"Sungjae, wake up!" said Hyunsik shaking him awake. "It's the week of the IOCs!"

"For you it is," said Sungjae as he sleepily woke up, "Good luck, Hyunsik,"

Hyunsik inspected his hair and school uniform in the mirror before he left his dorm, waiting for 10 AM, the time of his IOC to start.

He waited by the classroom, ready to start.

He spent the last 40 minutes gazing at the clock as the invigilator guided him to a desk where he would be annotating his given extract.

He unfolded the piece of paper and grinned in relief; it seemed easily enough.

With a couple of highlighters and pens, he began to highlight the extract whilst organizing his speech into paragraphs.

"This should be easy enough," he thought.

Hyunsik continued to stare at the clock.

Tick tock tick tock. It went, whilst a bee buzzed outside and sat on the window.

He waited as he watched the hands tick until the teacher called him in.

"Well," he told himself, "Here we go,"

The teacher gave him a microphone and instructed him to speak directly into it whilst giving his speech.

As soon as he was ready, he started the 10-minute speech.

From 5 minutes onwards he was beginning to gain confidence.

Not long after, he breathed in relief as his speech on the extract was over, and an extra 10 minutes of general discussion of the third novel followed by.

In fact, as much as he hated to admit it, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

He dashed out in relief as it was finally over.

As for Sungjae and Eunkwang, they felt that they were okay; at least the IOCs were over, when Peniel and Ilhoon were nervous about their results, and Changsub and Minhyuk were relatively confident.

After the IOCs were the foreign language writing assignments, but since they have been using English all their school life as well as Korean it was no biggie for them. As for Hyunsik and Sungjae, who were doing the Chinese and Japanese in-class writing assignments, they were relatively uncomfortable over the 4 hours.