“Run!”

I shouldn’t have had such high expectations. How stupid was I to trust this girl? Even though she was strong, she’d need to be a whole other breed to face against—what?—like a hundred people?

Sure, she barely took any damage, but we had no chance of winning no matter how I tallied it. This girl was useless without a sword. And as for Melissa, she was the one who caused the problem in the first place. This was an impossible scenario set up for failure.

Just how the hell did she aggravate so many people?

Even though they weren’t adults, a mass of teenagers was still no joke. There was a reason that zombies were so dangerous apart from the virus aspect. It wasn’t because of the individual might, but the collective strength of a group. Heck, the first cavemen to rise from their caves were the ones who toppled beasts like woolly mammoths with ingenious tactics.

‘We can’t win.’

With only three of us, unless we had grenades or something of that scale, we stood no chance.

“Where are we... Running?!” said Melissa, huffing in between words.

“Yeah, where are we running?” said Sam at a pleasant pace without breaking a sweat.

“...they’re running too fast…” I could still hear the chants in the distance.

“...catch up eventually at...dead-end…”

‘A dead-end?’

This time, I took a hard look at the area in front of me.

There was a giant blue sci-fi force field off in the not-so-far distance. As the barrier elevated, it grew in color while the inverse was true as it turned more and more transparent at the bottom.

I’m pretty sure we could still pass through it though. Would we get disqualified or something? Well, that would be pretty bad… Or not. Wait, wasn’t that a genius idea? If I got disqualified, then the school day was basically over for me so I could get back to training and doing important stuff.

‘Holy shit, I’m a genius.’

“We need to move… Hah… toward the building! It will be a dead-end if we keep running in a straight line…” Melissa continued blabbering unaware of my profound solution.

“Dead-end?” As if just now noticing the abnormality that was the blue dome, Sam looked at the cloudless and sunless sky with amazement. I could kind of understand it, but now was not the time for being awed.

As we got nearer and nearer, the blue started becoming less and less saturated while the white parts started glowing light-blue like radiation spewing from the blue skies. There was a faint light, but nevertheless still existed. The way the color grew lighter at the bottom reminded me of the myth that there were pots of gold at the ends of rainbows.

“Come on! We need to make a turn!” shouted Melissa, asking for consent to move. I didn’t really get why or who she was speaking at since there was both me and Sam, but I assumed I was supposed to answer her.

“We’re going straight through…”

“What? But we’d be disqualified!”

“That’s the point!” I remarked, admittedly a bit winded from all the running. Warmed up might be a better way of putting it.

I hardly trained to run so it made sense. It wasn’t that I was necessarily bad at it, but it’s just that I didn’t put in any effort for it to be my specialty. For someone like Sam who was physically on another level, that was a whole different story. Come to think of it, how the hell was she so strong in the first place?

As we neared the outskirts of the dome, the blue light had already become visible to the degree that I could make out hexagonal patterns in between the cracks of blue.

“Charge!!!” There came a loud scream from behind us. And judging based on the volume was enough to convince me that they were right on our tails.

‘Were students always so athletic?’

I seriously wanted to know what superhuman subspecies existed in this world that allowed the run-of-the-mill student to be able to run this fast and for so long. Heck, I should have wondered this earlier when looking at Melissa who was able to keep up with me, or Sam who was Superman incarnate.

“We can’t get disqualified! We need to run over there!” She pointed at a building within the far left of our position.

“Just do it so they can’t chase us!” I yelled back to her who had distanced herself from me and Sam, ready to split ways.

I was starting to question if she had any semblance of rationale. Was she an idiot like Sam?—wait, that’s not nice to say. I guess a more befitting term would be…

Intellectually challenged?

“We need to run faster so that we can escape!” she shouted again.

“It will save us a lot more trouble if we just leave the dome!” I didn’t understand what her issue was with certain safety over the possibility of being beaten up by a hundred people.

The only people who would want to stay in the exam are those who want to be a member of Eigenvalue’s club. It was a stupid reason.

“No! You can’t do that!” she shouted back with a changed expression.

“It’ll be safer if we just leave the area even if we are disqualified! Don’t you understand that antagonizing half of the student population will be bad for the long run!” I repeated myself once again.

Whatever she did to incur such hatred that would make those students chase us this far was not going to disappear after one day. A grudge would definitely form. There was likely no escaping their collective hate in the future. That applied to me as well, even though I knew nothing of why they were so angry at Melissa. Being associated with her in any way guaranteed mutual destruction. As for Sam, she didn’t seem to be the type who cares… With how strong she is, it shouldn’t matter that much.

“I… We just can’t get disqualified!” she shouted back again, stubborn in her pursuit of what I considered stupid.

“Sam, we can’t get disqualified, right?” And now, she was targeting a specific someone who had presumed a neutral stance the entire time.

“Isn’t being disqualified normally a bad thing?”

Seeing a glimmer of hope, Melissa shouted, “Exactly! So come on! We need to run in that direction!” She pointed to the left of us, implying to run along the borders of the blue dome.

“Alright. Let’s follow her, Daniel!” she nudged me in the shoulder as she casually jogged to Melissa’s side.

“Come on Daniel!” Melissa shouted at me too, thinking that convincing her would herd me over.

I was outnumbered in more ways than one.

Two idiots choosing the stupid option versus an obviously superior choice. This is why I hate group projects.

This is a project, isn’t it? At least as frustrating as one.

It was a fucking school activity. Why do they care so much as a damn about being disqualified or not? Heck, this isn’t even a legit exam. It was a diagnostic or something, wasn’t it? Were we even being graded on performance? No! So isn’t it stupid to continue wasting time on this dumbass shit?

It’s not hard to call it quits. It isn’t! It really isn’t!

In the first place, grades meant shit to me. I can’t even read which basically guarantees that my grades are inevitably going to be trash no matter what. There’s no hope for me even though the school year technically has not officially started yet.

Just why the hell do I need to go through this hellhole education system all over again? Once was enough! Enough is ENOUGH!

Fuck. Once I get strong enough, I’m fucking ninja-ing my way out of here.—It will be fucking Prison Break 2.0! And I know one thing for sure—it will be a lot more fun than being trapped in a goddamn school!

‘Fuckers.’

“Daniel? No! Stop! If you get disqualified, we all get disqualified as a team!!!”

“Sam, stop him! He can’t get past the boundaries no matter what!”

‘Shut up.’

I have better time to waste than for it to be spent on this stupid exam.

“Don’t let her escape!!!” A warcry followed suit with the encroaching enemy.

That’s what they get for not listening to me.

"Sam, don't let him disqualify us!"

I escape, while the morons lose.

This is what happens.

It’s simply life; disappointing as it may be.

And my cowardice… I can’t help but acknowledge its stupid existence as well.

‘I need to be stronger…’