The break was already over by the time I finished building the AOB patterns for the skill objects.

Surprisingly, the AOB pattern still held together despite the offset shifts. The skill IDs and skill type IDs were right where I expected them to be, even if other properties like skill range, AOE, minimum and maximum target counts, animation ID, and frame ID had all migrated forward by sixty-four bytes.

At least that saved me from having to rebuild the entire structure from scratch.

The professor had already resumed lecturing, continuing the topic from earlier as if nobody in the room wanted to kill themselves from boredom.

Meanwhile, I was still busy dissecting the game's memory layout instead of pretending to care about whatever PowerPoint slide he was reading word for word.

The next address I needed was the one controlling the dungeon window.

The process itself was simple, just painfully tedious: enter a dungeon without starting it, scan for 1 in Cheat Engine, exit, scan for 0, repeat until the address pool narrowed down to something manageable, maybe a thousand addresses or so. Then came the fun part, toggling values one by one and praying one of them killed the window cleanly without crashing the entire game.

Honestly, debugging memory structures was less mentally draining than this class.

Tap.

"Is there something more interesting than my lesson?" he asked in a tone that was outwardly calm but carried unmistakable undertones of bloodlust.

I looked over my shoulder and saw the professor staring directly at me, his expression twisted with the kind of rage normally reserved for someone who had just watched their entire bloodline get erased.

I had been so engrossed in tracing the dungeon window address that I hadn't even noticed him walking up behind me.

The entire class went dead silent. Even the air itself felt frozen, every second stretching uncomfortably longer than it should have.

A couple of students immediately looked away from me like they didn't want to get caught in the blast radius.

Would apologizing work here?

Fuck no. This guy was way past rational thought.

“No sir, it's just that your lecture is boring everyone to death, so I needed a quick distraction to stay awake,” I replied nonchalantly.

A vein pulsed against his temple, thin and blue like a map line drawn by an angry cartographer.

“Perhaps you would like to teach the rest of the class then, given how suffused you are with... independent study.”

Sarcastic bastard. Does he think tuition at this school is cheap? It's practically six digits a year. Not only was this guy doing a subpar job at teaching, now he's trying to make me do his dirty work for him?

Alright then. I'll double down.

I shrugged. “Sure, if you don't mind paying me first.”

An uneasy ripple spread through the computer lab. I could hear people inhaling through their teeth.

Somebody near the back muttered "holy shit" under their breath.

The professor suddenly turned and marched back toward his desk, stomping hard enough to make the floor creak beneath him, exhaling sharply like a rabid dog trying to contain itself.

"Alright," he said. "Since you're so eager."

That tone alone told me he was about to pull some petty bullshit.

He turned toward the rest of the class.

"Everyone. Open your code editors. You will build a working React app that detects and reports suspicious gaming behavior during class. You have until the end of the period. Anyone who does not finish will be scored a zero for today's activity. If I see any bugs you will be scored zero. If it fails to detect even one, you will be scored zero."

The students groaned collectively, several of them immediately throwing murderous looks in my direction.

One guy actually slammed his forehead against the desk.

Shit.

The professor knew damn well that most of these students barely understood hooks, let alone how to build a functional app from scratch in under two hours. This wasn't punishment anymore, it was retaliation.

He was weaponizing my classmates against me.

I minimized both the Cheat Engine window and the game client.

“If I finish this, exempt me from attending classes except during exams.”

A few heads snapped toward me so fast I thought someone had broken their neck.

The professor's eyes narrowed into slits. For a moment, I genuinely thought he might refuse. Honestly, that would've been the smarter decision for both of us.

But wounded egos make stupid decisions.

"Fine," he spat. "But when you fail, I'll personally make sure you receive a failing grade for the entire semester.”

“You better keep your promise.”

I opened VSCode and cracked my knuckles.

The classroom had gone almost completely silent now aside from the nervous clicking of keyboards and mice. A few students were already Googling things like "React suspicious behavior detection tutorial" as if that was somehow going to save them.

Others were just staring blankly at empty project folders like prisoners waiting for execution.

The thing about building apps under pressure is that you first need to understand what problem you're actually solving.

The professor wanted a "suspicious gaming behavior detection" app during class.

Vague as hell.

But that was intentional. Vague requirements are what kill inexperienced programmers because they spend more time panicking over where to start than actually building anything.

Unfortunately for him, I wasn't most students.