[252] Another Sky (2)
Mark kept darting his gaze between Shirone and Iruki, practically buzzing with excitement.
"Shirone-senpai's ahead, right? Right?"
"It's about even. If time keeps running out, Pascal will overload. If it gets that far, the match resets. Dante's lost his strongest weapon too."
Mark felt like crying with joy.
Until a moment ago he'd assumed Shirone's loss was certain. He'd even thought it was enough that Shirone had held his own against Dante, the kingdom's top prospect.
But Shirone had spectacularly turned the tide.
"As I thought—Shirone-senpai, huh. So he even outprocessed Dante-senpai?"
Iruki didn't answer.
When Mark turned toward him in confusion, all the seniors lined up were watching the duel with grave faces.
Iruki kept scratching his chin.
It was true Shirone had parsed Dante's system, but how he'd done it was a mystery.
If Dante's automaton could be analyzed that easily, Shirone wouldn't have struggled at all at the start.
Amy gave up trying to reason it out and asked bluntly, "How did he analyze the pattern? Honestly, I don't even know how Dante's automaton functions. I haven't a clue. Neid, what about you?"
"Same here. It's not that it's complicated — the system is just too large. You can't infer an elephant from only a leg."
Amy thought Neid's analogy was perfect.
"That's it. It wasn't a system made only to fight Shirone. Its adaptations vary wildly by opponent—how could Shirone read the whole thing?"
Iruki offered a hypothesis. "Maybe it isn't mathematical."
Mark cocked his head. "Not mathematical? Then what is it?"
Iruki frowned and chose his words carefully. "A sense… maybe."
"A sense? Like intuition?"
Mark was incredulous. Dante's system was the pinnacle of information magic. If you could understand such a thing by 'a sense,' why bother studying at all?
But Iruki was earnest. The idea made the most sense, and it wasn't something anyone could do casually, as Mark imagined.
"Sensation isn't superstition. It's more like an evolved form of inductive reasoning."
You don't have to count every person's eyes to prove humans have two eyes.
Most people are confident human beings have two eyes because none of their family or friends have three.
Amy said, "Shirone's insight is transcendent. He understands the whole from a tiny amount of data. But it has limits—you still need a certain amount of information."
Iruki added, "There are exceptions. It comes down to the quality of the data. You can't imagine an elephant from just a leg, but if you have the skeleton, you can guess the general shape."
Neid agreed. "Probably Shirone risked everything to infiltrate Dante's system and obtain special data you could only get that way. He used that information to analyze the entire system."
Mark recalled a phrase Headmaster Alpheas always repeated: insight is faster than effort and more precise than knowledge. If Dante could read channels, Shirone possessed an insight that pierced all things.
Every time Shirone moved, two thousand bracelets flared. They were safety devices, but if he kept them on like that they might as well be causing first-degree burns.
Dante stared in horror at Shirone surviving inside the Pascal system for over five minutes.
This automaton flattened any opponent it touched with overwhelming firepower within five seconds.
This was the very heart of the hell the system had created.
A normal person would be paralyzed with fear, but Shirone moved through it as if it were his own playground.
Why? Why doesn't he waver?
Insight is the apex of inductive logic, not an infallible oracle; it can't guarantee a hundred-percent correct answer. That uncertainty about the future should have bred anxiety.
Yet Shirone remained calm. He had the resolute spirit of someone whose form never falters.
As Pascal began to overload, Dante felt a stinging along the bridge of his nose. If he held out any longer, he and the magic circle would self-destruct.
But he didn't stop.
At the cliff's edge waited the first defeat of his life. The blade at his heart, honed by countless victories, would cut him clean with a single loss.
"I can't lose!"
Dante pushed Pascal's computational speed higher.
Stepping into an unfamiliar realm he'd never experienced, another wall crumbled and an astonishing vista opened.
Pascal's magic circle blazed, and the mansion's tempo accelerated again.
Long rows of binary numbers rushed through his mind like rapids, grinding against his brain.
The change in Pascal was immediately obvious to the students. Functions that had been at least two beats slower than Shirone's were catching up.
Dante was certain. "I can do it! I can push further!"
Pascal didn't need to process everything in parallel. By concentrating on the most critical computations, localized functions could be multiplied.
"Slow Mansion first. Then Fire, Bolt, Press, in that order."
Dante selected specific addresses from Pascal's memory and computed them first. He leapt from the 352nd operation to the 2,987th. Eventually, when he started skipping from one end to the other in a single bound, a thunderous roar erupted from the Pascal circle.
"This is it! This is exactly what I wanted!"
Dante felt his consciousness soar.
He could no longer see Shirone; he could no longer hear the battlefield's volleys. Only an infinite array of ones and zeros rushing at electric speed filled his mind.
Olivia trembled with emotion. "Dante..."
She'd known he would one day break through the wall. She hadn't expected the catalyst to be a pupil of Alpheas, but it didn't matter.
Reaching the realm of local computation, Dante matured in a way as startling as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
"Ouch."
