Second-Semester Finals (11)
Apparently, the words "Floor 0" were as infuriating as I'd intended.
Arthur grumbled that he wanted to hit me just once. Joy muttered that I really hadn't needed to go that far. Frey called it evil through puffed-out lips.
Phoebe... hmm. She didn't react much at all.
Which was hardly strange. Phoebe was the kind of girl who assumed there was a deeper meaning behind anything I did, so why would she get angry over a dungeon merely being a little longer?
Even if she'd said something like, "I'm so grateful I get to enjoy the young lady's dungeon for that much more time," it wouldn't have surprised me in the slightest.
By now everyone probably understood: the "Floor 0" label was an extremely deliberate device.
They'd already cleared four rooms, so I could easily have written "Fifth Room" or "Floor 5." So why did I deliberately write "Floor 0" instead?
Obviously, to make them furious.
The moment anyone starts thinking all their hard work has amounted to nothing, their blood boils — anyone's would, right?
And then, as they push through the dungeon in that state, when they finally realize all their agonizing hadn't been meaningless, the relief and joy hit exactly as hard as the anger had.
Heheh. Just picturing that scene makes me laugh out loud.
It's almost a shame I won't get to witness that moment with these two eyes.
"Child."
I was on my way back to the dormitory, basking in the satisfaction of a goal achieved, when Grandpa suddenly called out to me.
"Yes?"
"Did you truly intend to take that chestnut fist on the head?"
"You mean from the Third Prince? Yes. I fully intended to."
After all, even if Arthur had swung at me with everything he had, I doubted it would have hurt much.
That much was a fair price to pay in exchange for hearing his honest reaction.
Though in the end, with the stage set up so nicely, Arthur chickened out entirely, and the chestnut fist never came to pass.
I'm not exactly overflowing with generosity, but I'm not so petty that I'd seek revenge over something like that either.
Just how monstrous a person does Arthur imagine me to be?
"Haaah."
When I tilted my head at him in puzzlement, Grandpa let out a sigh so thick with exasperation it practically radiated off him.
"Child, you must learn to consider the consequences of your actions before you act upon them."
"...I'm sorry? What are you talking about all of a sudden?"
Did I do something wrong?
No matter how I turned it over in my head, I couldn't think of anything I'd done that was particularly problematic.
Oh. Wait. Could he mean—
"Grandfather, even if Arthur did rap me on the head, I don't think I'd get hurt."
It was true that he'd gotten stronger, but he was nowhere near the level where he could actually injure me.
Even if Arthur wrapped himself in aura, I'd just block it with divinity — no damage done at all.
If anything, I should probably be worried about his hand.
"That is not what I—! ...Haah. Never mind. As if you could ever be at fault. If we're assigning blame, it falls on that rascal Benedict."
Benedict's fault? What for?
I tilted my head, unable to make heads or tails of what Grandpa meant, but he refused to answer a single one of my questions.
"Grandfather! I really, really hate being treated like a little kid?!"
That whole 'children shouldn't concern themselves with adult matters' attitude — it's genuinely infuriating to be on the receiving end of it!
annoyed by the way he kept dodging the question, I gave him a piece of my mind, but all I got in return was a derisive snort.
"I call you a brat because you are a brat."
"Excuse me? What part of me looks like a brat?!"
"Hmph. Outside and inside both, you are young. If that is not a brat, what is?"
My outside might look like a little kid, sure, but my inside definitely isn't! Correct yourself nicely, right now!
Otherwise I won't hold back either!
"The way you flare up this easily is exactly why I call you a brat, little one."
The day after Ruel, having provoked Lucy, was put in a full-body grooming hold by the face-connoisseur fox and made to regret his own actions.
Arthur's party breaking through the fourth room seemed to have served as the spark — the leading parties began toppling it one by one, each in their own way.
The most absurd case among them was the party of the second prince of Ruhvi, who attempted to smash through the wall, botched the power control, and team-killed themselves right past the fourth room's gimmick.
Watching this, Jesl, the Dungeonology professor, began seriously pondering whether these people should really be allowed to graduate — though that's hardly information worth dwelling on.
After clearing the fourth room, those who descended the stairs to the basement and reached the dungeon's true first floor finally realized that the dungeon proper was an entirely different beast from the rooms before it.
The earlier rooms had tested not dungeon-clearing skill but the ability to decipher gimmicks. The dungeon itself was different.
The ability to map out the passages within.
The ability to contend with the countless monsters lurking inside.
And on top of that, the ability to handle the many traps scattered throughout.
The underground dungeon beneath the mansion was a place that tested dungeon-crawling competence in addition to gimmick-reading ability.
Ordinarily, the beneficiaries of such a shift would have been the upperclassmen parties, without question.
Upperclassmen with extensive dungeon experience naturally outperformed underclassmen in all manner of fundamentals — that was simply how things should be.
But that was not how it went with this final exam.
The dungeon's difficulty spiked so sharply with each floor that students of every year were cursing up a storm about the pointlessly brutal dungeon, regardless of whether they were first-years or third-years.
It got so bad that whispers began circulating among the exam takers: wasn't the year-based penalty system a bit too harsh?
What put a firm stop to that debate was Arthur's party clearing the first floor.
Their run raised the question of why first-years were setting records while leaving several illustrious names of the leading groups in their dust.
"The second prince of Ruhvi and His Highness the Second Prince are both still struggling on Floor 1, and a bunch of first-years clear it?"
"Their party lineup is impressive, sure, but this is something else."
"The Alrn girl's a first-year too. They probably got the advantage there."
"At this rate, the outcome's as good as decided."
