Anri was pretty sure he had tanked the section on humanities. A big fat zero was what he was getting if not a score in the negatives. The sorcerer submitted his answers to the AI and took off his VR headset. Breathing in deeply, he sighed and looked around. The previously filled classroom was now half empty. Several other candidates were quietly typing words on projection keyboards that only they could see through the lenses of their headsets.
The teenager stood up and placed his headset on the plain white desk before him. His stomach was begging for calories and he wasn't about to deny it a visit to the campus cafeteria.
______
"How did it go, son?" The old man asked him when Anri reached home. The teenager was carrying with him a large grocery bag packed with raw ingredients for a roast beef dinner.
"It went as expected," Anri replied. He had no interest in history, politics, and literature. Right from the start, Anri had planned to solely rely on his knowledge of the subjects in the other sections.
"You're lucky there's no sectional threshold score."
The old man had attempted and failed to teach him the humanities. If Anri wasn't interested then there was no reasoning with him. He was certainly lucky that the scoring system favoured his stubbornness. But the old teacher also couldn't deny Anri's intellectual capabilities which allowed him to act in such a brazen manner.
"I'll make dinner tonight," the teenager offered. During his transit back home, he had watched a video of a famous chef roasting meat. It looked easy.
"Eh- there's no need, son." The teenager's cooking skills could put pig slop factories to shame. The stricken old man had felt his lifespan growing shorter every time he tasted his student's creations.
Anri on the other hand was self-aware about his lackings and he wanted to improve so badly. He wasn't going to take no for an answer.
"Don't worry, I watched a video this time."
Later that night, the old man sat at the table, frightened but unable to look away from the slab of dark matter that Anri had plated with a few fresh mint leaves and a viscous red sauce that had an oily sheen to it. He was severely tempted to perform a spectroscopic analysis of the thing that his student was passing off as roast meat.
"The meat is a little burnt," Anri admitted without so much as a blush.
"Oh, a little burnt.... And where's your share, son?" The old man asked as he looked up at the teenager suspiciously.
"I ate it."
Lies.
The plate of food went flying into the air as Anri ducked right on time. It was a good thing he had ordered takeout for the both of them.
_____
The next day arrived bright and sunny. The teenager had already run a long circuit of the soy farm when his communicator beeped. The message he was waiting for had arrived.
To: ANRI - 7701
Subject: ROUND (2)/BATTLE AT BONEYARD DESERT.
The teenager read the message which informed him that his arrival to Boneyard Desert was expected at 16:00 hours. Failing to appear or register onsite at the mentioned time would eliminate him immediately from the pool of candidates.
The sorcerer had plenty of time before round 2 began. Still, after his experience at Fairmont College, he wasn't taking any chances.
As soon as the clock hit 11:00, Anri was out the gates of the soybean farm. He flagged down a taxi that took him straight to his destination which was an hour and a half's distance from the farm.
____
"Look who's here," a familiar voice loudly declared when Anri stepped out of the taxi.
"Forehead," the sorcerer responded. "I'm surprised you qualified for the second round."
"That's rich coming from someone who went to the wrong campus."
Anri scoffed at the hypocrisy of it. He was no longer in a position that required the redhead's assistance so he ignored the surly teenager and sat on a bench just outside the gates of the boneyard - a facility used for the storage, reclamation and scrapping of decommissioned air and space ships.
Anri then pulled out a pair of dark UV protection shades and wore them so he could fall asleep in a sitting position. The sorcerer was pretty sure that the battle was going to last half the night at the very least, and that it was in his best interest to catch some shut-eye before the big event began. After all, the old geezer at the soy farm was going to wake him up at the butt crack of dawn even if Anri was dying.
"Oi, you got any idea what they've got planned for us here?"
The sorcerer pretended deafness and made himself more comfortable on the bench. It was 02:30 and they were the only two - bonded by yesterday's trauma - who had arrived.
"Tch."
The redhead drank water from a bottle as he sat under the shade of a tree. He had heard from a reliable source that this was to be a team event. It sucked that his success of getting into Starfield was contingent on not just his own but his teammate's abilities. The teenager's thoughts were interrupted when he heard the sound of soft snoring.
"What the fuck.." He was astonished at how fast Anri had fallen asleep. Who gave him the guts to sleep so soundly in public like that? And wasn't he anxious about the battle at all?
At that moment, a silver-coloured armoured vehicle came to a stop near Anri's bench. The redhead was surprised to see that a third person had joined them this early. It was Nova. The celebrity candidate sat inside her air-conditioned car and began reading a book. Redhead couldn't understand why she would choose the hardships of a life as a soldier when she could just ride the luxury train on the coat tails of her superstar mother.
____
An hour passed by painfully slow but Anri hadn't stirred even once. Other candidates began trickling to the location and joining them outside the gate. The redhead counted a total of forty-eight of them when a green light winked on the gate and it slid open smoothly.
Registration was now open.
And right on time - Anri woke up, folded his shades and slid them into his shirt pocket. The sorcerer then stood up and joined the line of people walking into the boneyard. Nova stood behind the group of people, keeping her distance so she was the last person to enter.
"Good evening, candidates," a good looking man wearing a black suit greeted them. "Congratulations on clearing round one of the exams."
Anri's attention drifted to the tall piles of scrap that were visible through the wire mesh netting that separated them from the junkyard.
"Now I'm not here to give you a motivational speech so I'll get right to the point. Do you see the boneyard behind me? There's a semi-functional spaceship sitting somewhere in the middle of all that junk. You'll know it when you see it. Your objective will be to team up in fours and battle the other teams for the twelve-digit code that will allow you to gain entry into the ship."
Anri did the quick math. Four members in each team meant 12 teams. 12 teams and a 12 digit code. He could see where this was heading.