The CC1000 Express puffed out white steam and came to a steady stop at Cassell College's platform.
The sunlight was glorious, shining on the red maples blanketing the hills and the medieval castles, dazzling enough to hurt the eyes.
"We're here." Nono rose from her seat and stretched luxuriously, her dark red hair dancing in the morning light.
She produced a long black gun case from somewhere and swung it over her shoulder.
"Fingel, you're responsible for taking our S-rank to room 303 in Zone 1. Help him pick up his uniform and student ID while you're at it."
"Why me?! I paid tuition too, and today's the Day of Freedom!" Fingel wailed. "I'm already in my eighth year, and I still have to babysit freshmen!"
"Are you going or not?" Nono tapped the gun case, her face expressionless.
"Mission accepted! Safe travels, ma'am. May every shot be a headshot!" Fingel immediately snapped to attention and saluted, changing his expression faster than turning a page.
Nono ignored him, jumped off the train without looking back, and soon vanished into the shadows between the buildings.
"Come on, brother." Fingel sighed and grabbed his battered duffel bag. "You're lucky. You get to catch Cassell College's greatest annual tradition the moment you enroll..."
Whoosh-bang!
Lu Mingfei's toes had barely touched the ground when, thirty meters ahead, a cloud of blood suddenly burst from a male student's uniformed chest. As though struck by a massive sledgehammer, he toppled stiffly onto the lawn.
"Holy shit! The Day of Freedom's started! Find cover!"
Fingel let out a string of squeals like a pig being slaughtered and, with a fluidity utterly at odds with his enormous bulk, slid on his knees into a corner of the Odin Statue's base.
Lu Mingfei watched bullets streaking every which way and twitched his nose, searching the wind for the smell of gunpowder.
Fake bullets, fake blood, fake deaths.
"Boring," he muttered.
He walked behind the statue and crouched beside Fingel, about to ask what was going on.
The phone in his pocket suddenly vibrated. Old Tang had sent him a QQ Message.
Old Tang: "Brother, did you get there okay? What's that diploma mill's campus like?"
Lu Mingfei glanced up at the campus square and typed back: "Nothing but lunatics. Classes haven't even started, and they're out here playing live-action Counter-Strike. They've got way too much time on their hands."
Old Tang replied at lightning speed: "Shit, so they really are just buying degrees. Rich kids sure know how to have fun. Be careful. You're not in the same social class as those people. Don't get suckered into a pyramid scheme trying to fit into a circle you don't belong in!"
Reading the wisecracks on the screen, Lu Mingfei shook his head and slipped his phone away.
Suddenly, a shrill whistle cut through the air. A specially made tranquilizer round came straight for the space between his eyebrows.
Lu Mingfei instinctively sensed it coming, but he had yet to truly react.
Humm-
Ripples spread through the air, and a hexagonal barrier unfolded out of nowhere.
Smack!
The high-speed bullet struck the thin membrane, instantly flattened into a metal disk, and fell with a clink in front of his shoes.
Fingel, who was clutching his head, happened to glimpse the scene through his fingers. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, and his jaw hit the ground.
"Holy shit... Realm of Dust?! Instant activation without chanting Dragon Script?!" Fingel sucked in a breath. "That's an S-rank for you. You're a goddamn monster!"
Lu Mingfei stared at the lump of plastic on the ground and let Fingel draw his own conclusions.
Outside, the gunfire gradually thinned. "Corpses" lay strewn across the lawn amid billowing red smoke.
The field had been cleared. At last, it was time for the big fish to appear.
At opposite ends of the square stood a blond young master holding two Desert Eagles and a stone-faced man in black holding a long blade in a reverse grip.
"It's Caesar from the Student Union against Chu Zihang from the Lionheart Society," Fingel said.
After a few ridiculous lines like, "If you've made it this far, you're stronger than I thought," the two slammed into each other. Sparks flew as metal clashed, and the wind from their blades even sheared through the shrubs in the flower beds. As Fingel rubbed his hands together and delivered earth-shattering commentary, the pair fought with flowing precision, their movements beautifully poised.
