[384] Vol. 16 - The Meaning of Survival (6)
* * *
The students' faces were taut with tension. A seventh stage—something none of them had even heard rumors about—was unfolding right before their eyes.
"What the—he's getting crushed the whole time? There's no way he's actually going to die pinned to a wall like that, right?"
"That won't happen. If it did, it'd be no different from execution."
Colli's expression grew serious.
The Void Collapse wasn't simple crushing. It was a dreadful state that, if mishandled, could end a mage's life.
"I have to follow the official evaluation. But Shirone, you've already won. You don't need to push it that far to become a mage. You could lose everything."
Unable to ignore his conscience, Colli—unusual for an examiner—requested a reconsideration.
"Principal, shall we proceed? If we miss the timing, even if we deactivate the Virtual Zone they might not be able to get out."
Murmurs ran through the students at Colli's words. Could it really be possible that turning off the device wouldn't free them?
Amy blinked in surprise. "You mean they might not get out? No—if that's the case, we should have been told beforehand!"
"I'm not saying they definitely can't get out. I'm saying they might not. And the survival program is classified. Our school isn't the only one using it."
Right now, all countries in the same time zone according to international standard time were running the survival evaluation under the same program.
Even if they'd known, they couldn't disclose it. But to be honest, nobody expected it to get this far.
"It's been nineteen years. To see it again—"
In any case, Colli had already used the examiner's privilege; what remained was Alpheas' decision.
"What's there to decide? The student wants to continue. They should already know how to exit the Virtual Zone, right?"
"Yes. But the Void Collapse—"
"It's on a different order altogether. That's why there are stages. If you dragged any random student into stage seven it would be murder, but Shirone cleared every difficulty to get here. Isn't he entitled to be evaluated? How can someone call themself a mage if they can't judge the value of their own life?"
It sounded harsh, yet the students—who had already weathered countless dangers—fell silent in assent.
"Gruuuuh!"
The Shirone in the projection pushed with all his strength to drive the darkness away. Still, his body couldn't hold out and flattened under the pressure.
Colli exhaled a resigned sigh.
"So they're going to do it."
Thus the Void Collapse began.
* * *
"What—what's happening to me?"
Shirone was trapped like a specimen inside a two-dimensional rectangle. Stripped of time and height, he couldn't so much as twitch a finger.
"What on earth is—"
The bottom edge of the rectangle folded upward like paper.
Then it folded left to right, top to bottom, right to left in an endless repeating pattern.
It was shrinking.
It was collapsing toward a one-dimensional point.
You can't fold real matter infinitely, but the Magic Association had implemented the concept of the Void Collapse through a virtual program.
"Aahhhhh—"
A massive shock slammed into his head. Even Shirone's Spirit Zone was pushed to the brink.
Was he getting smaller, or was the world growing larger?
The more the scale gap widened, the more pressure swelled inside his skull and his eyes rolled back.
Each cycle reduced him to one-sixteenth of his previous size. He kept shrinking—past molecules, past atoms.
"I can't. I can't take this."
The students watched with blank faces. They couldn't imagine the kind of agony he was experiencing.
Because the projection's focus followed Shirone, all they could see was the regular folding pattern.
But even if they understood the mechanism, it wouldn't change the feeling of it.
It was a realm you couldn't grasp until you had grasped it. That was the enormous truth contained in the Void Collapse.
"Shirone!"
Amy shouted, pale. The Shirone collapsed in the Virtual Zone had his torso twitching.
Colli clenched his fists until they hurt.
"Shirone, give up! If you give up now you can live! Deactivate the Spirit Zone!"
The Void Collapse program drove into the mind a disparity on an astronomical scale.
Humans confined to a single planet had no sensory organs capable of apprehending that kind of terror.
If it went further, even if they shut the device off the mind would continue being drawn toward one dimension—until it fell into a vegetative state and never woke.
Shirone's back, slammed against the floor, arched like a bow.
That a body that had stood up even under extreme heat was now convulsing so violently meant he was in serious danger.
"Get out of the way! We have to save Shirone!"
As Amy lunged into the Virtual Zone, Nade clutched her arm in a panic.
"Wait! If you barge in you'll fail—both you and Shirone will flunk!"
"I don't care! I can retake the test next year! If Shirone gets hurt here I'll never forgive myself!"
Nade looked into Amy's blazing eyes and saw she meant it.
His pupils flickered. He turned his body.
"You're right. Let's save him together."
Then Iruki held them back.
"Don't judge rashly. It's Shirone."
"What do you mean? If Shirone—!"
"There's some change. It's not nothing."
Amy went silent and turned to the projection.
The same folding pattern still repeated.
"Change? What kind of change?"
"The folding's slowing down. Slightly."
Amy peered through her crimson gaze.
Indeed, the process had slowed compared to before. And it was slowing even more.
"Gruuuuh!"
Shirone had entered the Immortal Function.
He was trying to expand his mind into the realm of Infinity and claw his way out of the ever-deepening pit of the Void Collapse.
