering six hundred meters.
If you don't anticipate how the bars will twist and discover an escape pattern beforehand, the dragon will swallow you and leave you a wreck.
Even Shirone, focused to the limit, felt the bars' twisting look ominous.
He had forgotten even to blink as he stored the structure's pattern in his head when a jolt at his side made him flinch.
"Ahhh! What—someone save me!"
Mark had come to and, seeing the suddenly gigantic trap, screamed as if his insides would rip apart.
Because he hadn't passed the stages step by step, the sight of the rapidly barreling traps left him no hope of analysis.
'Here it comes!'
Even so, the Dragon Maze charged forward with its mouth open at record speed.