"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE GOING TO FAIL?!"
Just like that, the joy that had replaced Rudra's sorrow reversed itself completely — and came back doubled. He was on his feet before he had made any conscious decision to stand, staring at the person sitting on the bench behind him with the expression of a man who has just watched his winning lottery ticket catch fire.
The person — messy hair, enormous dark circles, the general appearance of someone who had arrived at this exam directly from a nap they hadn't quite finished — looked up at him with the slow, unbothered attention of someone for whom urgency was a concept they were aware of but had chosen not to adopt personally.
Arjun had turned away from both of them. His shoulders were moving in a way that communicated, very clearly, that he was doing his absolute best not to laugh, and that his absolute best was not going to be sufficient for very much longer.
"ANSWER ME! AND YOU —" Rudra pointed at Arjun's back "— STOP LAUGHING BEHIND MY BACK!"
Arjun's shoulders moved faster.
The person on the bench replied in a tone that could best be described as relaxed to the point of horizontal.
"It's exactly as I said, brother." He stretched one arm out along the back of the bench with the ease of someone settling in for a long conversation they have no particular feelings about. "I didn't know a single question."
A brief pause.
"I answered the ones I felt were probably right." Another pause. "Honestly? It was all more or less random."
Rudra stared at him. Then he looked at the bench. Then he looked at the hall they had just come out of, where he had spent three hours carefully copying answers from this person's paper under the assumption — the completely reasonable, entirely natural assumption — that someone who wrote that fast and that confidently knew what they were writing.
He turned back.
"Then WHY," he said, his voice at a register that was technically still speaking rather than shouting, "didn't you tell me that before I copied your entire paper?!"
The person tilted his head slightly. "Well, I did cover my sheet, didn't I?" A small pause. "But then you looked at me with that face." He gestured vaguely at Rudra's general facial area. "Brother, I am a common man. I don't have the spiritual strength to resist that face. Even death would reconsider with that face."
Arjun made a sound that was technically a cough.
"And besides," the person continued, completely unbothered by Rudra's ongoing existential crisis, "even if I hadn't shown it to you — we were both going to fail anyway. So I thought — better to fail with a small happy moment than to fail without one, isn't it?"
There was a silence.
Rudra's mouth opened and closed once. The argument against this philosophy was somewhere in his mind but had not yet arrived in a form ready for deployment. The person on the bench had a point, technically — a point wrapped in casual irresponsibility, but a point nonetheless.
Before Rudra could locate his counter-argument, the person spoke again. His tone shifted slightly — still relaxed, but with something underneath it now that hadn't been there before.
"Besides," he said, "I would have passed. I would have actually studied and passed this exam. But someone put a curse on me."
Both Rudra and Arjun went still simultaneously. The laughter that had been building in Arjun's shoulders stopped completely. They both turned to look at the person on the bench with the same expression — the expression that arrives when something that sounds like a joke turns out, possibly, not to be one.
Rudra's voice dropped to a normal register for the first time since he had stood up. "A curse?"
"Some kind of sorcerer," the person said, nodding with absolute certainty. "Someone who doesn't want me to become a Soul Fighter. They put some kind of magic on me about a week ago." He looked at both of them with the calm conviction of someone who has thought this through completely and arrived at a conclusion they consider airtight. "It's the only explanation."
The mood had genuinely shifted. Rudra and Arjun exchanged a brief look — the same silent question passing between them. A sorcerer actively working against exam candidates was not a small thing. It was exactly the kind of interference that connected to larger questions — Horns, the missing stones, enemies who might have reasons to keep specific people out of the Soul Fighters organisation.
"Can you explain exactly what happened?" Rudra asked, his voice careful and serious. "In detail."
The person nodded and settled further into the bench.
"It was about a week before the exam. I had been studying hard — really hard, I want that on record — for weeks. That day I had been at it for hours and I was exhausted. My brain wasn't holding anything anymore. So I decided to take a short break and play some games. Just to clear my head. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Then back to the books."
Both of them were listening with complete attention.
"So I start playing. And there's this boss fight." His expression shifted into something that was not quite pain but was adjacent to it — the particular expression of a man revisiting a specific defeat. "Really hard boss. Unfair, honestly. Terrible game design. But I'm not a person who quits, brother. So I kept going. I kept playing. I kept losing. I kept trying."
A pause.
"And then I beat him."
Both Rudra and Arjun had the same expression.
"And when I came back to my desk —" the person gestured at the general concept of time passing "— a week had gone by."
The silence that followed this statement lasted several seconds.
"Let me make sure I understand," Arjun said, in the careful tone of someone assembling a picture they want to have right before responding to it. "This happened continuously? Every time you tried to stop playing, you found yourself continuing?"
The person pointed at him with a look of vindicated certainty. "Exactly! You see it too! That's the curse! That's exactly what the sorcerer —" He stopped. His eyes narrowed slowly. "Wait. How did you know that? How did you know what happened unless —" The narrowing continued all the way to a squint. "Are you the sorcerer?!"
Arjun looked at him for one long, patient moment.
Rudra had already turned away, pressing his hand flat over his mouth.
Rudra himself played a significant number of video games. He had, on various occasions, lost track of time in ways he was not entirely proud of. A two-hour session that somehow became five. An evening that became a night. These were things he understood from personal experience and did not judge.
But an entire week. Continuous. Without sleeping enough or noticing the days turning over. A week that this person had attributed to supernatural interference because no other explanation seemed sufficient to him.
The dedication. The absolute, magnificent, breathtaking dedication of it.
He turned back around. His face was composed. Mostly.
Arjun, for his part, had answered the sorcerer accusation with nothing but a steady look, which was more restraint than the situation technically required.
Rudra and Arjun looked at each other. The look was brief and comprehensive. It covered everything that needed to be said about the conversation they had just had and the person they had just had it with, and it arrived at a shared conclusion without requiring any words at all.
They stood up.
"Hey — where are you going, brothers?"
They kept walking. The fresh air of the open space beyond the bench area was already within reach, and both of them were moving toward it with the synchronized, unhurried purpose of two people who have made a decision and are executing it.
"Hey! Come on! I'm just saying it's suspicious that he knew exactly what happened —"
The voice faded behind them as they walked, not because the distance was increasing fast but because they had both mutually agreed, through the medium of walking in the same direction at the same pace, that they were done with this conversation.
Then a shout, louder than the previous ones, carrying.
"My name is Karlos! Candidate number 691! If either of you somehow passed this exam — tell me! We can be in the same team!"
Neither of them responded.
Neither of them turned around.
But Rudra, walking slightly ahead, found himself thinking about the way Karlos had answered the sorcerer accusation with complete sincerity, and the way he had covered his exam sheet and then uncovered it because of a facial expression, and the way he had genuinely believed that a video game boss had stolen an entire week of his life through supernatural means.
He thought about candidate number 691.
He thought: this is going to be a very interesting exam.