The Fifth Gate's Breakthrough
"Ah……." A small sigh escaped Yura's lips.
Sirionella Private Academy, known for being Chris's one-man team. Yura had been determined to shake off that stigma by having the remaining three members work together to navigate the match successfully. But reality proved far crueler and colder than her hopes.
"……." There was no time to do anything. The gap with the leaders had already grown vast, and they were no longer visible even to the eye. They could neither check their opponents nor be checked by anyone. The realization made Yura grit her teeth and clench her fists.
'Don't make me laugh.'
Most of the audience was probably focused on monitoring the leaders. Only a tiny handful—if any—would be paying attention to their side. The thought filled her with unbearable frustration.
'I worked hard too.'
Staying up all night had become routine. Even during breaks, she had never once set aside her spellbooks. She had believed talent did not exist, that effort would always be rewarded someday. With that conviction, she had run forward with everything she had.
Yet effort was merely the foundation. Those with talent had covered far greater distances than her, even with similar effort—just like the enormous gap separating them from first place now.
"……." It felt distant and hopeless. She had wanted to prove her worth to her father through this competition, but all it had done was highlight the incompetence of an illegitimate child. Every shred of hope had vanished.
If Chris had been here, would the outcome have been different? If she had been born with the same talent as Chris, would her father have stopped turning away from her?
Her eyes, now dull and lifeless, swirled with sticky jealousy toward Chris.
"Come on! Let's push a little harder! We've only just reached the third gate! It's way too early to give up!"
Shubi cheered his teammates on with boundless energy, oblivious to her inner turmoil. He was an endlessly positive boy—that was probably why he could get along so well with Chris. But precisely because of that, he could never understand the darker side of human nature, nor the fact that unresolved negativity would inevitably lead to disaster.
＊ ＊ ＊
As time passed, the competition grew increasingly fierce.
'Finally, a reversal!'
After the fourth gate, despite the rising difficulty of the problems, Marily's ability to solve them before they even fully appeared allowed Benedict Academy's B team to overtake A team and reclaim first place. The margin was razor-thin, however, and it seemed only a matter of time before A team—now exiting the fourth gate—would overtake them again.
"Huff! Hah! Haaah!"
Above all, Togun, who had been rowing at full strength until now, was exhausted. His pace had slowed dramatically compared to their explosive start. His ragged breathing, as if his lungs might tear, and the sweat pouring down in streams that threatened dehydration made it painfully clear he had reached his limit.
"Just a little more! We're almost at the fifth gate!"
Despite all the twists and turns, things had unfolded exactly as Marily had hoped. Regaining first place in the fourth zone had bought them a sliver of breathing room. If Togun's stamina could hold until the fifth zone, victory would be right before their eyes.
"Arina! Are you ready?"
And the most crucial key to that victory was Arina.
"Mm-hmm."
Arina answered with a complicated expression. Honestly, she still wasn't sure she could pull off what Marily had asked. She had gotten a feel for it while passing through the first four gates, but improvising something on the spot was the area she lacked the most confidence in.
"It's fine. I glanced at it earlier—the problems Professor Magnus gave you were all covered in there."
Improvisation was impossible, but recalling memorized material was something she had become quite good at. Just as Marily's words were giving her courage, Arina suddenly noticed something odd in them.
"Huh? But how do you know what problems Professor Magnus assigned me?"
"Eh? Didn't I see them while passing by? You were always solving them right next to me."
"……."
Ah, right. Marily possessed perfect memory—she never forgot anything she had seen once. Arina quietly averted her gaze from Marily's slightly puzzled look, having momentarily forgotten that fact. While others envied her mana affinity, she found herself envying Marily's brilliant mind instead.
Boom!
At that moment, a familiar bombardment came flying from behind. A fireball in spherical form struck the water surface to their right.
"They're already here?!"
Startled by the attack, Marily looked back. The opponents were still distant enough to appear as mere dots, but that distance was closing rapidly with each passing second.
"Aaaaaagh!"
