Chapter 5: Understanding

I looked down at the questions.

‘What the fuck are these!?!?’

These were all insane questions about morals and ethics. None of this could be answered objectively. How was someone supposed to choose between these answer choices?

‘This is insane. Choose between a teenager and a child? How was I supposed to make a decision here? In fact, I’d go as far as to say that merely answering should be cause for point loss, there’s no right answer here.’

I began to skim through the questions. As I did I began to grip the pen in my hand tighter and tighter, to the point that a small crack appeared in its plastic shell. Not a single one of the questions could be answered objectively. Page after page, flip after flip, and turn after turn I came across questions that did nothing except challenge one's moral standing.

I kept flipping through all the pages faster and faster. I was barely reading the question now. It wasn’t long before I reached the end of the test, all 100 questions, all of similar style. I banged my head on the table, causing Roland beside me to suddenly flinch.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

I kept my head down on top of the table, silently contemplating why the school would assign such a test. Why would they assign something so impossible to answer? Why would they give a test that gave no correct answers?

‘Is AGH trying to see who aligns with their own moral code? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. The heroes that graduate from here are at minimum high A-Ranks and each one of those people would have wildly different experiences that would shape their beliefs.’

‘Making a test where only those that have similar moral beliefs to the school can pass would be disrespectful to all those heroes who have put their lives and given their lives in the line of duty.’

I then flipped back through the questions again, hoping to find that the questions had magically changed. Unfortunately, no such questions appeared. With a heavy sigh, I turned towards a large timer now hovering above the podium.

Remaining Time: 1 Hour 34 minutes

I still had a huge amount of time remaining but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I slumped back in my seat and covered my eyes with the back of my hand. To be honest I was mad. The school was asking us to decide the value of human life. They were asking us to play god, whatever we said in this situation would be us saying “I am the judge of the quality of your life, if it isn’t high enough, then I won’t save you.” That’s not something a hero should do, it wasn’t something anyone should do.

I turned towards a proctor standing right next to me. He had long auburn hair tied back into a bun and his otherwise handsome face had a large scar across his cheek. He had appeared sometime during the testing when I hadn’t noticed. My hands began to tighten into fists as I looked at him. I could feel my nails starting to dig deep into my skin, causing a small amount of blood to seep out. My face began to turn hot as I stared him in the eye.

He stared back at me, his face almost completely unmoving except for his right eyebrow, which began to raise. I knew he could feel my animosity towards this test, and he probably believed that I felt similar towards him, which I did. AGH did not hire anyone for the applications, everyone participating were volunteers. That meant that this proctor believed in this test, he believed in judging human life subjectively.

“I need to use the bathroom,” I said between my gritted teeth.

The proctor looked at me surprised, he probably thought I was going to attack him.

“If you need to use the bathroom we will come with you.”

With that, he placed his thumb on my forehead and I instantly lost consciousness.

…

I opened my eyes and found myself in a brightly lit, plain white hallway. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all concrete painted white. In front of me, there was a bathroom with two separate paths for men and women. I felt my face beginning to burn hot red and my knuckles were turning white as I squeezed them tighter.

“What the hell was that!?!” I yelled at the proctor.

“Are you talking about the tests?”

“OF COURSE I’M TALKING ABOUT THE TESTS!!!”

“That is something you will have to do as a hero. You can’t save everyone.”

“That’s not the point! I know you can’t save everyone. I know that sometimes you will have to let someone die. I know that sometimes you have to do something you don’t agree with.” By this point, I had begun shaking and was on the verge of attacking the proctor.

“I doubt that. Or else you wouldn’t be standing here, about to cry over a small little test about the very topics you pretend to grasp. You don’t understand anything about what this job requires you to do.”

I began to fill my right arm with psychic energy. I felt the muscles begin to contract and heat up as an energy source pushed them past their limits. I stepped towards the proctor and pulled back my arm. The next moment I threw it forward, a fist flying towards the proctor.

BANG!!!

A crater formed in the concrete wall behind the proctor and cracks traveled up the ceiling and across the floor. My arm had stuck itself almost a full foot deep inside of the wall. I had diverted my fist at the last moment and punched the wall, less than an inch away from the proctor's face, who didn’t move or even seem phased by my attack.

