Chapter 22 — Wind Village Robot Team

That morning started out promisingly. The whole team got up at six o'clock, had a quick breakfast with bread bought at a restaurant near the motel, the spirit was still excited from yesterday's qualifying round victory. Gia Han stayed up until nearly one o'clock in the morning to rewrite the command to handle the gold block, confident that it would no longer drop the wooden block like last time. Uyen Nhi reviewed the presentation one last time while eating breakfast, her voice was much more fluent than yesterday. No one in the car expected that, just fifteen minutes after leaving the motel, everything would change completely.

The sudden screeching sound of the brakes was accompanied by a strong shock that tilted the whole car to one side, causing Uyen Nhi to be pushed against the back of the seat, her hand clinging to the door handle.

Mr. Tuyen slammed on the brakes to avoid a motorbike carelessly crossing the road in the rain left over from last night's thunderstorm. The wet and slippery asphalt surface made the seven-seater vehicle wobble before stopping completely, the rear car horn blaring loudly.

"Is everyone okay?" Uncle Tuyen turned back and asked immediately, his voice still panicked.

"Robot!" Gia Han screamed, did not answer the question, but immediately rushed to the floor of the car, where the cardboard box containing the robot - which was carefully strapped between two rows of seats - broke free of its straps, hitting the seat hard before falling sideways to the floor.

The whole team gathered around and opened the lid of the box immediately. Inside, the lining layer had pushed aside, revealing the robot lying on its side, and with just a glance, everyone immediately realized that the worst had happened: the gripper arm had broken off from the main joint, the aluminum frame was bent at an angle, and worst of all, the "Wind Eye" tube - the homemade color sensor that the team was most proud of - had a long crack, revealing broken wires inside, and the blue LED inside was shattered.

No one said a word for a few seconds. Phong picked up the broken arm, his trembling fingers touching the fracture as if hoping it was just an illusion. Gia Han turned on the laptop, tried connecting it to the main control board, the screen showed the last red error message: no response signal received.

"The main board is also broken." She said, her voice almost breathless.

Uyen Nhi covered her face, her shoulders trembled, unable to hold back her tears. "It's my fault, I sat near the box, I should have held on tighter—"

"It's not your fault." Khanh Dan interrupted immediately, trying to keep her voice calm even though inside she was equally panicked. "No one could have predicted such a sudden braking event. This was an accident, not the fault of anyone in the car."

Nam sat down on the floor of the car, holding his head in his hands, staring at the broken pick arm - something he and Phong had painstakingly edited for weeks to achieve perfect precision. "How long until the exam?" He asked, his voice hoarse.

Khanh Dan looked at her watch, her hands shaking slightly as he calculated. "Ninety minutes."

That number fell into the middle of the car like a verdict. Ninety minutes to fix a broken main board, a broken gripper arm, and a shattered homemade color sensor — while they were sitting in the middle of a car on an unfamiliar street, with no workshop, not enough tools, no spare parts other than what they carried in a small bag.

"I won't make it in time." Nam spoke, his voice choked. For the first time, Khanh Dan heard true desperation in his always stubborn voice. "The main board is broken, there is no backup board, how can it run?"

Uncle Tuyen, still parking his car, pulled over to the side of the road, turned around to look at the scene behind him, his face clearly showing guilt. "I'm sorry kids, I didn't mean to—"

"It's not your fault." Khanh Dan said immediately, even though her mind was racing with dozens of thoughts at the same time. "You did the right thing. Avoiding a collision would have been much more dangerous."

She looked at the wreckage before her—the broken pick arm, the broken circuit board, the broken sensor—and for a brief moment, she felt a familiar panic rising, the same feeling she felt the night she watched the Falcon circuit board burn to black two years ago, the feeling of someone standing on the brink of the collapse of all their hard work.

But this time, there's something different. She was not alone, and the people sitting around her, even though they were panicking, had not yet said the words "give up".

"Ninety minutes." She repeated, her voice regaining certainty. "Not enough to start over. But maybe enough to fix it."

