Without hesitation, Ryoma opened the door to Oishi's hospital room.

What he saw surprised him very much. If he had found the Gobi desert on the other side of the door or that Oishi had decorated his room with Napoleon posters, he could not have been this surprised.

What he saw was his Oishi-senpai, not in bed and not injured in any way, beaming at him with extreme pride and affection, which was reflected in his green eyes. Instead, the freshmen trio lay groaning on the bed.

"Wha…"

"Congratulations, Echizen! I knew you could do it! Come in, come in!" Oishi patted him on the back, dragging him into the room.

Ryoma stared. "What?" He quickly scanned the room to discover that everyone was there, including Sakuno and Tomoka who were looking at him in loving admiration, Momo and Eiji who had somehow sneaked a television into the hospital room and were playing a World Wrestling Entertainment video game, and even Tezuka, who had been bleeding to death minutes ago but was now quite all right. Ryoma decided that this must be a dream, or maybe everything that had happened previously was a dream.

He finally found his voice. "Can someone explain what is going on here?"

"It's like this," Inui piped up from his corner. "We want to train you to become the future pillar of Seigaku, and we want to test you to see whether you have the required abilities to be a good pillar, which are determination, courage, skill, responsibility and independence. You have passed the test. You will now become the new pillar of Seigaku."

"Ah, it was quite tiring, setting up so many traps," Fuji said from aside, looking very content and not tired at all.

"Nyah Fuji, it's much more tiring dodging your traps!" Eiji grimaced. "Fuji is so mean. You didn't tell me where the traps were… what if you really killed me?"

"Me, mean?" Fuji smiled. "Don't you think Tezuka is meaner? He shot you without the slightest hesitation, didn't he?"

"Yeah, Tezuka is so mean! I know that bullet was a blank, but why did you have to shoot me with a 'the sooner he dies the better, YAY! DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE' expression on your face?"

"Because I really thought the sooner you die the better, YAY! DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE," Tezuka explained.

Ryoma decided that this captain must be a fake. Calm down, Ryoma, you must find your real captain. The fake captain must have kidnapped him and locked him in a broom closet.

Horio groaned on the bed, "Ryoma, you are mean too… you attacked us with your zero-shiki!"

Ryoma looked at him and had to laugh. "So you were those people with guns?"

"Yes. They let their guard down. They couldn't even aim at me correctly. I had to move to take the bullet myself," Tezuka said solemnly, as if he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. But then again, he probably didn't.

Ryoma didn't really know how to reply to this. He felt strangely betrayed and cheated. Even though they were doing it for his good, Ryoma didn't like to have his affections played with. He wondered whether Tezuka's senpais had given him the same test years ago.

"So, um, this whole thing is fake? Oishi-senpai did not really have a car accident?"

"Yeah," Oishi smiled and sighed. It was no fun at all pretending to be injured. The others could do the planning and join in the action, while he was in bed doing nothing.

"Buchou was not really shot?"

"The paint ruined my clothes," Tezuka said regretfully.

"Eiji-senpai's betrayal was actually a part of the plan?"

"Well, I was supposed to be killed by the flying needles, but my eyes and reflexes were so good that I dodged all of them instinctively…" Eiji said, "and afterwards buchou kept looking at me with his 'DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE' expression, so I…"

"Momo-senpai was just pretending to be dead?"

"Wasn't I a good actor, Echizen? I am so touched that you cried for me!" (Even though it was because of money.)

"Mada mada dane," Ryoma muttered, pulling his cap down to hide his embarrassment, "and so all the doctors and nurses are our own people?"

"None of the hospitals will let us put traps inside, so we borrowed a building from Atobe. A lot of Hyoutei people came over to help us decorate the place and acted as some of your enemies too," Inui said. "They liked our test for you immensely and next month we are going to do it again for their Hiyoshi Wakashi. They want to see whether he had the skills to gekokujou(2) successfully."

"So when Kaidoh-senpai left to go to the restroom, it was also because he was going to set up some traps?"

Everyone turned to look at Ryoma with shocked faces.

"What? Wasn't I right?"

"We forgot all about that viper!" Momo shouted and threw down his PlayStation handlebar. Luckily Kawamura caught it and started to play for him, or his Kurt Angle would have been thrown out by Big Show. (1)

"Well, actually, Echizen, he really did go to the restroom. We have no idea why he hadn't returned," Tezuka said, looking quite composed.

"Perhaps he had gotten lost," Fuji smiled, "I have put quite a lot of traps around the restroom and also some signs pointing in wrong directions."

"Fuji…" Tezuka sighed helplessly.

Oishi was, of course, worried. "We must find him. It's too dangerous to leave him out there."

"If all the enemies are people from Hyoutei, it won't be really dangerous," Ryoma pointed out.

"But even though all the doctors and nurses are people from Hyoutei, the corpses here really do walk around at nights!" Oishi cried in despair. "And there are all those outrageous traps that Fuji set up!"

"Okay, let's go look for him now!" Momo, being the hot-headed one of the group, declared and stood up, racket in hand.

"These are zombies we are talking about…" Kawamura said worriedly, "We have only rackets. Are you sure rackets are good weapons?"

Everyone told him that he was the one who shouldn't worry about rackets not being the best weapon, and to demonstrate their meaning they handed him his racket. Kawamura started burning right off.

"Hey wait, I want to throw Big Show out of the ring first!" Eiji whined, unable to take his eyes off his video game.

"Forget about Big Show, we need to save Kaidoh!" Oishi said, having a stomachache then and there. With his high stomachache rate he would probably really end up in a hospital room someday.

"Yudan sezu ni ikou," Tezuka said to no one in particular.

Ryoma stared at this scene, feeling ridiculous. Sometimes he couldn't help feeling that he must become the pillar of Seigaku. After all, all these senpais were abnormal. What would happen to them if Ryoma had not been around to take care of them and make sure they don't do stupid things?

Ryoma sighed. Even though he would rather die than admit this to anyone, these crazy senpais were, indeed, most important to him after all.

Therefore, he decided that he would become the pillar of Seigaku so he could protect his crazy senpais, and then he picked up his racket and followed the others into the unknown world of the crazy hospital.

The End. Thank you mysticlegend11 for beta-ing for me!

(1)Kurt Angle and Big Show: WWE people. They are big and muscled, but then most of the WWE people are.

(2) Gekokujou: Hiyoshi Wakashi's trademark punchline. Means to overthrow.

Thanks for reading this. Reviews are very welcome!

Terrfomp92: Thanks for the reviews! It's good that you two are Oishi and Eiji, you can play doubles together that way.

Shourin: Thanks for reviewing. I'm glad you were giggling all the way, because it wasn't supposed to be sad… thank you!

Haziah: Sorry about not letting you choose the ending this time… we can't do it because, as you can see, all the previous four chapters were written especially for this one ending… Thanks for reviewing!