Classroom of the Revenge

V1 - Chapter 7: Nagumo vs 'X' Day 1

I entered the student council room at 4:00 sharp. Everyone was already waiting. However, a new individual was in the room, the supervisor from ANHS.

"I presume you to be 'X?'" The man asked.

"That is correct," I replied.

"Now I will choose who will select from the box first as the neutral party," the man said. He pointed to Asahina which caused her to jump slightly. "You, choose from the box."

Asahina nervously stepped forward and pulled a piece of paper from the box, she read it aloud "visual memory. Every level, a number of tiles will flash white. Memorize them, and pick them again after the tiles are reset. Levels get progressively more difficult by adding more rows and columns of tiles. Fail once and it's an automatic loss."

The supervisor clapped his hands causing two moderately sized monitors to descend from the ceiling.

"The monitors will be a touch screen, and you will have as long as you need to memorize the patterns. You may begin whenever by pressing 'begin.'"

I walked over to my monitor and stared at it.

Nagumo walked over to his monitor and said "I pity you, my memory is something I hold in high regard."

"I would say the same," I replied.

I heard Nagumo chuckle and he began. I pressed "begin" and the first image appeared. After exactly 2.5 seconds the colored squares disappeared. I quickly tapped the formerly colored. Squares. The second round had the same idea. However, this time, the time was reduced to 2 seconds. The third round came and it was reduced to 1.5 seconds. The fourth round reduced the time to 1.25 seconds. And the fifth round reduced the time to 1 second. After the first five rounds, the grid went from a 3 by 3, to a 4 by 4 and returned to 2.5 seconds. I glanced behind me and saw Nagumo was flying through this as well. So I decided to put full focus into it. This pattern continued until the 8 by 8 grid where the time intervals stopped varying and stayed at 1.5 seconds.

During this time, I came to a conclusion. It was clear what this competition measured. Firstly, as the name states, it is a memory test. The ability to memorize was required. However, this test does not exclusively rely on memorization alone, the recall of the information has to have great clarity and precision. Clarity was used so one could navigate through the mental image generated, and precision to accurately remember the locations of each tile. Furthermore, the imaging would require great processing speed to capture it to memory. In other words, without all of them combined, one would struggle greatly with this test.

Eventually, the grid reached a 16 by 16. The first round of the 16 by 16 had the usual 1.5 second interval. However, the next dropped to 1.25 seconds. Then for 1 second. Then the grids would disappear after 0.75 seconds. At this point, Nagumo slowly answered each of them, his pace gone from previously. I, on the other hand, flew through this one. Then, another 16 by 16 image popped up with the squares only being present for 0.5 seconds.