Project: Death for Classroom Zero

Chapter 1: Valorem

Feeling the bright beam of light directly hitting on his face, Tristan Fauxier grunted while he complainingly opened his squinting eyes. He saw a set of light beaming through the dark surrounding. One of the light directly points him. It could be a spotlight if he was an actor in a musical theater.

Unfortunately, he was not.

A dry feeling on his throat which made him grunt. He was thirsty.

‘Water,’ he unconsciously thought. Still, it hadn’t sank in through his mind about the place where he was currently sitting.

Having no one to respond from his request, he looked above back again. He realized that the set of lights above were organized in a circular fashion. Those were spotlights. Each light were pointed below. Each place the light would land, there were people similar to him strapped in a peculiar chair. Students. Some of them were still unconscious, some were struggling.

Seeing the looks of the students on his front, he struggled his body. An imaginary block of cold ice fell at Tristan when he realized that just like the other light-spotted students at his front, his body was also being restricted. Tied. Realizing that his arms were at the back of the chair he was sitting at, he felt the shackling cold metal coiling around his arms.

A satin silk of black and gold were pressed on his mouth, travelling his cheeks, and tied at the top of his nape.

Around his body, a metal-made vest strapped him. Strips of thick metal was attached from his chair, and wrapped Tristan. The strips of metals travelled vertically at both of his shoulders, and horizontal on the part of his neck and chest. It locked him around his rectus abdominis.

His feet were free, but he could not use it to escape, because the chair was insanely heavy.

Few minutes passed. All of the students were finally awake from their dreamful slumbers. Unfortunate for them that when they woke up, the nightmarish reality was grinning in front.

Just like a dust in the wind, the black cloth covering the student’s faces evaporated into nothingness. It maybe unconventional for the thought, but Tristan prioritized screaming after the cloth strapped away of his lips.

“Help!” Hearing his voice, it was groggy. Dry.

There was this still burning sensation frizzing on his chest, making him weak and helpless. He remembered that earlier, he blacked out from a sudden electrocution erupted at the PVC ID the guard had given him.

Other students started screaming after Tristan did. But Tristan stopped his pathetic shrill when he realized that it was just a stupid thing to do. In here, they were all bounded, restricted, trapped. There would be no one who will willingly help them in this place.

But… what is this place? What is this entire blackness?

Observing the surrounding, he found out that all of the students—including him—while sitting at a metal-strapped chair, they were arranged in perfect circular-shape, just like the circular fashion of the spotlight above.

The yell of the students abruptly stopped when another spotlight flickered opening at the center of their collected group. There was a woman standing in the middle of their circle, brightly concentrated by the spotlight that had just appeared.

“Good evening, students!” The woman was stiffly smiling at them. She was standing as if she was a mannequin. Her arms rested on her tummy.

“I am Professor Josefina, your homeroom teacher.” Her lips were exploding with red tint of lipstick. Her sleek black hair were combed upwards, formed a shape of a bun. A black-framed glasses made her looking old, despite the youthful elasticity of her skin.

“Welcome to our first day of class. Are you excited?” she asked.

Still feeling the fear and panic, Tristan and the other students weren’t able to find their voices to answer the woman’s question.

From the silence, the woman asked again. “Are you ready?”

But still there were no one answering. Nothing but the drop of eerie silence and the whispers of the cold night’s breeze.

The smile on the woman’s face fell. The corner of her lips veered downwards. The glistens of her eyes went black and blank.

“Are you ready?” she again asked.

Tristan swallowed the dry saliva forming on his tongue. Still feeling frightened, he could not find his strength to answer the woman. He knew that the woman, s***h, homeroom teacher that was standing at them, and looking blankly, were already starting to feel mad. Furious.

She scoffed along with a smirk on her face. “What a bunch of irresponsible students,” she whispered, “ANSWER THE QUESTION OF YOUR TEACHER!”

Jumping from a sudden shock, Tristan managed to pull a thin strength from his chest.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. His in-whisper voice was crackled in trembles.

Sooner, the other students followed answering that woman named Professor Josefina.

“Yes ma’am,” they all said, differing in tune and depth.

Hearing the frightened answers of the students, Professor Josefina brew a smile back on her face. She said, “good! No one wants a bad mood first day Josen High, I guess?”

