Entrance Exam (2)
“The Hunter Exam begins now.”
“Quit playing around and get out of the way.”
After driving the boy who kept spouting nonsense while striking a ridiculous pose down from the platform—
…Seriously, what the hell was that guy’s deal?
Anyway, I climbed onto the platform and looked down at the examinees.
There were three hundred nine of them for this entrance exam. Roughly thirty percent were sponsored by high-ranking officers, seventy percent were former child soldiers, and there was one examinee from another zone.
Among them, three players.
Shut-In Honey, the former child soldier. Shin Eun-jo, the examinee from another zone. For the record, Taejeong fell under the sponsored-by-high-ranking-officer category. On paper, Taejeong’s guardian was Meursault. The real guardian, of course, was me.
Come to think of it, Taejeong didn’t seem to know anything about dating sims.
I had a vague idea of what Shin Eun-jo and Shut-In Honey had been doing before they possessed their current bodies, but I had never managed to talk with Taejeong about who they had been before. I had deliberately kept my distance so Taejeong could get close to the other servants, and I never called them aside for private conversations, so I actually knew less about Taejeong than I did about Shut-In Honey, whom I barely saw.
Once the entrance exam is over, I should sit down and talk with Taejeong too.
Anyway.
Shut-In Honey, Taejeong, and Shin Eun-jo all came from completely different backgrounds. The cadet proctors seemed to think I had proposed this exam because I was favoring the child soldiers and shutting out the sponsored kids, but the truth was I held no prejudice whatsoever about origins—sponsored child, child soldier, or outsider.
To me they’re all just the same NPCs anyway.
I didn’t give the players any special treatment either. There was no way a bunch of eleven-year-olds were going to fail an entrance exam this simple, after all.
In other words, this was a fair test for everyone. And the reason it was fair was simple: the content of the entrance exam was something every child has played at least once—tag.
“Tag, sir?”
“Wasn’t it supposed to be a monster hunt?”
At my announcement that the entrance exam was a game of tag, the cadet proctors stared at me with hollow expressions. Behind them sat an enormous pile of luggage. Both these kids and the sponsored examinees had clearly been loaded down by officers who thought they were heading out on a real monster hunt.
Once they enlisted they would all be using standard military-issue gear anyway. What was the point of packing all that junk? It only proved how few of the officers had ever actually gone on a subjugation.
You could tell the ones who had real combat experience—their sponsored kids only carried the bare minimum.
Even more perfectly equipped, of course, were the child soldiers. Everything they owned was already military issue. I still had no idea how Shin Eun-jo had managed to get her hands on a Cola Zone child-soldier uniform, though.
Even the child soldiers looked a little disappointed when they heard it was tag instead of a hunt. They weren’t stupid; they knew perfectly well who a monster hunt would have favored.
Then Shut-In Honey, standing in the very front row and staring up at me, thrust a hand into the air and asked,
“If it’s tag, what are we supposed to catch?”
“Ahem.”
One of the proctors beside me cleared his throat and glared at Shut-In Honey for the overly casual speech. Shut-In Honey made a thoroughly dissatisfied face and added,
“What are we supposed to catch… sir?”
Everyone else was clearly just as curious about what “tag” was supposed to mean here; every eye fixed on me. I answered briefly.
“Me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your subjugation target is me.”
According to Meursault, the Commander was extremely worried about this game of tag. As if he had expected me to quietly hand out written tests when he dumped the entire entrance exam on me in the first place.
More importantly, I had figured it would be better for the examinees to try catching me than a monster. Their faces, however, said otherwise.
“Guess it really is a Hunter Exam after all.”
Shut-In Honey was still spouting nonsense. From somewhere in the middle of the crowd, Shin Eun-jo raised her hand and asked,
“What does it mean that Haydam is the subjugation target?”
Unlike Shut-In Honey, her little-kid act was almost convincing. She asked with a serious face,
“Does that mean we have to attack you?”
“Obviously I’m not telling you to actually kill me.”
“Then what?”
“Exactly what it sounds like—tag. Use any means necessary and catch me.”
Even after I told them any means were allowed, the examinees still looked thoroughly bewildered. Rumors about my “origin story” had already spread throughout the zone, so the proctors were all wearing expressions that said, Does he seriously think eleven-year-olds can pull that off?
Shin Eun-jo glanced at the proctors, then asked me again.
“Is there… a particular reason you’re doing it this way?”
“Because it’s fun.”
My completely flippant answer left both examinees and proctors looking stunned. Only Shin Eun-jo remained composed and pressed on.
“What if… no one manages to catch you?”
“I’m fickle and do whatever I want. If I like what someone’s doing, I might just let myself get caught.”
“Let yourself get caught?”
“And I like people who don’t care about the means.”
“What does that… Are you saying we’re allowed to harm you?”
“Figure it out yourself.”
Shin Eun-jo’s brow furrowed, and it looked like the proctors rather than the examinees were about to start asking questions, so I raised a hand to silence them and continued.
“The search area is limited to the zone marked by the red lines. Step outside it and you’re immediately disqualified—keep that in mind. Leaving the search area does not count as ‘any means necessary.’ Understood?”
The fact that there was at least a defined search area seemed to reassure both examinees and proctors. If I had been allowed to run around the entire snowfield, catching me would have been hopeless.
“Tag begins at sunset. Until then you can form teams, draw up plans, whatever. Submit those plans to the proctors before the sun goes down.”
“Starting after sunset, sir? Then what about the time limit…?”
