He had never read the foreword. He scrolled back. The author, a retired professor named Dr. Vera Horvat, had written a small note:

Weeks turned into months. The PDF became worn in the digital sense—bookmarks, highlights, a folder of handwritten notes titled “Zbirka_Killing_Spree.” Luka discovered that the hardest problems often had the most elegant solutions. He discovered that asking for help was not weakness. He discovered that the satisfaction of solving a problem after forty-five minutes of frustration was better than any video game level-up.

Problem 17: 3(x – 4) + 2 = 5x – 6 . He stared. He tried. His pencil hovered. He rewrote it three times, each attempt ending in a different, equally wrong answer. By problem 34, the numbers had turned hostile. He slammed the tablet face-down.

Luka was good at many things. He could name every dinosaur that ever appeared in Jurassic Park , assemble a computer from spare parts in under an hour, and recite the offside rule in three languages. But mathematics? Mathematics was a foreign country where he did not have a visa.

“Why do I need this?” he whispered to the empty room. “I’m never going to use a quadratic equation to order pizza.”