42. A genius

Iker the Mantis stopped beside me, took a look at my screen, frowned, then said:

“Please follow me, young sir.”

I blinked. He was calling me ‘young sir’? I exchanged a puzzled look with Arkifa, then stood up, grabbed my knit cap, and followed the old man in silence. In front of their red screens, my fellow candidates were glaring at me as if I had murdered someone. Was I guilty of something?

The old Independent Hero led me outside, through a backdoor, then turned to me.

“Can you explain to me what happened?”

“That’s…” Shouldn’t I be the one asking that? I rubbed my neck, smiling. “It seemed that there weren’t enough questions for me.”

The old man’s thick, gray brows furrowed. Oddly enough, they reminded me of my grandpa. I bowed my head, confessing:

“I don’t know what happened, sir. I pressed ‘pass’ with my pen, and the program went crazy, passing the questions at full speed. There was nothing I could do, and when I was going to raise my hand to notify the problem, it just displayed that congratulations message.” I looked at him, worried.

“… So it was a bug from the program, you say.”

“I think so. I didn’t do anything weird, I swear.” Apart from pressing the ‘pass’ button for about ten minutes or so, but still, there was a bug anyway.

“Iker!” We turned to see a white-haired merfolk in a bikini running at us. I widened my eyes. That was the A-rank Independent Hero I had seen in Akiba Lake last month. If I recalled correctly, her name was… Cynsea the Hypnotist. She stopped, gasping for breath. “Iker, I heard there’s a hacker trying to disturb the test. Where is he?”

There was a hacker? Was he among the candidates? Iker pointed at me with his thumb.

“It’s him.”

“Eeeh?” I said, shocked. “Hey, I’m no hacker. I don’t know a thing about computers. I said it’s a bug—”

“You! You’re the cute blondie from Idol’s Lake!” Cynsea was suddenly cheerful. “So you came! How are you doing?”

“Aha… I’m fine, thank you. So you remember me.”

“Of course! Glad to see that you remember me too.”

“There’s no way I could forget you. You’re the only Hero in bikini I know. Aren’t you cold?”

The merfolk laughed.

“A bit, I’d say. Today’s really cold. But I brought my coat, here…”

It wasn’t a coat, it was a light blouse. Iker cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, Cynsea, but we’ve got work to do. Please take Armoon Men to the office.”

He totally mangled my name. Cynsea nodded.

“Okay, I’ll do that. But what do I do with him?”

“Make him fill in a form about what happened. And don’t treat him so familiarly. What happened is no trivial thing: all the candidates are waiting for the technicians to solve the problem.”

“All the screens were hacked?” Cynsea snorted in disbelief.

“Guys!” Tim the Clockwiser had left the gym and was walking towards us. “We have a big problem. It seems that the program the Nyomin made for us is a fork from a software initially made for racing quizzes. That is, in those racing quizzes, each answer must be correct, and the first competitor to finish causes the others’ screens to block. In the new software, the first feature was removed, but since no one would have normally been able to answer all the questions in our test, they forgot to remove the second feature. So now, everything’s blocked; we can reset the test but not save everyone’s status. Plus, there is a bug with the ‘pass’ button, apparently, but the technicians don’t know much about it yet. I heard they contracted out the development of the software to a private company.”

“Those idiots,” Iker hissed.

“Well, we’re at fault too, for not testing it enough,” Cynsea pointed out.

“Such a blunder for something so important,” the old man groaned. “If only they had let us more time, we would have used the traditional method with sheets and normal pens… What a disaster!”

“What should we say to the candidates?” Cynsea asked worriedly.

Tim shook his head.

“There is no way we can cover it up, can we?”

There was a silence. The three Independent Heroes were deeply upset. I felt out of place. I put my red knit cap on and forced a smile.

“Excuse me, but… how about you let everyone pass?”

The old man looked at me as if I was stupid. Cynsea sighed.

“I wish we could. But the Nyomin told us there can’t be more than one hundred twenty candidates in the second test.”

So few… I swallowed.

“But I have to pass that test,” I said. “I know it’s no use crying but… I really want to go to that training.”

“Every candidate does,” Tim the Clockwiser replied.

