Survivor (COTE One-Shot)

Survivor

I often find myself staring off into space without really thinking about it too much, or maybe it's that I have so much to think about that I can't focus on a single thing. To the other people my age I probably seem like a slacker, daydreamer, underachiever or maybe all of the above which is understandable I suppose. I can't really blame them for thinking those things about me, if I had the same upbringing as they did I probably would do the same. But to me it's these moments of peace, tranquility and nothingness that are the most important and meaningful. Before I enrolled into this school I never had the chance to just stop and think or just do nothing. I was always under pressure and had many things expected of me, an image that I had to live up to. This may sound very unappealing to most people but since it was all I had ever known before now I didn't really like or dislike it, it was simply put, my life, and I accepted that. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for the skills and knowledge that I acquired from my upbringing but I was always curious, I knew there had to be more beyond the white walls I was confined in. There had to be, maybe that was one of the reasons I kept going and didn't give up like many of the others around me did over the years. I'm not really sure. I'm glad that I didn't though because now I find myself here in another interesting facility, a school made with the sole purpose of nurturing the youth to become the people that will carry our country into the future. It sounds very grandiose but they really do have an interesting establishment on their hands here. You'd think that a school of this caliber would only allow in the best of the best, the finest even among elites but that doesn't seem to be quite right from what I can tell anyways. Sure there are some very intelligent people in my class and in my year, students who score only 90s and above but there are also some, how should I put it?, sub standard students. In my class for example there is a delinquent named Ken, he does not participate in the lessons we have preferring to sleep instead and has quite the bad habit of picking fights with anyone who looks at him the wrong way. Another example is a girl named Sakura who does not seem to be very adept socially and instead exiles herself from the rest of the class. Not exactly the types of students you would expect to be in a school like this but here they are. It makes me wonder what exactly this school is up to allowing students such as these into the school, are they doing some sort of an experiment or are they trying to fix these so-called defective students. It's definitely an interesting idea, one that could be seen as similar to the place where I grew up but quite a bit less extreme. Would it be as effective as the methods used on myself. I think in order to answer this question it's important to know about how I was raised.

I would say the main teaching method of the place I grew up was simply fear. It is an effective method if I do say so myself. The facility I grew up in, let's call it the white room. The white room took in many children at a young age that were either abandoned or put up for adoption. These children were raised to be about 4 years old as any child normally would be, they lived calm and happy lives. Once the last child turned 4 years old a new curriculum started for all of them. They were brought into a classroom and taught the basics of mathematics, spelling, grammar etc. That simple kind of stuff. At first the children enjoyed all of the new things they were learning. It wasn't too difficult for most and they managed to move along at a decent pace. This was until the first of the children started lagging behind as is only natural. Then there was the first failure of an exam. I still remember this day vividly when the child that failed was called to the top of the room in front of everyone. Our instructor said "I see we have had our first failure of the group, let's make sure this doesn't happen again". Before we could even breathe the child was mercilessly punished by the instructor in front of our eyes, the room was dead silent apart from the screams of the child. From that day forward there wasn't much fun to be had as we all knew what would happen if we didn't perform. I was especially shaken because I was one of the weaker students in the group, mentally and physically. More and more of these punishments were dished out over the coming years. Some students could not handle it physically, some could not handle it mentally and slowly over the years the group size lessened and lessened. I looked around and saw the fear on the others faces but I realized something they did not. I knew that these emotions were holding me back, they were the reasons the students kept falling one by one. I came to the conclusion that if I solely focused on my studies and on my physical training I could survive. So that's what I did. Now I find myself here in this new school, free from the shackles of my past, at least for now. You might be wondering what happened to all the other students in my little experimental group. They are all gone, simply because I adapted and they did not. Because I am a survivor, that is the only reason I am still here.