I was three rounds deep into a ranked Free Fire match, holding down a crucial choke point with an AWM sniper rifle, when my perimeter was breached.
"Femi! My dude! Drop the games!! We have a situation."
Josh burst into our dorm room like a frag grenade gone wrong. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest in 50-degree weather and smelled faintly of something sweet and alcoholic.
I didn't look away from the screen. A squad was pushing my position. "The situation is that three enemies are about to flank me, and if I die, my rank drops."
"Rank shmank," Josh said, reaching over and grabbing his phone, forcibly quitting him out of the game. The screen went black.
I stared at the phone he tossed back at me fighting the urge to strangle him. That was an automatic disconnect penalty. My teammates were probably cursing my entire lineage right now back in Lagos.
"You just cost me—"
"I'm saving you," Josh declared, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "It's Friday night, man. You've spent the last forty-eight hours either in classes, in that creepy basement piano room, or glued to that screen. You're turning into part of the furniture."
I adjusted my glasses, trying to recalibrate my brain from tactical awareness to social annoyance. "I am recharging. It is efficient."
"It's depressing," Josh corrected. "Look, there's a party off-campus on Prescott Street. Some guys from the rowing team. It's gonna be legendary. There will be actual human females there. Maybe even bad decisions waiting to be made. You're coming."
"No."
"Yes. I already told them I was bringing the genius who nuked a virtual city to save the world. You're a minor celebrity, dude."
My stomach gave a nasty lurch. The classroom incident. Two days later, and people were still looking at me sideways in the dining hall. The whispers followed me like lag. That's the guy. The cold one. The sociopath. The mad Nigerian.
"I do not wish to be celebrated for tactical ruthlessness in a social setting," I said stiffly.
Josh grabbed my jacket off the hook and threw it at my head. I caught it out of reflex.
"Too late. Put on your armor, soldier. We're going to warr"
*****************************************
The house on Prescott Street was easily identifiable by the bass thumping so hard the windows were rattling in their frames. It sounded like a generator struggling to power a whole street in Surulere during a blackout.
Josh, the golden retriever that he was, bounded up the steps and was immediately swallowed by a crowd of people near the door, high-fiving NPCs left and right.
I hesitated on the threshold. My brain immediately started analyzing the environment, and the results were terrifying.
It was a chaotic nightmare.
The air inside was hot, thick, and smelled of cheap beer, sweat, and desperation. The lighting was terrible—strobe lights flickering in a way that made tracking movement impossible. The noise level was beyond anything reasonable; people weren't talking, they were screaming directly into each other's ear canals.
It was like Balogun market on a Saturday, but with fewer useful goods and more privileged white kids trying to act like they were the shit.
I pushed my way in, keeping my back to the wall, scanning for threats. Someone spilled a cold, sticky liquid on my shoulder. I didn't even turn around.
"Femi! Over here! Gotta introduce you to the crew!" Josh was yelling from across the room, near a makeshift bar constructed from folding tables.
I ignored him. Tactical retreat.
I scouted the room and found a defensible position: a slightly less crowded corner near a darkened patio door, blocked by a large potted plant. It was a camper spot. Perfect. I slid into the shadow of the plant, pulling my phone out as a shield, pretending to be deeply engaged in important international communications.
From my vantage point, I observed the whole room.
It was fascinatingly stupid. These were some of the smartest young minds on the planet, yet here they were, chugging mystery fluids from red cups and gyrating off-beat to music that lacked any complex structure. Their social algorithms were glitchy. They were trying so hard to impress each other, running scripts they'd seen in movies.
And then, in the center of the main room, the crowd parted slightly, and I saw the weirdo herself.
Hailey.
She was impossible to miss. She was standing on a sturdy coffee table, holding a red cup high, leading a messy chorus of some pop-punk anthem that everyone seemed to know. She wore the same oversized denim jacket, but beneath it was a black tank top that clung to her frame.
She was the eye of the storm. She wasn't just surviving the chaos; she was generating it. People were orbiting her, laughing at whatever she was shouting between lyrics. She looked radiant, sweaty, and completely in her element.
It was infuriating.
How could the same person who lectured me about the "soul" of Bach be here, screaming meaningless noise and celebrating inefficiency? It didn't compute.
I watched her for a minute too long. Because suddenly, she stopped singing. She scanned the room, her eyes cutting through the strobe lights.
And locked right onto my camping spot.
