“Detention, Leo. And next time?” He pointed a bony finger at the proxy site. “Just play the tank builder on Coolmath Games like a normal kid.”

“ Unblocked Warthunder ,” he whispered to himself, typing the sacred phrase into a proxy site he’d found on Reddit at 2:00 AM.

Leo looked at the frozen screen. The last chat message, from a user named , was still visible:

The game loaded. Not the educational geography quiz or the solar system simulator that was supposed to be there. This was War Thunder —the real, raw, un-shielded version. Leo’s heart thumped as his hangar loaded. A beat-up P-26 Peashooter sat waiting, its fabric skin practically flapping in the digital wind.

The screen flickered in the dusty back corner of Mr. Henderson’s computer lab. It was the last period on a Friday, and the only sounds were the hum of old CPUs and the frantic tapping of Leo’s keyboard.