Even though Ero had not heard a thing, he ducked at once. It was pure survival instinct.

The kicked wall surface shoved outward as it was, then flew backward before it even had the chance to tilt. The barrier, nearly eleven meters tall, failed to withstand the massive impact and split in two before crashing into the wall behind it.

Kwaaang!

It looked like that would be the end of it, but even the opposite wall, which had shown no gap whatsoever, was instantly half-destroyed, and the force punched through the wall beyond that as well.

As the space expanded, a gale arrived half a beat late and whipped Ero’s hair and the participant’s hair violently around. The participant, who had been about to ask, So that’s your boss?, barely managed to keep his eyes open as he hunched his neck into his shoulders.

His vision was obscured by the dirt carried in on the gale, but the faint silhouette flickering through it was still unmistakably visible. Heat haze rose around that figure. He was taller, sure, but since he was running around with a small fry, the participant had assumed he was just another small fry himself... so what was this prickling tremor crawling over his skin?

Shivering from that inexplicable pressure, the participant turned his messy head toward the newly blasted-open space behind them. Right then, Leonardo Blaine, who had spun once from the recoil, extended an arm forward and fired an air sphere. The clouded dirt was blown away in all directions, and the ruined misery of the destroyed maze spread wide under the pressure of the wind.

The trajectory he sent out pierced endlessly through the layered barriers standing in rows. At the far end, barriers that still seemed to be trembling from the impact toppled one after another like dominoes. Because of that, a series of heavy vibrations and crashing noises boomed across the silent area for about five seconds. Hovering in midair, Leonardo Blaine pressed the side of his hand to his brow and let out a short whistle.

“As I thought.”

When the last barrier fell backward, a strange cylindrical structure came into view. On instinct, Leonardo Blaine thought that place must be the escape point. He landed on the ground.

Then, launching himself straight ahead in a line at the same moment he jumped, he called to Ero.

“Follow me!”

Ero, who had been crouched low beneath the shattered barrier, lifted his head at the shout.

He scrambled to his feet and looked around in a daze, then spotted the path blown clean open and hurried after Leonardo Blaine.

“Yes, yes! Boss, I’m coming!”

Just as he was about to run after him, he suddenly halted. He dug hurriedly through his pocket, then threw something behind him. The object traced an arc through the air and landed with a clink at the bound participant’s feet. It was a token.

It was the same 17 he had tried and failed to hand to Leonardo Blaine earlier.

“Hey, that’s from our boss!”

Ero’s voice echoed through the gorge formed between the maze walls.

The participant stared blankly at the two men growing farther away.

Even Thanatos, whom he had seen when his head was shoved into that hole, had tried several times to break through the maze walls. But at most, he had managed to scratch them. Even he had not been able to destroy them.

But that man... no, that boss who supposedly would even beat Kazard of the Council....

“So he was the real thing.”

The participant murmured the words to himself. In the drifting dust settling through the distance, the two silhouettes vanished in the blink of an eye.

Ero’s eyes sparkled, and even as he ran, his grin was split from ear to ear. He nimbly leaped over the chunks of barrier piled below like someone clearing hurdles. Even while doing so, he stretched a hand toward the hem of Leonardo Blaine’s cloak fluttering ahead of him. When the flapping fabric brushed his fingertips, reality finally started to sink in.

“Wow, boss. I’m really sorry that I keep saying this, but you’re seriously incredible! How the hell did you do that?”

“......”

“No, I mean, if you were going to do this, you could’ve just smashed through from the start. Were you pretending to get lost because you wanted to preserve the Council’s dignity or something?”

Ero kept rattling off exclamations of admiration. But Leonardo Blaine, his eyes fixed on the ground, was busy counting exactly how many fallen barriers there were.

Six, seven, eight...

With eleven-meter barriers lined up one after another, the distance was considerable. He sent his gaze ahead of his body and counted to the very last wall. There were exactly eleven. Just to be sure, he checked his token count, but even while flying over the half-destroyed barriers, the number did not go down.

It remained exactly as it had been the last time he checked: 521. Certain now, Leonardo Blaine opened his mouth.

“I really was lost. I just found a shortcut now.”

“A shortcut?”

“Here. A shortcut worth eleven token moves, no less. The guide said it at the start, remember? One point gets deducted every time you pass through a wall. There’s no way they’d take eleven for no reason.”

Ero replayed the memory, then clapped his hands as if realization had struck him. If that was true, then all those places the participant they met earlier had mentioned, where the token count suddenly dropped by a large amount, might have been hints to the shortcuts. It seemed the difference between escaping quickly and not was whether you merely thought something was strange, or whether you could pull a clue from that strangeness.

Suddenly Ero remembered the time the Division One match ended, and he had met Sandra with Leonardo Blaine, the one who had overseen the match. Back then, Sandra had said this:

“Those who can distinguish between the clear rules defined by the game and the means outside them, and furthermore doubt the information they themselves have judged, will become the variable in this League and another kind of powerhouse.”

Ero stared at Leonardo Blaine’s back.

And if the overwhelming powerhouse and that other powerhouse are the same person? Then he really would be the new champion, wouldn’t he?

Satisfaction filled the corners of his mouth. Right then, even Ero, with his inevitably lower vantage point, began to see the structure drawing near.

Pointing toward the form they suspected was the exit, he shouted,

“Boss! That pillar-looking place is—ugh!”

A scream rang out while he was running well enough, and Leonardo Blaine, who had abruptly stopped in midair, turned back.

