Academy Entrance Exam (6)
Compared to clearing dungeons with the knights back home, we'd practically been strolling through this one — and yet it had still worn them out completely?
Delving into a dungeon alongside Forsell was no joke.
Evans's dungeon might be classed as small-to-medium, but it was five floors deep, and the old man had dragged me through the whole thing in two hours flat.
Aside from the actual fighting, we never stopped running the entire time.
Isn't it a little harsh, comparing these kids to trained knights?
'Compared to me, they fall short by a mile.'
Case in point: I had more or less held the vanguard all by myself, and I wasn't even winded.
I'd barely broken a sweat, either.
I hold people to a rather high standard, true — but in this case, the odd one out is you, not them.
'Is that so?'
Grandfather's words didn't quite land with me.
Sure, I'd spent the last three months grinding through training hard enough that I'd actually caught myself thinking the knights were impressive — but three months was still just three months.
No matter how much game knowledge I had, or how efficiently I'd leveraged it, there was no way I could have grown that strong that fast.
...Oh. Could it be that my level is simply higher than those two?
That must be it. Joy had never once set foot in a dungeon before today.
And Jacob moved even more clumsily than she did, so the dungeon was clearly unfamiliar territory for him too.
The gap between level 1 and level 10 is no small thing.
Spending all that time around the Aln family's knights, it had honestly never occurred to me that I might be the higher-level one.
'...Let's take a short break.'
And you were planning to just push straight through to the end? With a boss waiting for you?
Obviously. That's how you shave a few more seconds off the record.
I'm the only one doing all the grunt work up front anyway — the other two just need to hang back and support me. What's a little heavy breathing between party members?
At least give them time to catch their breath. Even I never ran dungeons that ruthlessly.
Games becoming reality really does come with these annoying little downsides.
The characters in the game never complained, no matter how hard I worked them.
"Let's rest for a bit."
The moment the words left my mouth, Joy and Jacob collapsed onto the stone floor like marionettes with cut strings.
Watching Joy — who normally carried herself with every ounce of a duchess's poise — toss dignity and decorum straight out the window and sprawl flat on her back, I could tell it had genuinely been rough on them.
After some time had passed, Jacob hauled himself unsteadily to his feet. He pulled out a canteen, took a few swallows of water, then looked over at me and spoke up carefully.
"Lady Aln, how on earth are you so fit?"
'I trained.'
"Unlike a pathetic little runt like you, I worked my body hard. There's no way I'd lose to a lazy half-pint like you."
"I've done my fair share of conditioning as well, though..."
You're supposed to grind levels inside the dungeon, genius.
No matter how diligently you train, a low level has its limits.
"I'd honestly love to know what kind of training you do. Madam Delinquent."
Joy, who had apparently been listening in on us the whole time, spoke up from where she leaned against the wall.
What kind of training, you ask?
Nothing I can't share. There's nothing to hide, really.
I recited my usual training routine for them, and I could see the two of their expressions gradually go from neutral to vaguely nauseated.
"You actually do all that?"
'I do. No lies here.'
"Just because it's impossible for your own pathetic constitution, Scatterbrained Young Lady, doesn't mean you get to doubt me."
"You seriously trained around the clock?! Outside of eating and sleeping, you did nothing but train?!"
Was that really worth this much astonishment?
Compared to the family knights, I actually had it pretty easy.
Not that I'm a count's daughter and all, so Forsell went easy on me. Even to my eyes, the knights' training regimen was downright brutal.
Forsell had made real the philosophy that if your body's capabilities were superhuman, then your training should be superhuman too.
"So that's how you got this strong."
Joy eyed me with something between disgust and grudging respect, then used her staff as a crutch to push herself upright.
'Recovered your strength?'
"Can you walk now, Scatterbrained Young Lady?"
"Yes."
'And Jacob?'
"And you, runt?"
"I'm fine as well."
'Then let's move. To the boss room.'
"Then let's go. The boss of these antiques is probably just as decrepit as they are — let's finish this quickly."
When I pushed open the door to the boss room, a massive humanoid golem stood at the center of an otherwise empty chamber.
It was easily as big as Forsell, and unlike the golems we'd fought on the way down, it wore actual armor — battered, but properly forged.
In its hands it gripped what was less a sword than a blunt instrument, a greatblade with enough raw mass to qualify as a club.
Depending on how much strength that thing packed, mindlessly blocking it with my shield might just shatter the shield along with my arm.
The golem stood perfectly still at the center of the room like a statue — until the moment it confirmed our entrance, when its eyes flushed red and it raised its sword.
'I'll take point.'
"I'm going in first, so support me as you see fit."
I still hadn't reached the point where I could issue commands mid-combat.
If the enemy in front of me were trash mobs, I could afford some theatrics, but against an opponent demanding my full strength, focusing on the enemy was the best I could manage.
Still, Joy had read the situation and supported me on her own during the earlier fights, so she'd probably manage just fine this time too.
"Hey there, rusty old knight♡ Why aren't you attacking? Don't tell me you're scared of a little girl like me?♡ A cowardly golem♡ That's hilarious♡"
The instant I taunted it, red light flared from within the golem's helm, and its massive frame began lumbering toward me.
Each step it took shook the ground, a testament to the power coiled inside that thing — but watching it come, I felt nothing but ease.
It had Forsell's bulk, but its speed was slow enough to make me yawn by comparison.