Togun let out a roar and squeezed out his final reserves of strength. His rowing was so vigorous that one had to worry whether he would even be able to compete properly tomorrow. Both Marily and Togun were giving everything they had to win this match.
'So I have to…….'
For the sake of the team's victory, she had to succeed. She didn't care if she got hurt, but she couldn't tolerate others suffering because of her. A spark was thrown into the driving force behind Arina's growth.
"It's the fifth gate!"
At the same moment Benedict Academy's A team appeared, a massive barrier materialized in front of B team. The fifth gate—the place where the most difficult problems of the entire competition would appear.
Amid the intensifying interference from behind, Marily swiftly reached out toward the spell formula that had appeared before them. To Arina, the problem looked so intricately twisted that it made her dizzy just from a glance, but Marily solved it with effortless simplicity and without the slightest hesitation.
"Alright, you're ready, right? The timing is when we pass through the gate."
At Marily's words, Arina nodded with a tense expression. Following her signal, the gate swung open wide. As the boat passed through with Togun's powerful rowing, Arina suddenly thrust her hand toward the translucent spell barrier.
Whooooom!
The descending barrier could be considered a single massive phenomenon—a kind of magic circle drawn within the virtual world known as magic. Interfering with it was not entirely impossible. After all, Arina had already succeeded in interfering with the dungeon walls during the maze escape match.
Click.
From within the mana restriction cuffs on her left hand, she extracted a single magic circle. Then she forcibly pushed it into the spell barrier—like planting a virus inside a computer.
A single error inscribed upon the phenomenon quickly began contaminating the entire barrier. The shapeless Fluid Magic Circle burrowed relentlessly into the empty spaces within the massive spell barrier, like water seeping into a cup filled with gravel.
"Ugh."
During the process, an enormous flood of spell problems rushed into Arina's mind. What she was doing now was strictly within the domain of dispel magic—magic that reversed an opponent's spell to nullify its activation itself. By performing this through the form of a magic circle, she was forcibly transforming the spell formula of the massive barrier.
The fifth gate was filled with spell problems so difficult that even Amy Pewter, one of Benedict Academy's top elites, would need considerable time to solve them. Naturally, the difficulty of the formulas Arina had to reverse-engineer in order to transform them was on an utterly merciless level. The time it took was longer than expected, and before long, the distance between the two teams had closed to the point where they could practically be called neighbors.
"Arina!"
Marily called her name. Yet she swallowed the urging words that would normally have followed, keeping her lips firmly pressed together. Everyone was anxious, but panicking wouldn't improve anything.
"You don't need to completely rewrite the barrier! Just breaking the system is enough!"
Instead of urging her on, Marily offered advice. With the sensibility of an F rather than a T, she presented the most appropriate countermeasure for the current situation. And Arina followed her words exactly.
As cold sweat streamed down her face, a faint smile eventually appeared on Arina's lips.
"It's done."
With that smile, an anomaly occurred in the translucent, rippling spell barrier. Red error messages rose up. The smoothly flowing spell barrier suddenly ceased functioning and hardened like solid rock.
"……."
Aaron's expression hardened as well at the sight. The problems weren't appearing. It was a system error. And as long as it remained unfixed, they couldn't receive any problems. The barrier that could be passed simply by solving problems had been reborn as an impassable wall through some means—even for a 4-star mage like Aaron Dice.
'First place is out of reach now.'
He hadn't expected them to break the gate in such a manner. A bitter smile formed on Aaron's lips at the technique possible only because Arina was an alchemist.
'But I can't just sit back and accept defeat.'
Aaron Dice, the kind and tolerant student council president, was nonetheless a man who became more persistent and tenacious than anyone when it came to competition. Born with exceptional talent, he was someone who could not tolerate anyone standing above him. A crimson glow blazed like flames in his dark eyes.
"Baraki, make sure the boat doesn't capsize."
It seemed he would need to go all out this time. After entrusting the boat's operation to Baraki, Aaron extended his right hand forward. Four stars radiated an immense amount of mana. All of it condensed into a single point in his palm, soon transforming into flames that repeatedly compressed within his grasp.
