Chapter 37
Chapter 37
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 37
Chapter Title: The Uncrossable Bridge (4)
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* * *
The instructors were in a state of panic.
It was the first time in the history of the advanced class that the difficulty of the Uncrossable Bridge had risen to Level 10.
“Sir! O-Over there!”
One of the instructors raised a hand and pointed.
Shirone and Mark were diving into the center of the iron bars, which were tangled in a three-dimensional structure.
“Dammit! How reckless!”
The two participants, locked in their contest, had decided to continue the test.
Their determination to be promoted was commendable, but from the instructors’ perspective, it was nothing short of a suicide mission.
‘What an incredible trap. How do I get through this?’
Even with his life on the line, Shirone was solely focused on finding a way to cross the Uncrossable Bridge.
The structure formed by the bending iron bars was a ‘wave progression system,’ a configuration that surged forward endlessly, like ocean waves.
‘If I wait in one place, the traps will just keep coming.’
Ultimately, the key was to break through the waves in the shortest time possible and somehow reach the other side.
The first wave was a structure where the iron bars bent and lashed out like whips. Mark, having dodged it with ease, gained a measure of confidence.
‘If it’s just this much…’
The privilege of promotion, no matter how difficult the test, belonged only to the top student.
‘The higher the risk, the more it separates the skilled from the unskilled. This is actually for the best.’
Mark’s competitive spirit shone even in a situation like this.
‘No! This is bad!’
Shirone, on the other hand, was calculating not just the immediate danger, but the disasters yet to come.
Based on his observations from the start of the wave, the Level 10 obstacle was not a structure one could escape simply by dodging traps as they appeared.
If he didn’t analyze at least the first, second, third, and up to the fifth waves before moving, he would eventually be cornered.
“Wh-What?”
As expected, Mark looked dumbfounded the moment he dodged the first trap.
After the vertical wave, double horizontal lines rushed in, followed by triple horizontal lines that undulated like ripples.
Judging by the speed of the iron bars, even the slightest misstep in timing would result in broken bones.
‘No. He can’t dodge that.’
Shirone, who was observing the situation from a position higher than the third trap, quickly descended toward Mark, who was moments away from having his back broken.
“Keuk!”
Just before Mark was caught in the trap, the students who had imagined the gruesome outcome squeezed their eyes shut.
But no scream was heard. When they opened their eyes again, Shirone was holding Mark by the waist, linking a series of Blinks to escape the trap.
“Shirone!”
Saving Mark was an act of great courage, but it also seemed like a reckless choice.
Besides, wasn't this an official test?
“What’s he doing? There’s a limit to being nice.”
“How can you say that? Someone was about to die, it’s the natural thing to do, isn’t it?”
“Natural? Could you do that in his place?”
“You bastard! Why are you bringing me into this?”
While the students argued, Iruki alone wore a meaningful smile.
‘That’s not it, you fools…’
The traps stretched to the edge of his vision, and looking at them made Shirone’s chest feel tight.
When a net-like mesh approached, his mind went blank for the first time since the test began.
‘How am I supposed to dodge that?’
As the massive, 20-square-meter trap drew near, he felt like a fly awaiting a swatter.
“Aaaah! H-Help me!”
Mark began to struggle.
His courage had already been broken, and it was impossible for him to regain his composure during the test.
*I’m going to die here.*
The number of approaching traps was endless enough to inspire such a conviction, and their forms grew more bizarre with each passing moment.
“Stay still!”
Shirone wracked his brain for a breakthrough, but in the face of a massive wall with no room to escape, Blink was useless.
‘No, that’s not right. If a trap were truly inescapable, they wouldn’t have made it in the first place.’
At that moment, a thought struck him like a flash of lightning.
‘That’s it!’
“Aaaaaah! We’re all going to die!”
Just as Mark screamed, Shirone cast Blink, and Iruki shot to his feet, shouting.
“That’s it!”
Choosing to move backward with Blink, Shirone put distance between them faster than the net was approaching.
He had been so obsessed with the idea of crossing the bridge that he had forgotten the space behind him was empty.
‘If I fall back to secure enough distance, I can just leap over the whole net. It’s simple.’
Timing it perfectly, Shirone ascended diagonally, and the outer frame of the net grazed the tip of his toes as it passed.
‘Passed it for now. But…’
The Level 10 difficulty was not so lenient.
As Shirone gained altitude, the overall position of the iron bars rose to match his, and the next trap came rushing in.
Seriel cried out in frustration.
“Why is he doing something so reckless? If Mark is eliminated, he’s guaranteed to be promoted.”
Amy replied.
“He wouldn’t make that choice. That’s just the kind of person he is.”
“I know he’s kind. But he doesn’t have to go this far. We can’t prove it, but Mark did something as petty as hiring kids to interfere.”
“Shirone doesn’t want to be first place.”
He wasn’t competing to earn some number given by others.
“He wants to pass the promotion test and reach a higher level. He knows that being promoted is meaningless unless he can accept the way he did it.”
Amy understood Shirone’s heart perfectly, but that was precisely why she felt even more distressed.
‘But he was unlucky this time. It’s too dangerous. This test should be stopped right here.’
No one from Class Four could cross the Uncrossable Bridge at Level 10.
Shirone was still holding on, but based on Amy’s experience, the traps he had passed so far were only at about a Level 6 difficulty.
“Aaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaah!”
Mark, who had been screaming loud enough to burst eardrums, rolled his eyes back until only the whites were visible, then finally foamed at the mouth and passed out.
