"Betting closes in three minutes! Anyone who hasn't placed a bet, do it now. All stakes must reach my account before Free Day tomorrow for me to manage, or your bets will be void." Fingel curled up on a sofa in the common room of Dormitory Area 1, hugging his laptop as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
A dozen or so students stood around him, their expressions solemn and their eyes fixed on the screen.
Some kept track of the time, while others handled the accounts receiving the transfers. Everyone worked in orderly coordination as the seconds ticked away.
Chapter 43: Instant
Fingel's scheme worked, but in the end, six people transferred a combined total of nearly ten thousand dollars to bet on Lu Mingfei. Fingel knew five of them: Executive Department agents Ye Sheng and Jude Jiqu, and Professors Manstein, Guderian, and Schneider.
The sixth person's username was "Mountain Mist." The account's registration date marked its owner as a freshman, and theirs was the only transfer with an uneven amount.
Using his access privileges, Fingel ran a quick check. It was a recently emerged fan of Lu Mingfei who patrolled the forum relentlessly, arguing with anyone who disparaged him in practically every thread.
"Mountain Mist" was another name for heather, Norway's national flower, which symbolized solitude in the language of flowers.
Fingel gave it no further thought. He knew that the true essence of manipulating the news was never to sway everyone, but to filter out and influence the majority. In that respect, he had undoubtedly succeeded.
Now all he had to do was wait for Lu Mingfei to beat the Student Union and the Lionheart Society senseless the next day.
"Boss, we all trust your investment judgment, but is Lu Mingfei really that strong? If he actually pulls this off, wouldn't that mean Cassell College's education is a failure?" A slightly dark-skinned boy with a buzz cut, a little mustache, and thick glasses pushed his glasses up and asked calmly.
"No. It would only prove the success of Cassell College's educational philosophy, because an unprecedented genius has emerged. That's what this college truly wants right now." Fingel shook his head.
The boy nodded thoughtfully. "And a return this high is what we want."
Everyone smiled at that, pleased with the handsome returns this wager promised.
In the early morning, the clock hands aligned, and the arrival of the hour ignited the silence.
Guns of every kind roared and spat flame. Dense streams of fire poured from every window, weaving into a net that blanketed the opposing side's hiding places, trying to whittle down their forces in the opening salvo.
Once the gunfire thinned, both sides began sending small squads toward the opposing building.
Another wave of suppressive fire covered the squads from behind. Several P-90s vented conical plumes of bluish smoke, their shots merging into a continuous roar. Developed by Fabrique Nationale Herstal in Belgium, these submachine guns fired high-velocity 5.7-millimeter rounds. Their heavy magazines held fifty rounds, and they boasted a firing rate of fourteen rounds per second. Their 5.7×28-millimeter ammunition could easily penetrate body armor rated at levels III, IV, or even V, and they remained formidable even when loaded with Frigg Bullets.
But the clashes between the squads soon turned into a contest between the two sides' snipers.
A parking lot lay between the Student Union and the Lionheart Society, with almost nothing to provide cover. For snipers, killing people there was as easy as calling roll.
After several successive assaults were stopped, both sides returned to exchanging fire. Their command posts descended into chaos, voices clamoring over the radios amid heavy interference as each side jammed the other's frequencies.
Just then, a strange report came from the top floor of the Lionheart Society's building.
"Lu Mingfei spotted! Lu Mingfei spotted! Holy shit, seriously... he can use a Word Spirit!!!" A second later, the transmission went silent, as though the squad member had been incapacitated.
Chu Zihang was commanding from a middle floor. He picked up Murasame from beside him and immediately rose to head upstairs, but Lancelot, the Lionheart Society's vice president, reached out to stop him. "Let me go. You're our ace. You should face Caesar."
Chu Zihang nodded.
They had both underestimated Lu Mingfei. They had assumed he would hide and reap the rewards after both sides wore each other down, but he had attacked as soon as the battle began. Everything Fingel had posted on the Night Watch Forum had been misinformation. At the last moment, the bastard had bet tens of thousands of dollars on Lu Mingfei.
It wasn't that Lu Mingfei had no Word Spirit. He possessed a special one that could function within Word Spirit: Discipline-or perhaps the vice principal had exempted him from the domain's effects.
If he was Angers's illegitimate son, then by seniority, the vice principal would be practically his godfather!
Fingel must have known all of this perfectly well.
Lancelot was a third-year French student who had once been a candidate for president of the Lionheart Society. But Chu Zihang's arrival had won over both the former president and the Frenchman.
Fully equipped, he took several assault squad members with him and advanced toward the top floor in a column.
