I stared at the page for a long time.
Not because I didn’t know the answer.
But because the question in front of me was honest. It was brutally and viciously honest.
Most exams tested what you already knew. They asked about the formulas, the dates, and the techniques.
They asked about the right thing to do under perfect and imaginary conditions.
But this question? This one asked what you could live with for the rest of your life.
What you could stain your soul with and still wake up the next morning.
My fingers curled tighter around the pen. The ink hadn’t even touched the page yet.
Yet the silence in the examination hall didn’t feel peaceful anymore. It felt dense and heavy, like the air itself had weight.
I could hear the sharp scratch of Serena’s quill. It was precise and unrelenting. I could hear Freya, who was cursing through her teeth like a barbarian trying to interpret ancient tax law.
I could even hear someone breathing softly in the far corner of the other side of the room.
I closed my eyes and imagined the whole setting. Everything down to the smallest of details. I wasn’t in the classroom anymore.
I was in the fortress.
The wind screamed across the fortress, biting at my cloak like it had fangs. The scent of ash and blood lingered in the air. It was faint but growing with each passing second.
The walls beneath my boots trembled with distant impact tremors. Every stone knew what was coming.
I looked out over the cliff’s edge. A ravine stretched wide and jagged beneath me, like a scar in the earth. Beyond it was a horde of thousands of beasts. It was a tide of rot and death coming our way.
They had black claws and howling skulls. It was an army of the fallen, devouring everything in its path.
And between the horde and the city...
There were four hundred villagers.
They had no weapons and no chance to fight back.
Some of them carried babies on their backs while others leaned on walking sticks.
Some clutched the hands of wide-eyed siblings, lovers, and sons as tightly as they could.
Some were singing songs to stop themselves from screaming, while others were praying.
Some were just... waiting.
They were the buffer for the horde.
Behind me was a city. A place where thirty thousand people lived.
People who laughed, fought, cried, and dreamed. A blacksmith who baked sourdough with his daughter on Sundays. A group of kids who painted murals on the back of the library. A girl who told stories under the apricot tree and pretended not to notice the boy who always listened.
They didn’t know death was already marching toward them.
And I had one choice.
Either to blow the ravine and bury the four hundred in stone and fire, or hesitate, trying to buy time. The second option would lead to thirty thousand deaths screaming in the night.
My jaw locked, and my hands felt cold as I opened my eyes.
I was back in the classroom with the question staring up at me.
"What would you do, Commander?"
I breathed in as I started writing my answer.
Collapse the ravine. Sacrifice the 400. Save the city.
I wrote it not because it was the right answer, but because it was necessary.
You are not the priest. You are not the poet. You are not the voice of divine morality. You are the blade.
You are the weight behind the sword stroke that must fall.
You are the one who chooses who dies so others don’t.
I kept writing. I let the words burn into the page like brands on skin.
You cannot save everyone. And trying to save them all will end up killing them all.
Hesitation is not compassion. It’s cowardice in a pretty mask.
A decision made with trembling hands becomes a funeral just a day later.
There would be thirty thousand coffins lying at dawn.
Just because one man couldn’t bear to live with four hundred ghosts.
If you flinch—if you blink—then everyone dies. Not just the four hundred. But also the children in the alleyways. The elders in their gardens, the future mothers, and the hopeful sons.
Your job is to buy time with blood—and call it mercy.
So you blow up the ravine.
You damn yourself as you see the horde eating every single child. You feel their screams crawling up your back. You remember every pair of eyes that looks in your direction, begging for help.
And then you live with it.
Because this was the only choice from the start.
I paused for a second.
The silence in the hall felt louder now. It was as if the world itself was waiting to see if I would change my answer.
My fingers cramped under the pressure, but I didn’t cave in.
Then, slowly, I wrote the final line.
If you cannot make this choice, then you were never meant to lead.
I underlined the last line once as the ink bled slightly.
Across the room, a tall, stone-faced examiner froze mid-step. He had greying hair with a scar over one brow, and the kind of presence that made even silence stand at attention.
He turned slightly, and his eyes narrowed just enough to catch the chill leaking from my desk.
I let the answer hover before his eyes for a few more seconds before I closed my sheet. I let him sit with the weight of what I just wrote and ask himself if he could have done it.
Because I had done it.
I didn’t write the answer they wanted. I wrote the one I believed in.
A chair creaked at the front. Freya had stopped writing too.
Her face was pale as her brows were twisted with doubt.
"I said I’d evacuate the village," she whispered, almost guiltily. "But then I remembered there wasn’t time. So... I panicked. I just wrote, ’Blow the damn thing.’"
She glanced sideways, biting her lip.
"I still feel like crap, though."
She wasn’t wrong to feel that way.
She was just... still human.
There was a quiet strength in that. But there was also a limit.
Beside her, Serena didn’t even look up. She was already revising all her answers all over again. There were no emotions in her eyes as her gaze swept across every question.
I wondered what she wrote.
Probably the same thing I had. But it must be neater and prettier in the examiner’s eyes. Wrapped in poetic allusions and tactical detachment.
Her answer would read like a cold breeze through a cathedral. Clean and logical.
Mine was a knife straight to the heart of the question.
I set down the pen and leaned back, waiting for the examiners to collect the paper.
I let the others write what sounded good.
I wrote mine to survive.
And survival... always has a cost.