CH2: KOREDE BALOGUN II

This is a passion work. So, I would really appreciate it if you leave behind a review when you're done reading.

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Korede Balogun opened the door and walked into the study. He found his father behind the desk with a bunch of files in front of him.

'As expected' He thought

His father, Babatunde Balogun, closed the files he was working on and arranged them so that Korede could place the tray on the table. When Korede was about to pour his father a cup, his father said to him,

"Hold on. Get me a glass cup from the cabinet and sit with me. Since you returned from the training camp, we haven't been able to talk with how busy I am recently."

Korede nodded his head and walked to the cabinet to get a glass cup for his father. The inside of the cabinet was designed like a bar but since no one in the family drank, it was filled with fruit wine and some juices that they enjoyed from time to time when Babatunde wanted to have a casual conversation with his sons or when he had close guest around. Korede poured tea for his father into the glass cup and used the original tea mug to pour for himself

"How are you? It isn't easy going for military training almost immediately after graduating from university. They didn't even give you time to rest after graduation, just shipped you off to camp for four months. Your mother wouldn't stop bothering me. Well, I expect she pampered you well this week of rest you were given." said Babatunde Balogun.

Korede chuckled wryly when recalled how his mother complained of how 'thin' he had become after returning from boot camp. During the last week, she made sure he was fully fed until he couldn't eat anymore. Even when he tried to complained, he was met with a stern expression that allowed for no disobedience from. He just swallowed down everything she gave him along with his complaints.

'The pressure of a worrying mother plus that of a Supreme Court Justice can't be underestimated.' Korede thought. Even his brother, Kola, an army colonel couldn't go against her.

"I'm fine sir. Knowing how the university and the program worked, I already expected it and prepared adequately. Besides, while the training was tough, it's nothing new to me after all." replied Korede.

Korede Balogun attended the Nigerian Military University to study Medicine while also applying for the Advanced Special Forces program. As a result, his youth service will be a three years program serving in the military as opposed to a one-year program serving in a civilian organization expected of graduates of other universities. Actually, being a male member of the Balogun family, he was going to eventually serve five years in the military anyway. Also, since he went through the Advanced Special Forces program, he was immediately sent to boot camp after his convocation for four months of further intensive training. It was during this training that recruits for elites special forces units are chosen while others are sent to regular military units.

"I was surprised when I found out you were the overall best recruit. I thought you would continue to stay under the radar. After all, the family only requested you make it into the elite units. Your brother was laughing so hard that you finally found an evaluation process you couldn't fool." said Babatunde Balogun after sipping his cup of tea.

Korede shrugged his shoulders in submission, "I didn't know the method for choosing the overall best recruit had been changed. We weren't told. I assumed it was still the average of the scores in individual events. Never did I expect, it was to be a vote by the instructors. If I knew, I would have hidden more of my abilities from their eyes." He drank his tea then placed the cup on the table. He looked at his father with a sharpness in his eyes and continued, "In fact, I'm pretty sure big bro had something to do with this. It's too coincidental if he didn't."

Babatunde Balogun merely smiled and continued to sip his tea without accepting or denying his son's accusation. His youngest son's disposition had given him, and the extended Balogun family as a whole, headaches. Korede was found to be very intelligent, a fast learner. So, no effort was spared in harnessing this talent. Over time, however, Korede started to get 'lazy'. After discovering how far above his peers he was, he lost his motivation to improve. Concerns started to grow among the teachers in the family. Luckily, his eldest son was able to put a stop to it quickly. He even gave the teachers a method to use to motivate Korede. As Kola put it, Korede had an intense hatred for failure. Though it was not up to the level of an obsession, he would never willingly allow himself to fail. Hence, Kola suggested giving Korede goals to reach in order to control his performance.

While this method worked, it was only to a degree. After a while, Korede started to only perform just enough to reach the goals he had been given even though he could surpass them if he wanted to. He found more joy in achieving the exact goal he was given than surpassing them.

For example, if he was told to be among the top 3 in his class, rather than putting all his effort to target first place, he would spend his time studying the students around him, their strengths, their weakness, their abilities, their score history. Thus in any exam, he was able to accurately predict what each student in his class was capable of scoring and tailor his answers so that at the end of it all he would only meet the minimum requirement given to him, the third position.

This was what he did through his school life from junior secondary upwards. While he was in the university, his cumulative grade point was always 4.5 every semester since his family set a goal of first-class for him.

Kola was the first person to notice this trend back then, so he had asked his little brother how he did it. The explanation he received blew his mind away. He wondered how a twelve years old boy could think in such a complex manner just to avoid 'working hard'. Well, he worked harder than he needed to in fact. Later, they started to notice that Korede was good at reading people, their emotions, their habits. He could tell if a person was lying or not. He could even predict what they might do.

By the time he was sixteen, Babatunde started taking him to work to watch interrogations and see if suspects were lying. Korede could tell whether a person was lying or telling the truth almost every time as long as accurate information about the person was provided to him beforehand. Actually, 'almost every time' was used because on rare occasions the suspect was so good at controlling themselves that Korede couldn't tell if they were lying or not. However, on no occasion was he ever wrong.

Hence, Babatunde could understand why Kola laughed so hard when he found out the result of his plan. Kola had been trying, for a long time, to break his brother's 'lazy' record hence why he changed the method for deciding the overall best recruit in the boot camp. He knew that, while Korede could control his score, he wouldn't necessarily hide his skills and people as perceptive as the boot camp instructors would notice him. Hence, he was confident Korede would be highly regarded by them no matter how he controlled his score. After all, Korede had been trained since he was young by the best the Balogun family could offer.

Oh yeah, if you wondering why Kola was able to change the rules of the boot camp arbitrarily, the answer is simple. Colonel Kola Balogun is the Head trainer of the special forces camp(in name anyway) and Commander of the Army's Eagles squad, its most revered elite special forces unit.

[A.N: Please, don't forget to leave to leave a review of the work to encourage me. Your opinion really matters to me.]