Alex Rider, the top agent of MI6, had failed.
Alex couldn't believe it. Even after all he had been through, he had managed to fail the simplest assignment he had ever been given.
Disbelieving, Alex thought back to all of the hardest assignments he had taken on. He had taken the crash course with the SAS and survived kicking Wolf out of the plane, he managed to save millions of school children from Harold Sayle and his virus-ridden Stormbreakers, and hell, he even swam with the man's Portuguese Man of War.
Alex had sleighed Dr. Grief and defeated his clone (albeit he did come back to extract revenge), lived after foiling the Triads, rode the Cribber, survived a shark encounter, almost got adopted by a former Soviet general, and stopped Alexei Sarov and his destroy-the-world-so-it-can-be-a-better-place-by-blowing-up-nuclear-submarines plan.
He survived the real-life version of 'Feathered Serpent,' flew aboard Air Force One, was saved by a Russian assassin (multiple times), found and joined Scorpia, learned to become an assassin, shot the deputy head of MI6 (and failed), stopped Scorpia from killing millions of people, and was shot by a sniper. And he still hadn't ever failed an assignment.
But that wasn't even half of it. Alex smirked at the irony of it all. He was the youngest human to go to space and in doing so, saved the capital and Pentagon of the US. He met his godfather and learned of his betrayal to his parents, foiled another of Scorpia's plans, played poker with the rich, was poisoned and almost became crocodile food, and flooded the genetically modified plants that could've killed half the world. Alex could have laughed out loud. He had accomplished more things than others could dream of and he wasn't even 15.
And after saving the world, foiling evil plans, getting shot at, drowned, and hanged above crocodiles, Alex had failed the easiest assignment of all… his maths test.