00110: The Impossible Task

“Hey, can you see me now?” I asked, while adjusting the webcam’s angle.

“Sharp and clear!” Fujinami-kun smiled at me from the screen of my computer. His voice was still as calm and peaceful as I remembered it. He had just written me his handle and I added him to my friends list on Diskort. It was still a bit time until dinner and we both had nothing else to do, so we decided to talk about the school in more detail.

“Sorry, I don’t use this thing very often.”

“Don’t worry, it’s just fine.” He shook his hand as to reassure me. I noticed that his webcam was filmed in portrait mode.

“Are you at your phone?” I asked.

“Yeah!” He turned the phone around to show me his surroundings. Fujinami-kun sat on a kind of bench. The background was bright and behind him sat a few other people. The girls from the ramen restaurant were with him. His girlfriend, the one with the light pink hair, sat sideways on his lap and played on a handheld console while resting her face on his chest. This time she had the cat ear headphones over her ears. The other girl with the brunette hair typed something on a laptop. She looked up, as Fujinami-kun waved towards her. “Hey, Arano-san! Look, its Kanaoka-kun.”

I waved to greet her, but she just rolled her eyes.

Fujinami-kun turned the phone back at himself. “She seems to really like you. It’s rare for her to go full Tsundere mode.”

“I’M NOT GOING FULL TSUNDERE MODE!”, I heard her yell at him from the back.

I could not help but grin. The three really had a somehow amusing chemistry on their own even though they were completely different

He just smiled. “We are on our way back to the school grounds. But I’m not allowed to go into more detail about that.”

I nodded. “But that does already kind of answer the most burning question about you attending Ine …” Just as I started saying the school’s name, I remembered Arano-san’s words. Never say the school’s name in public again. I wouldn’t, after she chided me like that and especially not after the agreement, I gave at the arcade machine. I had to enter my contact info to apply. Even though I still wanted to attend this school, it did feel a bit strange with the insane amount of people applying from all over the world.

“At least he isn’t stupid enough to make the same mistake twice,” Arano-san snarled from the back.

“Yeah, all of us are attending the school. But most information about it is classified, so I can’t go into detail about that. Did you find what I hinted you towards?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I actually applied.”

“Oh, you mean … you played it all through in just one day?” Fujnami-kun asked.

“Yes, seven tries summed up, but my little sister was there, cheering on me.”

He laughed and grinned into a direction that I guessed to address Arano-san. “I’ve heard that certain people needed two weeks to get through the machine.”

“Just … shut up!” Arano-san yelled at him again. I didn’t know why, but Fujinami-kun seemed to have a very teasing-heavy relation to her.

I kind of felt a bit sorry for her. “Don’t mock her so much,” I said. “The game was pretty hard, and she did make it in the end, so I don’t see the problem.”

Fujinami-kun grinned knowingly. “I see, Kanaoka-kun. The knight in shining armor coming to rescue the princess from the evil dragon. You got your role quickly!”

“I was more concerned with the dragon appearing interested at the princess himself when he pays so much attention to her.”

His eyes grew bigger. “No! The dragon already has a dragon princess at his side. He even encourages the hero to slay him and rescue the princess to take her home with him.”

Before I could say anything, Arano-san interjected the conversation. “The princess happens to overhear the dragon and the hero conversing about her as if she was a mindless commodity to be won over by someone siding with her and strongly advises both of them to mind their own business.”

Fujinami-kun nodded. “The princess has a point there and the dragon rather pulls back to think of a better strategy to approach this situation.” He looked back at me. “Kanaoka-kun! You surely want to know a bit more about the entrance exams, right?”

I nodded. “Whatever you’re allowed to tell me would help a lot!”

“Sure, sure. The procedure itself is not a big secret, so I can tell you about that. You’ll receive a letter in the next days, a registered one, so be prepared for it. In it you’ll find the details for the examination. They are normally held in several rented seminar buildings in Yokohama. In my year there were more than 4,500 applicants, so prepare for it to be crowded. Make sure to arrive early.”

He sure was right. I almost felt like I was inside an overcrowded exhibition hall, when I entered the building half an hour before the examinations started. There were so many people waiting in the narrow corridors, even a lot more foreign-looking ones than I expected. Most skimmed through their notes, trying to prepare for the questions that would soon come upon us.

“You will get sheets of paper and a ballpoint for notes and a computer to enter your results into. But from my experience you should not make a lot of notes. The time is short, and it is better to focus on the PC instead. The questions will be hard like nothing you are able to imagine, so it’s better to think of the best way to approach them.”

The first part of the entrance exam was Japanese. It consisted mainly of multiple-choice questions and just a few text fields. As Fujinami-kun had told me, I had to enter my answers into a computer. I had hoped that the fast typing would make things easier for me especially for the free texts. But even though I had prepared like crazy, I could only stare in horror onto the monitor as I read through the letters on screen. There were texts with kanji I haven’t seen my whole life, and it seemed like I was not the only one. I gazed around and just saw sheer terror written over all the student’s faces.

A huge boar that towered over me. It looked impossible to defeat, nothing but a mountain of muscles that was way too big to cut through. Its expression looked sinister and with red glowing eyes, it stood unshaken right in front of me. Without a second thought I already knew: this mountain would not move the slightest bit no matter how hard I tried.

