Within 10 days of the start of Senior Assassin 2025, my best friend Hector Vash-Muñoz and I were almost immediately eliminated from the game.
Senior Assassin is played in teams of two, and each team has seven days to “kill” their target by shooting them with a water gun. If you can eliminate one target before the week is up, you and your partner move onto the next round. If you can’t, or if you yourself are splashed with water, you’re out of the game. With a 20 dollar buy-in and over 154 players, the winning pot is pretty impressive, and everyone wants to win.
After successfully tracking our first target, Kayla Nguyen, to San Francisco and eliminating her, Hector and I went into Round 2 feeling pretty unbeatable. Yet, when our Splashin App’s updated at 12 a.m. Monday morning with our new targets, we realized it would be nearly impossible to eliminate our new targets — Caleb Yu and Langdon Huynh— before the end of the week.
Hector was busy every day after school as a member of pit orchestra for the spring musical “Little Mermaid,” and I had track meets for the first half of the week and was leaving afterward to visit colleges. It also didn’t help that our targets were really invested in the game.
So the week passed and after many unsuccessful hunting attempts we failed to take them out, thus eliminating ourselves. Seeing the cold “You have been eliminated” line every time I opened the Splashin app was a continual blow to my general self-esteem. Having my friends clown me in class for getting eliminated so early also didn’t help.
Maybe the average duo would quit — throw in the towel and be content to watch the game from the sidelines — but not us.
Because on April 3 at 10:34 p.m. it was announced that periodically throughout each week, there would be special immunity objects hidden somewhere for teams to find.
“The team that finds it will have an automatic spot in the next round, no matter if both of them are dead this round,” the Splashin post read.
“This is our ticket back in,” Hector texted me exactly one minute after the post dropped.
So with that, we had a new goal: Get the special immunity and get back into the game.
Now, it’s been over a month since that post, and Hector and I have remained unsuccessful, but not for lack of trying.
Everytime an immunity post drops, we drop everything we’re doing and get back out on the field.
Studying for a physics test? Put your Crocs in sports mode and run.
Coming out of the movie theater at 9:30 p.m.? Drop the popcorn and get in the car.
Buying food after school? Leave a big tip — there’s no time to waste.
You’d think with our dedication and exuberant passion, we’d be back in the game in no time. But despite our best efforts, Hector and I have failed again and again.
We’re always a second shy of getting the immunity object, or we head to the wrong location when our first guess was right.
At first, it was frustrating seeing our chances of winning slip through our fingers. But, as we reached the 7th week of the game, we’ve learned to take it a little less seriously. It is, after all, only a game.
Besides that, running around town trying to find these objects has allowed Hector and me to spend more time with each other outside of school — which is really nice, given that we’re heading to different colleges in the fall. The whole reason we joined Senior Assassin was to do something fun together, and combined with the adrenaline spike and chaotic frenzy of racing against the whole senior class, it’s a good way to close out our last year of high school.
Our original goal was to win, of course, and now, despite all the obstacles we’ve gone through, I can confidently say we have done that, albeit in a less traditional, less measurable way.
As I write this, we have yet to successfully return to the game, but who knows? Maybe by the time you read this, we’ll have already won.
