Chapter Text
It was a quiet night when living hell descended on the world. The trainees had just finished a long day of drills and training exercises and were ready to melt into their bedsheets. Especially since one of them had misspoken and brought up that car incident, even daring to laugh about it, both chief inspector A and Gao Qi were in a bad mood. As such, they had run the course with the bombing simulation on, and now the trainees’ ears were ringing as well, not to mention the sore muscles in places they didn’t even knew muscles could be sore. In any case, the trainees were ready to go to bed and forget all about that day in purgatory. But it seemed that the universe had other plans.
Since the new system core had just been brought in not long ago and was still undergoing modifications, they weren’t allowed to enter or participate in any way in anything to do with the system. The inspectors, however, obviously knew about it, but they were extremely close-mouthed about it.
A trainee yawned and rolled around, scratching his chest. He couldn’t tell which part of his body hurt the most, but everything hurt so much he couldn’t take his mind off his poor muscles and sleep properly. After almost two hours, he started drifting off, splayed face-down like a starfish. As his mind started to go quiet and the sounds of the night started to drift away — BEEP! He fell off the bed as a loud alarm started going off. He groaned loudly and crawled back to his bed, pulling himself up while using as few large movements as possible.
A voice rang out like an announcement on the loudspeaker, but the words were quite weird. Maybe they made sense to others, but to him, they sounded like nonsense, especially in his sleep-deprived state.
[Welcome back.]
A scream sounded from far away. He shot up at that and he and his roommate quickly pulled on shirts and stumbled out, still barefoot. They looked around, but there was no fire or apparent emergency in sight. The only indication that something was off was all the inspectors stumbling out of their rooms like they’d been chased out by a ghost. Clad in pajamas, tank, some even shirtless or pantless.
It really was an odd announcement to make. No one was supposed to arrive today, especially not at this ungodly time. Who was this person welcoming back? And who was doing the welcoming?? It wasn’t a voice any of the trainees had ever heard before, so why was this mystery person speaking on behalf of their base?
[October 12th 11:54 pm. The outdoor temperature is 10℃.]
The voice itself was nice to hear, and sounded somewhat familiar despite it being unrecognizable or an exact match for people the trainees knew. It rang out again:
[All examinees, please make your way to the examination center. Exam selection ends in 5 minutes.]
They heard a loud thump and spun around to see Gao Qi getting up after falling from his second-story window, gun in hand. His eyes were bloodshot but promised murder. The door of the house next door was thrown open and a young man clad in nothing but sweatpants stormed out, eyes colder than an Alaskan blizzard.
The trainees didn’t know whether to ogle or turn away. This man really had a body to be jealous of. Defined muscles, not a shred of fat, yet not too bulky. Lean and muscular, just like a god.
“OI!” Gao Qi yelled, and the young man looked over. The trainees almost fainted. They had never once in their lives dreamed of seeing their feared chief inspector A anything but perfectly put-together, forget half-naked, but there he was — dressed in black sweatpants and nothing else, a gun in one hand and a phone in the other. He had the universal expression of someone who’d just been woken up against his will and now wanted to destroy the world as payback.
Gao Qi grabbed the two trainees, still standing dumbfounded, and dragged them over to You Huo. He opened the chief inspector’s door and pushed him in. “PUT ON SOME CLOTHES!” he roared, slamming the door shut. Then he turned to the trainees. “You two. Your job is to make sure he comes out properly clothed. If he’s not wearing a shirt or pants or anything like that, even if he’s not wearing socks, shove him back in. Got it?” The trainees gaped and their expressions begged with Gao Qi to rethink this and give them a different fate, one less likely to end in their bodies dumped into a ditch and eaten by panthers and never found again. He patted their shoulders. “I’ll trust you with this.” Then he cocked his gun and ran off towards the building storing the system core.
The two sacrificial lambs looked at one another in despair. “What’s an examinee?” One asked. “Why’s our base talking about exams? Are we supposed to be tested?”
