Running Late
The very first scenario in Ero Ability Shooters is the Entrance Ceremony.
You take a seat in the auditorium, sit through the principal's interminable speech, and then the student council president — Bianca, the heroine famous as that platinum-blonde dairy-cow beauty — shows off her magnificent cleavage while offering words of wisdom to a hall full of freshly enrolled first-years. That is how the scenario is supposed to begin.
And yet here I was.
I was fucked.
The time was 10:30.
This was not a matter of having missed the ceremony by a little. The ceremony was over. Classes were already in session.
As for why I was late — I had bolted out of the house determined to reach the academy by any means necessary. And then I remembered, all over again, that this was not a game. This was reality. There was no convenient system waiting to teleport you to the correct scenario location the moment you stepped out of My Room. Not in this cold, unforgiving world.
So I grabbed Angel and told her to navigate, fast. The answer I got back was a completely useless, "I've never been here either?"
Feeling the full, crushing weight of how thoroughly fucked I was, I put my brilliant brain to work and arrived at a single answer.
A phone!
If this was reality, I had to have a phone somewhere. I tore the room apart searching, and eventually I found it.
Fuck yes! Found it! That's my boy! Now I just punch it into the GPS and go!
"As expected of the Player!"
That flicker of relief died the instant I turned the screen on. A flood of texts and missed calls packed the display. I didn't read them all, but I could guess the general contents well enough that my head started spinning.
Getting to the academy came first. I found my way somehow, and I arrived.
Which brought me here — the academy's front gate.
A solid barrier the size of a decent two-story house rose in front of me, and across the top, enormous letters were painted in pitch black.
GREAT DEMON SUBJUGATION ACADEMY
Whoa. Seeing it in person, it really did have a certain grandeur to it.
"Player? What do we do? It's closed."
Angel fluttered her wings as she spoke. The hour when students would have been filing through had long since passed. Between the walls, a grate of pitch-black iron bars sealed the entrance shut.
"Hey, Angel. Don't worry. You know who I am."
"Who else would you be? You're the Player."
This clueless angel, I swear.
"Hah... I'm the guy who beat the hard mode Demon King with a sword. The pinnacle of control."
Crack. Crack. I loosened my hands and feet, bounced lightly on my toes, and stepped up to the gate.
"Hup!"
I kicked off the wall, leaped onto the iron bars, jammed a foot into a gap, whipped my body around, and used the spin to launch back onto the wall — then kicked off again and flung myself at the bars once more. Over and over. Repeating the motion, I climbed until I reached the top of the grate, sprang high, cleared the bars entirely, and tumbled through the air in a string of midair somersaults before landing on the other side.
Ahh. A perfect hundred out of ten.
"Player... how did you do that?"
Angel stared at me in open shock.
"Give early-game Jeong Jojun twenty Agility and this is nothing."
The agility required for that kind of acrobatic nonsense was exactly twenty. Skipping those ten points in Stamina and dumping them into Agility instead had been the perfect call.
"Let's go. Now!"
"Where to?"
"Where else? To class."
I already knew where my class was. The room packed with every important supporting character and heroine in the game. Class 1-5 — the first-year classroom built for the Player.
"Just run!!!!"
"Wait for meee~!!!"
Getting to class came first. This uptight academy was more than capable of throwing around words like "expulsion" and kicking me out on the spot. The second I walked through that door, I was going to slam my forehead into the floor.
"Hmm!"
Bianca watched the man's receding figure on the screen, her eyes sparkling. The documents on the desk contained the information of the man who had just vaulted the front gate with those extraordinary movements.
Selected Class: Swordsman
A freshman who had enrolled as the one and only Swordsman in the entire academy. No — not merely among the freshmen. He was the only male student in the academy's entire history to enroll as a Swordsman.
She had wondered what kind of person he must be, for that notoriously picky board of directors to recognize Swordsman as a legitimate new class...
To think he would turn out to be the kind of interesting boy who showed up late on day one and hopped the wall to get to school.
"This is fun!"
Clap! Bianca brought her hands together as if she had made a decision, and her magnificent chest bounced in time with the motion.
"Student Council President, what should we do?"
The woman with the blue bob standing ramrod-straight at Bianca's side asked the question, and Bianca answered.
"Let's watch him for now. We'll find out soon enough just how impressive he really is."
In the class ranking match coming up, that is.
Bianca swallowed the rest of those words, opened the second drawer of the desk where she kept the files she paid special attention to, and slid Jeong Jojun's record inside.
"I do hope he's impressive enough to contribute to our student council~"
She gave the drawer a couple of encouraging taps, then gathered the countless documents scattered across her desk and got back to work.
I ran like a madman and finally arrived.
Just below the ceiling hung a wooden plaque.
This was my class.
A tardy student from the very first day...
Hahh. A disappointing first appearance, and yes, I was nervous — but a real man acts rather than regrets.
Rattle.
I threw the sliding door open with all the swagger I could muster.
Ahh. Faces I knew well. The familiar supporting characters and heroines filling the room... and our smoking-hot homeroom teacher, her formal suit worn loose and half-undone.
