St. Jude’s Academy: The Unfair Game

The classroom smelled of cold glass, polished steel, and high-voltage panic.

Room 404 of St. Jude’s Main Tower didn’t feature traditional blackboards or wooden desks. Instead, sixty individual isolation pods lined the room, surrounded by high-definition cameras that tracked the pupil dilation of every student inside.

At the front of the room stood Aran Kasey.

At twenty-four years old, Aran moved with the quiet, predatory grace of a surgeon. His gray suit was immaculate, his arms folded neatly behind his back. His eyes didn’t sweep the room—they dissected it.

“Thirty seconds remaining,” Aran announced softly. His voice didn’t need to be loud; the acoustic dampeners in the pod walls amplified every syllable directly into the students’ earpieces. “I remind you that a score below ninety-eight percent results in immediate academic expulsion.”

Inside Pod 12, Taiki Riki spun a black digital stylus between his fingers.

His face was completely calm. While the rest of the students were drenched in cold sweat, struggling through a quantum mechanics algorithm that usually took three days to compute, Taiki’s mind worked differently. The serum hadn’t just made him smart—it had turned his brain into a hyper-dimensional processing core. To him, the complex equations floating on his screen were as simple as basic addition.

Question 50 complete, Taiki thought flatly.

He didn’t type the answer onto his own screen right away. That would look suspicious. Instead, he simply tapped his heel twice against the floorboard.

Three rows back, Ami Uzumaki closed her eyes.

The moment her eyelids shut, her perception detached from her physical body. Her vision passed seamlessly through the reinforced glass of her pod, drifting upward into the ceiling, expanding outward across the entire 5-kilometer radius of the campus.

She saw everything. She saw the guards on the perimeter, the birds flying over the glass dome, and most importantly, she saw the master key displayed on Aran Kasey’s hidden personal tablet under his podium.

Got it, Ami thought. Through her extended sight, she lined up the exact coordinates of the answer matrix and focused her vision directly on Jerrold Beyond’s desk in Pod 27.

Jerrold didn’t look up. He didn’t check his screen, nor did he look at Ami.

As Ami’s invisible sight locked onto the metal edge of Jerrold’s console, Jerrold casually rested his palm against the surface.

Touch-Memory activated.

The raw data streamed directly from the air into Jerrold’s nervous system. The complete set of 50 complex answers flashed in his mind like a high-resolution photograph. Without a single second of hesitation, Jerrold’s fingers blurred across his keypad, inputting the answers with mechanical precision.

BEEP.

The digital clock hit zero. The screens locked simultaneously.

Aran Kasey stepped down from his podium, his sharp eyes narrowing as the main central server calculated the scores. A red progress bar filled the giant display at the front of the hall.

ACADEMIC EVALUATION COMPLETE: CLASS AVERAGE: 41.2% (FAILED) EXPULSIONS: 57 STUDENTS

A wave of stifled sobs broke out across the room as dozens of elite students realized their lives were officially over.

Then, the top three lines refreshed in bright, neon green.

1. TAIKI RIKI — 100% (PERFECT) 2. AMI UZUMAK — 100% (PERFECT) 3. JERROLD BEYOND — 100% (PERFECT)

The silence in the room became suffocating.

Aran didn’t applaud. He didn’t even smile. He slowly walked down the central aisle, stopping right beside Taiki’s pod. He leaned down, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.

“Impressive, Riki,” Aran said, his gray eyes fixing onto Taiki’s face, searching for a twitch, a pulse jump, a drop of sweat. “A perfect score on a test designed by the Ministry of Education. And yet... your heart rate didn’t exceed sixty beats per minute once.”

“I slept well last night, Professor Kasey,” Taiki replied smoothly, meeting Aran’s gaze without an ounce of fear.

Aran stared at him for three agonizing seconds before stepping back. “We shall see how well you sleep during the midterms.”

As the heavy glass doors opened, allowing the three of them to exit into the grand marble hallway, a tall, handsome guy in an open security jacket stepped out from behind a pillar, holding three cold iced coffees.

“Hey, hey! The legendary trio strikes again!”

It was Vergil Kirby. At twenty-two, Vergil looked more like a friendly senior student than an official security officer. He flashed a brilliant, warm smile, handing a coffee to Jerrold, Ami, and Taiki.

“Man, you guys blew Kasey’s mind back there!” Vergil laughed, tossing his arm casually around Jerrold’s shoulder. “Seriously, how do you guys do it? I watched the security monitors the whole time—you didn’t even look at each other once. It’s almost like you guys have telepathy or something, huh?”

Jerrold took a sip of his coffee, his expression perfectly relaxed, though his thumb slightly tightened around the paper cup.

“Just lots of studying, Officer Kirby,” Jerrold smiled back warmly. “You know how it is.”

“Right, right! Just studying!” Vergil chuckled, tapping Jerrold’s shoulder playfully.

But as the three turned to walk down the hall, Vergil’s friendly smile slowly faded. His blue eyes turned cold as ice, watching their backs with calculated precision.

He raised his wrist to his communicator.

“Director Kenzo,” Vergil whispered into the mic. “It’s me. We have a problem. They didn’t use devices... but they definitely cheated.”