I pulled my arm back out of the wall and fell to my knees on the floor. I took a look at my hand and saw it bloody and disfigured. I hadn’t used enough psychic energy to reinforce my fist, concentrating most of it in my arm, leading to my hand receiving serious damage. My hand soon began to feel the aftereffects of my actions, burning painfully as though someone was jabbing every inch of it with a knife.

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“I know you must be a strong hero to have been accepted by AGH to proctor this test. Maybe you were even a past student here. I know that as a strong hero, you must have made hard choices. You must have made sacrifices.”

I looked towards the proctor, my eyes, now teary from the pain in my hand, showed a seething rage. The proctor's face now had a look of concern, his eyebrows were slightly bent down and inwards and his mouth frowned.

“I once heard a story of a young boy… he was forced to choose between saving his sister and saving a random woman. He could only save one, the other would die.”

My voice had softened and my face was cooling down. I was no longer crying from the pain in my right hand as well. The proctor looked at me, this time with a curious look on his face, wondering what I was going to say next.

“He made the obvious choice that night. His sister survived and the woman died… years later he would sometimes lie awake at night, thinking about the consequences of his actions. What of the woman's family? What of her friends? What if she had children? He had become a judge on life, and judged her unworthy to live.”

I stood up now and looked directly into the proctor's eyes.

“I know that if that boy was given another chance, he would have still saved his sister without hesitation. But his soul would never rest, he would never find peace with himself. Two people died that day… you may not believe me, but I know what it’s like to choose someone else. I know what it’s like to let someone else die.”

The proctor looked at me with new understanding. He nodded his head slightly and a small smile began to show on his face. I took this as a sign of my getting through to him and kept going.

“It’s eternal torment… there is no rest, there is no peace, and there is no forgetting. Every night you sleep and hear the voices of the dead. You hear the sobs and wails of their parents, of their siblings, of their friends… but worst of all, you can hear their children crying out for their parent. You can practically see them, begging for their mother to hold their hand, carry them in their arms, reprimand them for playing too many games, help them with studying, surprise them with a birthday party, or just give them a hug.”

There was no doubt now, the proctor's face now had a medium-sized smile. It wasn’t one born of malicious enjoyment of hearing a story of suffering, but one that came from meeting someone who understood their pain, someone who could shoulder a burden alongside them, and walk as brothers.

“Every night you hear that. And every night, you want to curl up and die for your sins. You wonder if you even have the right to live anymore. After all, you made a choice to not save them when you had a chance, you are effectively guilty of murder.”

The proctor now nodded at me. His face fully grinning as he began to slightly laugh.

“Looks like you do understand what it’s like. I won’t ask how or why you know, but I fully believe that you do understand. But still, you have to choose, at the very least, you saved one life.”

I sat down on the ground again, the proctor sat down with me. I looked him in the eyes, now feeling compassion and sorrow for this eternally tormented one. His face now radiated warmth and his eyes possessed an understanding. We had bonded over something deeper than words could describe, we bonded over our life.

“I know. I know that I have to choose.” I said, looking at him straight on. “But I refuse to take that test. It’s a test with no right answer, only wrong ones. Only answers that would leave one feeling guilty afterward. I must stand in protest of it. After all, if I don’t then who will? Right?”

The proctor didn’t respond. Instead, he looked at the ceiling, now full of cracks and falling apart. I looked up at it too. We just sat there, in silence, looking at the sky of this small tunnel, filled with cracks that would be easier to replace than repair.

“Let me ask you, kid, what kind of world do you want to live in? What world do you want to make?”

The proctor had spoken again. I looked at him, wondering if there was an underlying motive behind this question. The proctor however looked at me with innocent eyes. The only thing I saw was curiosity.

“A world where people won’t have to choose to make decisions like us. A world where nobody has to feel guilty at night because they saved a person's life. A world where people like you and me no longer exist… I think it would be a nice world to live in.”

“What’s your name kid?”

“Mark. Yours?”

“Arthur.”

All of a sudden I felt the proctor's thumb on my forehead again and I fell unconscious.

…

I woke up back in the lecture hall room where all the other applicants were. I looked down at the test. There I saw sheets of paper torn in half. My pencil was shattered with wood littered across the desk and my pen was crushed with ink seeping out.

All of a sudden the pieces of paper, shattered wood and broken pen flew up together along with all the other applicants' items. They flew towards the podium at the front of the lecture hall before disappearing.