"Fix it with what?" Gia Han asked, her voice still shaking, her eyes red as she looked at the laptop reporting an error. "I didn't bring that many spare parts."

Khanh Dan looked around the car, her eyes stopped at the small canvas bag Phong had always carried with him since the day he left Long Phong - Mr. Tu's screwdriver set, along with a few sundries he arbitrarily added at the last minute before leaving without anyone paying close attention.

"Wind." She called, her voice suddenly becoming urgent. "In your tool bag, besides a screwdriver, is there anything else?"

Phong quickly rummaged through the bag and dumped it all on the floor of the car: Mr. Tu's screwdriver set, a small coil of copper wire, a few odd screws, a leftover piece of electrical tape, and most surprising of all - an old Arduino circuit board, the first version they had used for testing earlier this year, something Phong had secretly kept in case of need, stuffing it into his bag before getting in the car without telling anyone.

"I... I thought I'd bring it just in case. I didn't think I'd really need it." Phong said, his voice was still shaking but his eyes flashed a ray of hope.

Khanh Dan picked up the old circuit board, her heart beating faster than ever, not because of fear anymore, but because a possibility just flashed in her mind - slim, but not impossible.

"This board can run the old program, but it doesn't have the newest program I just edited last night for the yellow block part." Gia Han spoke quickly, her mind began to change from panic to calculation. "Besides, its pins don't match the current connection completely, so we have to re-wire a few places."

"What about the gripper?" Phong asked, looking at the broken arm in his hand. "The main joint broke right at the pivot point, there was no replacement joint."

Khanh Dan looked around the car again, trying to find anything he could use. Her eyes stopped at the backpack containing her own personal belongings, where there was a good metal ballpoint pen she used to take notes, the pen body was made of thin aluminum tube, the diameter almost matching the broken spindle.

"Try this pen." She said, pulling out the pen, disassembling the ink cartridge, keeping only the aluminum tube. "If cut to the right length, it can sometimes be used as a temporary shaft."

Nam took the aluminum tube and turned it in his hand, his eyes flashing with the first ray of hope since the collision. "It might work. But I need to cut, and there are no metal cutting tools on the car."

"My grandfather's screwdriver set has a small folding saw blade in the handle. Can I try it?" Phong asked, recalling the small details in the toolkit his grandfather gave him.

The whole group was silent for a second, then looked at each other. A fragile ray of light just flashed among the piles of rubble before their eyes.

Uncle Tuyen, still sitting in the driver's seat observing everything through the rearview mirror, suddenly spoke up. "There is a motorbike repair shop two hundred meters away. I saw the sign just now. Do you need me to pull over? Maybe they have pliers and a welding torch to lend?"

Khanh Dan nodded immediately. "Let the car pull over there, as quickly as possible." She turned back to look at all four students sitting around the pile of broken components. Uyen Nhi's tears had not yet completely dried, Nam's face was still pale, but in each person's eyes, she recognized something that was gradually replacing the initial panic - a sharp focus, the type of focus that only appears when people no longer have time to be afraid.

While the car moved the last meters to the car repair shop, Khanh Dan immediately pulled out her phone and called the organizers' hotline number printed on the neck card, trying to keep her voice calm even though her heart was still pounding. "Hello, I'm the teacher in charge of the Mountain Wind team, Long Phong school. Our car had a problem on the road, we need a little more time, can we please change to the last test in the morning?"

The other end of the line was silent for a moment before answering. The operator's voice seemed hesitant but in the end he agreed: the Mountain Wind team would be moved to the final round of competition, right before lunch break, which meant they had nearly forty extra minutes than originally planned — not much, but in this situation, every minute was as precious as gold.

"One hundred and thirty minutes." Khanh Dan announced, putting the phone back in her pocket, her voice regaining the certainty needed to lead the team through the most important moment, a completely different tone from the desperate ninety minutes just now - no longer the countdown of a verdict, but the countdown of a last chance. "Not enough to start over. But enough to demonstrate what we've learned over the past few months."