To every last one of them, I—
"I'm so sorry!!!!"
I snapped into a crisp, regulation ninety-degree bow.
"I'm sorry once again for being late!!!!"
This time I even pulled out the pinnacle of all apologies — the Grand Kowtow — pressing my forehead to the floor to express the full depths of my remorse.
A strange silence settled over the room.
Right. My apology must have been insufficient.
"I'm so sorry!!!"
Then how about this — Jeong Jojun's Special Scorpion Apology Bow. The key was to remain in the full prostration while extending one leg forward, holding it pointed like a scorpion's stinger.
Agility twenty, baby.
"Hey."
What broke the eerie silence was a single word from our homeroom teacher, her voice husky and devastatingly sexy.
"Yes, ma'am!"
I sprang to my feet and snapped to attention.
"Come here and take a beating."
A monstrous punch buried itself in my gut.
Urgh! Getting hit is not my kink!
Thud! Thud! A relentless barrage of blows followed. I curled into a ball and took every one of them.
"S-spare me!"
Apparently deciding I had been hit enough, the teacher clicked her tongue — tsk! — and hauled me to my feet.
"Hey, tardy. You're Jeong Jojun, right?"
"Y-yes, ma'am! That's me!"
"Hahh..."
She sighed and scratched her head. Ohh... for a split second I caught a glimpse of her cleavage.
"What kind of headache just walked into my class? Nngh..."
She sighed at me again, then waved her hand as if she were done with the whole affair.
"Fine. Get to the back and don't interrupt class."
"Yes, ma'am!"
I scanned the room. One seat remained in the back row. And next to it—
"Hah!"
A cat-like girl with reddish-brown twin-tails whose eyes had just met mine. Alice was sitting there.
"Ahem...."
What was I supposed to do about this.
I shuffled over, sat down beside her, and offered a lame little "Ahaha... hey?" — only to receive a cold, merciless "Shut up" in return.
Guh!
"Ugh... what kind of lunatic got assigned to my class..."
The homeroom teacher scratched her head, then picked up a stick of white chalk from the podium as if to resume the lesson my entrance had so thoroughly derailed.
"You all know why you enrolled in this academy, right? This place exists to cultivate the talents you possess — your abilities and your skill as shooters — and raise you into demon-killing weapons."
"However," she added, pointing the chalk straight at me.
"That freak over there."
"Yes?!"
"Yeah, you. As far as I know, the only talents in this world capable of subjugating demons are abilities and shooting. But that freak somehow received a talent called Swordsman."
At the teacher's words, every classmate except Alice turned to look at me. Hmm. This kind of attention was actually quite nice. A novelty I had never experienced during solo play.
"Well, the board of directors officially recognized it, so a mere teacher like me won't argue about talent any further..."
She grinned, crushing the chalk in her grip as she spoke.
"But if my student turns out to be a worm, that's a different conversation."
A worm...
I couldn't help it. A small laugh slipped out.
It was the complete opposite of what I used to hear on the game community boards — that insane monster bastard, a lunatic so overleveled he's gone past rotten and evaporated.
Taking my laugh as defiance, the teacher raised an eyebrow with a low "Oho~" and went on.
"And that goes for the rest of you, not just that freak. From now on, I kill the worms in my class."
BANG!
She slammed the podium with a statement dripping with charisma.
"And starting now, as you all know, we'll be holding the class ranking match to sort out the maggots in this class. Line up outside."
Ohh... it was finally starting.
The biggest event in the Entrance Ceremony scenario — the class ranking match. The higher your rank here, the higher the affection you could earn from the heroines. A premium event.
Rattle...
Alice stood from her seat without a word. I stood with her and casually tried to talk.
"Hey, Alice, about earlier..."
"Hey."
Her reddish-brown twin-tails whipped around as she turned to look at me.
"I told you to shut up..."
She pressed her lips into a tight, pointed line, making it abundantly clear she was pissed.
"Y-yes, ma'am."
Watching Alice stride out of the classroom and leave me behind, I made a resolution. I needed to score some serious points in this class ranking match. And Alice was not the only one I needed to impress.
I flicked my eyes forward. A girl with flowing purple hair stood up, stretching through a long, lazy yawn.
The other heroine in the class — Violet.
She had a laid-back, unhurried personality about everything, but in complete contrast to that temperament, she was overflowing with enormous pride in her own skill. And this event was not actually about Alice. It was the single most important event for capturing Violet.
If the player crushed Violet with overwhelming skill and took first place in the class ranking match, Violet would feel inferior, become obsessed with the player, and the whole thing would eventually lead all the way to that insanely dirty signature line — You might have me beat in skill, but you're weak when it comes to sex~ — and the H-scene that followed.
Yeah. This event was how I patched things up with Alice and planted a flag with Violet. Two birds, one stone. A two-for-one special.
"Player! You got this!"
Sensing a man's resolve, Angel popped into existence beside me and cheered.
Alright. Let's do this, Jeong Jojun.
Time to show them the skills of the guy they used to call that insane monster bastard.