Volume 10 Bugs Chapter 74 The fastest animal in the world
The race entered the final sprint, the archway of the finish line was in sight, the devil rider named Fujiwara Takumi had already taken the lead and jumped onto the arch bridge, followed closely by Yan Zhen riding her "Zhu Dudu", and I landed not far behind them and soon jumped onto the bridge. A series of rapid and noisy hoofbeats sounded on the bridge, like a hammer hitting our chests, making our hearts sink into despair bit by bit.
Thirty seconds later - no, at most twenty seconds, this game will end in our defeat, and we have no choice but to watch this humiliation happen. This kind of defeat that was evenly matched from beginning to end but lost by a hair's breadth at the last moment was even more frustrating than being crushed by an absolute disadvantage. The frustration in our hearts at this time was simply difficult to describe in words.
Hey, what is that? Just when I was feeling extremely depressed, suddenly, a dry and ugly thing appeared outside the bridge railing. It slowly stretched out, stretching forward while swaying back and forth leisurely, like a broken branch swaying in the wind.
This thing looked very familiar, as if I had seen it not long ago. In the fierce competition, I even reined in my horse in disbelief and rubbed my eyes. It was not until I almost dug my eyeballs out that I was finally able to confirm: this was indeed the thing I had just seen, to be exact, it was undoubtedly the glans of Xiange Yayi.
...Uh, I mean this is the head of Xian Ge Yayi's turtle mount!
Soon, the figure of Xian Ge Ya Yi followed the swaying turtle head and appeared. It was obvious that they had crawled out of the river under the bridge. Although I was curious about how they had swum almost twice as far as us to get here in such a short time, I didn't want to figure it out at all. They landed too close to the finish line. I just hoped that they could bring us a miraculous victory.
"Go! Go through that arch! Go!" I had completely given up on sprinting. I was dancing excitedly on my horse and shouting at the top of my lungs at Xiange Yayi's back.
Xian Ge Ya Yi didn't even look back and rode the turtle towards the archway.
"Honey, come on!" Yan Zhen called out sweetly while riding on the wild boar's back. Hearing this greeting, the elf sharpshooter's face flushed with excitement, and he couldn't help but turn his head and waved to her triumphantly.
"Xiao Xianzi, if you lose, you will have to pay for the bet of this game yourself!" Feiyin's roar came from behind.
Suddenly, Xian Ge Yayi's smug expression disappeared, and he immediately bent down and accelerated with all his strength - he didn't know if it was an illusion, but after hearing Miss Feiyin's roar, even the old turtle's head seemed to shake more vigorously.
When Xiange Yayi's turtle head - I mean the head of the turtle he was riding - finally rushed through the finish line, gorgeous magic fireworks flew out from both sides of the gate. At the same time, a sky-blue halo immediately rose from under our feet, announcing that we had become the winners of this team race.
A moment later, we were enveloped by a vortex of magic again and returned to the cabin.
Our opponents looked very unhappy - I could understand why they looked that way, in fact, just a moment ago our situation was the same as theirs - they stamped their feet and beat their chests as they walked out of the room, not even willing to look at us again.
We were so excited that we hugged each other and celebrated our miraculous victory with cheers and laughter. Only poor Niu Baiwan didn't know what happened and stopped each of us to ask what happened.
"Hey, hey, what's going on? I just ran to a crater and was teleported here. Did we win? Who is the first place? You guys should tell me..."
Crater? Although we have all experienced Niu Baiwan's mysterious ability to get lost, I was still deeply shocked by him this time - at least in my opinion, finding a crater in such a large rainforest and swamp in such a short time is much more difficult than winning the competition.
…
"You are really good..." Ignoring the confused Niu Baiwan, I rushed over and hugged Xiange Yayi's shoulders tightly, hitting his shoulders hard, "... Tell us quickly, how can you run so fast? The waterway on the map is almost twice as long as the landway. Can you fly?"
Xian Ge Yayi smiled proudly and told us the secret of his victory.
