Elsewhere, far from Z City, the competition organizers were restless.
The cybersecurity platform was preparing for its upcoming international hacking competition. Based on historical data, performance metrics, and past records, the system had already predicted the top ten teams likely to dominate the event.
Everything was proceeding as expected.
Until a new name appeared.
A user who had registered that very day—no history, no footprint—had cleared every qualifying round.
Cleanly.
Efficiently.
Too efficiently.
The internal team double-checked the logs.
They tried tracing the account.
Location—masked.
Device signature—scrubbed.
Background—nonexistent.
Nothing.
No clues. No patterns. No identity.
It was as if the user had appeared from nowhere.
The room buzzed with mixed reactions.
Excitement—because fresh talent like this was rare.
Unease—because their carefully modeled predictions had just been rendered useless.
Someone broke the silence.
"If this person is real," one of them said, "the competition just got interesting."
The prize pool didn't hurt either.
First place carried a reward of ₹10 lakhs, enough to attract skilled individuals and organized teams from across the world. Registrations surged as word spread.
Speculation followed.
Who was the newcomer?
A hidden veteran?
A team using a new alias?
Or something else entirely?
Forums were already whispering about it.
Back in Z City, PK was unaware of any of this.
He had no idea that a single username—Mr.Fool—had disrupted months of predictions and analysis.
No idea that people were already watching.
All he knew was that he had passed a test.
And somewhere beyond his screen, the world had quietly taken notice.