But unless his mind expanded faster than he was shrinking, he couldn't escape the trap of endlessness.
"This isn't enough. I need a greater expansion—"
The cohesion of his consciousness began to loosen. For an ordinary unlocker, that would mean losing oneself—dissolving into everything.
But Shirone never lost himself.
A psychic transcendence.
Breaking the fiction of scale, the Immortal Function slipped outside the Void Collapse's domain, and even in the projection the folding stopped.
"It's—it's stopped."
The students murmured. Then Shirone began to unfold in the reverse order of how he'd been folded.
"What is he doing?"
Something even more astonishing happened inside the Virtual Zone.
The students slowly backed away. The collapsed Shirone was staggering to his feet.
"How's he moving? He's supposed to be half-dead."
"Look! The projection!"
All eyes went to the vision. The Shirone in the image matched the Shirone in the Virtual Zone pose for pose.
The man who had been motionless with his head bowed raised both arms and started pushing the walls of darkness aside.
"That—that's—"
Colli trembled as if he couldn't believe it.
Reality and projection moved in perfect sync.
Shirone slowly raised his head and snapped his eyes open. At the same moment the darkness of the Void Collapse in the projection dissolved and the real scenery reappeared.
The same space, the same person.
Two Shirones—one in the real world, one in the virtual—spread their arms and glared forward.
"He broke the Void Collapse on his own…"
- Stage 7, Void Collapse program terminated. Deactivating Virtual Zone extreme-cold system.
When the mechanical announcement faded, Shirone slowly lowered his arms and climbed down from the Virtual Zone.
The students flinched and quickly stepped aside.
Even those who normally looked down on Shirone instinctively knew better than to touch him now.
He was, after all, a passer of the stage-7 survival evaluation.
All eyes tracked him as he walked up to Fermi and stopped.
"There was something I wanted to tell you but couldn't because you ran off."
Fermi's eyebrow rose.
"I'm going to become a mage. Do whatever you want, but if you try to stand in the way of my dream, I'll drop everything and break you first."
The students' expressions hardened.
It was a declaration of war against Fermi—and a message to everyone present.
Don't block my dream.
Faced with a resolve to fight to the death—to single someone out and take them down first—everyone's thoughts tangled.
"Damn. Fermi alone is trouble enough…"
Anyone in the graduating class knew Fermi exerted control over things.
No one opposed him because the first person he set his sights on would be the one who failed graduation.
Fermi's influence was still significant, but Shirone's arrival had subtly shifted the atmosphere.
"The second survival-evaluation master in the school's history."
That meant if survival came up in the graduation exam, passing was nearly guaranteed.
"I've been doing what Fermi picked until now. What if I get stirred up and end up as the one screwed over…"
All eyes turned to Fermi. They would judge anew based on his response.
Fermi gave a perfunctory smile. Anything he said would sound like a loser's excuses.
"Today I'll back down."
Without another word, Fermi turned and walked away, leaving the students stunned.
They had never seen him yield the initiative like that.
"Damn brat. From now on I'll count you as my greatest enemy. You'll regret making me think this way for the rest of your life."
Anger showed on Fermi's face—an emotion none of the graduating class had ever seen from him.
"Final survivor, Arian Shirone. Add twenty points to all Red Team members; deduct twenty points from all Blue Team members."
When Colli announced it, the students finally shifted back to thinking team-versus-team rather than Shirone versus Fermi.
"Yes! We won! Twenty points!"
"And we beat Fermi to get them! Feels great! I told you my judgment was right!"
Amy and Nade hugged and jumped up and down, and Shirone celebrated with a high-five from Iruki.
"Wow—"
From a distance, Maya watched in awe.
She'd been a seasoned member of the graduating class, but nobody had ever directly opposed Fermi like this.
Her face soon settled into a lonely expression.
"Must be nice, being strong…"
She'd never dared defy Fermi. Even if she tried to act out, he wouldn't notice.
To her, Shirone lived in another world—someone she hoped might, by sheer luck, become a mage and lift her tribe out of poverty.
"Shirone! That was amazing! I can't believe you passed stage seven!"
"I told you! No matter how great Fermi is, he can't beat an unlocker!"
Shirone, Shirone, Shirone.
Even students who usually kept their distance joined together to praise his feat.
Compared to the other participants, Shirone had advanced at least two stages farther and led his team to victory. Fifteen people got twenty points each because of him, so being cold to him now would only hurt their relationships.
Alpheas, who consoled the Blue Team as they left the training ground, finally looked back at Shirone. His feelings were mixed.
"Is this really the boy I remember?"
The boy who had climbed over a wall at twelve to beg for magic lessons was now the student who had broken the Void Collapse.
While he was proud of his pupil's growth, he also worried it had come too quickly.
It was no coincidence that long-ago memories overlapped in his mind.
Olivia, watching Shirone, said, "Psychic transcendence—or an equivalent extreme discipline. Without one of those two, escaping the Void Collapse by oneself is impossible."