Throughout their advance, everyone on the top floor remained silent over the channel. It seemed they had all been wiped out.
Gun raised, Lancelot cautiously peeked out at the top of the stairs. Working with his teammates, he kept every possible angle of attack covered.
The building had only one staircase, yet Lu Mingfei had not chosen to attack from the best defensive position.
Lancelot's squad easily secured half the top floor. They searched as they advanced silently, closing the net. Along the way, they saw the "corpses" of many members stationed there. Hit by Frigg Bullets, they lay sprawled in their firing positions, seemingly without having put up much of a struggle. It had been a completely one-sided slaughter.
The good news was that Lu Mingfei's Word Spirit wasn't highly dangerous. The rooms showed only gunfire damage, most of it caused by Lionheart Society members instinctively pulling their triggers before passing out.
At the last room, Lancelot signaled a halt. Two squad members positioned themselves on either side of the door with a battering ram, while the others divided into covering and assault positions to ensure they couldn't all be taken down at once.
Under the ram's heavy blow, the wooden door's latch snapped off with a crack, and the door burst open.
The three assault members quickly rolled inside, steadied themselves, and dropped to one knee with their guns raised, covering every corner of the room.
"Vice president, Lu Mingfei isn't here."
Everyone entered the room. Apart from a sniper lying beside the window, there was indeed no sign of Lu Mingfei.
Lancelot, commanding the squad, frowned deeply. He realized he had overlooked something.
The top!
This wasn't truly the top. Above it was the bare rooftop, but it offered no cover whatsoever. Even the Lionheart Society's snipers couldn't guarantee their survival up there, so it hadn't occurred to him at all.
"To the roof!"
Lancelot gave the order.
He wasn't alarmed. If Lu Mingfei had chosen to go onto the roof, he was only courting death.
They returned to the stairs. The squad members left on guard reported no sign of Lu Mingfei, further confirming that he hadn't gone downstairs. Instead, he had chosen to trap himself.
Lancelot threw a smoke grenade toward the stairway exit onto the roof. It detonated outside the doorway, forming a cloud of smoke that expanded the defensive firing line from a narrow exit to the entire perimeter of the cloud.
The Lionheart Society members emerged from different sides of the smoke simultaneously.
This time, they met resistance. The dense gunshots almost merged into a single sound as bullets pierced the smoke and struck most of the squad with precision. But Lancelot rolled clear of the fatal attack, raised his gun, and fired straight toward the sound of Lu Mingfei's shots. He had trained to shoot blindfolded, aiming by sound.
Game over. Even a dragon couldn't dodge a bullet's speed.
But a second later, he knew what Lu Mingfei's Word Spirit was.
Lu Mingfei fired an assault rifle with one hand while holding a longsword in the other. He raised the sword and split the bullet, its Frigg tip bursting into a crimson puff against the blade.
"It's Instant!"
Lancelot shouted into his radio before a follow-up shot took him down.
Chapter 44: Sniper
Word Spirit: Instant.
A Word Spirit of extreme speed, it was both the lesser counterpart and the sole nemesis of Word Spirit: Time Zero. It multiplied the caster's movement speed, with its acceleration increasing in powers of two. First-stage Instant merely doubled one's speed, the second stage quadrupled it, the third increased it eightfold, and the fourth sixteenfold... at the seventh stage, Instant could reach 128 times normal speed.
Lu Mingfei hadn't used that Word Spirit. His physical reactions and strength alone had achieved the same effect as Instant.
After taking down Lancelot's squad, he looked up at the sky.
Small black dots first appeared overhead, trailing curved tails of smoke. Only as they drew closer did they resolve into a swarm of bucket-sized shells covering the main battlefield. Under someone's precise control, they detonated at different heights.
White smoke gushed out and fell vertically like waterfalls. Thick clouds immediately shrouded both buildings and the parking lot.
In the Student Union's command center, Caesar's staff immediately recognized them as Smoke Shells fired by mechanical smoke-generating equipment. These large smoke munitions were usually deployed by division- or brigade-level units and could produce screens several kilometers across and a hundred meters high, concealing entire troop assembly areas and important bases.
"Considering the weather, wind direction, and any modifications the Equipment Department may have made, this smoke could linger in the narrow area between the buildings for as long as ten minutes!"
Everyone understood that only the security equipment controlled by Norma could carry out an operation like this around the college. In other words, someone had called in weapons support far beyond anything available to students.
"Chu Zihang couldn't pull off something like this. His mentor Schneider wouldn't be interested in Free Day. It has to be the S-rank. Is Lu Mingfei really the principal's son?" A senior Student Union officer stared in disbelief.
