It was blatant corruption.
Tears finally spilled from Vanessa's eyes.
Several nearby teams shot them sympathetic looks, but everyone had to focus on their own screens.
The Doyle family was playing dirty.
They deliberately rigged it so The Hope Initiative couldn't even compete.
And they were targeting them specifically because they were poor scholarship students.
Even knowing the Doyles were behind this, they had no voice and no power to fight back.
That was why their enemies were so brazen.
"Ignore him," Caleb ordered.
He stared at the yellow card, then at Bianca, who was still smirking at them from afar.
His gaze was freezing, but a fierce fire burned in his chest.
"It's just a virus. I've got this." He placed his hands on the keyboard. "The Captain isn't here, but we aren't backing down."
His fingers began to fly. "Since she chose us, we have to prove ourselves. We can do this."
"We aren't trash. We aren't ants waiting to be crushed."
"Eradicate it."
If they wouldn't give them a way out, they would carve one themselves.
As Caleb quickly fell into a trance, launching the antivirus protocol, Jasper and Vanessa grabbed pens and paper. They frantically performed manual calculations
on the side to help him find logical loopholes in the code.
The fact that Caleb had made it into the Vanguard Honors Program and was considered a top-tier threat by Bianca proved his undeniable skill.
His typing speed was terrifying.
Lines of decryption code scrolled rapidly over the red background.
Five minutes.
Eight minutes.
Ten minutes.
With a final, heavy strike of the enter key, the massive exclamation mark shattered.
The red light vanished.
The familiar login page finally appeared.
"It's gone!" Jasper choked out, his voice hoarse, tears of relief in his eyes.
But Caleb showed no signs of joy.
He glanced at the giant scoreboard.
Ten minutes.
In a race against time, ten minutes created an insurmountable gap.
By now, Bianca's team was miles ahead, leaving even the second-place team in the dust.
Because of the delay, The Hope
was dead last
belongs to snovels
The point gap was suffocatingly huge.
"Hurry, answer the questions!" Caleb yelled, not even bothering to wipe his sweat.
He dove straight into the intense battle.
The three of them chased the leaderboard like madmen.
They fought tooth and nail.
Forty minutes into the match, the atmosphere in the arena was at a boiling point.
Only twenty minutes remained.
The clatter of keyboards grew denser and more frantic.
Rankings on the big screen
constantly shifted, each change
fugging at the nerves of
Gontent
But for Caleb and his teammates, these forty minutes were absolute hell.
Caleb's fingers moved so fast they practically sparked.
The scratch paper in front of Jasper and Vanessa had piled into small mountains.
They pushed themselves to their absolute limits, maximizing every ounce of their talent.
But that ten-minute gap at the start was a bottomless pit.
No matter how hard they fought, they were stuck hovering between the bottom third and fourth places.
With less than twenty minutes left, their elimination was practically set in stone.