Proving Worth (6)
Current location: Floor 93.
I was shortening my travel time by leaping off cliffs, and somewhere along the way I'd come to a realization: free-falling was a far more thrilling experience than I'd ever given it credit for.
When I first hurled myself off the edge, I'd shrugged it off — eh, it was like this in the game, no big deal — but after falling for what felt like forever, my opinion was slowly starting to shift.
Next time something like this comes up, I'm picking a safer route.
This is a do-it-once kind of activity.
<>
I'd been idly watching my long hair whip upward in the wind when Grandpa spoke up.
'What is it? Make it quick. I need to time my landing perfectly, and it's about to get tricky.'
Even I couldn't come out of a fall like this completely unscathed. If I failed to cancel the impact midway, I'd take the fall damage outright and be retired on the spot. Since this was the Academy Dungeon, getting booted outside the dungeon the moment I hit would technically be the end of it — but I had no desire to experience this fall twice, so I wanted to nail it on the first try and be done with it.
<>
Twenty seconds had passed since I leapt off the cliff. Time to pull a scroll out of the Inventory.
With my preparations made, the end of what was starting to feel like a never-ending fall finally came into view — a floor of gray stone rising up to meet me.
Not yet.
Not yet time to unleash the scroll.
A little lower.
Lower still.
Wait, and wait again, and then...
Now!
I released the magic sealed within the scroll, timed to the instant.
What I sought to summon was a storm — a colossal valley wind surging upward from below.
My body, which had been accelerating along with gravity, gradually began to slow.
By the time my falling speed converged on zero, I was hovering roughly three meters above the ground. A moment later the scroll's magic ran out, gravity reclaimed me, and I touched down on the stone floor.
I panicked and popped it a little early, didn't I. In the game, that would've cost me fall damage.
Clicking a mouse behind a monitor and casting it with your own two hands are, admittedly, very different things. Unless it's a genuine do-or-die moment, choosing the safe route is the correct call — screw up even slightly with this stuff and you drop dead on the spot.
Smoothing out the wrecked mess my hair had become from the fall, I called for Grandpa.
'So, Grandpa. What did you want to ask me?'
<>
'There is?'
<>
'...Huh. I guess so, yeah?'
<>
At Grandpa's words, I let my imagination run for a moment.
Me — the person who built this dungeon — watching some other soul clear it through the most absurd methods imaginable.
First, they'd wonder what on earth they were looking at. Then amazement would curdle into sheer disbelief. Soon enough they'd grow curious about just who this lunatic was. And the moment that lunatic stepped out, they'd drag her off and interrogate her about every last detail.
All to ask: how did you possibly conceive of a clear strategy like that?
'How am I supposed to explain THAT?!'
I had zero confidence in my ability to account for my own clear strategy. If this were a game, I could proudly rattle off my route step by step — but this world wasn't a game, now was it!
<>
'You can't be serious!'
Ugh. What's done is done; there was no taking it back.
Once all this business with the Cripple Prince was wrapped up, I'd think it over at my leisure. If all else failed, I'd just play the insufferable genius card. What, you couldn't even conceive of that approach? Typical professors of a scrub-tier Academy. Something along those lines.
He'd definitely look like he was itching to give me a knuckle rap, but oh well. Nothing to be done about it.
Even as I sighed, my feet kept carrying me forward — toward the end of the Academy Dungeon.
By cliff-diving my way past the stretch between Floor 93 and Floor 99, I'd left only one thing on the to-do list.
Floor 100.
Where the boss guarding the dungeon's end lay in wait.
<>
The moment I gripped the handle of the boss room door, Grandpa voiced his concern.
His judgment was sound. My current state fell well short of the word pristine.
No matter how stout my stamina.
No matter that I'd skipped the proper route entirely and pulled every stunt in the book.
I had sprinted from Floor 1 to Floor 100 in barely half a day.
I wasn't so exhausted that I couldn't move — but calling this my best condition would've been a stretch, too. A sensible person would rest up properly, replenish their strength, and only then press onward. I chose not to.
It wasn't that I was obsessed with setting a record. If it were a speedrun, I'd done those to the point of nausea in my past life; I'd long since purged myself of that particular fixation.
So why was I pushing ahead without resting?
The answer was wonderfully simple.
Because the boss waiting up ahead was something I could handle just fine in my current state.
'Don't worry. This'll be over in a flash.'
<>
'Not madness.'
The glitches here did exist, sure — but those were the kind of tricks that only worked inside a game. No applying them to reality.
<>
'The honest way.'
For the finale, I figured I'd earn my keep swinging this mace a little.
Gripping the door handle, I readied myself for battle with practiced ease.
Spreading divinity through my body.
Reinforcing myself with layer upon layer of holy magic.
Downing potions to top off my health and mana.
And finally, sheathing my mace in divinity, I opened the door.
There in the center of the chamber crouched something black.
The final boss of the second-semester dungeon — the being that demonstrated every gimmick the dungeon taught.
A existence fused with Denial.
This thing was the ultimate test of whether a challenger had properly mastered the countless gimmicks scattered throughout the dungeon.
Ordinarily, it was a tiresome boss you could only fell by overcoming every single gimmick from Floor 1 through Floor 99 — but there existed another way to beat it.
One glance at its sinister silhouette told you everything: this was an undead-type boss.
Which meant that with divinity above a certain threshold, the whole thing could be dragged down into a simple brute-force brawl.
The instant I stepped into the chamber, the door slammed shut behind me, and the boss waiting in the darkness curled its lips into a crimson smile.
I smiled right back at it.
