“Aaaah!!”
Thud!!
Just one second ago, baseballs had been flying toward the spot where Midoriya’s head had been. They were only balls, but judging by their speed and the depth they sank into the ground when they missed, getting hit would have meant at least a serious injury.
Midoriya barely dodged the baseballs and looked forward again, tears welling in his eyes and scattering away.
He didn’t have time to wipe them.
Whoosh!!
Two bamboo swords tied to ropes—he had no idea where they had come from—were hurtling toward him at terrifying speed.
“Left!? Right!? Should I duck!? Jump!?”
That split-second hesitation stiffened his body, and the price of that stiffness was brutal.
Thwackthwackthwackthwack!!
“Ghk! Ack! Kyaaaagh!!”
The bamboo swords started beating the curled-up Midoriya like dust being knocked out of a rug on a rainy day.
They were wrapped in cloth, perhaps as a shred of mercy, so it wasn’t devastatingly painful—but it still hurt like hell.
“Ugh, nghh!!”
Midoriya threw all his strength into his legs and shoved with everything he had. The lower-body strength he had built through more than a hundred days of running saved him.
“Aaaagh…!!”
His own leg power flung him out as he rolled across the dirt. His whole body scraped against roots and pebbles, but he managed to escape the bamboo-sword barrage.
“D-don’t stop! I can’t stop!!”
Already on day thirty, and after attempting to clear this hellish course hundreds of times, Midoriya sprang up and ran again.
But that all-out sprint lasted less than two seconds.
Squelch.
“Ah.”
Midoriya, who had forgotten to watch the ground, realized something was wrong the moment his right foot sank deep into the earth.
Crash!!
“Waaah!”
The ground collapsed in an instant and dragged him into a pit about 1.5 meters deep.
“Cough! Cough!!!”
Spitting out dirt, dust, and fallen leaves that had gotten into his mouth, Midoriya could see a shadow looking down at him.
“Heh. H-hello, Hakuji-kun…”
“Get out already.”
Midoriya gave an awkward laugh as he looked up at Hakuji.
“You lasted quite a while this time.”
“Really!?”
“11 minutes and 1 second. About a minute longer than your last record. If your lifespan gets extended by a whole minute, that’s impressive.”
“…………”
Midoriya had gone through all that, even rolling across the ground, only to last a minute longer. The thought made him grin and then immediately fall into a miserable expression.
“The biggest problem is when you’re faced with a choice. You think too much, so you slow yourself down.”
“R-right…”
“And at the end, you got so focused on running that you were late reacting to the trap. During combat, you need to pay even more attention to the ground than to the enemy.”
“Mm-hm, mm-hm.”
But his discouragement only lasted a moment. Midoriya immediately pulled out a small notebook from his pocket and started writing down Hakuji’s advice.
“At this rate, do you really think you’ll be able to get down the mountain before summer break ends?”
“I-I’ll do my best!!”
Clenching his fists, Midoriya struggled his way back up out of the pit.
This was his assignment for now.
To get down this mountain, packed with countless traps, before summer break ended.
Of course, it wasn’t nearly as simple as it sounded.
The paths were complicated, and the dense, towering trees made it impossible to see far ahead.
And then there were the vicious traps, loaded with malice, that could come flying from anywhere at any time.
On top of that, the thin air unique to Sagiri Mountain made people feel like they were going crazy.
This mountain was full of traps that would have been instantly fatal if they had been left as they were.
“Originally, it was steel balls instead of baseballs, real swords instead of bamboo swords, and pits full of spears…”
Sagiri Mountain belonged to the Soyama family. Because of its special environment, it was a restricted area for civilians, and only members of the Soyama family were allowed to enter.
So Hakuji had filled the entire mountain with countless killing traps and used it as his personal training ground.
Of course, right now he was only using the baby trap course made specifically for Midoriya.
Hakuji, feeling that he owed Midoriya a little for the lessons he had been receiving, had swapped out the traps he normally used for ones suitable for a beginner.
“Go back and wait five minutes. I need to reset everything.”
“O-okay… thanks…”
Even if it only took a few minutes to reset the dozens of traps Midoriya had triggered, every time he saw Hakuji going through that trouble again and again, his chest felt heavy.
“Three days left… I have to get down the mountain within three days.”
On the way back to Hakuji’s hut, the starting point, Midoriya began memorizing all the traps he had stepped on and dodged so far.
“A springboard after one second, bamboo swords after five, another springboard after eleven, a log after seventeen…”
He started muttering like a madman, memorizing every trap that came at him by the second with both his body and his mind.