The other shook his head. “No, nothing like that. Maybe a random inspection?”
The first frowned. “Then why are the inspectors freaking out too?”
The door flew open again and You Huo stormed out, this time properly dressed in a white hoodie at least one size too big. He glared at them. “Good enough?”
The two trainees were already mentally writing their eulogies and didn’t understand what the great master meant for a few seconds. One of them finally realized he meant his clothes and nodded frantically without even checking. “P-p-perfect, chief inspector.” He bowed deeply and pushed his roommate down too. When they straightened, A was gone, running towards the system core as well.
[Violation warning: Examinees You Huo, Gao Qi, and Chu Yue have attacked the examination center. The invigilators have been notified. Invigilator: 001, 154, 922.]
The trainees looked at each other, confused out of their minds. More furious screaming they recognized as coming from Gao Qi sounded from the building housing the core. As they saw some other trainees running in that direction too, they decided to follow and took off at a sprint. When they got there, they skidded to a stop and stared.
It was a veritable pajama party. Gao Qi was dressed in a hastily buttoned shirt and his boxers. Chu Yue was dressed in shorts she would never be seen in otherwise and a hoodie with a butcher knife on the front. You Huo was dressed the best, in his sweatpants and clean white hoodie. Zhao Jiatong was there too, dressed in a panda onesie. Seeing their feared inspectors dressed up like this, the trainees really didn’t know whether they were dreaming or high on something. Maybe they had lost their minds from being bombed so many times.
[Reward: Examinee You Huo has received the right to draw once. Examinee Chu Yue has received the right to draw once. Examinee Gao Qi has received the right to suck—]
The voice paused, crackled, then came back on.
[Examinee Gao Qi has received the right to draw once. The invigilators have been notified.]
The trainees were absolutely flabbergasted. Draw what? Why were they drawing? Were their inspectors secretly artists? Did they have secret passions under all that military bravado??
But it seemed that the inspectors knew what was going on. At least, You Huo did. While the others continued shooting at the building and trying to unlock the multiple-protected door, he took out his phone, called someone on speed dial, and held the phone to his ear. As the trainees watched, he snapped some words sharply and seemed to get more and more annoyed as time went on. In the end, they caught two words of his conversation: “Fuck off.” How helpful.
Suddenly, the voice spoke up again.
[Due to unforeseen circumstances, the examination center has stalled. Examination is suspended. All examinees please leave immediately. Self-destruction in ten, nine, eight—]
Before it hit seven, a 200-meter radius circle around the building had been cleared. Peeking out from behind buildings and army vehicles, trainees and inspectors alike waited with baited breath for the countdown to finish.
Our two unfortunate trainees ended up hiding behind the same tank as Gao Qi, who yelped suddenly. “A, what are you doing?!”
The trainees stuck their heads out like meerkats to see chief inspector A striding purposefully to the building with the system core. He got there as the countdown reached three, then kicked the door again and again until the countdown reached one, then zero. The loudspeaker transmitted beeping noises, then fell silent.
No one spoke a word. They waited for a few seconds, then You Huo scoffed. “Fucking nuisances.” He looked at the door suspisciously, then made some obscene hand gestures, before turning and storming back to his house like a mini hurricane. No one disturbed him, not even Gao Qi or Chu Yue, who normally could coax him when he was in a horrible mood. The trainees looked at each other, then slowly went back to their barracks and tried to fall asleep again.
Just like the car incident, an explanation for this never arrived. Instead, the trainees convinced themselves there was a radio malfunction, where noise from somewhere else, like an examination center, was broadcasted here. They ignored the use of the real names of three of their inspectors, pushing that out of their memories as minds trying to compensate tend to do.
What they did know, however, was that for the next few days, all the inspectors were in a horrible mood. The trainees were the ones who suffered, running more and training more than they had ever done before. Every waking minute, doomed to bear the weight of sore muscles indefinitely, they cursed the person who had messed with the speakers and that mysterious voice.
Far away, at a bar with his two subordinates, Qin Jiu sneezed.