The students weren’t able to pull another answer with the use of their voice. So instead, they all hesitatingly nodded.

There was a certain woman, however, who still pulled a strength to throw a question towards the mannequin-like professor.

“Professor Josefina. Why was our first subject commenced at night? Can it be later morning?” The student who asked the question has a stressed face, a bag of black around her eyes, and a disheveled hair. But hearing through her voice, the flick of a girlish tune was hard for her to hide.

“Great question, Ms. Gomez,” said Professor Josefina.

The woman—who apparently has a last name of Gomez—felt shocked when she heard her last name she remembered never telling yet to anyone.

“Well, it was because of this!”

Feeling excited, she spread her arms as if she was a host in an entertainment show. That type of hosts for ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ segments in television. A series of pink neon-colored light flickered at her back. Those lights were formed in shapes of letters, creating a word which she enthusiastically shouted; “Valorem!”

The pink-colored neon lights blinked, and turned orange. It blinked again, and turned blue. Green. Yellow.

Tristan’s eyebrows collided with each other. Just like other students, he was confused with the blinking lights behind the woman.

“By the way, our subject for today is Mathematics. Good luck, students!”

From the stiff standing at the center, Josefina was slowly eaten by the floor. She was standing at a platform that was slowly descending downwards, and eating her away, and gone.

The utter confusion at Tristan’s mind felt incurable. There was a lot of question swirling on his mind that he could not find its answer.

One thing is… was this the start of the class? Was this the boasted curriculum and teaching style of the Josen High? Put the students in a chair and horribly restrain them so that they could learn?

“At what form of learning would we acquire with this setup?” he asked himself through whispers.

The lights beaming from above-spotlight suddenly shut. Screams from each other made them comforted while being swallowed by the grave of the unknown darkness.

“What is this?”

“Help me!”

“I don’t want to do this anymore!”

“I back out!”

Those were just the things that Tristan heard being mindlessly uttered by other students sitting in a circular-arranged chairs. The dark surrounding had made Tristan’s hearing senses sharper.

Not a second passing, whirr of mechanical engine accompanied their panic. Something that was near them had moved. On their front. The sound of it was as if those were tendons of an archetypical robots.

Lights flickered back again. Tristan squinted. The light that blinked open was not the spotlights anymore. It was the bright light being exploded by the main bulbs from the whole room.

Tristan finally saw the scene’s setup. It was a room. White-painted, white lighted.

In his front, there was a floating quadrangular thick tabular metal. At the middle of the metal, twenty slots filled with zero numbers were placed.

These slots resembles a type of combination padlock. Or more like, a padlock of slots which can be used with set of fixed numerical combination. If the combination was known, the padlock would be opened.

Three sharp drill bit attached from the chair was loudly whirring near the heads of each students—near their temples, left and right, and near their forehead. It was rapidly spinning, threatening to bury on their heads in one wrong move.

Seeing the dangerous spin of the pointed metal, Tristan tasted the bitter flavor of his blood. One wrong move, and the spinning drill bit would be buried on his temples and forehead.

A portion of the white ceiling opened. Four forty-two inched screen—facing in different sides—slowly descended below. Written on the screen was a set of numbers. Timer.

Five minutes.

A sound echoed in the enclosed huge room. It was similar to the sound he has been hearing on a race game. Along with the erupting sound, their hands were unshackled from behind the chair.

When the time on the screen started to decrease each second, the students started to scramble something on the floating tabular metal. Their faces were wary and afraid. Some of the students were crying. But still, they have no choice but to grab the floating metal on their front, and scramble through it.

Tristan felt the cold sweat running on his nape and eyebrows. He doesn’t know what was happening.

“Wh—What are you all doing?” having the courage, he asked.

Yet, despite it repeating twice, no one dared answering him.

“What the hell.” His eyes were starting to blur with his tears. This was the first time he experienced crying inside the class—if this was really a class, and if the place where they were at, can be considered classroom.

Copying the others, he grabbed the floating metal on his front. He expected that it was heavy, but surprisingly, it weighed a cotton pounds. He stared at the metal. Unlike the other students, he does not know what to do, nor what to scramble on the slots of numbers on the tablet.

“Solve the puzzle.”

Beside him, a woman spoke. Finally, someone answered him.

“Wh—What puzzle?”

