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Ali set up the phone camera to face the wide table he and the others were going to eat on, and then quickly went to sit on one of the chairs behind it.
"Hello, viewers!" he greeted happily. "Welcome to our channel!"
"Your channel," Alicia corrected. "We are in no way affiliated with this idiot."
"In a way, aren't you kinda 'affiliated with this idiot' though since you're participating in the video with me?" Ali said, his innocent smile now turned into a smirk.
"I'm only here because my other friends are doing it," she reasoned, then whispered, "and did you just admit you were an idiot?" Now it was she who was smirking, at Ali with a dissatisfied look on his face.
Pretending he heard nothing, he looked at the camera and hid his slight irritation with happiness again. "Today, we are going to be doing..."
As he said this, a packet of spicy noodles was thrown at his head, making a crumpling pak!! sound.
Ali looked at Khai, the person who threw it. He was now purposefully avoiding his eye contact, even when Ali screamed, "Khai! What was that?! I told you before the video to throw it in my hands!"
"Is it my fault your hands happen to kind of look like your face?"
There was a pause between all of them. "Khai, where are your glasses?"
Khai, somehow only realizing he was not wearing glasses now, went away with a quiet whoom... on his hoverboard.
"I..." Ali sighed, "never mind." He tried smiling again, but it was a bit difficult to with the pain of the noodles—being hit with a dry noodle packet unexpectedly is a surprisingly painful experience. "So as I was saying! We're going to be doing the spicy noodle challenge!"
Ali saw Khai whizzing back on his hoverboard with two things: another noodle packet, and a smirk. In return, Ali gave a look that told him, Don't you dare.
He whizzed back away.
"The one making our noodles today is going to be... Zass!"
Zass rushed into the room with his super speed and presented some bowls of noodles, leaving as quickly as he arrived.
"Okay! This is just Level 1!" He took his fork and, very slowly for the camera, slurped it up. "It tastes so good! Not so spicy—this is practically plain noodles!" He turned to look at Alicia. "It too spicy? You need some milk?"
"Oh, please," she replied, actually yawning even though the sky wasn't dark and she had enough sleep. "This noodles isn't even that good."
Zass showed his face from the kitchen and gave Alicia a sad look.
"Z-Zass!" She immediately became apologetic. "No, I didn't mean it like that! I was just being, you know, uh—"
His look of silent sorrow remained as he put another packet of noodles in a pot to boil.
Ali wiped some soup that went on the table with a napkin and then looked at Alicia. "Now look what you did. How dare you call Zass's food not good!"
She groaned and finished her bowl. "I'm done." She looked to her right and saw Mika and Roza finished as well. "How did you two think about it?"
"It was okay," Mika said.
Roza was panting. "If this is just Level 1, I don't know if I'll survive Level 2!"
"Eh? You think it's too spicy?" asked Mika.
"N-no!" she defended her herself with pride. "Ugh, I don't need to be in this stupid challenge!" she shouted as she stood up and left the table.
Ali pleaded, "Wait! Don't leave!"
"Don't worry," Roza assured him, "I'll throw dried noodles at Khai's face for you."
He now didn't seem as worried about her leaving, and with a pleased face he told her, "Pfft, actually I agree with you! You really don't need to be in this stupid challenge, do you?"
"I'll throw it right after I give Zass emotional healing after what Alicia just said to him." Roza gave her an angry expression.
"I didn't mean to say that!" Alicia yelled.
"Whether you did mean it or you did not mean it, it was still mean!" Roza shouted at her, now in the kitchen with Zass. Those in the room with Ali could hear in a soothing voice from the kitchen, "It's okay, your food's great. Alicia's just a meanie."
Alicia frowned with irritation.
The bowls being given were now Level 5, and most of the agents still haven't lost the challenge yet, with only about a tenth having left, but for those who have stayed, practically all of them were panting.
"I..." Jet huffed. "I don't know how much longer I can last with these bowls..."
Ali felt the same way, but he attempted to show otherwise. "We're just halfway through!" Ali encouraged him. There were 5 more levels left to Level 10, the last.
Zass and Roza sat in front of them, both of them drinking milk about an arm's length away from them.
"I really gotta say," Roza spoke while trying not to laugh, "this milk is really good!" She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. "Don't you agree, Zass?"
Zass nodded in an extremely exaggerated manner to show the others. It wasn't a coincidence that he chose a seat right in front of Alicia, her face a shade close to pure red. (Whether or not this color of face was from the spicy noodles or from her utter irritation, she didn't know, nor did she much care at the moment. She had certainly underestimated the challenge, and now she was paying the price.) He closed his eyes and kept nodding while taking another sip, with a slurpp sound that made the others want to jump into a freezing pool of milk.
Jet stole a glass of the milk from the two so quickly one would have thought he was Zass, and gulped the liquid down in less than five seconds, the loud sigh after drinking giving those in the challenge annoyance like they've never thought was possible.
Roza welcomed Jet to the other side of the table, the one with the cold glasses of milk, with a "Welcome to the Team of Losers!"
Zass frowned.
"Sorry. Welcome to the Team of Losers, plus Zass."
Zass didn't speak, but his smile said without words something like, Much better.
Level 9 was just done, and now it was just three people left: Ali, Alicia, and Moon.
Alicia seemed to be barely handling the spice (but only barely), Ali was on the near verge of quitting even though he the one that encouraged everyone to do this challenge in the first place, and Moon seemed to be in the same situation as him. It seemed Alicia was going to be the winner.
Zass raced in the room again with the last three bowls.
Level 10. The noodles looked vastly different from Level 1. Much more red, like the three competitor's faces at this moment.
Eating his bowl, Ali lost and ran away to the other side of the table to gulp down milk.
Eating her bowl, Alicia lost and ran away to the other side of the table to gulp down milk. (With shame. And a still slightly sad/mad Zass, and the other agents like Roza and Jet mad on his behalf as well. Not exactly the best day of her life.)
And lastly, eating her bowl, Moon... won!
"This tastes absolutely... tasteless." she remarked. "Not saying it's bad, but it just doesn't really taste so spicy. Did you just add red food coloring to this bowl?"
Zass got out his phone, and with Alicia thinking he was going to take pictures of her loss, she ran away, shouting in defense, "I have to water my pet cabinet!" (Cabinet?)
Taking a picture was not his intention though. He went to his app where he takes notes and made a new one. He typed for a bit and then handed it to Moon.
She read:
I believe I broke your tongue's taste buds.
When they finished the recording, Ali watched through the whole video with the others.
All of them said in unison the same thing in a quiet tone:
"This footage... It's unusable...!!"