She didn't smile. She didn't wave. She just hopped off the table with surprising grace and started cutting a direct path through the crowd toward me.
My instinct was to bail. Use the patio door. Escape velocity. But that would be cowardly. I was the IGL of the 'Gbagada Titans'. I didn't run from a 1v1.
I pocketed my phone and stood up straighter as she breached my perimeter.
Up close, she looked tired, despite the energy. There were shadows under those intense amber eyes, and she smelled like cheap tequila and vanilla perfume.
"Well, well," she shouted over the bass, leaning against the wall next to me, invading my personal space. "If it isn't the Butcher of Boston. Didn't peg you for the party type."
My jaw tightened. "Josh was... insistent. And I don't appreciate that nickname. It's stupid. "
She laughed, a throaty, raspy sound that somehow cut through the music. "Tough shit, Robo-Cop. You earned it. You scared the piss out of half the class."
"I solved the problem," I said, falling back on my default defense. "The scenario required a binary choice to ensure species survival. I made the choice. The data supported my actions."
She swirled the remaining liquid in her cup, staring at me over the rim. She wasn't looking at me like the others did—like I was a freak. She was looking at me like I was a difficult puzzle she hadn't quite cracked yet.
"The data," she repeated, rolling her eyes. "You know, Professor Vance thinks you're a genius. He was raving about your 'uncompromising clarity' to some grad students today."
A flicker of pride tried to surface, but I pushed it down. "He is a logical man."
"Yeah, well, I think you're full of shit."
The bluntness of it actually made me blink. "Excuse me?"
She pushed off the wall and took a step closer, until I could feel the heat coming off her skin. The noise of the party seemed to fade a little into the background, narrowed down to just the two of us in that shadowy corner.
"You hide behind it," she said, her voice dropping, losing the mocking edge. "The math. The data. 'Compromised variables.' You use all those big, cold words to build a wall so you don't have to feel anything."
"Emotion is.... It's inefficient in a crisis," I recited, my voice tighter than I intended.
"Bullshit," she spat back. "Emotion is what makes the crisis matter. If you don't care about the 500,000 people you just vaporized, then what's the point of saving the rest? You're just moving numbers around on a spreadsheet."
I felt a tremor in my hands and quickly shoved them into my jacket pockets. She was getting too close to the firewall.
"You were terrified," I said, turning the attack around. It was a desperate counter-offensive. "In the classroom. I saw your face. You were horrified because you knew, deep down, that my logic was irrefutable. You hated it because it was true."
Hailey didn't flinch. She just stared at me, those amber eyes uncomfortably perceptive.
"Yeah. I was horrified," she admitted. "It was fucking terrifying to watch someone turn off their humanity like a light switch. But you know what else I saw?"
I didn't want to ask. I really didn't.
She leaned in conspiratorially. "I saw your hand shaking when you typed in the command to blow those bridges. Just for a microsecond. But it shook."
My breath hitched. I hadn't realized—I thought I had suppressed it. I thought the lag was internal.
She smirked, but it wasn't cruel this time. It was almost victorious. "You felt it, Femi. You felt the weight of it. And you hated that you felt it. So you buried it under a mountain of bullshit logic."
She drained the rest of her tequila, grimaced, and crushed the cup in her hand.
"You're not a robot, Robo-Cop," she whispered, poking a finger hard into my chest, right over my heart. "You're just scared shitless of being human in a messy world. And honestly? That's way more interesting."
Before I could form a coherent response—before I could reboot my crashed brain—she turned on her heel and dove back into the sweating, screaming crowd. Within seconds, she was back on the coffee table, pulling another poor soul into her chaotic orbit.
I stood there in the shadow of the potted plant, my heart hammering against my ribs where she had poked me.
My hand was shaking again in my pocket.
I couldn't stay here. The noise, the heat, the sheer, terrifying accuracy of her interrogation—it was too much overload.
I slipped out the patio door, vaulting a low brick wall and landing in the cool damp grass of a neighboring yard. I didn't stop moving until I was blocks away, the thumping bass fading into the background noise of the city.
Back in the silence of the dorm room, I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark.
I hated her. She was abrasive, illogical, and deeply irritating.
But as I replayed the conversation in my head, analyzing it frame by frame, I had to admit the one variable I couldn't calculate away.
She had seen the micro-stutter in my performance. She had identified the glitch I thought was hidden.
She was sharp. dangerously sharp. And for the first time in my life, my camouflage wasn't working.