“Look at the surrounding and observe. This place is the puzzle itself.”

“How?” he asked again. But the woman did not bother to answer him anymore.

Three minutes was left on the time, and he had not started yet. He panicked. His fingers trembled and fidgeted at the thing he was holding.

Beside him, he heard an abrupt stopping of the drill bit’s whirring. The sound of an unshackling metal had made the other player look at the woman who gave Tristan a clue. She was now free from the bounds of the chair. She stepped forward.

Ten steps forward, she stopped. From there, she descended down the floor, just like the professor earlier.

Before fully diving in the floor, her stare landed on Tristan. Seeing the face of the woman, he remembered that she was that woman who was staring at the red sky with her ashen eyes, when they were still outside of the building.

When the woman was totally eaten by the white ground, there was an automatic clicking of her voice inside Tristan’s head.

‘Solve the puzzle. Look at the surrounding and observe. This place is the puzzle itself.’

Two and a half minutes remaining. Along with the click of the digital timer, the voice of the woman who answered her had repeated inside his head.

“Solve the puzzle. Look at the surrounding,” he repeated, “Solve the puzzle. Look at the surrounding.”

His eyes landed at the shaped neon lights blinking at the center of the circle-arranged chairs. He had almost forgotten its presence because of the room’s brightness and of his panic. Had he not observe, just as what the woman told, he would not see it again.

He read it. Valorem.

He was partially glad when he remembered the woman casting a Latin prayer outside the building.

Valorem is a Latin word. Meaning, value.

Value. Was that a clue? Holder asked himself. He saw another set of students who had finally solved the problem with a relieved sigh and a joyful yet still terrified shouting.

Two minutes.

“Bullshit, what is this value?” he whispered to himself, “value of what?”

He observed the surrounding. Still, because of the time pressure, he could not see another clue.

One and half minute was left at the timer.

Tristan almost want to cry, for it seemed that the whirring sound of the spinning drill bit was nearing on his head. Beating. Pulsating. Thirst for the splatter of his blood.

When he looked back to the surrounding, particularly at the circularly formed chairs of the students, something clicked on his mind. A clogged thought drifted away of him. His chest pounded gravely again. His breath shortened.

His gaze fixed at the second slot of the zeros on the metal tablet. Tears fell on his eyes when he saw a period after sliding that combination slot using his fingers.

Certain of what he would do next, he slid the first slot towards number three. The third slot was number one, while the fourth slot was on the number four.

3.14

“Circumference. Diameter. Circle. The value of Pi.” He smiled. He quickly scrambled the next numbers on the slot of the metal tablet.

One minute remains. There were only ten student remaining still fastened on the chair. For Tristan, it added more pressure.

3.141592653

The value of Pi was infinitesimal. Irrational. There would be no end to the numbers that it will generate at the decimal level.

Counting the numbers of slots in the middle of the tablet, there were twenty. One was for the whole number three, another one was for the decimal. Therefore, he would need eighteen of the numbers at the pi’s decimal places.

“Bullshit,” he muttered. Feeling the pressure, he was mental blocked.

Thirty seconds remaining. Tristan’s hands were trembling as he nervously maneuvered the slots of numbers.

3.141592653589793

“What’s… what’s next?”

He closed his eyes. He repeated the numbers he had placed at the metal tablet. His heart was racing away of his possible death. He needs to answer this quickly.

“Two.” He quickly scrolled the number on the sixteenth slot.

“Three.” Only one remaining slot. But there were only fifteen seconds left.

For five seconds, he turned blank. His mind felt drought. In contrary to his eyes, it was wet with tears.

“Please. Please.”

Eight seconds…

He repeated reciting again the decimals of pi until the seventeenth value.

Five seconds…

His eyes widened, as if he was the enlightened one. He remembered the last number. “Eight!”

He quickly scrolled through the last slot of numbers. His eyes were wet and blurry, that’s why it was harder for him to scroll.

At the last three seconds remaining, the whirr of the spinning metal near his head stopped. He gasped for air which he forgot doing for about few seconds. He breathed frantically. Repetitive.

He was safe. Alive.

Five different voice erupted in the enclosed room. He looked at the screen which tells that the five minute timer came to an end. With a frantic, shaking eyes, he looked at the man on his front still sitting on his chair—bloodied, lifeless, three long metals drilled through his head.