55 First blood.

"Mao, you there?" Rune's voice rang in my ears.

"Yeah."

"What's the situation?" His voice was rather calm. Unlike Yuuno. "Location, antagonists, and situation." The gibberish he spouted made total sense to me.

Our lingo was in check. I was used to it. We had been doing this in-game quite a bit after all. The years together online helped us grow together as comrades. They helped us reach a level of understanding only two FPS squad players could have.

It built up to this day.

"Well, I'm in a classroom on the first floor. I don't know the location, purpose, number of the hostiles. I don't need them right now. But I do need access to the contact system and preferably the cams."

"What do you want to find?"

"Luha's location."

"Gotcha." His voice muted and I could hear the sound of my breath. I had seemingly composed myself. "They seem to have a disrupter in the server room… Just get rid of that."

"Where is it?"

"I'll guide you through the blueprints. Go upstairs." He instructed.

"I see." I got up, and while tugging my body close to the wall headed in the direction opposite to where the guard was. In this building, there were two staircases on either side. The one the hostile got up from was the one near the front gate.

I made an educated guess that the one away from the front gate would be the staircase free from intruders. But just to make sure I increased my senses.

There was a power that belonged to the people who had perfect control over some facet of mana. Called mana mapping.

Mana mapping wasn't sending waves out and then reading them as they bounced through objects, like echolocation. It was literally taking in and understanding mana that already existed in the environment.

I extended my search radius to around the corners and started making my way up the staircase. I would avoid any path there was an intruder on. Which wasn't hard. For some reason, the main building was rather empty. But that might have been because out of the elementary, middle, and junior high, our building was the least populated.

For some reason it felt like everyone around me was moving in an organised manner, as if they were planning something in particular for this building.

A feat only possible if they had access to the blueprint of this place.

'Focus. First, get to the server room, and figure the rest out later.'

Rune sent the blueprint right to my lens. I followed it.

Soon, I was on the same floor as the server room. But there seemed to be a problem. A guard, singular, was stationed inside.

"Rune, there's someone in that room." I said while hiding to the side of the sliding door.

The hostile was fully suited and would be near impossible to kill with bare hands.

"You reckon you can take him on 1v1?" Rune asked.

"Hell, nah." I answered truthfully.

"Run then."

"But then we won't know where Luha i-"

"If you want to know that you would need server access. You can't get that with the guy in there. Staying here any longer might alert the guard. Getting caught would do more harm than good. You can always look for her manually. As for contacting her... Well, you can't."

He was right. Which made it really hard to argue.

"HOW ABOUT!" I had a brilliant idea.

"Shhhh."

Oh yeah, we were stealthy.

"How about I lure him out with my phone and then run?"

I pulled my phone up and looked at the 5-star on my screen with melancholy. I wasn't sad about transferring or losing the phone. I was sad about the fact that I didn't even get to see the 5-star pull after spending so much money on it.

"Rune, back up my phone."

"You just want to keep the gacha don't you? Like hell, I'll let you keep the waifus even I couldn't pull."

"What if I told you I had pictures of Yuuno eating and doing stupid stuff on it?"

"Gotcha. Do I back you up to your gaming cloud?" Still a siscon.

"Yep."

A loading bar ran across my screen and the phone had been backed up.

Right after, I turned to YouTube and pulled up some gun videos.

"That's your brilliant idea?"

"It's worth a shot at least." I justified.

"I mean…" Rune didn't sound convinced. Oh well, it was too late now.

I turned the volume to 100, hit play, and slid in across the floor over to the other side of the hallway like I was slowly rolling a grenade. As soon as I did that, I hid inside the door.

My phone was the latest gen guyPhone™ , it obviously had good speakers. Speakers good enough to convince even me that there was a legitimate gun in the room.

Obviously, it was good enough to drag the hostile out.

"YES!" I fist pumped and snuck into the server room while he was out. "Turn the invisiShade™ on. It'll take him even longer to find the phone with that."