Just as those voices, murmuring among the students who'd suffered miserable failures on the first floor, began creeping louder and louder—
it was Cecil's party that crushed them.
Chasing Arthur's party at a frightening pace, Cecil's party claimed the second floor first and seized back the lead.
"How amusing. Blaming the dungeon because your own skills fall short — spare me."
With those words, flung at the sycophants who'd come crawling over to flatter him — leading the pack despite a penalty, how remarkable! — the talk of unfair year-based disparities more or less died on the spot.
What truly kept the controversy from gaining traction, moreover, was the simple fact that most of those in the lead were second- or third-years.
And within that lead group, the only first-years locked in fierce competition were Arthur's party and Avery's.
Setting those two aside, the rest of the first-years were nowhere near the lead — even reaching Floor 0 was a rare feat among them.
"Perhaps those people are simply exceptional."
As this opinion congealed into the accepted truth, anyone still spouting the words "year-based discrimination" found themselves treated like an idiot, and the artificially manufactured controversy fizzled out completely.
But that wasn't the only event to spring up among the Dungeonology exam takers.
"Ughhh! Seriously?!"
"I'm itching to give her a chestnut fist! Itching to lecture her!"
"This is exactly why I didn't want to look at the hints!"
"LUCY ALRNNN!"
The students who read the second distributed hint began gathering together, swearing vengeance upon Lucy Alrn.
Final exam grades be damned — united under the single goal of showing Lucy Alrn exactly what they were made of, they willingly shared their dungeon-clearing methods with one another and threw themselves into reaching the dungeon's end.
Even as students began dropping out for cheating, the madness never stopped — as if to demonstrate just how enormous their rage had grown.
And so, after three days packed with countless stories, the exam reached its fourth day — by which point a great many students had already dropped out of the race for first.
For most of them, it came down to stamina.
These were students who had spent three days grinding through the dungeon while also preparing for every other final exam on their plate.
As what everyone had assumed would end in a day or two stretched past the three-day mark, those pushed to the brink of exhaustion had no choice but to give up the competition.
The poster child for this was, of course, Avery's party.
They'd posted eye-catching results among the upperclassmen and been hailed as one of the prides of the first-year class, but in truth, this was a party that had climbed high on Toby's shoulders alone.
Lacking both the ability and the endurance to match the lead group's pace, the party finally dropped out of the race when Avery Lumley declared she simply couldn't live like this any longer and announced a rest.
Besides them, many more dropped out for reasons of their own, and by the end of the fourth day, it was accepted as settled fact that the First Clearer would emerge from one of these three parties.
The parties of each year's finest, watched from the very start.
Arthur's party, the best of the first-years.
Cecil's party, the best of the second-years.
Kurten's party, the best of the third-years.
Even as countless others gave up, these three traded the lead back and forth in a vicious, relentless contest — and before the fourth day ended, they broke through the dungeon's fourth floor, snatching away what little hope remained among the rest of the examinees.
The fifth day of the academy's final exams.
By the time it arrived — with only three days left until finals ended — attitudes toward the Dungeonology exam split cleanly into three camps.
"I was never making it to the end anyway. Just don't fail."
"I'm drowning in my other exams. I can't waste time on this forever."
"Ha. Screw it. I'm just gonna quit."
Those who cleared just enough to avoid failing — or to scrape a passable grade — and then turned their backs on the dungeon entirely.
"I've come this far. Might as well see it through to the end."
"I can't just leave myself open for Lucy Alrn to laugh at."
"How deep do you think we'd need to get to make the top ranks?"
Those who resolved to push the dungeon to the end — whether out of sunk cost, a desire to teach Lucy a lesson, or ambition for high marks.
"Lucy Alrn. That little witch. Has she even cleared this dungeon herself?"
"Obviously not. She just made it hard to torment everyone and sits there giggling."
"I don't think she even built the thing."
"Haah. A year ago she was just a brat. Now look at her."
"Ugh. This is such bullshit."
"Why should I have to fail because of that one girl?"
"Her hints were shit, too."
And then there were the defeated — those who had abandoned everything else to devote themselves to the Dungeonology exam, only to be squeezed out of the competition anyway.
Having botched their other finals and forfeited any claim to the First Clearer's rewards, they had reached the point where no amount of scrambling could save them from failure.
Anyone overhearing their grumbling would surely have told them, isn't the problem that you made such stupid choices? But among a mob of equally matched fools, no such self-correction was possible.
Was that all?
Perhaps because fool plus fool adds up to even greater folly, some among them went on to lose whatever brakes they had left, degenerating to the point of hatching a plan so idiotic it defied belief.
"Hey. Since it's come to this, why don't we just humiliate Lucy Alrn?"
"How?"
"It's her dungeon, right? Make her clear it herself."
"...Say what you want about that girl, but she's actually good at dungeon crawling."
"You idiot. Look at how the three lead parties have been throwing themselves at Floor 5 all day without cracking it. Doesn't that tell you anything? She never intended for anyone to clear it in the first place."
"...Huh. Come to think of it, it's kind of amazing nobody's cleared it, considering who's in those parties."
"Maybe she didn't even prepare a reward?"
"Then she's genuinely the worst?"
"What's it matter? We're just checking. Follow the proper procedure, and there's nothing in it that hurts us, right?"
"Right. If she clears it, she clears it. And if she can't — jackpot."
The fools who believed Lucy Alrn had ruined their lives drafted a plan, with their calcified brains, to force a humiliation upon her.
And of anyone in the world, that was a plan Lucy Alrn herself would have welcomed most eagerly of all.