The Ranch

Kai's POV (3)

Kai wakes up to the strong smell of his own sweat. He glances outside his window to see the blackness of night. He weakly gets up and takes a cold shower, rewrapping his bruises after he's dried off. The blackish purple marks cover a large region of his torso. Kai was extremely lucky not to have broken anything.

Kai checks on the still unconscious Tih, before grabbing a meal at the cafeteria. The money the island gave him when they first arrived here should be enough to last them the first month of their stay. That should be enough time to pass his classes and get a job if he's efficient enough.

Quickly finishing his meal, he drags his still tired body back to the apartments to go back to sleep. Kai's days consist of checking on Tih, eating, sleeping, and class. A heavy feeling continues to grow as more time passes.

As half a month passes, Kai has gotten more used to the training and won't immediately fall asleep. He usually spends his time studying for his Environmental Engineering class, but he doesn't feel like it today. Deciding to take a break, Kai ends up staring at Tih who's been in a coma for a full fifteen days.

Poking his face, Kai talks to air," It's already been fifteen days... If you don't get up, I'll end up leaving you behind. I can barely take care of myself, I don't have the time to be worried about someone else, so hurry and wake up..."

No movements.

"I really will discard you. Why should I keep someone around if they're only a burden..." He looks at the soft sleeping expression on Tih's face," Tch...don't look at me like that. This is just how the world works. Those deemed useless are disregarded, thrown away. The only way to survive is by being able to put something on the table, something that seems you useful. How do you expect me to be friends with someone in a coma!" Kai starts yelling to himself, in the silent room. He gets flashbacks from his time before he came to the island, before he met Tih.

The stone in his chest seems to only grow in pressure after he yells. Frustrated, Kai kicks his dresser, injuring his own foot. He curls into a ball,"Damn it..." Kai's day's of forced hustling pop into his head. The nights he spent in that smelly underground room with all the other children.

He shakes his head to rid his brain from the memories. He goes outside for a run, recalling the phrase, "The worthless are good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled on by the strong." from his memory and ingraining it into his head.

A month passes as the cycle of eating, sleeping, and classes continue. The newbie tournament is in a few days and Kai is currently in the cafeteria for breakfast. He starts to hand his ID to the worker, for him to scan. Before the worker touches it, the ID starts blinking red.

The worker retrieves his hand,"Good luck, newbie."

"What?" Kai doesn't understand what the worker means.

"That red light means it time for a trial. Go find an electronic board and read the instructions." The worker explains.

"Ah...okay, thanks." Kai turns around a and heads to the bottom floor. Using the electronic board, he notices a new message.

Clicking on it, instructions appear on the screen," Head back to you dorm. There will be a blindfold on your bed. Put it on and lay down. Any further instructions will be provided at a later time."

Not knowing if there's a time limit to these, Kai decides not to risk it. He skips his meal and directly heads back to his apartment.

Walking in, he finds a black blindfold placed neatly on his bed, Tih is peacefully unconscious on his own bed, and there are no signs of breaking and entering.

Kai concludes that whoever makes the trials have total access to all dorms. Lodging that information in the back of his brain, he wraps the blindfold around his head and lays down on his bed.

The concept of time drifts away from Kai. He can't tell how long he's been laying down, when he hears a beeping noise. Kai takes off the blindfold to realize he's in a completely different place. His bedroom has been replaced with a closed off walls of concrete, trapping him inside. The cube-shaped trap is 11' x 11' x 11'. In front of Kai are a multitude of shapes, such as kites, triangles, rectangles, squares, rhombus, parallelograms, trapezoids, pentagrams, and other polygons. They can also be divided into the colors blue, red, yellow, and green.

Each shapes is about the size of Kai's palm and they fill up an entire wall, with some stacked on top of each other. It seems like there some sort of magnetic device keeping them on the wall.

Before Kai can think of anything else, Kai starts hearing a small sound of grinding from above. The ceiling is slowly moving down as time passes. Kai comes to the conclusion that if he can't escape in time, the ceiling will crush him.

Seeing as there's nothing else in the room, the key to escaping must lie in the, over a hundred, small shapes. The shapes are covering the entirety of the 11' wall, meaning Kai can't reach the ones at the top, even though he's above average in height.

Before the trial started, Kai suspected that the trials increased in difficulty the longer your on the island. This is more of a theory than a hypothesis, as Kai hasn't gathered nearly enough evidence. The only reason he had the theory in the first place is because he believes the purposes of the trials is to test and make sure the islanders are constantly improving themselves.

With that theory in mind, Kai tries not to think too outside the box. Kai first tests to make sure all the walls are magnetic. Finding that they are, he starts grouping the shapes he can grab into their respective colors. Four groups to be exact.

Memorizing each shape as he moves them, Kai notices that all the groups have the same exact shapes, except for a single shape in each group that's slightly different.

Assuming the goal is to put the shapes together to make one giant shape, the small, single different shape will change everything. The final shape should probably be different on all four sides.

As the ceiling comes closer, it slides the shapes that were at the top down towards the middle. The more time passes, the more shapes Kai can reach, but if he waited till he had all the pieces to starts putting the together, he wouldn't have enough time.

Kai starts with the incomplete greens. He looks at the wall full of randomly placed shapes and started rearranging them in his head. This is a skill that few can copy. Kai was lucky enough to have been born with the potential and his environment helped grow the skill.