"On it." Rune confirmed.

"By the way what am I looking for?"

"An antenna."

I turned through the server room. There were many. I mean... it was a server room.

But luckily Rune could see what I was seeing through the lens. "Ah, that one!" A second later a red AR circle marked a specific antenna and locked onto it.

It pointed at a yellow and green antenna that was connected to the USB port on our computer.

"This one? Do I pull it?"

"Yes. And after you do, wait for a ping. We'll send the server over to our internal one. The antenna and the entire server room would be useless after that. Put the antenna back before running back out... So you don't arouse suspicion."

"I see." I said while pulling the thing out. It wasn't like I was technologically illiterate. I mean I was a pioneer of technology in my era. Technology that this era still hasn't discovered. Like the reincarnation spell.

It was just that I didn't quite catch up with the electrical sides of this world yet. Science always intrigued me more.

I heard a ping.

"Wait a sec…. And done. Put it back and get out of there." Rune told me.

"Okay."

I put the antenna back and prepared to rush outside the room and as you'd know it- there was a man waiting there. I stopped and hid back inside immediately.

The man was standing in front of the window and looking right into the server room. He probably wasn't planning on moving. If he tried to get back inside I could have at least used the element of surprise to pull one over him. But nope. He just stood there. Waiting patiently.

I really did use up all my luck on that one gacha.

"Time to fight I guess."

I silently took off my shoes and their laces. Then I wrapped the anklets tightly around my index finger. I needed to get rid of that hostile if I had a chance at getting to Luha.

He was clearly on guard after having been pranked by a smartphone.

The hardest part was that I couldn't see his face.

"Hey what are you doing?" Rune asked while watching me prepare.

"Getting ready to hunt."

"You'd better not. Just stay inside and hope for the best. There's no way you're winning against him. He has a ranged weapon and the path is a st-"

"Shhh."

I broadened my Mana Senses to track his breathing. Any human under a tense situation cracks his pattern. I just had to wait for that.

One breathe. Two Breathes. Three Bre- Misses.

'RUN!'

I took that one fraction of a second and charged to the side opposite to the one he held the gun in. He was next to the window. And we were on the third floor. The man instantly put his guard up. He was trained.

Too bad I wasn't aiming for his guarded chest in the first place.

It was only a moment but he panicked. He didn't have mana from what I could tell. He was obviously unable to yield body strengthening.

I put as much force into my leg as I could and jumped right into the window behind him. As he saw my trajectory he pulled his gun out but it was already too late.

My legs shattered the glass and with the lace in my hand, I strangled him as inertia let me fall through the window. I used my weight to hang off his neck.

Unluckily I was a little too late so his fingers prevented him from getting his neck broken immediately.

Too bad for him I weighed 60 kilos and with the 40-kilo weights on each appendage, that JiiJii strapped on me, I weighed 220 kilos in total.

I held my place looking up straight at him trying to maintain his life. He knew that if he jumped, he would die, and if he suffocated any longer, he would still die.

I figured that I had to give my acknowledgement to whoever made the shoelaces… I mean the ability to take that much weight was actually insane. That's something you would expect from the best schooling in the country. The gamble paid off for the first time today.

The man valiantly struggled. Moving his body right, left, front, back… until his hands stopped altogether.

I heard a crack and a slight wobble in my hands.

My first blood this life.

I reverted somewhat to the person I was before. But this time I knew that I was in the right. These people aimed to kill us and I stopped that before they could pull something like that off.

Somewhat accomplished, I finally turned my attention outside the building. Immediately faced consequences and felt a sharp pain in my head. The sight was appalling.

"Are you really fcking serious right now?" I sighed.

8 guns pointed straight at a boy hanging from the window of the second floor using a lace wrapped around a dead assailant who anchored him inside. My situation was skewed.

"Guess I'm gonna diiieee die this time."