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fifty-seven: breaking point

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[“Don’t ever suggest that I would throw away hundreds of my own people’s lives.”]

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There was a second wave of attack two hours after that, then a slightly more desperate third. A sleepless, tense week passed without incident. Taehyuk, one of the only PCs who allowed Jun to possess him in order to relay information, told Juyeon that they had apparently doubled back to their tents and vans for good. Minah confirmed it, twenty minutes and a massive headache later.

It was not a relief. Sure, it meant that they realized the students weren’t playing around and they were given more time, but it also meant that the next wave would undoubtedly be more difficult to fight off than the last.

Juyeon was stuck up in the girls’ dorms for most of it. When the waves subsided, she scrambled downstairs and ran to Outpost K, checking to make sure everyone was okay. Besides occasional injuries due to small pieces of metal getting blown off the barricades, no one had been seriously hurt or shot yet, to her immense relief. However, when a new wave hit, she was kicked back upstairs without a word in edgewise.

The fourth wave came, at night. It was worse than all the others, and went on for almost three hours. They had attacked both Outpost K and Outpost E, attempting to smash the glass doors. Another group of GTA, smaller and meaner, tried breaking in through the small side door at Outpost F. One of them succeeded in wrenching their arm through a small space in the barricade and nearly shot off a PC’s foot.

Juyeon scrambled down afterwards to find that the glass doors of Outpost E were thankfully still unbroken—it would take more than plain old glass to stay standing in High Class, after all—but were riddled with cracks and bullet holes. It didn’t look like it’ll hold up another assault.

Two more weeks passed before Juyeon could finally admit they were in deep .

Seoyeon was right. They had managed to survive until the end of April without much incident, but it was clear that the GTA had the same idea High Class did. The past two weeks weren’t a buffer period, it was an isolation attempt.

After confirmation by Shim Minah that there were no surprise attacks coming for some time yet, Juyeon called a meeting.

The Exo, Sumi, Taehyuk, and Seoyeon sat in Class 44, ugly and dim with the curtains drawn and the sunlight only streaming in through thin bars of light. Juyeon was poring over dozens of sheets of paper, all taped to the professors’ desk up front and matched together like a puzzle set to form a rough, ugly, pencil-drawn blueprint of High Class, done mostly by Daeri’s powers, Suho’s photographic memory, and Taehyuk’s knowledge. The different outposts scattered around side doors and open hallways and windows just big enough to fit a person were circled in red throughout the map.

”They’re trying to starve us out,” Juyeon said. That was obvious.

She certainly felt starved. She had barely eaten in two days, surviving only on water from the taps and whatever Sumi could convince her to nibble on. A portion of the strange blob-food left in the kitchen had been destroyed by the fire from the first wave, which didn’t help matters, but when she realized they were rapidly running out of food she had chosen to forgo eating, at least for now. She wasn’t even doing anything, the food needed to be given to people at the outposts, give them energy.

Of course, she didn’t tell the Exo about it. As far as they knew, she was eating like everyone else. She had a feeling they knew what was going on, though. Juyeon had never gone a day without food before, being from a relatively well-to-do middle-class family, and she wasn’t taking it well. Once she saw her own face, tired and pinched and looking thin between her messy braids, she tried to avoid looking in any more mirrors afterwards. She was certainly not a sight for sore eyes these days, although her eyes felt sore—she would have to start wearing her glasses for good instead of contacts soon.

Regardless of her decision, the rest didn’t look all that energetic. Juyeon hated making her rounds to the different outposts with Suho and seeing the under-eye circles lining everyone’s eyes, heavy with lack of sleep, and the stiffness in everyone’s shoulders, tense with always being on edge.

The red rawness in some of their eyes was even worse. PCs, always so intent on being strong and powerful, were beginning to privately cry, from fear or homesickness or hunger or who knows what.

Juyeon hated having to pretend that it was okay, that they were going to get through this, as she saw the exhaustion in their faces and the way she brought everyone less and less food every time.

”We’ll need to find a way to get supplies,” Sumi said. She seemed to be refusing her body to feel exhaustion. She would wake up and do exercise in the cramped hallway every morning, and seemed to be louder and grumpier. Juyeon noticed, though, that she added more makeup around her eyes, as if to hide the fact that she had worse under-eye circles than the rest of them. “One of our outposts must be less watched than the others. If we can sneak out and get to the normal’s cafeteria, maybe we can buy ourselves another month and a half of food.”

”Too big of a risk,” Taehyuk argued. The other Exo were on their guard around him and not being particularly pleasant, but it had been silently agreed upon that their own personal rivalries with each other would be put on hold until afterwards. Taekhyuk had more knowledge than anyone else on the secrets of High Class. “The shortest, safest route we can go through is directly through the courtyard, but if they’ve already attacked Outpost E, then that means they’ve broken through the rest of the Academia already. Who knows what they’ve been doing inside t