At this pace I could toy with it using footwork alone, but right now what I needed was a quick victory, not a safe one.
I hoisted my shield and charged straight at the golem.
Seeing my movement, it raised its sword high.
Don't block. Dodge.
'I know that much, Grandfather.'
I'm no idiot — who would eat an attack that slow on purpose?
Forsell had drilled this into me until I was sick of hearing it.
If an attack can be dodged, there's no reason to raise your shield.
Blocking means surrendering the initiative — so take the initiative back by evading.
As the greatblade came crashing down, I darted sideways, slipping past the blade entirely.
BOOM!
The enormous mass smashed into the floor, blasting the stone apart and kicking up a cloud of dust.
Not bad power. Then again, next to Forsell it was small-fry.
I was mulling over which part of that lumbering rustbucket to smash first when a burst of flame streaked past and struck the golem's head, detonating on impact.
Joy's support fire, huh.
Fast and accurate.
Even better, she'd timed it to the exact instant the golem froze its movement.
Truly a min-maxed prodigy, isn't she? Her stamina leaves something to be desired, but her magical talent is the real deal.
Still green, though.
She should have prepared something other than fire magic.
Decrepit or not, a golem is the one opponent a fireball was never going to work on.
When the smoke from the blast cleared, the golem's helm emerged — lightly scorched, otherwise completely fine.
'Joy! No fire magic!'
"Scatterbrained Young Lady! Does your brain not work?! Are you seriously dumber than me, the girl who guessed her way through the entire magic exam?!"
"Then what am I supposed to do?!"
'Just do what you were doing!'
"Keep that thing slowed down with ice magic, like before!"
The golem was already sluggish. Layer Joy's debuffs on top of that, and this thing would be reduced to a very intimidating-looking sandbag.
The attacks could come after that. Plenty of time.
"Got it! Give me a moment!"
Listening to Joy's reply, I dodged the sword as it came down again and swung my mace into the golem's thigh.
Hard, but not unbreakable.
While I held its attention, Jacob — who had run up close to the golem — swung his sword from behind.
His strike wasn't bad, but the matchup was terrible.
A sword is the worst possible weapon against something this hard.
The instant Jacob's blade bounced off, the golem's gaze swung toward him.
"Hey. Cheap-knight. Where do you think you're looking?"
Your opponent is standing right in front of you. Where's this wandering gaze of yours off to?
You look like a knight, but turns out you're a two-timing flirt who doesn't even know the first thing about chivalry?
"Don't tell me men were your type?♡ Oh dear. My apologies♡ Must've been disappointing, going up against a little pipsqueak like me♡"
Once again, the golem's red glare swung back to me.
That's right. Look at me.
Your enemy is me.
From there, the fight was nothing more than grinding the golem's health bar down.
Joy layered on debuffs with her magic, I drew its attention while chipping away at it, and Jacob piled on damage like he was poking it with a toothpick.
There was no tension at all.
Tension, after all, only exists where there's danger — and a golem shaped like a knight couldn't threaten us with so much as a shred of it.
At some point mid-fight, my mace pulverized the golem's thigh, and from there subduing the thing's flailing death throes was all that remained.
"Is that it, then?"
Joy asked it with a strangely ambiguous tone as she watched the golem's core shatter.
'Yes. I'd say so?'
"I'd say so. Why, is something odd about that, Scatterbrained Young Lady?"
"No. It's just that I got all tense thinking it was a boss fight, and it ended so anticlimactically."
Anticlimactic it was.
But with a boss fight, anticlimactic is exactly what you want.
This isn't a game — who needs a fight down to the wire?
Real-life combat is at its best when it's boring.
"So we just head back now, right?"
'Yes.'
"That's right."
"But... which way do we go back?"
What do you mean, which way?
We've cleared the dungeon, so the exit door—
Why isn't it there?
Something was wrong.
The boss of 'Where the Alchemist Resides' was, without question, the knight-shaped golem we'd just killed.
Defeat it, and — like every other dungeon — a door to the outside appears, and stepping through it ends the exam.
Maybe I don't know much about entrance exams specifically, but I've sat through plenty of practical exams in my day.
It always worked that way. So why wasn't the door appearing?
'Jacob...'
"Hey. Runt. You've got one of those communication tools that connects to the outside, right?"
"Yes. One of the examiners gave it to me, but it's..."
The way Jacob's voice trailed off made my stomach tighten.
'Spit it out.'
"Don't trail off, it's annoying."
"I'm sorry! It's — it won't activate! Either it's broken or something!"
What? What did he just say?
I snatched the tool right out of Jacob's hand and tried to trigger it myself, but nothing happened.
Completely dead.
"Lady Aln."
I looked up at the sound of Joy's voice. She was holding the escape tool the examiner had handed her.
"This one's not working either."
...A coincidence. I wanted to believe that, but there was no way.
Soul Academy would never hand out exit tools without verifying they worked. And even if one had coincidentally broken in here, both of them failing at once would be absurd.
On top of that, the exit door itself hadn't appeared — and this was supposed to be coincidence?
Not a chance.
One thing might be chance. But pile chance upon chance upon chance, and it becomes inevitability.
This situation was inevitability.
Just as my thoughts were beginning to spiral into confusion, a single message materialized before my eyes.
[Agra is watching you.]
Oh.
Son of a bitch.