Isabella stood to the side, watching Serena do what she always did.
Steal all the spotlight that rightfully belonged to her.
Steal everyone's attention.
Standing surrounded by adoring fans, bathed in praise and admiration.
But clearly...
All of this was supposed to be hers.
Her face contorted with bitterness.
She couldn't accept defeat. She refused to let Serena crush her over and over again.
Her jealousy twisted her heart into a dark knot.
But on the surface, she put on a gentle, concerned facade. "Serena, don't blame me
for speaking out of turn. This algorithmic puzzle had every single team stuck for days. Forget solving it, even making minor progress was impossible."
"I imagine a puzzle like this would give top international professors and experts a massive headache. Yet you solved it in under a minute."
She paused, acting troubled. "Serena, is it possible you just memorized the answer before the competition?"
The implication was obvious.
Serena was blatantly cheating.
Just to look good, she had procured the answers ahead of time.
But the moment the words left her mouth.
A competitor instantly fired back. "Cheating? Why don't you try cheating and see if it works?"
"In a competition of this caliber, if cheating were possible, The Dreamscape Initiative would have done it ages ago!"
"Do you think we're blind to the shady tactics you used to scrape past the
elimination lines just to make it to the finals?"
"This perfectly good tournament was completely tainted by the Doyle family's dirty money!"
"Because of your team's
incompetence, the entire island lost
power and ruined our work! You
tried to pin on The Hope Initiative,
and now you have the nerve to slander Goddess Serena?"
"Hah, you think we're brain-dead pawns? That you can just throw out a few words
and manipulate us into questioning Serena like absolute clowns?"
"No research institute in the entire world has reached this stage of neural data computation! You say she memorized the answers? Whose answers? If the answers existed, the Doyle family would have bought them by now!"
"What a joke. Serena cheating? She's taken flawless first place for ten rounds
straight, absolutely crushing the competition!"
"If you suck, just keep your mouth shut. Is it that hard to admit you're trash?"
"
A crowd of elite academics throwing insults was relentless, barely pausing for a breath.
Isabella and Bianca's faces cycled rapidly between red, pale, and green.
Bianca hadn't even said a word, yet she was taking collateral damage from the furious mob.
They even dragged the Doyle family through the mud.
Bianca trembled with rage.
She noticed a few students in the crowd-students who had been sponsored by the Doyle family and were usually incredibly polite to her-now firmly taking Serena's side.
She was so furious she felt like she might explode.
Serena watched the competitors practically pressing their faces against the tablet
screen.
Their eyes were filled with an obsessive zeal.
They all wanted to study the formula and burn Serena's algorithmic structure into their brains.
But the tablet was only so big.
They couldn't see the entire equation.
And the tiny fragments they could glimpse weren't enough to piece it all together.
Serena checked the time, then glanced at Chief Arbiter Howard Graves, who was staring blankly at the tablet in Caleb's hands. "When will the power be back up?"
Graves snapped back to reality,
looking at her with a newfound sense of reverence. "I... I just
checked with the team. The Emergency Grid Restoration Crew is fixing it. It take at least another thirty minutes."