How was this supposed to work? I clenched my hands around the ballpoint. This surely was an elite academy, but those tasks were way beyond possible. I groaned. It was my only chance to get to Ineigaikan. I just could not let it pass and had to fight as hard as I could. I certainly was not the only one facing these insane questions. The other applicants seemed to struggle as well. I just had to do my best and if this would not be enough in the end then I could not blame myself. I started reading the parts of the sentences I understood and tried to derive their meaning from the context. With some of them it worked, but with most it didn’t.

I managed to place only few cuts that dug into the flesh. My blade slipped or got stuck completely in the skin. The boar didn’t even bother to move. This were nothing but scratches for it. I massaged my face and stared at the monitor. There had to be a way! Something that I did not anticipate. Something like … and then it hit me like a train.

I looked for the proctors – two young men, probably students. They sat at the front and looked attentively through the rows. But all monitors were facing away from them. They were not able to see what we did. I gazed back at my own screen. The page I was just entering the answers in, was nothing but a web site. Only the internet access was restricted, but there was no need for that. I hit the F12 key, and a window opened up at the side.

The boar slowly turned its head into my direction. It knew that I now was right on the trail to his weak points.

A web page was actually nothing but a special kind of textual description of the page’s appearance. A web server provided just the right blueprint for the requested URL, and it was up to the web browser itself to draw this page to the screen. Since the visualization happened only on the device, it was necessary for developers to supervise, track and modify the drawing process. You could actually take a look into these blueprints and even alter them to try out how changes affect the visualization of the page.

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Browsers Development Tools. With them I could inspect the very page of the entrance exams. The template was organized in a tree structure of elements. I clicked my way to the lowest level, until I reached the first question. There was a comment inside the code: A + C.

As I looked closely there were fine red lines on the boar’s skin. As if someone has marked it for me.

I gasped. Code Comments were simply ignored from the computer and not drawn to the screen. It was a handy way for programmers to explain what the cryptic lines were actually doing. But here the developers had used them to store the answers to the exam’s tasks. I looked at the question on the left side, where they were still displayed as intended and read the text again. Yes, A and C were absolutely possible to be the right options. I checked the second question and it also matched.

This had to be intended. Nobody would be stupid enough to leave code comments like those. They were easily accessible if you knew how to look. Also, it surely was no accident, that the two proctors never moved through the rows. That obviously was, what Fujinami-kun was talking about with the ‘best way of approaching’ the questions. I grinned and filled all the right checkboxes with the corresponding answers.

For the texts, there were even variants written just in Hiragana or Katakana hidden inside the code comments. It helped me understand what most of the texts meant. After I had found access to essentially the whole solutions, it went easy as a breeze.

I rushed towards the boar in front of me, keeping the red lines on its skin always in sight. I swung my katana, and the blade went through like a hot knife through butter. The beast screamed in pain and tried to hit me with the huge fangs. But it was too big to follow me as swiftly. I jumped along the sides. Left right and then the very last strike at the side of its neck. A last scream and it collapsed lifeless to the ground. That was intense, but it had been slain. I breathed through and slit my weapon back into its sheath.

After a break there came English. This part was a bit trickier since the solutions were not hidden inside the elements themselves. It took me a little while, but I found them meticulously hidden inside the web page’s script logic that was responsible for sending the entered results to the server. To top it they even distributed the answers through different parts of the code with varying degrees of difficulty. It was more like a scavenger hunt to find all the pieces to complete each task.

The last part – Math – however ramped up the difficulty to the limit of what I could handle in the short timeframe. Inside a hidden image file with a red text “solutions” on it, I found a text snippet. It was encrypted with a simple algorithm called Vigenère cipher. Nothing very strong, but for the short time of the exams, I had no time to brute force it and instead needed to find the key. With a little experimenting I managed to access the web server’s file system and found it hidden there. With that I just needed to code a small program that decrypted the text. It was nothing too hard but took me a few minutes. The time in general became a pretty big problem. I only had about ten minutes left when I got the final set of answers. With just enough time I made it to the finish line. Why do all of these things have to be so close in time?

I went out of the room with a good feeling that a few days later proved to be justified.

“I passed!” Proudly I presented the email on my phone to the webcam of my laptop.

Fujinami-kun grinned on the other end of the call. He clapped his hands. “Thank God, you got my hint. Congratulations!” He sat inside his dorm room. Over the last few months, he and I had somehow befriended. We regularly played videogames online. He was not really good in them – except in the ones where you had to play little mind games. We always had a lot of fun.

“Thank you for your support!” I bowed.

“I knew you had potential when we first met. I hope I can count on you with my club now.” A sly smile crept onto his lips.

“Your club?”

He nodded. “Until now I was not allowed to tell you about that, but I am actually the president of a small club. We don’t have the best reputation at the academy, but … I would be grateful if you join us.”

“What kind of club are we talking about?” I tilted my head. A club with Fujinami-kun would definitely be interesting, but if I joined a demonic cult that tried to summon artificial life, I’d rather know that beforehand.

“No details over an unprotected line but you still know my girlfriend, Airii-chan, don’t you? She is also a member.”

“Arano-san as well?” I asked.

His grin grew slightly wider. “Unfortunately not, but you will have plenty of opportunities to … talk with her outside of lessons.”

Why was everyone suspecting ulterior motives when a guy showed interest in a girl? I shook the thought off. “I still need someone to show me the campus. Maybe you can tell me what kind of club we are talking about then.”