“Thank you for your submissions everyone. We will return to show the scores and current point rankings in 5 minutes.”

“Mark where the hell were you? You were gone for nearly the entire test.” Roland asked, confused and concerned.

I looked at him and smiled. “I was just getting some therapy I suppose.”

Roland looked at me, his face seemingly saying ‘Seriously?’. I looked at him back, my face showing nothing but a warm smile and radiating innocence. In response, Roland shook his head as though disappointed in me. But something suddenly caught his attention.

“Hey, what happened to your hand? Were you wearing that the whole time?”

‘Eh?’ I looked down at my hand. It was wrapped in a seemingly unhealthy amount of bandages. There was a small message on it, saying: “Thank you for the talk.”

I looked at Roland and said, “I have no idea when I got this.”

At that moment the bandage slowly came undone on its own. Roland and I watched in silent amazement the whole time as it unwound itself until it completely fell off. My hand was completely healed aside from being slightly red.

I looked at Roland and shrugged my shoulders. He on the other hand looked at me suspiciously, as if he suspected I was hiding something. I once again gave him a big smile and an innocent face.

“Mark, stop doing that. You look more guilty that way.”

“Really now? I was told I looked like a saint when I did that as a kid.”

“Well Mark, you aren’t a kid anymore. Now you look like someone trying to proclaim their innocence by smiling too big.”

I gave a small chuckle to what Roland said. At that moment we heard the speaker system go off.

“We apologize for the short delay. We had to double-check one of the scores to make sure that it was accurate. The mean score is -88/100.”

Roland and I turned to each other simultaneously. Mathematically speaking it seemed basically impossible, most of the questions had only 2 answers with some having 3. That would mean the average should be somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, yet the average was instead 12% correct.

“I knew the test was hard but… damn that is bad,” Roland said to me, shaking his head in disappointment. “I don’t think I did much better though. I couldn’t choose for most of the questions.”

“Heh, you think that's bad, I only chose one before I left.”

“Here are the current leaderboard results.”

2 screens suddenly popped up in front of Roland and me. On Roland's screen, it showed some data on him.

Name: Roland Nordt

Birth Date: 7/1/2007

Seat #: E2

Room#: B49

Test Score: -43/100

Ranking: #17

Total Points: -43

A smile grew on Roland's face. It made sense, the only downside to losing points was the potential to be eliminated, but as long as one could stay away from that then the only thing that mattered was having more points than anyone else. With Roland now in 17th place, his chances of being accepted into AGH were very high.

I gave Roland a high five before turning to look at my own screen.

Name: Mark Tran

Birth Date: 6/14/2007

Seat #: E1

Room#: B49

Test Score: **/100

Ranking: #*

Total Points: **

Wait… why was some of my information blanked out? My test scores, rankings, and total points didn’t show anything at all.

‘Wait is this a result of nearly attacking that proctor Arthur earlier? Did I already fail the application?’ I turned towards Roland whose eyes widened as he looked at my screen and back at me. His face was full of pity, probably because he thought I had failed the application as a result of answering practically nothing.

“Do you think I failed?” I asked him. At this point I was just looking for comfort in words, I was fairly confident I had failed the application completely.

Roland responded, his voice tinged with sadness and pity for my situation, “Yeah I think… yeah I think you did fail.”

‘Well… fuck.’

The screens then changed, showing a slow-moving leaderboard going through all of the applicants. Most of them had horrible scores, concentrating mostly around the -80 to -100 range. The higher ranked a student got though the more spaced out the points were. The top ten all had scores in the positive range except for first place which wasn’t shown.

‘I wonder how high first place got. Second place has 34 points so first place could be a lot higher.’

“Congratulations to our high scorer with a 100/100, Mark Tran!”

‘...what?’

My screen suddenly changed with my rankings, points, and test scores now showing themselves.

Test Score: 100/100

Ranking: #1

Total Points: 100

My jaw dropped and my eyes widened. Roland turned and looked at me with a similar look on his face.

‘What the fuck… how?’

I heard every single applicant in the room turn towards me. Some of their faces showed animosity, some presented jealousy, others presented joy as if they were happy for me, but the most common face was one of confusion.

Mark Tran, the one who attacked a member of the Woo family and disappeared for most of the test, had almost 3 times more points than the next highest-ranked applicant.

End of Chapter 5