Episode-831
Chapter : 1661
His right hand held the stylus with a loose, relaxed grip. He didn't look directly at the blue dot. He looked at the center of the screen, letting his peripheral vision track the movement of the walls. He anticipated the shifts. The maze followed a pattern—a complex, algorithmic rotation that most people would miss, but to a card counter, it was as obvious as a marked deck. Left, up, wait, right. Shift. Down, left, wait, up.
His hand moved in a flowing rhythm, dancing the dot through the gaps before they fully opened.
His left hand hovered over the number pad. 12 x 4. His finger tapped '48' before his conscious mind even registered the question. 30 - 12. Tap '18'.
He was chewing a piece of gum, the rhythmic motion helping him keep time. Chew, move, tap. Chew, move, tap.
Lloyd watched him for a full minute. Kaito’s score was climbing steadily. He wasn't perfect—he missed a math problem here and there—but he never let the dot die. He prioritized survival over points, sacrificing a bonus to keep the primary objective alive.
"Interesting," Lloyd murmured.
Kaito didn't look up. "The algorithm speeds up every sixty seconds," Kaito muttered, his voice barely a whisper. "But the math difficulty resets every ninety seconds. There's a thirty-second window of high speed and low math difficulty. That's the scoring zone."
Lloyd raised an eyebrow. The kid had deconstructed the test's pacing while taking it.
"Don't get comfortable," Lloyd said. He reached down and tapped a hidden corner of Kaito's slate.
Suddenly, the maze inverted colors. The walls became white, the path black. The math problems started appearing in random locations on the screen instead of the sidebar.
Kaito flinched. His hand jerked. The dot scraped a wall, losing health.
"Focus," Kaito hissed to himself. "It's just a distraction. The dealer changed the deck. Adjust."
His eyes darted around the screen. He widened his focus even further. He stopped looking at specific elements and started looking at the flow of light. Within ten seconds, he had found the rhythm again. Tap. Move. Tap.
"Good," Lloyd said, walking away. "A pilot who can't handle a surprise is a dead pilot."
Two rows over, Vala was having a different experience.
Vala wasn't doing math. She was guessing.
She moved the dot with an eerie, fluid grace. She didn't predict the walls like Kaito; she reacted to them. Her reflexes were unnatural. When a wall slammed shut, her hand twitched faster than thought, saving the dot by a hair's breadth. It was the same instinct that had saved her from the carriage wheels—a primal, terrified refusal to be crushed.
But the math... the math was a problem. She wasn't educated. She barely knew her multiplication tables.
So she guessed. She looked at the numbers and tapped the one that "felt" right. Amazingly, she was getting about sixty percent of them correct. It was enough to keep the slate from turning red.
Lloyd stopped beside her. He saw her strategy immediately.
"You're guessing," he said.
Vala jumped, almost crashing her dot. "I... I'm not good with numbers, my Lord!"
"You're lucky," Lloyd corrected. "Or rather, your subconscious is processing the patterns faster than your conscious mind can do the arithmetic. You aren't solving the equation; you're recognizing the shape of the answer."
He watched her dodge a closing wall with a flick of her wrist.
"Your evasion stats are in the top one percent," Lloyd noted. "But if you rely on luck for the targeting systems, you're going to miss a lot of shots. Keep moving. We can teach you math later. We can't teach reflexes."
Vala nodded, biting her lip, sweat dripping down her nose. She kept the dot alive. That was all that mattered.
Finally, Lloyd reached Ren.
The clockmaker sat in his wheelchair, his posture slumped, looking for all the world like he was asleep. But behind his thick glasses, his eyes were darting back and forth with machine-like precision.
Ren wasn't playing the game. He was insulting it.
His right hand moved the stylus with microscopic adjustments. He didn't stay in the middle of the path; he hugged the corners, taking the most efficient lines possible to shave off milliseconds.
His left hand didn't just tap the answers; it tapped them in a rhythm that matched the hum of the slate.
