Crossing the Finish Line
Professor Plato wasn't even human by race; he was an ego-item. In other words, he was a being who had long since abandoned his humanity.
“A sound mind dwells only in a sound body! And so, I reasoned: if I forged the supreme, ultimate physical vessel and possessed it, my mind would become sounder than anyone else’s!”
He flexed, his form gleaming brilliantly in the light. “Behold! Crafted by pouring out my entire life savings, this is the paramount rare-metal prosthetic body! A physique so indestructible that even should I take a full-power, serious punch from the Headmaster and shatter into dust, I can regenerate completely!”
Watching his body shimmer and sparkle, Zhuang muttered under her breath, “Titocoga would go crazy for that if she saw it.”
“I would love nothing more than to bestow upon you fresh-faced cadets the sheer bliss that dwells within a robust physique, but alas, rare metal is exorbitantly expensive! Even if you brought me a million points, it wouldn't begin to cover the cost!”
Nobody asked for it.
Completely unfazed by the raw, genuine repulsion radiating from the students' eyes, Professor Plato unveiled the theme of today's lecture.
“However! Even with your wretched lumps of frail organic matter, there is a way to achieve a healthy body! And that is to develop your physique through grueling, violent exercise, and accelerate your recovery rate with copious, hearty meals!”
The students’ eyes flashed.
“Copious meals?”
“Are you feeding us?”
“Can we have double portions?”
Professor Plato answered with a booming laugh.
“Naturally! Why stop at double? You may down ten portions if you have the stomach for it!”
“Whooooaaaa!”
“Professor Plato is the greatest!”
“The sole conscience of the Academy! A paragon of living intellect!”
“The greatest professor who ever threw away his humanity! You're the coolest!”
Basking in the deluge of shameless flattery pouring from every direction, Professor Plato smiled like a seasoned showman. Then, he thrust a massive fist into the air.
“Do you wish to feast?!”
“Yes!”
“Do you want to gorge yourselves?!”
“YES!!”
“Then run! Sprint with everything you have toward yonder mountain, exhaust yourselves until your stamina drops below ten percent, and return ten minutes before the lecture ends! That is your first assignment!”
Professor Plato walked down the line, firmly tapping each student on the shoulder. With every tap, a fist-sized muscular figurine popped into existence, sticking fast to their shoulders like a stubborn piece of chewed gum.
“Blegh. What is this?”
“It's way too buff. Gross.”
“Did he shrink himself down to a two-hundredth of his size?”
The miniatures were minor copies of the professor himself—a variety of miniature avatar. And their purpose soon became clear.
“Orknodi’s remaining stamina: 90%.”
“Giselle’s remaining stamina: 82%.”
“Son Ocheon’s remaining stamina: 96%.”
“Isabelle’s remaining stamina: 88%.”
They were condition monitors. Or rather, remaining-stamina gauges designed to plunge the students straight into utter despair.
The path leading toward Mount Omine was chaotic from the start. Close friends banded together to match each other's pace, while others suddenly gunned their engines and charged up the rugged slopes like lunatics.
The brainless muscleheads mostly fell into the latter camp. Watching them tear ahead, Isabelle found herself newly awed by the sheer depth of Orknodi’s physical endurance.
“She’s already completely out of sight.”
“Indeed she is,” Giselle wheezed.
Any fleeting pang of feeling left behind quickly evaporated. It didn't take long for Giselle and Isabelle to realize just how naive their initial assumptions had been.
“Giselle’s remaining stamina: 75%.”
“Isabelle’s remaining stamina: 84%.”
Their stamina simply wasn't dropping. Well, technically it was, but their reserves were holding out far longer than they had anticipated.
“Is it even theoretically possible to drive our stamina below ten percent for this exam?” Giselle gasped.
“It has to be,” Isabelle answered. “You just have to pour out massive amounts of energy in an instant. Like an all-out, breakneck sprint for over ten minutes, or burning yourself out until you can't even lift a single finger.”
“This is madness. Isn't this course overwhelmingly biased toward physical powerhouses?”
“No. The more conditioned a student is to intense training, the more disadvantageous this lecture becomes. Overwhelmingly so.”
“And you're choosing to explain this to a man who is actively dying right beside you?”
Looking at Giselle, whose sweat was cascading down like a monsoon, Isabelle wore an expression of genuine envy.
“I actually envy that lazy body of yours.”
“Are you mocking me? Even a genial fellow like myself has limits, Isabelle.”
“I’m not mocking you. Look, your stamina ticked down again while you were talking.”
Noticing their gaze, the miniature Plato perched upon Giselle’s shoulder piped up in a flat, mechanical tone.
“Giselle’s remaining stamina: 74%.”
“Look at that decay rate!”
“That's precisely what I envy.”
Giselle finally saw the light. For someone like him who barely engaged in physical exertion, even a modest amount of movement drained his stamina fast. But for the musclebound meatheads whose entire lives revolved around conditioning, a class that required them to strip away their stamina forced them to burn through a monstrous total pool—requiring an entirely different magnitude of sheer, torturous effort.
“Then what about Son Ocheon and Lady Orknodi…?”
“It's going to be brutal for them,” Isabelle murmured grimly. “More exhausting than every lecture they've taken so far combined.”
Dorothy, on the other hand, was brimming with confidence.
Outside the Academy’s walls, her profession was a forest keeper. Even if she was technically only an apprentice, she had treated dense, untamed woodlands like her own backyard. Though forests and craggy mountains possessed different terrain, the knack for navigating overgrown woods transferred remarkably well to mountain running.
Heheh. This is actually pretty fun!
Nothing felt better than leaving stronger, clumsier peers choking on her dust simply because they lacked the proper knack.
Watching the imperial nobles sputter phrases like, “Absurd! How can she keep pace with body enhancement from Mana Cultivation Techniques using pure physicals?!” or “That speed isn't human!” or “To think I'd be overtaken by some weed-plucker from the outskirts!” was exceptionally gratifying.
“Dorothy’s remaining stamina: 45%.”
Considering her starting pool was ninety percent, she had burned through exactly half in an hour. If she spent the remaining half on the return sprint, she could shave off the rest with mathematical precision. The plan was flawless—on paper.
Reality, however, proved brutally unforgiving.
“*Huff, huff…* This is… way too hard…!”
The closer one's stamina drew toward zero percent, the heavier the physical toll became. Numerically, forty-five percent was just a number, but forty-five percent while operating near peak condition was night and day compared to scraping through forty-five percent when your reserves were dragging along rock bottom. Barring superhuman willpower, wringing out that final drop of stamina down to absolute zero was practically impossible.
I ran way too far!
She suddenly felt intense envy toward the nobles she had so proudly overtaken earlier, cursing her own overzealous legs. But then a thought struck her.
Wait a second… weren't there people I haven't seen a single glimpse of since the very start?
Dorothy came to an abrupt realization. There were monsters who had dashed far faster, and gone far deeper into the mountains, than she ever had!
No matter how bad I mess up,