Iker the Mantis stated:

“All we can do is choose the candidates based on the test until the screens were blocked. Tim, everything should have been recorded. Take the results to the gym as soon as possible. Cynsea, take that boy to the office. I’ll try to buy time and calm the candidates.”

Bzz, bzz. Bzz, bzz. As Tim was making a run for it and Cynsea and I were heading to a facility next to the gym, three cellphones buzzed. The three Independent Heroes stopped, looked at their phones, then turned to each other at the same time and gathered again. What…?

“That Bloody Cook,” Tim breathed out. “What is she thinking?”

Was he talking about the other Independent judge, Gilda the Bloody Cook? Cynsea grimaced.

“We can’t do that, Iker. They’ll hate him.”

Iker’s eyes closed for a moment then looked at me intently.

“Boy. What’s your background?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ah, if it’s about that, I have it here,” Cynsea said, searching in her phone. “Rita passed me all the info about the candidates. There he is: Armen Moon, born in Keelung Lighthouse, east of Taipei, Bird Island, on October 21, year 2005. His parents are lighthouse keepers. He has an elder sister that works in the Nyomin Research. He’s studying at Harvard High, no criminal record apart from an interrogation by the police last summer for the Old Docks shopping center incident and a recent minor infraction at school. Also, he is… er… not a very good student,” she concluded grimacing at her phone.

I was aghast. Did they do such a thorough searching for every candidate? I felt stripped of my privacy.

“Very well,” Iker the Mantis sighed. “Then, Armen Moon, you said you wanted to pass that test. Well, you passed.”

I stared at him. What?

“You passed,” he repeated, blushing. “You won the race. Actually, there was no bug.”

There was a silence.

“Am I supposed to buy that?”

“Ehehem,” Cynsea chimed in. “Iker is shamelessly asking you if you could be so kind as to not talk about this incident to anyone. As long as you don’t talk, we’ll let you pass.”

I couldn’t believe it. Were they bribing me? The Independent Heroes were bribing me?! And they were bribing an undead at that… But they were saying I would pass. I smiled.

“Then it’s okay. There was no bug. I’m just fast at clicking the ‘pass’ button.”

“Don’t say that. If you passed the test, it means that you got a lot of answers right,” Cynsea said.

“So, hehe… I’m a super-fast genius?”

“S-Something like that. But that means some candidates will blame you for messing with an exam that was really important for them. They will hate you for that. Are you still willing to pass?”

I frowned. Maybe some people wouldn’t be able to pass because of me… or, rather, because of that bug that screwed up the exam. But then again, there would only be one hundred twenty candidates that would be allowed to take the second test so…

“I’m willing,” I said. “I don’t mind if they hate me, since I did nothing wrong. But, now that we’re at it, may I ask for a favor? I know some of the candidates, and I’d want you to let them pass. There are only two of them. Well, maybe three. All of them very capable—”

“Don’t get full of yourself,” the old Iker cut me off.

What… My smile died on my lips as I frowned. Did I overstep my limits? The three of them glanced at each other. Then, Cynsea sighed.

“I’ll write down the names. If their scores are not too bad, we can take them in.”

“That’s going too far,” Iker growled. But he didn’t protest further.

Tim the Clockwiser stared at me.

“Boy, if you ever say anything about this,” his eyes gleamed, “you’ll regret it.”

I grinned.

“I’ll be as silent as a dead man, sir.”

And so the first test came to an end. When I returned to the gym, the other candidates were taking another test, most likely just to buy time for the Nyomin employees and the Independent Heroes to handle the situation. I only shrugged at Arkifa’s interrogative expression then just waited in my seat until, suddenly, the screen of a candidate went green and every other screen blocked… Geez. Were they doing a racing quiz to calm suspicions? Something like, ‘look, what happened was normal, it’s just that we didn’t expect to have a genius capable of answering so many questions in two hours’. Anyway, at noon, we got our results.

Out of one hundred twenty eligible candidates, I was made the top candidate.

The repeating guy who couldn’t get even a single grade above average at school became a genius.

Everyone was amazed, but I was probably the most amazed of all. Why was the Independent Hero Association so eager to cover for their blunder?

Holy Gods. I would have run away from there if Ray wasn’t waiting for me on Phoenix Island.