Date: April 17, 2026 (Friday)
Time: 8:31 AM
Location: Classroom 1-4
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The sound of forty test booklets flipping open echoed through the room like a flock of birds taking flight.
Flip. Flip. Flip.
Then, silence.
Then, the sound of confident pencils scratching against paper turned into hesitant tapping. Then, erasing. Then, nothing.
A girl gasped. Someone dropped their eraser.
"What... what is this?" a student in the front row stammered.
"Is this a joke?" another whispered, his voice trembling. "I can't even start Question 1."
Albert looked down at his desk. There were one hundred questions. He adjusted his glasses and focused on the first item of the Japanese test.
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Question 1: In the original, unedited manuscript of the Tale of Genji, during the 'Suma' chapter, exactly how many layers of silk did the protagonist wear on the third day of the rainstorm, and what specific regional plant was used to dye the innermost layer?
Albert stared at the text.
This is not a high school question. This is as difficult as a one-million-dollar question from a television game show. It requires insane, encyclopedic memorization of a hyper-specific text. A normal student could read literature for ten years and never memorize that detail.
He flipped the page.
Questions 2 through 10. His eyes scanned the text blocks.
The vocabulary shifted entirely. It was no longer about memorization; it was about structural deconstruction. The phonetic rules and the archaic conjugations… it was dense, academic, and completely suffocating. He frowned. A normal high schooler wouldn't even recognize the alphabet structure being used here, let alone translate it.
He kept turning the pages. Questions 11 through 50.
The density lessened slightly, but the grammatical syntax was still violently complex. It was analytical, requiring a deep structural understanding of pre-modern sentence mapping.
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He flipped the page again.
Question 51: Choose the correct kanji for the word 'Environment'.
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Albert stopped. He stared at the question.
Basic. Pure, standard, middle-school-to-early-high-school level vocabulary.
He quickly flipped through the rest of the booklet. Questions 52 to 100 followed the exact same pattern.
Basic reading comprehension. Standard kanji.
He lowered the booklet. Kuzumi-sensei's words echoed in his mind: Passing Score: 50/100.
He ran the numbers.
If a student completely ignored the terrifying front half of the test and only answered the last fifty questions, they would secure exactly fifty points. A guaranteed pass. A perfectly safe baseline score.
Albert sat back in his chair and looked around the room.
It was a massacre.
The silence in the classroom was heavy, broken only by the frantic, aggressive sound of erasers tearing at paper and the nervous tapping of shoes.
To his right, Leo was staring at the ceiling, the end of his pencil clamped between his teeth, his leg bouncing in a rapid, anxious rhythm. Maya had both hands pressed against the sides of her head, her shoulders hunched forward as she stared in sheer horror at page one.
Albert shifted his gaze straight ahead.
Tendo Kyoko sat directly in front of him. Her perfect, icy posture from the morning was completely gone. Her left hand gripped the edge of her desk so tightly her knuckles were white. He could hear her breathing—short, shallow, panicked gasps. Her mechanical pencil hovered over the paper, trembling slightly before she violently scribbled something out.
Albert gripped his booklet. He rapidly flipped from page one to the end, then back to the front, the sound of the paper snapping sharply in his hands. He watched the text density shift.
The data aligned perfectly. He finally understood the grading curve.
Questions 2 through 10: PhD-level linguistics.
Questions 11 through 50: Master's degree level syntax.
Questions 51 through 100: High school kanji and reading comprehension.
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I see the architecture. One astronomically improbable trivia trap. Nine PhD questions. Forty Master's questions. Fifty High School questions.
Albert spun his pencil.
I could answer Question 1. My photographic memory held that exact museum archive, right down to the botanical composition of the ink. I could deconstruct the archaic phonetic drift for Question 2 just as easily. If I went full throttle, I could secure a flawless 100/100.
But then, a memory hit him. A cold, sharp shard of the past.
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Flashback Starts...
Middle School
Albert was holding his midterm paper. A big red "100" was circled on top.
"Whoa," a classmate sneered, looking over his shoulder. "Atherton got a perfect score again? That's the third time in a row."
"Seriously?" another girl whispered. "He didn't even study during recess. He just reads those weird books."*
"It's kind of unnatural, isn't it?"
"Yeah. It's creepy. He's like a robot. Why does he try so hard? Is he trying to show off that he's better than us?"
"Nerd."
