Chapter 167: Entrance Test
The iron gates of the school swung shut behind them with a dull, heavy clunk, as if severing them completely from the outside world.
Before them stretched a long, straight avenue lined with tall, withered plane trees. Their dried leaves rustled dryly in the chill wind, stirring up the faint, dusty scent of decayed paper and old books.
At the far end of the avenue stood an aged five-story school building. The exterior paint was peeling and cracked, and several shattered windows had been hastily covered with rough wooden boards.
The entire campus was drowned in a dreary, lifeless gray. It was unnervingly silent, save for the hollow echo of their own footsteps.
Ding-a-ling—ding-a-ling—ding-a-ling—
Three harsh chimes from an unseen electric bell broke through the dead silence.
The moment the ringing stopped, a pale-faced teenage boy in an ill-fitting, faded uniform appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the road, blocking their path.
“Are you… the new transfer students?”
His voice was hoarse and raspy. In his arms, he clutched a thick binder filled with densely packed survivor names and IDs.
Milk Tea Seven Parts Sugar immediately stepped forward. Before being pulled into the survival game, she had been a regular high school student, and the school environment was familiar territory.
Spotting the fabric armband pinned to the boy’s sleeve, she asked quickly, “You’re a senior from the Student Council, right? We just transferred today. Where do we report?”
The boy kept his head down, flipping through the yellowed roster. “You are all first-year students, assigned to Class 16.”
His head snapped up, his hollow eyes staring past them. “Running, shouting, and wandering into other classrooms are strictly forbidden on campus grounds.”
With that chilling warning, the boy dissolved into gray smoke and vanished into thin air.
“There’s our objective,” Lin Huai whispered to the squad. “Head straight for Classroom 16 in the main building. Stay alert, everyone—this trial has an unnatural feel to it. Whatever happens, do not violate campus rules.”
The twelve of them proceeded cautiously along the paved path toward the school building.
Crossing the threshold through the main entrance, an even heavier draft of cold air and damp mildew washed over them.
The hallway stretched long, narrow, and dark, lit only by a few flickering fluorescent tubes humming faintly overhead. The classroom doors on either side were sealed shut, their bronze class plaques green with rust.
They quickly found the door marked First Year, Class 16.
Pushing open the creaking wooden door, they found a female teacher already seated behind the lectern at the front of the room.
She wore wire-rimmed glasses, her sharp, predatory eyes glinting behind the lenses. Laid out neatly on the wooden desk in front of her were twelve blank test papers and sharpened pencils.
“The first lesson for new transfer students: an entrance examination,” she announced without looking up, her voice devoid of warmth. “Take your seats. Maintain absolute silence throughout the testing period. No whispering, no glancing around. A passing mark is 60 points. Those who pass may proceed to the cafeteria for their meal. Those who fail… will remain behind forever for remedial tutoring.”
The members of the Elite Squad exchanged panicked glances. An academic exam in a survival trial?
Distress was written across nearly every face. Except for Milk Tea, everyone else had graduated from school years ago. Who could possibly remember high school test material?
Cute and Sparkling clasped her hands in frantic prayer: “Please no math… please don’t let there be math…”
Milk Tea muttered her own plea under her breath: “No English… please no English…”
Sister Cai sat frozen at her desk, staring blankly ahead as if all the fighting spirit had been drained from her body.
Even Dragon Emerging from the Sea scratched his head in sheer frustration, his weathered face twisted in misery.
The teacher dropped the stack of tests onto the front desk with a dull thud. “Pass them back.”
Seated right in the front row, directly under the teacher’s sharp gaze, was Old Wang.
Holding a real doctorate in materials science, he wasn’t intimidated by written exams in the slightest. He deliberately straightened his broad shoulders, trying to shield the teammates behind him from the teacher’s view.
As the test papers were passed down the row, Lin Huai picked up her sheet and instantly felt a splitting headache.
It was a comprehensive language exam. Worse still, the final section was an argumentative essay worth a whopping 60 points on its own!
The timer was set for one hour. Swallowing their dread, everyone gripped their pencils and began scratching answers across the pages.
When Fastest Hand at SF Express hit a wall on an obscure classical poetry question, he instinctively leaned sideways to peek at Old Wang’s paper.
The teacher’s head snapped up. A sinister red glow flashed behind her eyeglasses.
