It was Lu Ren's turn to serve.
He stood behind the baseline, spinning the volleyball in his hands. Unlike last time, he didn't back up several meters to get a running start. The muscle at the back of his right thigh no longer hurt, but the terrifying sensation of it nearly snapping still lingered in his mind. His health bar was full again, but the psychological damage was probably about the size of half the court.
"Not going to jump-serve?"
Seeing Lu Ren standing still, Tanaka Ryūnosuke instinctively took two steps forward and stopped near the three-meter line. Kageyama Tobio moved up with him. Clearly, they both assumed that after his painful lesson last time, the rookie would choose the safest option: an underhand serve.
The kind people commonly called a "free point."
Looking at their positions, Lu Ren could barely suppress a grin.
You guessed right. It is an underhand serve, Lu Ren thought. But who says an underhand serve has to be a soft little ball that barely clears the net?
He glanced up at the gym's vaulted ceiling. Karasuno's gym was old, but it certainly had plenty of height. The rows of lights hung at least a dozen meters above the floor.
For a gamer, using the map to your advantage was basic. If he couldn't win on the horizontal plane, he'd just switch dimensions.
Lu Ren turned sideways and gently tossed the ball up with his left hand. It rose no higher than his head. The instant it began to fall, he dropped his body sharply, clenched his right hand into a fist, and used the twisting force of his core to punch hard at the underside of the ball, like a rising dragon punch.
Thump!
A dull impact.
It wasn't the sound of hitting the center of the ball. It was pure, brutal upward force.
As if fitted with a vertical thruster, the volleyball shot straight toward the ceiling, without the slightest forward arc.
"Huh? Did he hit it out?" Tanaka froze for a moment and tipped his head back.
The ball climbed higher and higher, disappearing into the blinding halo of the overhead lights. For one second, it vanished from everyone's sight.
"No, it's still in!" Sawamura Daichi shouted from the sideline.
After reaching its peak, the ball finally began to fall.
From that height, gravity accelerated its descent until it was moving faster and faster. And because Lu Ren hadn't struck it with a flat surface, the ball spun strangely as it fell.
Tanaka Ryūnosuke stood near where it was coming down, his head tipped back. For a moment, the lights above dazzled him. By the time he picked out the ball again, it was already plummeting like a meteor.
"I've got it!"
Tanaka shouted and brought his hands together, ready to receive it overhead. To him, a ball coming straight down was the easiest kind to handle. He just had to wait for it to drop.
But he overlooked one thing.
An object falling from a height of over a dozen meters moved much faster near the ground than the human eye expected. And when someone stared up at a falling object, their sense of balance and distance could be thrown badly off.
The ball was here.
Tanaka confidently reached out.
Whoosh—
The volleyball grazed his fingertips with a rush of air and slipped right between his hands.
Smack!
It slammed into the floor less than five centimeters behind Tanaka's heel.
The gym fell silent.
Tanaka remained frozen in his receiving stance, like a character model that had gotten stuck after losing its connection.
"Out? No... it landed in." Kageyama Tobio stared at the spot where the ball had hit, his expression grim.
The scoreboard flipped. 6:1.
"Nice!"
Lu Ren jumped excitedly behind the baseline and pumped his fist. "The Physics Engine never lies! High-altitude drops really are a killer move!"
He'd seen this "High Serve" in a highlight reel from the Spring High tournament. At the time, he'd thought it was practically made for lazy people who didn't want to run around. It required no exhausting run-up, and the gym lights could give the opponent a "blindness" debuff.
He hadn't expected to land a critical hit on his first try.
"So this is what they mean by, 'If you read enough guides, there's no boss you can't beat'?" Lu Ren looked at his fist, feeling as if a whole new world had opened up to him.
On the sideline, Sawamura Daichi stroked his chin, his expression growing thoughtful.
"This kid..." Sugawara Kōshi stood beside him and couldn't help marveling. "His form's awful, and everything he does is unorthodox, but he seems to know instinctively how to make things difficult for people. If I were seeing that serve for the first time, I might misjudge it too."
"The important thing is that he dared to try it," Sawamura Daichi said gravely. "A regular beginner would be panicking by now, just trying to get the ball over the net. He's thinking about how to use the lights and the height to outsmart his opponents. That guy's head isn't full of volleyball. It's full of tactics."
From then on, the match swung decisively in Team B's favor.
Lu Ren might have been short on stamina, but he knew his role well. In this dungeon, he didn't need to be the main carry. He just needed to be a support who didn't make mistakes—and, while he was at it, toss a few debuffs at the other side.
The real main carry was Tsukishima Kei.
The tall, bespectacled boy had a nasty personality, but his talent for blocking was downright enviable.
"Touch!"
Tsukishima once again read Kageyama's intentions perfectly and got his fingers on Tanaka Ryūnosuke's spike. The ball slowed, and Yamaguchi Tadashi barely managed to dig it up from the back row.
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