Tap-tap-tap-tap.
Lloyd looked at Ren's score. 99% accuracy.
"You missed one," Lloyd pointed out.
Chapter : 1662
"I didn't miss it," Ren said, his voice bored. "The input sensor on the number '5' is sticky. I pressed it, but it didn't register in time. Hardware failure, not user error."
Lloyd chuckled. "You blame the tools?"
"A good craftsman knows his tools," Ren retorted, not looking up. "This slate is a prototype. The calibration on the Y-axis is off by two millimeters. And the logic processor heats up after prolonged use, causing a frame skip every forty seconds. I'm compensating for the lag."
Lloyd stared at the cripple in the wheelchair. Ren wasn't just piloting the dot; he was mentally reverse-engineering the device while using it. He felt the machine's pulse. He understood its flaws and worked around them.
"You treat the lag like a physical obstacle," Lloyd observed.
"It is," Ren said. "Time is a physical dimension. If the machine is slow, I have to be faster to meet it halfway."
"Time!" Lloyd shouted suddenly, his voice booming through the room.
The slates went dark.
A collective groan of exhaustion filled the air. Candidates slumped over their desks, rubbing their cramped hands and massaging their eyes. The mental strain of sustained, high-speed multitasking was agonizing. It was like running a sprint with your brain.
Lloyd walked to the front of the room. He looked at the master slate.
Twenty-five red lights. Twenty green lights.
"If your slate is red," Lloyd said, his voice devoid of sympathy, "leave. You have good muscles. You have brave hearts. But your minds are too slow. The Aegis would eat you alive before you even took a step. Go."
The failures stood up. Some looked angry, some looked relieved to be done with the torture. They filed out of the room, leaving twenty survivors sitting in the silence.
The room felt bigger now. Emptier.
Lloyd looked at the twenty remaining candidates. They were the weirdos. The nervous ones. The ones who twitched and muttered to themselves. They were the ones who didn't fit in the army, but they fit here.
"Congratulations," Lloyd said, placing his coffee cup on the desk. "You have proven that you can think and chew gum at the same time. That puts you ahead of ninety percent of the Royal Guard."
He smiled, but it wasn't a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who was about to open a door to a nightmare.
"However," Lloyd continued, "thinking is easy when you are sitting in a chair. Thinking is easy when the lights are on. But the Aegis isn't just a computer. It's a coffin. It's a sealed metal box where you will be locked in for hours, sometimes days."
He walked over to the heavy blast door at the back of the room.
"The neural link puts immense strain on the human mind. It connects you to the machine, but it also isolates you from your own body. If you panic, the link snaps. If the link snaps in combat, you are a statue waiting to be smashed."
He spun the wheel on the door.
"The next test is not about how fast you think. It is about how well you handle the dark. Follow me."
Lloyd opened the door, revealing a long, unlit corridor that seemed to swallow the light.
"Welcome to the Black Room."
________________________________________
The corridor leading to the Black Room sector was intentionally designed to be oppressive. The ceiling was low, forcing the taller recruits to hunch slightly. The walls were made of raw, unpolished iron that seemed to suck the warmth out of the air. The only sound was the echoing footsteps of the twenty survivors and the rhythmic, gliding hiss of Spirit Jasmin’s movement.
Lloyd led them deeper into the facility. He didn't speak. He let the silence do the work. He let their imaginations run wild.
They arrived at a long hallway lined with heavy, reinforced steel doors. Each door had a small, thick glass viewport and a heavy locking mechanism that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. There were no handles on the inside.
"Stop," Lloyd commanded.
The group halted. They looked at the doors with growing unease.
"This is the second phase of selection," Lloyd announced, his voice echoing in the narrow space. "We call this the Black Room. It is a sensory deprivation chamber. The walls are soundproofed with alchemical foam. The seals are airtight. Once that door closes, there is no light. There is no sound. There is nothing."
Vala hugged her arms, shivering. "For how long?"
"One hour," Lloyd said.