A/N: This was actually originally half of the last chapter, but I thought that would too long. Now, Happy Birthday All_4_Fun! I hope you enjoy this even though you're not in this chapter. Also, Robotics class gets a lot tougher.
Dark themes: violence?

With the knowledge of the fun night we would have when they day's finished, time ticks even more slowly.

Our Special Math, Filipino, and and Math Enrichment class creeps by with assignments and tests, then we meet for lunch. I call my Mom to let her know about the sleepover, and she sends over my overnight bag. We all head to the office and register our names to stay over for the night. Spending the night at school isn't as bad as you think it would be. At seven when the normal classes and review classes are sure to be over, the classrooms can get converted to dorm rooms with the turn of a special key. Something about a special mechanism in the space manipulator engine. The desks, chairs, whiteboard, and bulletin boards would disappear. In their place would be seven bunk beds, a decent bathroom, fourteen lockers, and a couch with a table in front of it. The place was originally made so that in case of a typhoon or sudden and long Sin attack, the students could have a safe place to stay. It was protocol for each school to have such rooms for emergencies, but school was one of the rarer ones that allowed the renting of rooms on normal days.

Students don't pay for the room with real money, they do it with credits they earn from acing tests, winning contests, or having good behavior. Credit is our school's form of incentive, and we can't lend it to each other. I never really used my credits for anything other than stationery and the occasional candy, so I had a lot of it in accumulated over the years.  I could easily pay for a month of lodging, food and all, with my stock of credit, but there wasn't much point in that. Home's more comfortable, and I never thought about renting a room until I started getting close to Rika and the others.

Anyway, English's poem recitation signals the end of lunch with frantic last-minute memorizations, Science gives us a lesson on formulas for gravity, and my class enjoys recess before the dreaded Values Education. It isn't that the class is hard or the teacher is bad, it's just that you need to have quick hand in note-taking to fill both sides of a sheet of pad paper within forty-five minutes. When our teacher leaves, we're all mentally exhausted but hold the knowledge on how to further strengthen our weapons.

The teacher for the next class comes in, and we line up to march to the third floor Robotics Room. As technology advanced, Grace decided that its students could learn some new things, so Robotics class was born. It was a class that was either hard and stressful, long and boring, or fun. As soon we enter the room, I know that today was going to be a fun one by a chip with the words 'Snakes & Ladders' on its label inserted in the space manipulator engine.

The last few Robotics meetings had been spent making a program and building a bot called the Bingo Twist. It looks like a brick suspended by four thin legs with a dial at the bottom. When the program runs, the dial would randomly turn until stopping over a number on a circular sheet of paper below.

Our teacher proceeds to tell us that the game would be played as usual, but that the Bingo Twist would be substituted for dice. Two groups would face off against each other to reach the hundredth room in a simulation, all the while having to dodge traps, fix Problems, and pray that they wouldn't end up in a Snake Room where you would be sent to a lower-numbered room.

As soon as she finishes, she gives us five minutes to download the program into the robots, spray them with a solution that would harden into a transparent shell to prevent damage, and douse weapons in wisdom-infused Holy Water to attack Problems. She reminds us not to bother writing answers down, since today would be focused on reaching the hundredth room. I, along with Rika and Matemo, were in Group 6. Our opponents would be Caterine, Darae, and Warron, the members of Group 5. Everyone did as instructed with zeal. Seeing that all were ready, the teacher turns on the manipulator, and each pair of groups gets surrounded by holographic-looking walls. I see the other groups for an instant before the walls turn opaque, trapping the groups within a square room with a single door with a 1 in front.

The teacher's voice rings out. "God Bless and start the test!"

Matemo and Warron run the programs, and Rika and I pray for a high number. Beeps signal the results. A six for Group 5, and a four for Group 6. Caterine and Darae cheer, and Rika and I sigh. The door in front of us slides open and we rush in. The room is full of monsters. They aren't Questions or Problems, just creatures meant to block our way. They split evenly to attack us, three for each group. Warron throws a grenade to get rid of his group's monsters in one go and they continue on. I summon my sickles, re-fuse them, and throw my chakram. The disk decapitates two of our group's monsters before embedding itself in the wall. Rika stabs the final one to let us continue.

The next room is empty, and Group 5 is nowhere to be seen. The room after that is full of monsters, and Matemo gets rid of them by shooting them from the second one. The fourth room has an empty black void for a floor, but a button is on the wall beside the door to the next room. Rika shoots it and makes the floor appear. The door refuses to open until we run the program again. We get a three this time. The door opens, and we're greeted with an exploding grenade. One of Matemo's eyebrows get scorched off and Rika's face gets a slight burn. I'm spared from anything due to being short enough to stand behind my group mates to use them as human shields.

"Sorry!" Warron shouts before launching more explosives at the swarm around him.

This room is larger than the others, and wave after wave of monsters come from a portal at the left side of the door. Across the room, another portal opens on the right side of the door as we step in. Monsters come out of that as well, and they begin rushing to attack us. Rika's face and Matemo's eyebrows have recovered by the time we attack.

"What's happening?" I yell over the scratching, slashing, snarls, and explosions.
"There's a Problem!" Darae yells back. She tosses a monster caught in her frying pan in the air like a pancake, then whacks it like a tennis ball.
Caterine slashes through two monsters at once before adding, "It's at the portal, but we can't reach it!"

