Kiki turned away, gathering her things, clearly about to move seats.

I couldn’t let that happen. If she moved now, with our relationship already in the negatives, there’d be no getting close to her again anytime soon.

I quickly racked my brain for something to keep her there.

Then I spotted something she’d just picked up—an object that didn’t exactly belong in someone’s everyday carry, unlike headphones or other cheap accessories.

"That’s a VR Dive Ring, right? You play Heaven’s Path too?" I said quickly, putting on a smile to open a new conversation.

"None of your business." Kiki wasn’t biting. "Go talk to your girlfriend over there and leave me alone."

"Wait. Want to party with me in-game?"

I caught her sleeve lightly, careful not to make her drop anything. Her eyes went ice-cold. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

"Sorry, but I’m a hardcore player. I doubt you could even keep up with me—I’m already level 15!" She declared it like a badge of honor.

To be fair, level 15 at this stage was genuinely impressive.

Especially given that most players had already migrated to the starter village before they’d even hit level 10. The difficulty spike, the jump in monster AI, the gear gap—grinding past that point was no small feat.

"Oh, level 15?" I smiled, letting just a little tease slip in. "My party’s sitting at level 20 right now. Join us, and I’ll even throw in a full set of level 15 armor as a bonus. What do you say?"

Kiki’s movements stopped cold.

"...Level 20?" She repeated.

I already knew why she hesitated.

She’d probably played straight through from midnight to eight in the morning, burning her full daily play window in one sitting—which explained the current state of her appearance. Eight solid hours, and she’d clawed her way to level 15.

That alone said a lot about how brutal this game actually was.

Miyabi and I hitting level 20 in roughly half that time were the outliers. The abnormalities.

"Are you saying you’re WhiteGod?!" Her eyes went wide.

I just smiled and didn’t confirm anything.

"You’ll only find out if you agree to party up. So?" I let go of her sleeve and rested my chin on my hand, watching her with a satisfied look. "Even if I’m lying, you don’t really lose anything. A full armor set isn’t easy to come by."

In this game, the faster you killed an enemy, the better the loot it dropped.

Kiki had probably been grouping up with a bunch of low-level players like herself, treating normal monsters like raid bosses and piling on through sheer numbers. Then splitting the drops and gold equally among everyone involved.

At that rate, she’d barely be scraping together any gold, let alone decent gear.

Miyabi and I, on the other hand, were one-hitting most enemies—meaning the loot we pulled was close to the best those monsters had to offer. If Miyabi hadn’t died so many times, we’d probably have had enough gear to outfit an entire party before we logged off.

"...I’m still not convinced."

As expected, Kiki wasn’t the type to fold easily.

"This professor’s about to throw a programming test at us—on a holiday weekend, no less. If you score higher than me, I’ll party up with you." She crossed her arms. "If you don’t, you hand over that full armor set you’ve been bragging about."

"So it’s a bet?"

"Yes!"

I just smiled and watched her settle back into her seat.

"Alright, everyone. Quiet down, eyes on me, and pay attention."

Right on cue, Professor Karashi’s voice boomed from the front of the room. He kept going, each sentence more condescending than the last.

The task for the day was already up on the whiteboard.

[First Practical Exam: Basic Programming I]

[

Given a randomly generated N×N grid, find the shortest path from the top-left cell to the bottom-right cell that also minimizes total movement cost. Walls are represented by 1 and open paths by 0. Each step has a base cost of 2, however, moving upward doubles the step cost, while moving downward halves it. Your program must handle grids up to 10,000 × 10,000 in size and produce a result within 100ms. Output the total path length and its cost, or -1 if no valid path exists.

]

I hadn’t touched a keyboard in over thirty years, but I was still fairly confident in my coding instincts. Even so...

’There’s no way a first-year class should be covering this.’

The second semester had barely started, and this question had absolutely no business being on a first-year syllabus—not based on what I could make out from the class outline, anyway.

Technically, it was solvable using concepts already introduced. But only barely. Students like us right now couldn’t come close to solving it under 100 ms and with a tight memory constraint.

’What a nasty professor. He’s got no intention of letting anyone pass this.’

I shook my head quietly and turned to face the blank code editor in front of me. Glancing sideways, I could already see Kiki hammering away at her keyboard at full speed—whether she’d cracked the solution or was just building momentum, I couldn’t tell. But she wasn’t slowing down.

"I should get started too."

My fingers settled on the keyboard, ready to begin—

[Master, I’ve finished solving the problem. Would you like to see the solution?]