In contrast, Shirone’s mind grew even sharper.
At some point, he forgot even his own existence as he passed through the traps. The instructors, who had been wringing their hands, and the students, who had been making a fuss, now watched in silence.
Even Alpheas, in repeated states of astonishment, had his gaze stolen by Shirone’s dazzling movements.
‘Crisis brings out potential. But everyone has a limit to their endurance. So how?’
How was he still able to hold on?
Currently, the Uncrossable Bridge was hurtling forward at a speed of 200 kilometers per hour.
It was a situation where an ordinary student would have been overwhelmed by the speed alone and lost consciousness.
And yet, Shirone was flashing through the black iron structures like lightning.
‘Was there never a limit to begin with?’
The reason one cannot soar endlessly, even on an upward trend, is that every human eventually reaches a moment of self-satisfaction.
Magic was the same.
Was the reason not all mages become the best simply a matter of skill or talent?
The limitation of one’s ‘vessel,’ which becomes satisfied upon reaching a certain level, was an insurmountable barrier that inevitably acted on the human psyche.
‘Shirone, are you, in a human body, dreaming of infinity?’
It was as if he had no vessel to begin with.
Because he had no standard for satisfaction, his mind was able to withstand the endlessly escalating difficulty.
Shirone, who was surely in a state of self-transcendence, would probably not remember this moment.
But Etella, the youngest bishop of the Karsis Order, felt she would never forget Shirone’s feat she had witnessed today for the rest of her life.
‘He is finding escape routes with near-infinitesimal odds, endlessly and in real-time.’
What kind of mind could make that possible?
‘That’s the kind of mental fortitude even a great high monk could only maintain at the moment of their passing.’
The structure had now moved beyond complexity and was twisting to the point of feeling grotesque.
It was a trap of chaos, with no discernible rules.
‘I need to break it down even finer.’
As the waves became so short that he couldn't dodge them without moving within a one-meter range, Shirone’s leap distance also shrank.
This was no longer a situation where he could dodge one and then calculate the next; he had to analyze everything from the start and dive in.
Left, right, left, left, right, left…
Shirone imprinted the pattern of the overlapping, ring-shaped traps onto his eyes and recalled the pattern.
He cast Blink, and a flash of light zigzagged through the structure, but this time, an identical trap rushed in vertically.
There was no time to calculate a new pattern.
‘It needs to be denser!’
Time itself seemed to be sliced thinner, and the flash of his Blink curved downward in a parabola.
As the students and even the instructors stood with their mouths agape, Iruki’s mismatched eyes widened as he shouted.
“Rainbow Drop! So he’s finally reached that point!”
The flash of light, bending like a wave, passed through the center of the circles as if it were an eel swimming.
Rainbow Drop was an advanced Blink technique, a spell that only a graduating specialist could perform.
That was why the advanced class students couldn’t comprehend the current situation, where a flash of light had bent to escape a trap.
“Is that really possible? How can Blink curve? Light only moves in a straight line, right?”
Iruki tapped his head and said.
“The principle is simple. If you differentiate a circle, you get an infinite number of straight lines. He’s broken down the interval of his Blink to about one-thousandth of a second.”
“One-thousandth? Is that humanly possible?”
“Even if you can’t calculate it, you can imagine it intuitively. He’s a genius whose power of omnipotence is far greater than his omniscience. In short, he’s the opposite type of genius from me.”
The students turned away, as if to ignore Iruki’s words.
‘A genius, my foot. He’s just a Class Five.’
Meanwhile, the speed of the Uncrossable Bridge was reaching its maximum.
The afterimages of the iron bars had become so long that now, only the person whose eyes had adapted to it could even distinguish the shape of the structure.
Shirone’s form, slipping through those afterimages, had transcended technique and reached the level of art.
Everyone was entranced by the sight of him manipulating a curved trajectory by finely slicing a straight line of light.
“Could he actually… do it?”
The remaining distance to the finish line of the Uncrossable Bridge was a mere 30 meters.
The students had now set aside all other thoughts and were cheering for Shirone’s success with all their hearts.
This was a situation where an advanced class student might master the Uncrossable Bridge for the first time in the magic academy’s history.
“Headmaster! Over there!”
Someone pointed to the finish line of the bridge, and the faces of all the instructors who looked there turned pale.
The inevitable had finally arrived.
From the finish line, the iron bars began to twist like burning hair, forming a massive, three-dimensional structure.
“It’s the Dragon’s Maze! That’s impossible! Deactivate the device, quickly!”
The Dragon’s Maze was a trap that appeared only once in Level 10, named because its completed form resembled the face of a dragon.
Though the exterior was similar, the internal structure was different each time it was created, and the length of the iron bars used to construct the trap amounted to a staggering 600 meters.
It was a terrifying trap that would swallow you like a dragon and tear you to shreds if you didn’t grasp its formation from the beginning and discover the escape pattern.
Even to Shirone, who was focused to his absolute limit, the way the iron bars were twisting looked ominous.
He was committing the structure’s pattern to memory, having forgotten even to blink, when he felt a tremor at his side.
“Aaaah! What is this! Somebody help me!”
Mark, having regained consciousness, let out a piercing scream as he saw the massive trap that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
To his eyes, which had not gone through the gradual progression of traps, it was a dizzying spectacle of high-speed obstacles that he couldn’t even begin to analyze.
‘It’s coming!’
Even in that situation, the Dragon’s Maze was rushing toward them at its highest speed, its mouth wide open.