“The time limit is until sunrise tomorrow.”
I smiled sweetly.
“I hope no one gets eliminated before they manage to catch me.”
Of course I wasn’t running a game of tag for the entrance exam purely for fun. Starting next year I planned to go right back to the soul-crushingly boring written tests, after all.
The reason I was putting this year’s incoming class through something like this was simple. Now that we knew the boundaries between zones were gone, we were going to start clashing with players from other zones long before the Second Apocalypse hit in ten years. I had no idea how many players the other zones had, but we all looked the same age.
Except for the Unicorn Zone players, that is.
So what would happen if every eleven-year-old kid in our zone—our peers—started acting just like players?
Anyone who had opened the system wouldn’t fall for it. But players who couldn’t use Character Inspection might get the wrong idea. They would think the Cola Zone was crawling with players…
In short, I was padding our numbers.
Even Shin Eun-jo didn’t seem to believe that the only players in our zone were me, Shut-In Honey, and Taejeong. She still hadn’t figured out how Daphne could possibly be a player, and that clearly made her uneasy. That was probably why she had insisted on taking this military academy entrance exam in the first place. For all I knew she was already opening every kid’s status window one by one, checking for players—completely wasting her time, of course.
The academy’s original intake was only about thirty.
But just as I had promised in my graduation speech, I intended to select a hundred Haydams. Someone might argue it would be better for the future to accept and train every single examinee, but that wasn’t true. Not everyone could become an officer. Failing the academy didn’t mean you couldn’t become a soldier. An army without enlisted troops was no army at all.
So in this exam I planned to sort out the children who would become officers, the children who would become soldiers, and the children who would become “players.” The ones I intended to raise as “players” were the ones who stood out in this entrance exam; I would pull them aside for special training.
They could never become real players, of course.
But I could make their way of thinking similar enough.
Shin Eun-jo had looked stunned when I said I was doing all this because it was fun, but she probably didn’t actually believe I would go this far just for entertainment.
Right about now she’s probably buried among the examinees, frantically checking whether there are any other players or special NPCs.
The real reason I insisted on holding the entrance exam on the snowfield was that there was a place I needed to check. The cave where I had collapsed after absorbing the Snow Giant’s jewel. I wanted to know exactly what had happened there afterward.
Shut-In Honey had claimed he told them where to find me because he already knew that cave. But how the hell had he known I would be in that cave and insisted they go rescue me? If someone falls off a cliff you check the bottom, not a cave halfway down the face.
And no matter how I look at it, it’s weird that he knows something I don’t.
So I decided I had to examine the cave myself. I was also curious why a cave even existed in a place like that. In short, I had used the game of tag as an excuse to buy myself free time to move around.
I told the proctors I would hide from the examinees and that my location would be kept secret to prevent any cheating, then immediately left the search area and headed for the crevasse. Finding the cave without a Snow Giant chasing me was easy. The traces of everything they had set up to rescue me last time were still there.
The cave entrance I rappelled down into was completely intact, despite the chaos that had taken place. I had been worried the impact might have collapsed it or that they had sealed it after the rescue, so that was a relief.
Back then, racing through it in a panic, the tunnel deeper inside had felt endlessly long. Walking in with no threat at all, I realized it wasn’t that deep after all.
The first thing I saw deeper in was a massive pile of icicle fragments.
The place where the Snow Giant died.
The spots on the ceiling where the icicles had broken off were still clearly visible, so it was easy to recognize. After they recovered the Snow Giant’s corpse they must not have bothered clearing the ice…
…What’s that?
A strange pattern was carved into the far wall—something I had never seen the last time I was here. At a glance it almost looked like a magic circle, and there were deliberate gouges all over it where someone had tried to destroy it.
“Ah.”
As I started toward the pattern, my foot kicked something—a Star Candy—and I suddenly understood.
This… is where I collapsed, isn’t it?
It looked like the exact spot where the Snow Giant had smashed me and sent me flying. When I lay down and tried to match the position from my hazy memories, I found myself lying dead center in the pattern.
So this pattern… appeared after I blacked out?
I had no memory of seeing anything like it before I went down, so it must have formed right after I lost consciousness—after I absorbed the Snow Giant’s power. Maybe it was a side effect of taking in the jewel.
But even more confusing than the unfamiliar pattern itself was something else.
Why has no one ever mentioned that a weird mark like this was left behind?
Had the Commander or Meursault been told about the pattern? And if they had, why hadn’t they said a word to me?
I’ll have to ask when I get back.
Not that I could go ask until the entrance exam was over. Deciding to leave the headache for later, I laced my fingers over my stomach and closed my eyes for a moment. I planned to wait here until sunset, then head back toward the examinees.
I wonder if the pattern will still be here when I come back.
Maybe I should memorize the design before I leave. That was the thought running through my head when I heard something that sounded like the flutter of insect wings.
Bzzz…
It was tiny, but I had been on guard, so I immediately knew the sound was wrong.
What is that?
The noise grew steadily closer. It was far too loud for a small insect’s wings, and it was definitely coming into the cave.
Bzzzzz—
And when the sound finally became clear, I understood.
That’s…
The engine of a hoverboard.
…No way.
I opened my eyes, sat up, and looked toward the entrance.
A white-haired man I knew all too well casually appeared before me, still standing on his hoverboard, looking down at me with that same indifferent gaze.
Dopamine Addict spoke.
“I went to all the trouble of sending you away, and here you are again.”