Caesar, who had been watching the surveillance screens, remained silent. The view through the windows was already obscured, and even the cameras on the corners of the building were gradually being affected by the white fog.
"This is an opportunity for both sides. End the battle in ten minutes." He made his decision.
From the moment the battle began, every sniper the Student Union had stationed outside had been silently eliminated, leaving only brief cries over the channel: "Lu Mingfei!"
Lu Mingfei had plucked out their eyes, then obscured the battlefield. No one had imagined that his participation alone would completely transform Free Day.
"Now this is interesting. If the college allowed it, I'd call in equipment like this to change the battlefield too. It's like switching maps in a game." Fully armed, Caesar set out with the Student Union members, carrying his two Desert Eagles.
Across the battlefield, Chu Zihang reached the same conclusion.
They had already been struggling to break through each other's fields of fire. Staying inside the buildings would also leave them exposed to the smoke seeping through the broken windows, and they might end up being picked off one by one by Lu Mingfei using Word Spirit: Instant.
Lu Mingfei stood at the edge of the roof, quietly looking down at the sea of smoke below.
He had requested this from Angers. After reviewing information on previous Free Days, he had felt that the Student Union and Lionheart Society's combat was hardcore enough for young students, but a far cry from dragon slaying. Cassell College's records showed that humanity's war against dragons relied on alchemy, substances highly toxic to dragons, and the individual combat prowess of hybrids with high-purity bloodlines. Technology had advanced in the modern era, but according to Executive Department reports, clashes with dragons mostly occurred in dragon ruins or the Dragon Tomb, and were usually encounter battles.
Both sides lining up to exchange fire was divorced from reality.
So Lu Mingfei had proposed creating a fog of war and fighting in low visibility, just as he, Ye Sheng, and Jude Jiqu had explored the dark, intricate tunnel network of the Bronze City by flashlight.
At such close range, blades and guns were both decisive weapons. Life and death were separated by a single instant.
In his vision, the Student Union and Lionheart Society appeared as clusters of hot human silhouettes. Almost everyone had come out in force. A few remained guarding the buildings' entrances and exits, while the rest spread into small squads, avoiding column formations as much as possible and sweeping the space ahead with gunfire before advancing.
The two sides' tactics were remarkably similar.
Lu Mingfei sheathed Red Skies, gripped his assault rifle, and leaped down, landing steadily.
A four-person Lionheart Society squad happened to be right in front of him. They heard the heavy impact, and without waiting for their leader's orders, all four immediately concentrated their fire. Bullets carved slender channels through the smoke, but the only sounds were impacts against the ground and walls.
Lu Mingfei darted to their flank. His slash and bullets arrived almost simultaneously. Three fell to Frigg Bullets, leaving only the boy who had fired first.
Red Skies paused at his neck before withdrawing. Disappointed, Lu Mingfei finished him with a shot.
The boy had reacted quickly, but his judgment of the attack and his response lacked sharpness. He hadn't realized he was facing a blade at close quarters rather than gunfire. He had crouched to reduce his exposure to the bullets, practically delivering his neck to Lu Mingfei's sword.
He wasn't even close to Fingel's level.
So this was the average standard of Cassell's students?
The opposing Student Union squads soon followed the gunfire and peppered the area with scattered covering shots. Lu Mingfei evaded them easily and vanished into the fog again.
Once the Lionheart Society and Student Union squads became intermingled, neither side continued firing wildly, for fear of hitting their own people.
Small clashes erupted here and there in the smoke. When opposing squads met, only a few meters separated them. Firing, charging, dodging, or relaying information all demanded split-second reactions.
Even without using his Word Spirit, Caesar's hearing was sharper than an ordinary person's. He couldn't hear heartbeats, but picking up footsteps was more than manageable. Time and again, he scored kills through the smoke.
"We have seven squads left. In the last engagement, the Lionheart Society used gunfire to lure us in and almost wiped out three of our squads. The members on guard report that the east entrance has been taken." A senior Student Union officer gave a quiet update over the channel.
"Move into the Lionheart Society's building. The smoke is dispersing now. Visibility will soon be good enough to set up firing positions." Caesar replied quietly, "We still have one sniper."
On a small hill beside the two buildings, someone lay prone, sniper camouflage covering her deep-red Student Union combat uniform. Through her scope, she searched for anyone who wasn't a Student Union member.
"Have you seen Lu Mingfei?" someone asked over the comms.
"Can't see the Lionheart Society, can't see Lu Mingfei. God knows where that guy is," the sniper muttered.