What kind of shitty turn-based game was this? Why were people still fighting with cold weapons in the twenty-first century?
Lu Mingfei suddenly found it ridiculous.
That cold-blooded old bastard Gendo Ikari would shove his own son straight into an EVA like a disposable biological component if it meant winning. He never bothered with chivalry. If it could secure victory, he would exploit every resource available, even clones that violated every moral and ethical boundary.
He thought of Misato Katsuragi. When an Angel descended from orbit, she had still gritted her teeth and roared over the comms in a cracking voice, recalculating its trajectory so that three pilots could simultaneously catch an Angel with the mass of an asteroid with their bare hands.
He even thought of Asuka. That young lady, normally as proud as a peacock, had kept fighting when the mass-produced EVAs surrounded her, even after they bit through her intestines and stabbed out her eye. Like a rabid dog driven into a corner, she had spewed blood in the cockpit and screamed, "I'll kill every last one of you!" fighting furiously until the very last moment.
Survival was a filthy, brutal struggle to strangle one another in the mud. As long as you could drive a knife into the enemy's core, you could bite with your teeth, gouge with your hands, or ram with your head.
Once the umbilical power cable was unplugged, Shinji would shed all human reason in desperation, crouching over the ruins like a beast to devour an Angel's heart raw. That savagery, capable of tearing even the barrier of the heart apart, was ten thousand times more terrifying than these two young masters, who observed aristocratic etiquette and still remembered to strike a pose.
There was only one explanation for how these dragon-slaying elites with superhuman bloodlines could be raised to be so genteel: the dragonkind here was simply too weak. So weak that these young masters and ladies, with chivalry on the brain, still had time to treat an apocalyptic crisis as a stage for their adolescent hormones. If the Fourth Angel crashed into this lawn instead, none of them would last even ten seconds.
"What a world. So peaceful it puts you to sleep."
Lu Mingfei tilted his head back, resting it against the cold statue and feeling the warmth of sunlight on his face.
Their glittering blades on the lawn reflected in his eyes, and a nameless fury suddenly flared in Lu Mingfei's chest. Why had the people he knew dissolved into LCL, while these lucky young masters got to spout pretty words and treat war as a clean, gentlemanly game?
"Coming through, buddy."
On the roof of the Library Clock Tower, Nono lay behind a low wall, slowly sweeping her scope's crosshairs across the square.
A figure who had no business being on the battlefield was emerging from the statue's shadow. He was now walking straight toward Caesar and Chu Zihang.
Nono bit her lip. She had no idea what Lu Mingfei intended to do, and she couldn't make out his expression through the scope. He looked like someone who had been woken up by a racket and was now heading toward its source. If he only wanted to walk over and make a few sarcastic remarks, that was no big deal. Caesar had a thick skin, and Chu Zihang wasn't the kind to draw his blade over a few words.
But if he attacked...
Her index finger returned to the trigger as she hesitated over whether to leave the roof and go stop him.
A Frigg Tranquilizer Round struck her. Nono's knees buckled, and she slumped onto the low wall. Struggling to turn her head, she looked toward the church's bell tower opposite her.
Susie knelt in the bronze bell's shadow and smugly lifted her gun in a salute to Nono.
Nono was so furious her chest hurt. Her mouth opened several times before she managed to squeeze out a sound.
"Su... sie, you sneaky... sneaky..."
The rest of her curse dissolved into the wind in an indistinct mumble. Her tongue no longer obeyed her. She took one final look toward the square. Lu Mingfei had passed the flower bed, and Caesar and Chu Zihang seemed to have noticed him at the same time. Nono desperately wanted to see what happened next, but her eyelids were already as heavy as lead.
"You little brat... just wait till I wake up..."
In the last instant before she lost consciousness, she struggled to raise her hand and gave Susie the middle finger.