For some reason, the latch inside the locker was completely jammed and wouldn't budge.
"Stay calm." Conan took a deep breath and tried to block out the ticking of the second hand. In the cramped locker, he shifted his body and reached for his shoes.
"Without a soccer ball to cushion it, using the Enhanced Foot Strength Shoes directly might injure me... But this isn't the time to worry about such details!"
After 0.1 seconds of hesitation, Conan decided that his life was more important— the bomb above his head was about to go off. A sore leg was better than being blown into a grilled skewer at point-blank range.
Having weighed the situation, he grimly turned the switch and kicked with all his strength!
Bang!
A Fake Elementary School Student howled and clutched his foot.
—The Enhanced Foot Strength Shoes had failed to activate. Without their technological boost, the strength of a first-grade elementary school student's leg couldn't budge the Storage Room locker door at all.
The pain in his foot made Conan suck in several blank-minded breaths. When he came back to himself, he stared at his shoes in disbelief. Why had they malfunctioned at such a critical moment, just like the latch above?!
"...Is my luck really this bad?"
At that moment, the saying that heaven never seals off every path felt like a joke.
Conan looked at the metal locker trapping him, then listened to the bomb above his head. Suddenly, he felt as though he had moved into an urn ahead of schedule. After staring blankly for a moment, escape plans flashed through his mind one after another, only to be dismissed one by one.
In the end, Conan silently took out his phone and opened his Mailbox.
...At this point, he might as well