Chapter 24 — Wind Village Robot Team

"Where's the Mountain Wind Team? There's three minutes left until it's their turn!" The voice of a volunteer from the organizing committee rang out urgently when he saw the group hurriedly running into the exam waiting area, sweating profusely, hands still clutching cardboard boxes.

"Present!" Khanh Dan shouted, leading the team through the crowd. The robot box was placed right in the preparation area. The group hurriedly opened the lid for a final check while waiting for their names to be announced.

"Is it still running well?" Gia Han asked, her hands trembling to reconnect the laptop, her eyes glued to the screen waiting for a response signal from the old circuit board.

The indicator light on the board flashes, connection is successful. The whole group breathed a sigh of relief, but before they could feel completely reassured, the loudspeaker rang out their team's name.

"Mountain Wind Team, Long Phong Secondary School, invited to compete in the final round."

The whole group carried the robot onto the field and placed it on the starting line under the curious eyes of the surrounding audience - some of them had vaguely heard that this team had an incident on the road, so when they saw the robot with its clearly patched shell, whispers arose here and there.

Uyen Nhi stepped up to the podium to give a short presentation, her voice was still breathless from running, but when she picked up the microphone, she regained surprising calm.

"Dear judges, this morning on the way here, the vehicle carrying our team had a small accident, the robot was seriously damaged." She spoke, her voice trembling slightly but clearly, without hiding it. "What you're about to see is not the perfect robot we've been practicing for the past six weeks, but a robot that was repaired in ninety minutes, using a screwdriver from the grandfather of one of our teammates, and a flashlight borrowed from an auto repair shop along the way."

A silence covered the audience area, then sporadic applause rang out, not because they had finished the exam, but because of the rare sincerity in that introduction.

From the opposite audience row, Trinh Anh Khoa stood up from the Kim Long team's seat, moved closer to the safety fence to observe more clearly, his expression was no longer the social curiosity of the first meeting, but the real attention of someone who clearly understood the value of what had just been said. He had heard through the internal loudspeaker about a team having an accident on the road, but he did not expect that it was the Long Phong team with the homemade sensor tube he had admired yesterday.

"Three, two, one, start!" The referee calls, the timer goes off.

The Mountain Wind Robot rolled, and from the first seconds, it was clear that it was no longer as smooth as the original version - the wheels were slightly out of tune because the frame was slightly warped from the collision, but it still went straight up the steep incline, a little slower than yesterday but steady.

At the Z-turn, a tense moment occurred: the robot stalled for half a second at the first corner, the wheels spinning in place before finding the right direction again. Gia Han held her breath, her hands tightened on the edge of the table, but did not intervene - the exam rules did not allow manual editing once it had begun.

"Go on, keep going." She muttered, as if praying for the code she wrote.

The robot passes the second turn and enters the gravel section. Midway through the segment, a strange noise came from the left wheel — a small creaking sound that only someone who has heard this robot run hundreds of times would immediately recognize that something was wrong.

"Left wheel bearing, probably misaligned from the collision." Phong whispered, his hands clasped together, unable to do anything but stand and watch.

The robot slowed down significantly, but continued to crawl forward, until it completely passed the gravel section and entered the picking area. The entire team held their breath as the gripper - with a shaft made from a copper-coated ballpoint pen aluminum tube - stretched out, and the flashlight version of the "Wind Eye" began scanning the first block of wood.

Red light turns on and off. Green light turns on and off. Blue light turns on and off. A short pause made the whole team extremely nervous, then the handle closed, lifting the wooden block - red, exactly - moving it to the red basket, dropping it smoothly.

Applause erupted. Nam held Phong's hand tightly, both of them did not take their eyes off the robot for even a second.

The second block, green, was also processed correctly, although the reaction time was a little slower than usual because the replacement hardware was not fully optimized.

On to the third block — the golden block, the hardest part, the one that cost them points in the qualifying round. The flashlight version of "Wind Eyes" swept over, the processing time was much longer than the previous two times, making the whole team hold their breath to the point that no one dared to breathe loudly.

The indicator light finally lights up: yellow is confirmed. The gripper closed and lifted the block of wood - slowly, much more carefully, perhaps because the command Gia Han wrote last night included an extra step to check the grip force before moving.

The handle carrying the golden wooden block moved to the corresponding basket, and in the last moment, dropped the wooden block — falling straight into the center of the golden wooden basket, without sliding out like before.

Screams broke out from the whole team, mixed with the applause of the surrounding audience. The robot continued to roll the last meters to the finish line. Although the left wheel still made a weak creaking sound, it was completed.

"Time's up!" The referee shouted, stopping the clock at two minutes and fifty-eight seconds — slower than the qualifying round, but completing all three wooden blocks of the correct color, something that even at their best, the team had never done without errors.

All five people hugged each other right in the middle of the arena, no longer caring about the eyes of the audience or the surrounding judges. Uyen Nhi cried, but this time it was the tears of someone who had just accomplished what she thought was impossible. Nam shouted loudly, his voice hoarse from shouting too loudly. Gia Han hugged her laptop tightly to her chest as if hugging a companion who had gone through the storm with her. Phong stood still, just smiling, still clutching his grandfather's screwdriver set in his pocket.

Khanh Dan stood looking at that scene, feeling a surge of happiness that could not be described in words, different from any feeling of victory she had ever experienced in her engineering career. This was not the victory of a perfect product. This was the victory of not giving up when everything seemed to have completely collapsed just two hours before.

She remembered every face in that chaotic morning - Uyen Nhi hugged her face and cried, blaming herself, Nam sat down on the floor of the car as if everything was over, and she herself had a brief moment of wanting to surrender to the wreckage. But none of them really let go, and now, standing amid the applause of hundreds of strangers, she understood that moment of ninety minutes of panic, not any previous smooth practice session, was the biggest lesson the team had just overcome together.

The electronic scoreboard has not yet shown the results, the judges are still consulting, but at this time, no one in the Mountain Wind team really cares about the number that is about to appear. They had what they needed before they knew the score: living proof that, no matter how much things fell apart, they still knew how to get back up and finish what they started.

From the fence, Trinh Anh Khoa clapped louder than anyone in the audience, not hiding the admiration on his face. Several members of the Kim Long team standing next to him looked at each other, somewhat surprised by their captain's reaction, but no one spoke out against it - perhaps because they, the ones who best understood the difficulty of the challenge they had just completed, also recognized the true value behind the patchwork shell of the robot named Gio Nui.

The man wearing a technical advisor badge sitting in the middle of the judges' seats also did not scribble in a notebook like in previous rounds. He sat still for a long moment, his eyes still watching the robot being carried by the Mountain Wind team back to the waiting area, and an expression that was hard to name flashed across his face — not exactly surprise, but more like a recognition of something familiar from a long time ago.

He stood up from the judges' row, whispered something to the person sitting next to him, then left his seat and walked towards the waiting area of the competing teams, where the Mountain Wind team was still hugging each other in celebration, none of them had noticed that they were gradually becoming the focus of attention not only of the audience, but also of the person who would determine a large part of the final result of the competition.

The loudspeaker rang out, announcing that the next team was about to take position, interrupting the team's moment of celebration. Khanh Dan quickly wiped the sweat and tears from her cheeks, pulled the group back to the waiting area to give the field to the next team, her heart still echoing the echoes of the past two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, something she knew for sure, no matter what the final result was, would be one of the memories she would carry with her for the rest of her life.