"Creep.
"Let's not invite him to karaoke. He'll probably just do math problems in the corner."
Albert had stood there, clutching his perfect score. He wanted to be proud. He wanted to be praised. But instead, the number "100" felt like a target painted on his back. It didn't make him a hero; it made him an alien.
Then Leo had walked up, slapping him on the back. Leo also had a 100.
"Nice job, Albert! We matched again!" Leo grinned.
"Wow!" the same girl squealed, rushing over to Leo. "Leo! You got a 100? You're amazing!
You're so smart and athletic! Is there anything you can't do?"*
"He's a genius!" the boy shouted. "Leo is the King!"
End of Flashback.
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Albert stared at the blank test paper. The nausea from that day came back, settling in his stomach like lead.
That's the reality of the world. The 'Halo Effect'. If a handsome, charismatic guy like Leo gets a perfect score, he's a Genius. He's a protagonist. People admire him. But if a gloomy, average-looking guy like me gets a perfect score, I'm not a genius. I'm a 'Nerd'. I'm 'Obsessive'. I'm a 'Creep'.
He looked at Leo's back again.
I can't go through that again. I don't want to be the 'Weird Genius' that everyone whispers about. I don't want Maya to have to defend me from the rumors again. I don't want their pity.
Albert took a deep breath. He made his decision.
I don't need 100 points. I need peace. And honestly... isn't it cooler to control the score perfectly? Getting a 100 is just brute force. But getting exactly 50? That takes precision.
Albert flipped his test booklet to Question 51.
He ignored the astronomically improbable history question. He ignored the PhD-level linguistics.
He picked up his pencil.
Q51: The kanji for 'Environment'.
Q52: Standard reading comprehension.
He knew the answers instantly, but he did not write them instantly. If he finished a ninety-minute exam in twenty minutes, he would be stuck sitting in his chair with absolutely nothing to do for the remaining seventy. Staring blankly at the wall for over an hour was incredibly boring, and it was exactly the kind of weird, creepy behavior he wanted to avoid.
So, he just stalled.
He answered a question, then stopped to look out the window. He tapped his eraser against his desk while watching the dust floating in the sunlight. He deliberately stretched a twenty-minute task across the entire time limit simply to kill time.
When he finally answered Question 100, he set his pencil down and flipped back to the front page.
Questions 1 through 50 remained completely blank. Not a single stray mark.
Score: 50/100. Rank: Average. Status: Safe.
He kept his head down and waited for the next subject while listening to the frantic scratching of erasers from forty other students, all panicking over a trivia question he had already translated in his head and discarded. He cleared his mind, mentally preparing for the Social Studies packet coming next.
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Subject: Social Studies Exam
Albert flipped to the back.
Question 51: Name the capital of Hokkaido Prefecture.
He wrote 'Sapporo'. He continued his method of killing time. He answered a few questions, watched the second hand tick on the wall clock, and rested his chin on his hand to comfortably pass the time until the bell rang.
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Subject: Mathematics
The afternoon session dragged on. They survived Science and English. Now, the final test. The Gauntlet was almost over. The students were completely exhausted. The scratching of pencils was slow and heavy.
Albert opened the Mathematics booklet.
He looked at Question 1.
Calculate the exact closed-form evaluation of the following 5-dimensional anisotropic Watson integral:
W = ∫₀^π ∫₀^π ∫₀^π ∫₀^π ∫₀^π (dx₁ dx₂ dx₃ dx₄ dx₅) / (3 − cos(x₁)cos(x₂) − cos(x₃)cos(x₄) − cos(x₅))
Then, extract the coefficient of the z^24 term in its corresponding hypergeometric series expansion.
Albert's eyes narrowed. He analyzed the problem structure.
It was clear now. The school hadn't just made the test difficult; they had engineered a systematic filter. Every single opening question across all five subjects was a monster designed to derail the students' momentum. The goal wasn't to measure knowledge—it was to ensure a perfect score was mathematically and psychologically out of reach for everyone in the room.
This Math Question 1 was the ultimate killer. It required a level of raw computational violence that most would find paralyzing, even if they had the right strategy.
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Endnote of Chapter 22
In Japan, using a pencil during quizzes and exams is normal.
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Logic Engine Log of Chapter 22
Constants:
*Albert's 'Middle School Trauma'
*Maya defended Albert during the 'Middle School Trauma'