It turned out that not long after he swam out of the water as a turtle, he found a hole on the edge of the cliff. In fact, the hole was very hidden, and he had already passed by it. If it were someone else, they would definitely speed up in the race and would not look back to pay attention to the hole they had missed. But Xiange Yayi was obviously more self-aware than them. He knew that with his speed as a turtle, he would be lucky to swim half the distance after the race. Instead of doing that, he might as well enjoy the scenery of this place. So he turned around, found the hole again, and swam in along the current.
To his surprise, the cave entrance was not a dead end, but an underground river. Although it was very dark and he couldn't see the distance even with a torch, the good thing was that it was a downstream waterway - he didn't have to worry about his speed being too slow, but he had to be careful not to hit the reefs in the water because of the speed.
When he rushed out of the underground river along the current, even he was shocked: he had never expected that the exit of the underground river was so close to the finish line of the race, so that he could win the race just by climbing ashore and taking a few quick steps.
Xian Ge Yayi's explanation suddenly made us realize the truth. I couldn't help but feel both fortunate and envious of his experience: I was fortunate that it was thanks to his timely appearance that we turned the situation around and won the final victory of the game, and I envied him that he was able to find a secret and unknown path and become the key figure in determining the outcome of this game.
Of course, among those of us who are sober, envious, or even more or less jealous, there are always some people who have remained highly calm and collected, found the key issues that have been overlooked in this matter, and thought more deeply...
"You mean, you missed the entrance to the underground river and turned back?" Feiyin suddenly asked amid our cheers.
"Yes..." Xiange Yayi nodded and said, "...You know, this is not an easy thing. When I turned back, I had to go upstream. The water flow was very fast there. It took me a lot of effort. If not..."
Our Elf Archer wanted to explain his hard work in more detail, but was interrupted mercilessly by the President:
"How long did this process take you?"
"Well... I'm not sure, maybe 20 to 30 seconds... maybe not that much, but at least 10 seconds. I had already rushed over for nearly 10 meters, even if my turtle could only swim one meter per second..."
"You mean, if you didn't miss that entrance, you could have been at least ten seconds faster?" Fei Yin didn't pay any attention to these details. She looked extremely excited and stared at Xiange Yayi, as if she could see gold from his face.
"About that..." Xian Ge Yayi was confused by the questioning. He looked at Fei Yin in confusion, not knowing why she asked so many questions. "...and I also wasted some time because of the bumps and bruises in the dark river." He added.
"Great!" Feiyin jumped up and rubbed her hands excitedly. Suddenly, she turned around and asked us seriously:
"Think about it again. If you run more skillfully on this map, how much faster can you increase your speed?"
Everyone looked at each other, not quite sure. Only Niu Baiwan hadn't figured out the situation yet, and he answered in a naive way, "I don't know."
Of course, his answer was immediately ignored by us. I personally think that the time he needs to complete the race is infinite, and no matter how familiar he is with the terrain, the time he needs is at most infinity minus five or six seconds - in fact, no one can tell which of these two numbers is bigger.
After thinking for a while, Chang Sanjiao spoke up: "If I can calculate the foothold more accurately when climbing and pass through at the fastest speed, I can probably improve my time by ten or eight seconds at most. But to find the shortest way, I have to run hundreds of laps at least. If I just run a few more laps, it will not be easy to speed up by two or three seconds."
What the half-orc shadow thief said was not entirely correct. In my opinion, the time we wasted the most on this journey was not when we passed through difficult terrain, but in the ordinary running stage that occupied the vast majority of the distance. On this long runway, if we can find the shortest distance at every turn and every intersection, pass through at the fastest speed , and choose the straightest route when running, and reduce unnecessary minor turns as much as possible, the time we can shorten to complete the whole journey may be more than 20 seconds. But who can do this? With my unknown talents that belong to the natives, perhaps I can get a significant improvement after thirty or fifty laps. Although my friends who are involved in space have extremely high talents in imagination and creativity, they are far inferior to me in observation and calculation ability - I think this is also a more essential difference between natives and involved in space.
But from a practical point of view, what Changjiang Delta said is not without reason. Increasing the speed by a few seconds when familiar with the terrain is probably the standard that most people involved in aviation can achieve.
