It wasn't just a murmur this time. It was a massive, overlapping explosion of noise. Desks scraped against the floor as people leaned forward.
"A full scholarship?!" a boy near the front yelled, looking back at his friends in total disbelief. "For three years? Are you serious right now?"
"That covers everything!" a girl squealed, grabbing her friend's arm. "My parents would stop breathing down my neck about student loans!"
"Three years of free tuition just for dancing?" another guy shouted over the noise. "I'll break my legs trying to win if I have to!"
"Are there any catches?" someone else yelled from the back. "Do we have to maintain a certain GPA?"
"Just win the contest," the professor replied loudly over the din. "That is the only requirement."
Mark sat perfectly still in the back row.
His eyes widened upon hearing full scholarship. He came from a very average, struggling household. His parents scraped by every single month just to send him enough cash for rent and cheap study guides. A three-year free ride would change his entire life.
It would lift a massive, suffocating weight off his shoulders. He wouldn't have to work part-time shifts at the convenience store anymore. He wouldn't have to count his loose change just to buy a light novel.
"Quiet down," the teacher ordered, raising his voice again.
The chatter slowly dialed back into excited whispers.
"Let me explain the logistics," the professor said, reading from the paper. "There are forty students in this room. The competition requires groups of exactly twenty members. Therefore, this class will be split evenly down the middle. There will be two groups here."
Mark dropped his gaze to his notebook. He grabbed a pen.
For the last three years, he had trained his brain to perfectly mirror his idol. Whenever a new special exam was announced in the light novel, Reine Asakura never acted surprise. She immediately dissected the raw mechanics of the test, stripping away the teacher's words to hunt for the hidden catch.
Mark applied the exact same protocol. He started running the numbers.
Twenty students per group. This university was massive. It was a sprawling campus that took twenty minutes to walk across. There were roughly twenty thousand students enrolled this year.
He scribbled the numbers on the margin of his paper and calculated instantly. Twenty thousand divided by twenty.
One thousand.
There would be roughly one thousand groups competing for the top three spots.
The blood drained from his face. The sudden, bright hope of a blessing dropping right onto his desk vanished entirely. It turned into cold, hard dirt. He stared at the blue ink on the page.
One thousand teams. To secure the scholarship, we have to beat nine hundred and ninety-seven other groups. The odds are incredibly, brutally low. Impossible.
Then, another logistical problem hit him. He frowned and stared at the numbers.
Wait. One thousand teams? A dance contest?
If each group performed a three-minute routine, plus two minutes for setup and stage clearing, that was five minutes per group. One thousand groups multiplied by five minutes was five thousand minutes. That was over eighty hours of continuous, non-stop performing. It is impossible to finish all those live performances in one day. Or even a single week. It would take a lot of days which will completely affect the regular class schedules. The faculty couldn't possibly judge that many live performances without shutting down the entire campus.
"About the dance," the professor announced, cutting right through Mark's internal calculations. "It will be street dance. Costume coordination is very important. However, you will not perform live on a stage. You will perform the dance of twenty members and record it in a high-quality video."
Mark stopped tapping his pen. Upon hearing that, the video submission format made perfect sense. A digital submission pipeline solved the logistical nightmare completely. The judges could filter and review videos at their own pace.
"The deadline for the final video submission is not yet finalized," the professor explained. "But you have three months to prepare your choreography, film it, and submit the file. The criteria for judging will be posted on the main bulletin board soon. The official results will be posted exactly one month after the submission date."
Mark stopped writing. He stared at the blue ink on his paper. A sudden, sharp realization locked into place in his mind.
His chest tightened—not from panic, but from a sudden, sharp spike of adrenaline flooding his system.
Wait. Look at the actual logistics, he realized, his mind racing. Forcing twenty random students to coordinate a single creative project for a life-changing reward? The university isn't running some secret psychological experiment, but the setup naturally forces one anyway. The dancing itself is barely the point. It's a massive group battle testing resource management, social hierarchy, and herd psychology.
A sudden thrill crept up his spine.
This is the closest thing to a real-life special exam I am ever going to get.
He had chased that daydream since high school. A desperate craving to test himself in a ruthless game. But now, the board was actually set in front of him. His heart rate dropped, and his breathing slowed.
The professor closed the folder. "I expect you to organize your groups immediately on your own time. Class dismissed."
Hours later, the afternoon sun baked the large, grassy open field behind the main academic building.
Mark stood near the edge of the grass. The twenty students assigned to his half of the classroom were gathered here to meet up.
It was a complete mess.
They didn't form a single circle. They fractured immediately into their pre-existing social cliques. Mark observed the layout.
They were divided into three distinct chunks. To his left, a large group of eight students huddled together. They were the loud, extroverted kids who always sat in the center rows. On the right, a tight-knit circle of six girls and boys who usually talked together about fashion trends. In the middle, five students who bonded over the same gaming club were checking their phones.
Eight. Six. Five.
Nineteen people, neatly divided into three exclusive chunks. Mark did not belong to any of them. It just happened that Mark's actual circle of friends was sorted into the other twenty-person group by pure alphabetical bad luck. He stood completely alone on the outside edge.
A tall guy with styled hair named Jake stepped out from the group of eight. He sighed loudly, crossing his arms.
"Look, this is boring," Jake said, addressing the scattered groups. He didn't sound interested in the slightest. "We all have classes. We all have somewhere we want to go after school. Trying to coordinate practice times for twenty different schedules is going to be a big headache."
He waved his hand dismissively. "Let's just meet up the week before the deadline and just perform an average dance. I'm not interested in the competition. Who cares who wins anyway?"
"I totally agree," a girl named Chloe chimed in from the group of six. She rolled her eyes. "I'm not interested in grades in P.E. An exemption? That's a really cheap prize for three months of sweating outside. I'd rather just show up to class once a week and play volleyball. It's way less effort."
The girls and boys started talking and whispering to each other. The noise level rose as people began agreeing with the path of least resistance.
"Yeah, I mean, I want the scholarship," one boy from the gaming group said, scratching the back of his neck. "But come on, let's be real. It is impossible to win against a thousand other groups, right? There are probably actual dance crews and theater majors competing in this thing. We will just work hard for absolutely nothing."
"Exactly," a girl named Sheila said. She checked her expensive wrist watch and let out a long, exhausted breath. "I don't care about the prize money at all. The odds are garbage. Let's just go home. We'll see each other one week before the deadline to film it. Everyone cool with that?"
The chatter broke out into a messy chorus of agreement.
"Sounds good to me. I have an essay due tomorrow anyway."
"Yeah, I'm down. Just add me to the group chat later."
"Send the video ideas when you find them, Chloe. Keep it simple."
"I'm out of here. I'm starving."
"Wait, do we even need matching shirts?"
"Just wear black. It's easier."
"Whatever."
They didn't even wait for a formal consensus. The group of eight turned and walked away to the campus convenience store, laughing about something entirely unrelated. The group of six drifted off towards a certain classroom. The group of five headed for the campus gates.
They scattered like dust in the wind. Then they were all gone.
Except for Mark.
In the large open field, he was entirely alone.
He stood under the hot afternoon sun. The wind blew across the open space, rustling the leaves of the nearby trees. He stared at the empty spot on the grass where the noisy groups had just been standing.
It's over.