"Wow, you can make people's skin crawl with a smile alone♡ I guess in this dungeon, the grosser you are, the higher up you get♡ Floor 100 really suits you♡"
Time to crack some skulls.
*
When the door to the next floor materialized, Cecil withdrew his aura and let out a long, long breath.
Nearly half a day had passed since he'd entered the dungeon, and he had scarcely stopped moving, clearing floor after floor without pause. Even with his exceptional physique, the fatigue was beginning to tell on him.
His party members were in far worse shape. The moment the boss's death was confirmed, they'd collapsed onto the floor in heaps, breathing so hard that getting out a single word seemed beyond them.
Watching them, Cecil concluded that pushing any further today was impossible.
Still — this much was more than enough. They'd cleared over half the dungeon on the first day. Tomorrow, they would see the end of the Academy Dungeon.
Ha. A new record that would go down in Academy history, then?
Crushing Lucy Aln, erasing even the mark his elder brother had once set, and carving his own name above it?
As Cecil leaned against his sword and chuckled at the thought, he raised his voice to his party.
"We return. Today we rest, thoroughly. Tomorrow, we finish it."
Emerging from the dungeon, Cecil was drinking in the dying sunset when he turned his head toward the ranking board.
Naturally, his own name would be written at the very top. The question was where Lucy Aln's name would fall.
Given her abilities, she would most likely be trailing close behind him — just below, he expected.
But when his gaze found the board, the words written there froze him solid.
He was wrong.
Or more precisely: partly right, and partly very, very wrong.
Cecil's name and Lucy's were listed side by side in first and second place — but the order was reversed.
1st — Lucy Aln
Current Floor: 100 — CLEARED
2nd — Cecil Soladin
Current Floor: 60 — IN PROGRESS
Lucy Aln above. Cecil Soladin below.
Cecil — Cecil, who had stooped to every dirty trick in existence in pursuit of victory — had lost to Lucy.
Cleared?
She cleared the dungeon?
Before a single full day had even passed?
...What kind of nightmare is this?
The instant Cecil finished reading the board and froze in place, a voice drifted over from behind him.
A slightly high voice — clear, and beautiful, and for that very reason all the more grating to his ears.
"Finally decided to show up? Making a lady wait — how terribly rude of you. Or should I say, are you simply too incompetent to manage basic courtesy?"
Lucy Aln.
The rival he had agreed to compete against.
The one person Cecil had sworn to beat this time, by any means necessary.
She stood gazing at him, impossibly pristine — not a hair out of place, in a state that defied any claim she'd just spent a day inside a dungeon.
"...How."
The word slipped out of Cecil's mouth of its own accord.
How had she already cleared the dungeon?
Wasn't it impossible?
The dungeon's layout? He knew it too.
The clear strategy? Same — he knew it, and he'd prepared thoroughly for the run.
The method for hunting the boss? He'd known all of it.
Their conditions had been perfectly, flawlessly identical. Which meant the side with the higher overall specs — his side — should have been the faster one. Wasn't that only logical?
And yet. Why?
Why had Lucy Aln overtaken us? Overtaken me?
Why, damn it all!
"Did you bring a professor in with you?"
"Sorry, but unlike the Cripple Prince, I don't need any help clearing a scrub-tier dungeon like this. I'm plenty capable all by myself. I'm a competent genius, you see. Unlike some people."
"Did you use dishonest means?"
"Dishonest? I literally just told you. I'm different from the Cripple Prince, remember?"
She entered alone.
She used no dishonest means.
And yet she cleared the dungeon faster than me? Faster than us?
That made no sense. None at all.
Even if — even if — you were competent, there are limits. With every other condition identical, a gap this size was impossible.
There was only one explanation for a difference this vast!
Unless you possessed martial strength surpassing my own, something like this could not —!
Bloodshot veins crawling across his eyes, Cecil glared at Lucy Aln's face in silence — then drew his sword from his hip and leveled it at her.
"Prove it."
"Prove what?♡ The Cripple Prince's total incompetence?♡"
"That you are stronger than I. That your overwhelming results were the natural, inevitable outcome."
He was demanding a duel.
Lucy stared at the tip of his sword for a moment — then promptly burst out laughing.
A laugh soaked in pity. A laugh steeped in contempt. A sneer that wormed its way into his ears and clung there, thick and slow, like something viscous.
She didn't spare even the twitch of his brow so much as a glance, simply laughing and laughing — until at last she covered her mouth with one hand and, eyes curving with mirth, delivered her verdict.
"Nah, I'm good?♡"
"...What?"
"Why would I have to?♡ Your incompetence has already been thoroughly proven, Your Highness, and I have no desire to hammer in the last nail♡ Call it mercy♡"
"..."
"Wellll. If you're that desperate to ask, shouldn't you show some matching politeness?♡ Care to lick my shoe?♡ Ahh, never mind, that won't work either♡ It'd gross me out too much♡"
As Cecil's face flushed redder than the sunset itself, his feet began to move — and a black aura gathered along the length of his sword.
The overwhelming blade that had split open the skulls of countless enemies.
Still a formidable weapon, even worn down from the long grind of the dungeon — weaker than in days past, but lethal all the same.
The sword Cecil trusted above all else, the sword he took the greatest pride in.
That sword was raised against Lucy Aln.
"A sneak attack?♡ Even for something this pathetic, don't you think there should be limits?♡ Ahhh, so the Cripple Prince was too stupid to even know where the limits were?♡ Ugh, honestly, it all makes sense now♡"
That sword never reached Lucy Aln.
Because a gleaming white shield, produced from her side in the blink of an eye, had already risen to block his blackened blade.