"Three!" Toby exclaimed like an overly enthusiastic game show host. "Rocks down!"
They all stood up, dusted off their knees, and turned around to face the center of the circle.
"Alright," Marcus declared, dusting his hands and crossing his arms with the smug aura of an inevitable victor.
"Let's see them. Arthur, who did you vote for?"
Arthur adjusted his glasses, suddenly looking like a scholar. He pointed a finger at his patch of dirt. Scratched into the ground were three undeniable letters.
"Ian."
Marcus's smug smirk quickly disappeared. "What? Why?! He literally just promised to use us as human tripwires!"
"I..."
Arthur was at a loss of words. Why was Marcus acting so serious? For some reason, he started having a bad feeling.
He had voted for Ian purely to waste his vote.
Since the rules forbade voting for himself, making his vote go to waste was the most mathematically sound way to deny the others a majority.
It was the perfect petty strategy. Unfortunately, he couldn't exactly say it out loud.
'I threw my vote away because I refuse to let any of you idiots win.'
"Ahem. That is simply the result of my... advanced calculations," Arthur lied smoothly, pushing his glasses up his nose. "As for his earlier comments, it was clearly a joke. I am certain he will be a great leader. That's why I voted for him."
Deep down, Arthur was practically doing cartwheels. Since his vote was safely wasted, as long as he received two votes from the others, his victory was mathematically guaranteed.
"Wait a minute," Bob interrupted, the color draining from his face as he stared down at his own boots. "I... I also..."
Next to Bob's feet, carved in messy strokes, was the exact same name.
"IAN"
Bob began to sweat a little. He had employed the exact same logic as Arthur. Who else was going to vote for Ian who was the weakest in the team?
For a moment, they could still vote for him genuinely, but with his drastic speech? Definitely not.
It was supposed to be a safe throwaway vote! But if Ian got one more vote... Bob didn't even want to imagine.
He shot a look at Marcus and Arthur, thinking, 'Please tell me you didn't.'
"You too?!" Marcus started trembling violently. It was entirely unclear if his body was failing from the residual poison, or if it was for a different reason.
He stared at Bob's dirt patch. He stared at Arthur's. Then, with the gaze of a man approaching the gallows, he looked down at his own writing in the dirt.
"Ian."
Marcus was trapped. If he admitted he had voted for the gambler just to spite the chef and the accountant, he would look like an absolute petty clown.
He had to do something. He had to protect his image from this disaster immediately.
Marcus swallowed his cough, smoothed his collar, and nodded with fake calmness.
"Well, of course," he lied through his teeth. "I also voted for Ian. As a regional manager, I have an eye for talent. His... brutal honesty earlier? Classic leadership material. A true boss tells it like it is!"
Bob blinked repeatedly. If the corporate suit and the math nerd genuinely believed in the one-armed guy, Bob couldn't possibly admit his vote was wasted! He'd look like the only idiot in the room!
"Exactly!" Bob boomed, puffing out his chest and smacking his cast-iron pan. "My instincts never lie! You need a cool head in the kitchen, and Ian didn't even flinch when he promised to sacrifice us! The man is ice cold! A born leader!"
"Also, what's wrong with running away in the face of danger? Only clever people can do that, and we need a clever leader!"
'Me?' Ian stood frozen, a finger subconsciously pointing at his own chest.
He desperately wanted to ask them out loud if they shared a single, malfunctioning brain cell, but he was too stunned to speak.
Somehow, even though he had delivered the worst campaign speech in history, he had won by a landslide. He didn't know whether to laugh or curse them.
Arthur adjusted his glasses, stunned. 'These two actually believed in this guy?'
"Indeed," he nodded, sweating profusely. "My calculations... also predicted Ian's inevitable rise to power."
"It looks like we all think alike! That's so great, it means we're all really smart!" Toby cheered, completely oblivious to the thick cloud of mutual gaslighting hanging over them.
Ian simply scratched the back of his neck.
He had just promised to feed them to the nearest monster to save his own skin, and they were actively praising his visionary leadership. Was something fundamentally broken in their heads?
He didn't realize that none of them were willing to admit they were the only idiot in the group, resulting in collective delusion that Ian was a genius.
"Four votes," Arthur concluded, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. "The democratic process has spoken. Ian will be our leader."
There was no revote. Nobody had the guts to ask for one.
If even a single person had been honest enough to confess, the whole house of cards would have collapsed. But because they all firmly believed the other three had genuinely voted for Ian, they assumed their single retracted vote wouldn't change the outcome anyway.
So, they swallowed their pride and accepted their mistakes.
Marcus casually stretched his legs, shooting a glare at Ian's boots.
'I just need to make sure I run faster than the boss,' he thought, reminding himself to stay on his feet.
Bob gripped the handle of his frying pan like a lifeline, his eyes glued to Ian's good leg.
'If he even twitches his foot near my ankle when a monster shows up, I'm swinging for the fences,' Bob promised himself, sweating bullets.
Arthur mentally calculated the exact distance required to stay out of a sudden tripping radius, subtly moving two steps to the right.
Ian stared at the group of men who had just elected him for some unknown reason.
The absolute worst part? Each of them firmly believed they were the only fraud in a group of loyal Ian-fanatics, leaving them completely terrified of their own team.
They all thought that the other three were Ian's followers that truly supported him.