…
Only fifteen minutes remained before the time limit.
It was already the last day of summer break.
And the sunset he had set as the deadline was beginning to dye the sky a faint orange.
“There’s no time left! This is probably my last attempt!!”
“Huff! Haaah!! Huff!! Haaah!!”
Midoriya was running while taking in the thin air of Sagiri Mountain as quickly as possible, breathing long and short in rapid succession.
If he had been his old self, he would have collapsed from exhaustion long ago, but the legs he had driven mad with running for nearly half a year refused to give out.
“One, two! Three!!”
Snap!!
He counted in his head, and the moment he reached three, a rope shot up from the ground to trip his legs—but Midoriya jumped lightly over it.
“After a tripwire, the next one is highly likely to be—!”
Whoosh!!
“A logggg!!”
The moment he saw the thick log aimed at his solar plexus, cushioned at both ends, Midoriya twisted his body sideways and barely dodged it.
He barely regained his balance, staggered, and immediately sprinted downhill again.
Then came a bamboo sword suddenly springing out from a tree branch.
He tilted his head and barely avoided it.
A whip dragging across the ground.
He forced his way through with a forward roll.
Baseballs flying in off-beat timing without giving him even a moment’s pause.
He read the rhythm of the off-beat attacks and twisted his body this way and that to evade them.
As he ran like that—
At some point—
“...Huh?”
Midoriya felt something strange.
The senses of his exhausted body had become sharper than ever before.
“What is this?”
The world began to look clearer and clearer.
The roots rising from the ground.
The unevenness of the earth.
The thin cords connected to traps scattered all around him.
Even the faint ting of those cords snapping into place—sounds he had never even noticed before.
Through senses sharpened to the absolute limit, Midoriya was seeing a world he had never seen before.
“What is this?”
Midoriya didn’t know.
But even if his mind didn’t understand it, his body did, and it immediately sent commands to his nerves and muscles.
“Run! Duck! Jump over it! Roll!!”
Snap!!Thud!Crack!!Boom!
Midoriya began breaking through the traps far faster than before.
“After flailing around for a month and only figuring out how to focus properly at the very end, you really are talentless.”
Watching Midoriya suddenly pick up speed, Hakuji, who had been hiding his presence and observing from a tree, laughed.
“Be grateful, Izuku. That’s something only the chosen can barely see.”
Midoriya’s eyes were wide open, and though his body was rigid with muscle stiffness, he was reacting instantly to every trap and evading them.
Normally, for someone at Midoriya’s level, reaching that state of extreme concentration would have been nearly impossible.
“Ah. Right side. There’s a branch on the left. Duck and dodge…”
But in Midoriya’s field of vision, every time a trap appeared, it felt as though the world was slowing down for a split second.
This was the so-called tachysensia phenomenon, where under extreme stress the brain spins at superhigh speed for survival, making time feel momentarily slower.
He had exhausted his stamina to the absolute limit.
His body, soaked in pain, had forcibly awakened his senses in order to preserve itself.
The low oxygen on Sagiri Mountain had caused abnormal behavior in his brain.
And Midoriya’s own high-speed thinking ability had also played a part.
By interlocking all four of those factors, Hakuji had deliberately driven Midoriya into tachysensia and brought him to a realm he should never have been able to experience.
“It’s only a taste this time, but someday this will save your life, Izuku.”
Hakuji smiled for a moment as he watched Midoriya move faster and faster, then was already waiting for him at the bottom of the mountain.
“……Huff… Haaah… Haaah…”
And a little later, the sound of breathing like that of someone on the verge of death came drifting down the mountain path.
“…………I made it down… Hakuji… kun…”
“Yeah. You passed, Izuku.”
With the period of concentration over, Midoriya was completely exhausted. He swayed, then collapsed right in front of Hakuji with a silly grin on his face.
Carrying Midoriya on his back, Hakuji said in a voice touched with laughter, “Good work. Weakling.”
Of course, by his standards, Midoriya was still a weakling.
Still, he had been promoted from the weakest of the weak to just a weakling.
…
tmi.
1. What is that ability, you ask? In Demon Slayer, it’s what happens when Tanjiro starts muttering like crazy every time he’s in danger and time seems to stop.
The phenomenon one step beyond tachysensia is what we commonly call a life-flash.
2. Hakuji had set up ropes near the shrine so visitors couldn’t wander into the trap zone, and whenever he wasn’t on the mountain, he would stop all the traps before leaving.
3. There will be an illustration in the next chapter. I whipped up WhipGPT and whipped it hard.
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