President Feiyin also made a rough estimate herself, then nodded vigorously, a cunning smile appeared at the corners of her mouth, and two familiar, greedy and cunning rays of light shot out of her eyes.
"Hurry up, everyone, come out, let's open a new competition room!" She ordered hurriedly, and walked out the door, her excitement as if she was about to rob a casino.
"Why?" The slow-witted Niu Baiwan still hadn't figured out the situation. "Isn't this room good enough?"
"Fuck you, I'm going to get a room that costs a thousand gold coins!" Before she finished her bold words, Fei Yin had disappeared at the door.
…
A series of events that followed proved that you couldn't afford to be hurt by a woman who dared to spend a thousand gold coins to book a room. We ran that familiar track more than thirty times in a row without losing a single time. Whether the opponent was a jungle elephant or a conical-toothed tiger, a shaggy-maned prairie lion or a colorful chocobo, a moonlit wolf or a giant sickle beetle, Xiange Yayi's turtle always won an overwhelming victory with an amazing lead, and was always the first to cross the finish line - Xiange Yayi even won the honorary title of "Lightning Sprinter" for his amazing performance in the competition.
At the beginning, the rest of us tried to compete with our opponents so that we could make up for any accidents that happened to Xian Ge Ya Yi. But as we became more familiar with the arena, the gap between Xian Ge Ya Yi and our opponents became larger and larger, and our desperate galloping seemed more and more unnecessary. Later, I even let my horse run freely and wandered around, taking in all the scenery in this arena.
Well, you have to admit, the world can no longer stop the turtle!
It is worth mentioning that no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find the crater that Niu Baiwan mentioned - we all doubted whether this guy who was lost as if by divine help had broken the powerful magic of the "copy" for the first time and wandered to another track.
By winning the competition again and again, we earned more than 30,000 gold coins. Looking at this huge amount of extra money, our president was very happy and smiled, and kept complaining about why there were no rooms worth 10,000 gold coins.
In the end, it was time that stopped us from this crazy money-grabbing trip - the survival needs of my space-related friends in another time and space forced them to temporarily bid farewell to the Farvi Continent. When they left, almost all the opponents who were willing to spend a thousand gold coins to participate in the competition had been ravaged by us - the reason why I said "almost" was that there were always some stubborn elements among them who refused to accept the challenge and challenged us again and again, so some were ravaged by us twice or three times.
What we didn't expect was that our perfect performance on that day brought about earth-shaking changes in the racing circle of the entire continent. Some of our opponents conducted in-depth research on our performance. My friends told me that one of them used a magic called "panoramic video" to discover the secret of the turtle's invincibility. Soon after, the ugly, slow-moving, and only one-skill "clumsy swamp elephant-legged tortoise" became the most popular mount among the continent's racers, so much so that if you didn't ride a turtle, you would be embarrassed to say hello to others at the competition venue.
After learning about this situation, our guild leader immediately showed the wisdom and courage we had when we discovered the secret of the "boxing gloves". He reported it to the sacred GM at the first opportunity, and once again won a considerable reward for the guild.
Later, the off-road race had to spend a lot of effort to modify this section of the track, further extending the distance of the dark river, giving other mounts a fair chance to race against the turtle. At the same time, in order to compensate those racing enthusiasts who had already captured the turtle, they agreed to recycle the turtles, giving those adventurers a chance to choose a new mount.
Surprisingly, not many people were willing to give away their turtle mounts. On the contrary, this move further stimulated people who love speed racing to explore the track further, and drew their attention to the waterways that were once ignored. What excited them was that in addition to this swamp track, there were also various different water paths hidden in other tracks. There was an equal chance of winning the race by water and by land, and the difficulty and money spent on capturing a "clumsy swamp tortoise" were far less than those of the exotic animals that were good at running. Under the leadership of these people, riding a turtle to participate in speed racing became a trend and fashion. Some people even spent a lot of effort to specially research many kinds of speed racing tactics with turtle mounts as the core. These tactics were named "turtle flow" and became popular.
In their minds, perhaps only the tortoise is the fastest animal in the world...