The greatest characteristics of flames were their destructive power to burn everything and their diffusiveness that scorched wide areas. But beyond those traits, flames possessed one other peculiar property: the stronger the pressure, the higher the temperature rose.
Whoosh!
From red to orange, with scattered white flames mixing around it. It was an ultra-high-temperature flame that only expert-level mages could typically produce, something rarely seen in nature except in outer space. The flame Aaron created instantly evaporated the seawater and shot in a straight line toward Benedict Academy's B team, which was still passing through the gate.
"Are you insane?!"
If he couldn't take first place, then he would eliminate first place entirely from this match. Startled by that violent decision, Marily urgently looked at Togun. In this situation, the only person who could block that attack was Togun alone.
"……."
But as if rejecting that expectation, Togun—who had rowed with every last ounce of strength—had already collapsed from exhaustion. He didn't even have the energy to draw the Anti-Magic Sword, let alone swing an ordinary blade.
'It's all over now!'
All they had to do was pass the fifth gate. After that, they could leisurely row to the finish line without worrying about any pursuers. She had never imagined the student council president would launch such a ruthless attack, declaring that if he couldn't be first, then no one would.
"……."
Even Marily had already accepted defeat in her heart when, in that moment, there was one girl who alone refused to give up and stared directly at Aaron's magic.
The state of hyper-concentration achieved by hacking the fifth gate. The altruistic mindset of wanting to win for everyone. The talent that had blossomed during her fight with Chris. These three factors aligned as Arina, who had been blankly watching the incoming flames, slowly raised her hand.
'It's possible.'
She calculated within the realm of the unconscious. And she became certain. The hypothesis she had just conceived was likely possible.
Whooooom.
Following her raised right hand, the magic circle embedded within the mana restriction cuffs on her left wrist was pulled upward. What she had drawn out this time was neither the magic circle Professor Paracelsus had inscribed nor the ones she had created herself. It was something far more fundamental—the very reason mana restriction cuffs were called magical tools. The magic circle that had been inscribed since the tower first created them.
'Mana Sealing.'
It was the power of the magical tool the tower had developed by studying the Masao family's mana-rejecting constitution to restrain criminals. She extracted that power as it was and spread it widely forward in the form of a spatial field. There was no time to modify it to her will. Moreover, she lacked the ability to decipher an ultra-high-difficulty magic circle capable of restraining even expert-level mages. So she simply deployed it as it was.
Even this much was sufficient to extinguish the ultra-high-temperature flames that could evaporate the very sea.
Flash!
The two magics collided in midair. There was no grand or flashy sound. What occurred alongside the collision was nothing but absolute silence.
"Whoaah!?"
Yet contrary to that silence, the waves began to churn with unprecedented violence. Waves surged upward like a tsunami. Baraki stretched his arms deep into the water like an anchor to maintain balance and prevent the boat from capsizing. On the opposite side, using the Fluid Magic Circle 'Weight Reduction,' Arina reduced the boat's weight to the absolute minimum. Risking the danger of capsizing, they rode the tsunami and passed through the gate at high speed.
The distance between the two boats grew farther apart due to the aftermath of the collision. Meanwhile, Aaron narrowed his eyes and watched Benedict Academy's B team's boat until the very end.
"Ha, haha."
A hollow laugh escaped him involuntarily. In the end, the boat that had succeeded in its gamble and avoided capsizing. He watched the first-year students on board clapping their hands in celebration of their victory.
'It's over.'
With their passage, the gate closed completely. Interference was no longer possible. Quietly accepting the outcome of the match, Aaron brushed back his red hair.
'I really didn't think we'd lose.'
Though he had genuinely cheered for the first-years' efforts, now that he had lost, the frustration was something he couldn't suppress. Before Amy, who lay sprawled on the deck as if unconscious, and Baraki, who had collapsed beside her from exhaustion, Aaron could only stare for a long while at the first-years' boat disappearing beyond the fifth gate.