It was unbelievable, but the flat ground had opened up, and Ero was falling straight into a black void below.

“Boooss!”

His outstretched hand and voice rang out pitifully. For a brief moment, Leonardo Blaine stared blankly at Ero as he dropped farther away. Then he came to his senses belatedly and jumped into the black hole after him.

“Goddamn it—”

Putting a trap in a place like this is cheating, isn’t it?

He had already thought the crawl holes and shortcuts were abnormal, but who would have guessed the floor itself would open too? He had no idea how this place was constructed. Stretching his hand toward Ero, Leonardo Blaine descended with him into the dark earth.

***

“Congratulations on clearing the first part. Would you like to proceed directly to the second part?”

Just moments ago, everything had clearly been dark, but now their surroundings brightened all at once. Leonardo Blaine and Ero squinted from the glare and the impact of the fall before finally managing to open their eyes.

They were not injured, thanks to an air mat for preventing injuries that cushioned them from below. But with two grown men tangled together, there was both pain and an unpleasant sense of excessive bodily contact.

“Clearing it?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Aagh—!”

Leonardo Blaine shoved Ero, who was sprawled on top of him, aside with one hand and rose unsteadily to his feet. A smiling guide was looking down at them.

Leonardo Blaine looked up at the sky, where a light very different from before was pouring down.

Then his gaze naturally lowered to his feet. He had meant to check for a shadow, but something else caught his eye first.

“This is...”

The floor was entirely transparent. If not for the grid lines drawn across it, he might have mistaken it for empty air.

It seemed this was the upper side of the barrier that had covered the top of the maze. And beneath their feet, the maze’s structure and the participants still wandering inside it were visible at a glance. Even the scene of the shortcut he had broken through being cleared away in perfect order by the legionnaires deployed in response.

Thinking again that they must have been watching everything from up here all along gave him a strange feeling. His use of the magic circle and flames had probably already been fully exposed, but perhaps it was a good thing, at least, that he had not melted the walls.

They should have told us in advance.

At that moment, Ero, half-risen and still reeling, looked down at the floor and made a loud fuss. Leonardo Blaine’s gaze shifted to him.

That bastard really does have a knack for finding routes.

At that instant, a ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ shout rang out from far away.

“Uaaah!”

The two men reflexively turned their heads. And the sight spread out ahead of them was no less bizarre than the floor beneath their feet.

This was clearly inside the arena, and yet what stretched across their view was a vast desert. It covered an enormous area, enough to blanket about one-third of the circular stadium wall.

Another strange detail was how angular the scene looked, as though rectangular pieces of desert photographs had been cut out and pasted together one by one.

It felt like staring out at the outside world from inside a spotless transparent igloo. It was as though the inside of the arena had been arbitrarily connected to the outdoors through portals and mirrors.

The participants were each holding something in one hand and crossing the burning sand by throwing it ahead of themselves. Just as the rules were starting to make him curious, the guide who had been waiting for them approached holding black spheres in both hands.

“I will now begin explaining the rules of the second part. This event is shot put.”

“Shot put?”

“Yes. These shot puts are transformed forms of the tokens the two of you were carrying. Can you see the numbers here?”

The shot puts, black like betting chips with striped patterns drawn around the edges, had the numbers 80 and 541 inscribed in the center.

“When you cleared the first part, twenty uses were added to each of your final token values.”

The size felt comfortable and appropriate, small enough for even an adult woman to grip in one hand. The guide helped Ero, who was still seated on the floor, to his feet by the forearm.

Then he placed the shot put marked 80 in Ero’s hand.

He lifted it together with him, then let go with the warning, “It’s fairly heavy, so please be careful.”

“Whoa!”

Ero’s arm was yanked downward in an instant, and he toppled over in an ugly heap. The shot put he was supposed to use also rolled from his hand and struck the floor, and the sound it made was anything but ordinary.

It was such a heavy, dull sound that even Leonardo Blaine’s expression stiffened for an instant, like a solid iron sphere had slammed into the ground.

After picking up the shot put and handing it back to Ero once more, the guide continued explaining.

“This shot put’s number decreases by 1 each time it is thrown. A participant may move only as far as the point where the shot put lands immediately after the throw, and once they reach that location, they may throw it again. The number of times this can be done corresponds to the number inscribed on the shot put. If you proceed straight west through the desert, you will come upon an oasis island. Arriving there while still in possession of your shot put is the objective of the second part.”

The guide added that, as with the earlier tokens, reaching 0 did not mean immediate elimination, but movement beyond a five-meter radius would become impossible, and that in this part in particular, because of the desert’s intense heat and its hazards, any participant who declared an intention to withdraw would be eliminated immediately and allowed to return home.

“The shot put must be thrown directly by its owner, and weapons and abilities may be used freely except for teleportation. However, you may not physically touch another participant’s shot put. Situations in which thrown shot puts collide and interfere with one another will be judged an unavoidable incident during the match and will not be addressed separately. Naturally, the count will still decrease by 1 as normal, so please keep that in mind. Do you have any additional questions?”

With his legs trembling, Ero managed to get to his feet and awkwardly lifted the shot put in both hands. Then he looked at Leonardo Blaine with a miserable face.

“Boss, this is heavier than it looks!”

After staring at him for a moment, Leonardo Blaine asked the guide,

“That thing. How much does it weigh?”

Holding out the shot put marked 541 to Leonardo Blaine, the guide answered with a smile.

“Twenty percent of the shot put’s value, in kilograms.”