The massive main screen in the auditorium turns completely dark, absorbing the harsh white light of the previous evaluation.
Min-sun sits frozen in her seat, her knuckles turning white as she clenches her hands tightly together in her lap.
Her breathing is shallow, her eyes fixed entirely on the empty void of the display.
Inside her chest, her heart beats with a frantic, desperate rhythm.
She prays sincerely in her heart that Arashi survives whatever nightmare the system is preparing to construct.
She doesn’t think she could bear to see anyone die again, especially after what happened to her roommate Hina just minutes prior.
Beside her, a group of candidates whispers in hushed, nervous tones.
The low hum of the machinery overhead suddenly deepens, a heavy vibration rattling through the floorboards.
“Look, the screen is humming back to life,” a candidate two rows behind Min-sun remarks, leaning forward over his seat.
“The simulation is starting. Let’s see what happens to this one.”
“Yeah, I can’t wait to see what makes this guy tick,” another candidate whispers back, his voice tight with malicious curiosity.
“He’s been acting like a robot since the day he arrived. Let’s see how long his composure lasts when the machine rips his head open.”
Min-sun overhears the cruel words, but she ignores them entirely, forcing the voices out of her mind as she watches the screen more intently.
On the massive monitor, a dark, surreal landscape materializes out of the shadows.
The simulated version of Arashi appears on screen.
He is walking slowly, his shoulders perfectly level and his posture relaxed.
He keeps both of his hands slid casually deep into his tracksuit pockets.
He steps forward with rhythmic, unhurried strides, his boots splashing lightly into a thick, dark red liquid that carpets the ground.
The place is completely indescribable, a claustrophobic maze where the very walls seem to warp and drip with fresh, glistening blood.
“What kind of mindscape is this?” a boy in the front row whispers, his voice trembling as he stares at the visceral imagery.
“It looks like a literal slaughterhouse.”
On the screen, the simulated Arashi continues his steady advance, completely unbothered by the horrific surroundings.
He doesn’t look at the walls, nor does he check his boots.
His dead, apathetic eyes remain fixed straight ahead as he arrives at the edge of a massive, ancient stone gate.
Beyond the threshold of the gate lies nothing but a sheer, terrifying hundred-foot fall into a swirling abyss of darkness.
Directly at the base of the gate, a small boy sits quietly on the blood-soaked ground, playing with a small, broken toy.
The boy’s face is completely obscured, hidden beneath a mop of messy dark hair.
The simulated Arashi doesn’t hesitate.
He walks directly towards the boy, his pace never changing by a single fraction.
In a strange, sudden movement, the little boy drops his toys onto the ground.
The clatter echoes sharply through the quiet void of the simulation.
Arashi pauses his advance, standing exactly three paces away.
In a deeply creepy, unnatural motion, the little boy slowly turns his head all the way to his back, his neck twisting with a sickening crunch before his lower body even begins to follow the movement.
The unnatural display instantly creeps out the thousands of candidates watching from the auditorium seats, a collective shiver running through the crowd.
Even the seasoned observers watching from the windows of the control room lean back in instinctual disgust.
Instead, his hollow, darkened eye sockets tilt upward, staring directly forward as if he were looking through the screen, making direct eye contact with the candidates watching from the rows below.
Inside the high-tech control room, the atmosphere turns instantly freezing.
Ms. Sato grips the edge of her metal terminal, her eyes wide as she looks at the monitor.
“Dr. Akane, look at the orientation of the entity’s ocular focus. Why does it look like the boy can see us?”
Dr. Akane’s fingers hover over his keyboard, her eyebrows furrowing in deep confusion.
“There is no logical way that is possible, Ms. Sato. The entity is a localized psychological manifestation. It exists strictly within Arashi’s mind. It has no external awareness.”
Suddenly, on the secondary monitor in the control room and across the primary screen in the main auditorium, the little boy’s lips curl upward into a wide, impossibly jagged, creepy smile.
His voice pierces through the audio systems of both rooms, sounding unnaturally clear.
“You sure?” the little boy asks.
Before anyone can process the words, the child’s form fractures.
His flesh stretches and tears as he suddenly transforms into a cluster of fierce, towering monsters.
The creatures let out a deafening, terrifying yell that shakes the audio speakers to their absolute limit.
Throughout the auditorium, the candidates watching the main screen all gasp out of sheer fear, several of them throwing their hands up to shield their faces from the display.
Yet, on the screen, Arashi stands completely unflinchingly directly behind the roaring monsters.
His hands remain inside his pockets.
His pulse lines on the monitor do not fluctuate.
His expression remains a perfect, unmoving void, as if he were looking at an empty room rather than a horde of psychological demons.