Rika strings her bow to start shooting instead of slashing in an attempt to lower the number of enemies heading towards us. Matemo starts firing away, and my chakram is split into sickles once more.
"You guys keep the monsters away from me and I'll try to go ahead."
"Sure."
"Okay."
I charge and slice in front of me while my group mates take down the monsters on either side. I reach the end of the room and spot the Problem. This Problem was a spider-like one but had five legs. It scurries around the portal tapping different areas to keep it active. Here it reconnects a wire, there it taps a code. I fix it by cutting it in half. My group mates run up to me so we can continue. Seeing how Group 5 was still struggling, we fixed their Problem too.

"Thanks!" Caterine chirps.
"Welcome!" we say as we move on to the next room.

Group 5 soon catches up and gain a lead again. Then we gain a lead, then we get stuck in the same room, then they lead again when they land in a Ladder Room that takes them seven rooms forward by a ladder dropping from the ceiling. The programs are constantly run to get both groups to the next room. We encounter more monsters, Problems, empty rooms, quicksand, barricades, puzzles, and several other things that hinder our progression. Group 5 helps us at times, and we help them too.

My group reaches the fifty-second floor first, then pauses to run the program again. Strangely, the button stops working. We press the button to start it over and over, but it refuses to run.
"Come on," I mutter impatiently, "We're losing our lead!"
"Check the batteries," Matemo suggests.
Rika shakes her head. "No, we just replaced it earlier before the challenge."
We bicker over what's wrong until Group 5 comes by. They step in just in time to see it happen.

The plain floor below us changes into the pattern of several snakes on the ground. They slither and twist about until they all fuse into a giant snake head staring right up with its fangs bared and mouth wide open. The giant serpent stretches its mouth until my group is in it, then comes to life. The snake snaps us up in moments, and the floor disappears. I might have let out a scream in surprise. We slide down the dark chute as if on one of those large tube slides in the playground. The ride ends by dropping us from the ceiling of a room.

I blink to get adjusted to the brightness of the room before gritting my teeth. I get up, ignoring whatever injuries I sustained from the fall before helping Rika up. Matemo grabs our robot from beside him and runs the program as he gets to his feet.
"Fortieth floor," Rika reads from the door as we wait for the program.

We get a six, and I mutter a short prayer in thanks. None of the rooms had reset their challenges, and we even advance a whole floor by a ladder leading from the forty-sixth floor to the fifty-fifth one. A Problem same as the one from the fifth room is here, and we employ the same strategy as before. The room after that lacks a floor, and has several buttons on the opposite wall. Rika and Matemo hit a dozen decoys until a bullet strikes the real one. A switch-and-light puzzle from the twenty-eighth room makes a reappearance, but with more lights to have to turn on. The rest of the rooms are harder versions of earlier ones or just empty.

When we reach the empty Room 81 and have to run the program again, we take a short two-minute break to catch our breaths.
"Hey. . .Rika," I pant. "Do you think. . .Group 5. . .won yet?"
"Probably," my friend shrugs as well as she can with aching arms.
Matemo's sitting Indian-style while he curls and uncurls his fingers, wincing. I glance down and see that I'm still holding my sickles tight in my hands. I will the weapons to disappear, then hiss as I flex the digits. I probably should have practiced more. I sigh as I close my eyes. We're going to lose at this rate. Oh well, at least it was fun. Dear Lord, thanks for this fun challenge-
"Are you praying?" Rika interrupts.
"Yeah. Dear Lord," I begin aloud. "Thank you for this day you've given us to do this fun challenge. Please help us to win, and if we don't, thank you for letting us have a Robotics class today where we didn't have to program much. Please give us the strength to finish this, amen."
"Amen," my group mates echo.
We help Matemo get up and our program gives us a five. As I jog to the next room, I feel somehow energized despite having crushed no beads. Thanks God, I think with a smile.
We reach the eighty-sixth room and catch Group 5 just leaving.
"We still have a chance!" Rika grins.
"Then start helping me with this puzzle!"
We have to solve the logic puzzle by arranging several dots, lines and bricks into the correct pattern. After four errors, we finally get the items to the right positions and proceed.

Room 87 has a swarm of monsters(fortunately lacking a portal), and 88 contains a balancing challenge where Rika nimbly gets to the other side to lower a bridge to let me and Matemo cross. The eighty-ninth room is blank, but the ninetieth contains a giant monster with a lighter colored patch of hide that serves as its weak spot. Matemo kills it within a dozen shots. The two rooms following it are empty. I guess the teacher wanted to give us a break. We reach 93, then get a two. So close yet so far! We hurriedly run the program. We haven't seen Group 5 since the eighty-sixth room, so some hope remains. The program gives us a three. Just two more to go.

We run through 96, then enter the next one to see Group 5 frantically try to get their robot to work. As soon as they see us, realization flashes in their eyes as well as ours. The floor promptly becomes covered in snake patterns, and they form a massive head.
"No no no no-!"
The rest of Caterine's no's are lost as the snake head materializes and swallows her group whole. As they slide down to who-knows-where, a faint scream reaches us. I grimace and see that Rika's doing the same. We hope they don't get hurt too much by the fall before advancing to the next room. We run the program once more, each praying for a two. We watch the dial spin, spin, spin until stopping over-

"Yes!" we cheer, and run past 99 in a blink of an eye. The hundredth room is large and circular, a 100 holographically spinning in the air while equally fake confetti rain down on our heads. The center of the room holds a pedestal with a trophy made of gears, beams, and pegs on it. Rika, Matemo and I stand around it, then lift it by its base.

"Group 6 wins!" a computer-generated voice cries out.
We smile
Thanks, God, I think as the fake room collapses around us, leaving us at our table in the Robotics Lab.