Dante withdrew the finger that had been pressing down on an ant. The ant that had been biting his index finger wriggled and fell to the ground.
Olivia glanced at the fallen ant and asked, "Oh my—did it bite you? Does it hurt?"
"Haha! I'm fine. It happens all the time."
Dante put his finger in his mouth and sucked it as he watched the ant. The aimless ant No. 1111 circled helplessly, as if realizing the kingdom was collapsing.
"All channels are interconnected. If a particular channel is cut, everything collapses. But—"
Dante gently picked up the panicked ant and surveyed the kingdom's chaotic order. Studying carefully, he set ant No. 1111 down somewhere, and stability slowly returned around that point.
He didn't stop there. He placed several ants at critical nodes. The sight of a kingdom, moments from ruin, being rapidly reconstructed into a firm system filled Olivia with wonder.
"Hehe! Sorry, little ants."
Dante looked up at Olivia with a bright smile.
"It's alright now."
Olivia smiled back and, after studying the boy's clear, translucent eyes as if trying to draw something out, made a decision.
"Dante, would you like to learn magic?"
That was the day Olivia and Dante's bond began.
From then on, Olivia never doubted Dante would become the kingdom's greatest mage.
He was not simply an information-processing machine. He was a human who could shatter limits.
Shirone was undoubtedly remarkable, but there was no equal now who could beat the Dante who had leapt the wall.
"Grrr…!"
Dante forced himself to stay conscious. His information-processing speed accelerated beyond anything he had experienced.
Magic erupting from eighty-six mansions now radiated so wildly in every direction that even direction seemed meaningless.
If Shirone's judgment slipped even slightly, the match would be over. Even the students could no longer say who would win.
Dante's mental reserves were draining fast, but Shirone was chaining over two thousand teleports in succession himself.
"Damn! Why? Why isn't it landing?"
Dante was stunned.
He had pushed Pascal to its usable limits, yet Shirone still moved through the system. It was clear Shirone's thoughts had accelerated to match the gears Dante had raised.
Dante's five senses were fully open; he could no longer tell what was visual and what was auditory.
It was an astonishing experience.
Shirone's information mingled with his own until body and mind felt like one.
"Damn! No thanks—this with a guy is too much!"
Whatever his private feelings, Dante tasted supreme exhilaration. The reaction speed of thought reached an uncharted realm, and all of Shirone's information decomposed into signals and surged in.
The two of them exchanged a conversation of being—raw communion, neither lie nor truth. At that moment Shirone and Dante both trembled. Flashes filled their vision as if they had become electricity.
The dialogue between the ultimate talents of induction and deduction took the form of magic and was transmitted to everyone watching. The students watched the duel without blinking.
Combat is collision. Yet the two moved like dancers—a dance woven from every kind of magic and knowledge.
Alpheas smiled. "To know what is right, you must take the long road. Be certain, deny it, and when you are certain again, the spirit settles in the body. Worry as you please. After all, isn't this under a different sky?"
Olivia's gaze softened.
The battle-simulation system Two-Thousand was both a place for students to experience real combat and a stage to display superiority.
But did Jacquebain, Two-Thousand's developer, intend that? Perhaps he'd given students the freedom to fail as much as they liked.
Olivia clenched her fists in her lap.
Alpheas's philosophy was right—but she didn't want to compromise now. Once a battle began, only the victor would be written into history. The winner had to be Dante—the pupil she considered the best of her career.
Shirone and Dante's exchange of information surged to an extreme, and the students spun their increasingly hot bracelets.
Eighty-six mansions and a single flash.
Watching the hundreds of information exchanges per second that combination produced made the world spin.
Maria's eyes grew moist. Talent beyond the human realm. When two people with such gifts entwined, this absurd spectacle unfolded.
"Dante-senpai… really incredible."
Mark turned in astonishment. He'd assumed Maria would, of course, root for Shirone. Beyond personal feelings, she wouldn't forget the humiliation her group had suffered at Dante's hands.
"Maria, what are you saying?"
"Maybe today's duel will be recorded in history."
Mark went quiet as realization dawned. Maria was right—this match had outgrown mere practice.
"I used to hate competition so much."
Mark knew that feeling. The weight of competition had once stopped him from activating a mechanism on a bridge he couldn't cross.
"But now… I really think it's an amazing world. Shirone-senpai was just the kind of genius you could look up to without thinking. But Dante-senpai is forcing that Shirone-senpai to fight with everything he has."
Mark looked at Maria with a pained expression. Her feelings seeped in and tugged at him.
He felt the same. But he couldn't let himself fall into that. If he did, he might never rise again.
Maria lowered her head sadly. "Maybe I… will never experience something like this in my life."
Mark ground his teeth. Shirone's image matched exactly the ideal mage he'd dreamed of.
What must it feel like—to display your craft in a celestial realm, to seize the greatest opponent and fall with them to the ends of hell?
He couldn't begin to guess, but it must be the supreme ecstasy a mage could feel.