Inside the observation booth, Principal Kenjiro’s eyes narrow to sharp slits.
He slams his hand down onto the console.
“Kill the simulation immediately, Dr. Akane! Shut it down now!”
“Yes, sir!” Dr. Akane shouts, slamming his palm against the emergency override sequence.
“Terminating the neural link!”
Immediately, the hum dies out and the screen is turned off, cutting into absolute, silent blackness.
On the main stage, the heavy mechanical helmet releases with a loud hiss, rising back into the ceiling.
Arashi calmly unstraps himself from the heavy metallic chair, releasing the wrist and ankle constraints before the automated system can even finish its cycle.
He stands up smoothly, slides his hands back into his pockets, and walks down the steps of the stage.
The entire auditorium remains completely silent, everyone staring at him with their jaws dropped in absolute shock.
Arashi walks down the central aisle with the exact same slow, rhythmic pace, entirely unbothered by the thousands of eyes locked onto him.
He reaches his row and steps inside, returning to his designated seat.
Beside him, Min-sun sits petrified, her body trembling as she stares at his unblemished, calm face.
She turns her torso toward him, her voice a hushed, terrified whisper.
“Arashi… what was that? What did we just see in there?”
Arashi adjusts his position slightly, leaning back against the cold metal of his chair.
He looks straight ahead, his voice completely flat, monotone, and devoid of any lingering adrenaline.
“This is exactly what the academy wanted, Min-sun San. They sought an extraction of baseline parameters. The system attempted to find an anchor, and it generated a sequence based on its own internal programming limitations.”
“But the gate… and that little boy. He looked directly at us. He knew we were watching him. How could a memory inside your mind—”
“Do not ask too many questions, Min-sun San,” Arashi interrupts smoothly, his low voice cutting through her frantic inquiry like a knife through ice.
He doesn’t turn his head to look at her, keeping his dead eyes fixed on the front of the room.
“Seeking unnecessary patterns in a terminated simulation is an inefficient use of your cognitive resources. Focus on your own baseline stability instead.”
Min-sun cuts her question halfway through, her lips pressing together into a tight line as she sinks back into her seat, silenced by his chilling, absolute neutrality.
Suddenly, a sharp, high-pitched electronic tone chimes through the audio system.
The massive main screen flickers back to life, the digital matrix recalibrating to display the final metrics of the trial.
Every head in the room tilts upward as the text materializes in glowing, bright white characters across the center of the display.
CANDIDATE 235: ARASHI TANAKA
EVALUATION METRIC: ∞
The entire room descends into a confused, anxious murmur.
The candidates look at each other, whispering frantically as they try to decipher the strange readout.
“An infinity symbol?” a candidate in the front row mutters, tapping his fingers against his knees.
“What the hell does that mean? Is that a score?”
“Did he pass or did he fail?” another voice calls out from the middle section.
“Every other screen showed points or a failure notice. What is the system doing?”
No one in the vast auditorium knew what it meant.
The symbol sat there, glowing softly against the dark background, completely defying the standard classification protocols of the evaluation metrics.
Up in the control room, the confusion is even more severe.
Dr. Akane stares blankly at his primary interface, his fingers clicking frantically across the diagnostic logs.
“The data fields aren’t compiling correctly, Principal. The system isn’t outputting a numerical value for Candidate 235. It’s just looping the infinity character.”
Ms. Sato leans over his shoulder, her eyes scanning the raw source code.
“Is it a software glitch? Did the sudden emergency termination corrupt the final calculations?”
“No,” Dr. Akane whispers, his face turning pale as she reads the underlying system logs.
“The architecture didn’t crash. The dampeners reached their maximum output limits trying to scale his psychic resistance, and the system simply defaulted to an infinite variable to prevent a total hardware meltdown. Not even the technicians who designed this core framework knew this readout could appear in the system after a trial.”
Principal Kenjiro stands perfectly still by the glass window, his eyes fixed entirely on Arashi’s motionless form sitting quietly in the middle rows below.
He crosses his arms slowly over his chest, his mind evaluating the terrifying strategic implications of the result.
“Did he pass or fail, sir?” Ms. Sato asks quietly, looking to the Principal for guidance.
“How do we record this profile for the next phase of the program?”
Kenjiro doesn’t answer immediately.
He watches Arashi adjust his collar with a single, slow movement, completely detached from the chaos his score has caused throughout the entire facility.
“He didn’t pass, and he didn’t fail,” Kenjiro says softly, his voice dripping with a cold, calculated curiosity.
“He simply broke the scale we use to measure them. Keep his profile active. The next phase will determine exactly what that infinity symbol is worth.”