High School Revolution

Chapter 24: Class Chaos

The moment Strider turned the page over to start the surprise exam, he was faced with the mental pressures of the torment, wretched pain and heartache of reading Night over the weekend, now shaking his pen as he struggled to recollect every single aspect of the story, the tanks and soldiers were firing at him from all cylinders. He had only thirty minutes to correctly race and survive against twenty packed tanks loaded with content and artillery that would blast his attempts at success should he fail to withstand the brutality and correctly avoid the multi-choice traps and race to the end of this unexpected war.

He breathed, now in the word space of horror he charged to, charging at the question with his dragon Stress Spirit above him. His eyes skimmed from question to question, flying past every mine and trap he could tell before the dragon claws slashed at what he believed were the answers. Those were the easy questions, the ones he had to remember. For the harder questions he had to swallow, the mental forces he had to face could have brought him to tears as he shifted to his raven spirit to dodge the traps. Narrowly dodging the cruel flames and camps that befell innocent lives, he solemnly carved in the right answer with the black wings on his back as he tried to stop the vision of a survivor getting beaten down in front of his eyes.

Even with his inability to bowl his eyes out, they were starting to get watery and the cannons were narrowly close to cluttering his wings. Barely outspeeding the air raid of trick multiple choice responses and landing at the correct outposts and abilities, correctly remember the stealing incident, and marked the answer as his eyes flinched from the atrocity.

However, five more soldiers were left, and despite analyzing, the wings holding his memory struggled to shield him against the remaining obstacles he could not solve. Deciding to cut his losses, he dodged gunfire from two, put up a decent fight against the last two, and gambitted against the hell-ridden soldier before jumping into the trenches of the second part of the pop quiz: the short answer.

He gulped before reading the question out loud, staring at a massive humanoid with a disfigured face, guns and flamethrowers for hands, and had begun chasing him down, forcing him to flee. He kept his breath quiet as he narrowly dodged, slipped, and flew around trying to figure out how to defeat it.

Then he escaped back to reality to see how everyone else was doing. Some like Eliza seemed to be challenging the monstrous, massive evil in human clothing with relatively ease. Others in Hanaka, Krystal, Yuki, and Zhichao seemed to be struggling. There was only five minutes left on the clock and Ms. Ingrid had to remind him to keep his eyes on the paper. He dived back in to make what time he had left, and took a strike to the gut, blown away by the complexity of it's moving parts while his hand had barely moved, his wings barely keeping him afloat.

Strider was at a loss. "Think, what is the message?" Then, he noticed the creature heading towards him, only this time the image of two prisoners fighting over a piece of bread, about to get stomped on. The concerned look on his classmate's faces were just as similar to theirs, about to resign to their fate. He had no choice but to move. He swung his pen, flew straight into the line of fire, and struck the creature's leg off in one fell swoop before it could do any more damage.

"That's the key," he thought enthusiastically. "Break the question one by one. What was your key takeaway from Night, why did the author write this, what would you want others to learn from this, and what were the key themes? My key takeaway was," putting his thoughts as flew from the evil's attempt to falay him into burnt ashes and answering what he viewed was the cruel nature of how the soldiers treated each other, and the cruel, bleak reality of the prisoners forcing each other to fight, as he formed a sword with the dragon scales, and struck the second leg, driving it through it's leg as he finalized carving through the themes on his paper. The evil collapsed on its torso, but only two minutes were left.