"Huh?"

I glanced at Ram, still perched on my shoulder. Weightless as she was, I’d nearly forgotten she was there. But what she just said...

’She already solved it?’

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Grateful for having such an overpowered AI? Or quietly humbled at being beaten to the punch?

"...Go ahead."

Curiosity won out in the end.

[Displaying solution via Augmented Reality overlay. Text will appear between the screen and your eyes. Please copy it as written.]

The moment she finished speaking, lines of text began appearing in my field of vision—hovering just in front of the monitor, not on it.

’Augmented display? Seriously? I’m not even wearing glasses!’

Curious as I was about whether the code actually worked, I started copying. With my typing speed, transcribing roughly 1,500 lines wasn’t going to take anywhere near the full hour we’d been given.

Once I finished, I compiled it and waited.

A minute passed.

"...It actually worked." I muttered under my breath.

The compile ran clean—no errors. I hadn’t run any test cases yet, though, so I raised my hand and called out.

"Teacher, I’m done. Could you check it?"

"...Cocky little brat." Professor Karashi scoffed, eyebrows raised. "Thirty minutes in, and you think you’ve solved it? Fine—let’s show your classmates exactly how arrogant you are."

A few keystrokes later, the projector display switched over entirely, now showing the testing program as it transferred my compiled solution to the teacher’s machine.

Once the transfer completed, the evaluation began.

Most of the class only half-glanced at the projection before returning to their own screens. Only a handful had the nerve to actually watch.

The results ticked by one after another—each check passing cleanly, benchmarks appearing alongside.

The runtime stayed within 10–25 ms across all test cases, its complexity benchmarked at O(N log N). Space complexity landed at O(√N), showing that the solution finds the answer without even loading the entire map into memory.

By any measure, it was past a perfect solution and bordered impossible already.

Still, I didn’t relax.

I watched the progress bar climb. 10%. 20%. 50%.

The students who were watching couldn’t help but murmur. Every single check so far had passed without a hitch.

But then—

ERROR.

A red flash lit up the projection. Everything had passed except the very last question.

"H-hah!" Professor Karashi barked out a laugh—though I noticed the faint sheen of cold sweat on his forehead. "See?! Still not perfect!"

"..."

He was more rattled than he was letting on. A student clearing that many test cases on the first attempt clearly wasn’t something he’d been prepared for.

[Master...]

But then Ram said something, and my lips curved into a quiet smile.

I raised my hand and pointed at the values on the screen.

"Professor, the expected answer on the final question is wrong. Mine should be correct. Please verify."

"...Huh?"

The sharp, icy look he fixed on me was not my imagination.

I’d just told a professor, in front of the entire class, that he’d made a mistake. Nobody who’d been teaching for any length of time would take that sitting down—regardless of whether the student had any ill intent behind it.

Half the class was staring at me like I had a death wish.

"You’re telling me I made a mistake? Me—someone who’s been teaching this subject for three years?!"

Professor Karashi’s voice came out in a low growl, barely containing himself.

I didn’t budge. "If I can prove my answer is correct, will you give me a passing grade for this class right now?"

"Go ahead and try, you little—! Prove me wrong!"

"Heh."

I just smiled, turned back to my computer, and quietly hijacked the projector.

Not borrowed—hijacked. Full remote control.

I pulled up the final test case directly—the full 10,000×10,000 grid—and displayed both outputs side by side. Mine, and the professor’s expected answer.

"The expected output takes 28,231 steps at a total cost of 49,803." I pointed at his result first, then mine. "Mine takes 30,847 steps at a total cost of 46,496."

The murmuring started immediately.

"Fewer steps, yes—but the professor’s path climbs upward quite a lot, padding the accumulated cost."

I highlighted the third value shown beneath both outputs—the average energy per step. His read 1.764, while mine read 1.507.

"The question asks for the path that is both shortest and cheapest. By every meaningful measure of efficiency, teacher’s answer isn’t even close."

That was all it needed.

The silence that followed was complete.

"Done." I said, leaning back.

By that point, Professor Karashi’s face had gone the color of chalk.

He’d just watched his own answer key get dismantled in under two minutes, its flaw laid bare on the projector for every student in the room to see. Technically it was Ram guiding me every step of the way, but that was between us.

"So... can I be exempted from this class now?"

I turned to Kiki staring at my face from beside me, mouth agape, and winked.

At my words, the professor let out a barely audible sound.

"No... way..."

And then crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.