[Warning! Survivor ‘Fastest Hand at SF Express’ has violated examination regulations: 1 Strike! Accumulating three strikes will result in immediate disqualification and exam invalidation!]
The cold, mechanical voice of Desolate, the assigned system handler, rang through the classroom without warning. Shunfeng jumped in his seat, a cold sweat breaking out across his neck as he shoved his nose back down against his desk.
“Damn, they’re not joking around!” Sister Cai muttered under her breath in the faintest whisper.
[Warning! Survivor ‘If You’re Bad, Practice More’ has violated examination regulations by speaking: 1 Strike!]
Sister Cai clamped her mouth shut instantly, her face flushing crimson with embarrassment and frustration.
Now, everyone sat perfectly rigid. Even the sound of their breathing grew faint and controlled.
Lin Huai forced herself to focus, working through the sections at high speed. She answered the multiple-choice questions she recognized and filled in “C” for every question she had no clue about.
She completed the fill-in-the-blank problems she remembered and left the rest clean.
For the reading comprehension section, she wrote down whatever sounded plausible, filling every line in the hopes of earning pity points.
She took the same approach with the essay, ensuring her handwriting was legible and that she comfortably surpassed the required word count.
Before long, the hour was up, and everyone laid down their pencils.
The teacher collected the papers and graded them with unnatural, mechanical efficiency.
After a few tense minutes, she looked up from the podium, an irritated scowl twisting her face. “You truly are the most pathetic batch of students I have ever had the misfortune to teach!”
“A rudimentary entrance test! Twelve examinees, and only eight managed to scrape by! Four failures! Do you have no desire to graduate?!”
She tapped the wooden lectern sharply. “Those who passed may proceed to the cafeteria for their meal. Those who failed will remain in this classroom for individualized remedial instruction.”
“Out of a maximum score of 150 points, the passing scores are as follows: Milk Tea Seven Parts Sugar with 114 points; Cute and Sparkling with 75 points; AAA Building Materials Old Wang with 108 points; the Young Miss with 69 points; Peace and Violence with 91 points; Flash Delivery Yellow Knight with 69 points; Shudao Mountain with 72 points; and Bone Ashes Mixed with Rice with 60 points!”
Lin Huai’s heart had been in her throat, but hearing that exact 60, she let out a quiet breath of relief. She had cleared the bar by the thinnest possible margin.
Yet any relief she felt vanished the next second, replaced by mounting dread for her fallen teammates.
Dragon Emerging from the Sea, Sister Cai, Fastest Hand at SF Express, and Hungry Spirit Blue Knight—the four strongest frontline fighters in the entire squad—had all failed.
It seemed raw physical combat power and academic test-taking really couldn’t coexist.
Having read out the roster, the teacher picked up a heavy wooden pointer and rose from her chair. The rhythmic click-clack of her high heels struck the dusty floorboards like a funeral drum as she walked toward the back row where the four failing students sat.
“Students who fail require… specialized remedial care.”
Her voice sounded like rusted iron blades grinding together. “I will personally tutor you one-on-one until… you pass.”
Dragon Emerging from the Sea rose abruptly to his feet, his broad shoulders squared and every muscle coiled tight, clearly preparing to smash his way out.
Sister Cai went pale. Her hand dropped toward the weapon holster at her hip, but remembering the strict campus rules, she forced her fingers away.
Shunfeng was drenched in cold sweat, his legs trembling beneath the desk, while Blue Knight’s eyes darted across the windows and doors, searching for any potential structural weakness to exploit.
“Teacher!”
Lin Huai spoke up, keeping her tone as calm, polite, and respectful as she could muster. “Excuse me, will the tutoring session take place right here in this classroom? We all transferred together as a single group, and classmates should look out for one another. May the rest of us wait here until they finish?”
The teacher turned her head toward Lin Huai, her neck producing a sickening, wooden click as the joint rotated.
Her cold eyes bored into Lin Huai’s face. “No. You will proceed to the cafeteria. They will remain here. Remedial tutoring… requires absolute quiet.”
She lingered on the word quiet, rhythmically tapping the heavy pointer against her open palm with a hollow thwack-thwack.
“Teacher,” Milk Tea gathered her courage, her youthful voice chiming in timidly from the side, “we all arrived on campus at the same time and don’t know our way around yet. Would it be alright if we…”
