Neo crouched in the arena dirt, balanced on three limbs. His right hand clutched a dagger, its narrow edge slit across his left eye and held defensively before his face.
Panting, he stared intently at the woman standing tall at the other end of the arena, she was holding a training pistol and twirling it while smirking at him.
"Is that all you've got, Sparky?"
Neo's right eye twitched.
Calling him by his last name was enough, but adding a "y" at the end of it pissed him off, as he could be easily taunted by staining his family name, now that only 'he' held it.
"Crazy bitch..."
Neo muttered, but it was enough for the woman to hear it, making her entire innocent-looking face turn ugly.
She aimed the pistol at Neo, raining pellets on him.
Neo ran in circles, dodging the pellets while shielding his face with a narrow slit of his dagger, at least not letting his eyes be blinded by them.
Panting from another round of dodging, Neo chased the woman who was now reloading her pistol, and was kiting him to the bitter end.
It was a mismatch from the start.
Their speed was almost equal, yet their range was not.
Even throwing his own dagger wasn't an option either, for with any slight movement that let his face free from the woman's sight, she targeted it, aiming at his eyes.
"Surrender now, Sparky... you can't even get near me."
Neo's face contorted. Though he was good enough at using weapons, his reaction time wasn't fast enough to deflect all the pellets using a dagger.
Adding the continuous taunt of the woman calling him 'Sparky' made him hot-headed, wanting to tear her apart and see her crying on her knees.
"All that speed and you still fight like a coward, Stella."
Stella smirked, no one was fool enough to fight melee using a gun.
Unless it was her, the prodigy who also excelled in hand-to-hand combat in their school.
She really loved to destroy the face of Neo, but ending his suffering soon was kind of mercy she doesn't want to give… not to him.
And then, another round of running and shooting happened once again.
Unable to hit Stella with a dagger, Neo would do anything to hurt her, even just by words... Running around covering his face while shouting 'hag', 'cow,' 'bitch', 'witch', anything ungentlemanly towards her.
Well, he believed in gender equality... and for him, Stella was more manly than himself, the protector of all female classmates who were weak enough to cry from Neo's sharp mouth.
The shooting and dodging continued for another minute.
Stella now didn't have a pellet in her pistol, giving Neo time to scratch his itching body from the pellets that had hit him.
"Out of ammo, Stella? Now we're on my terms!"
Stella just shrugged it off, and with a burst from her legs, she immediately pounced at him, aiming her gentle hands towards Neo's face.
Neo's trained mind measured where Stella's foot would land and immediately put his left foot on it.
'Good!'
Stella's foot landed just above his foot, stumping it so hard that Neo's face contorted from the pain, and when he tried to pull it to make her lose her balance, Neo saw Stella smiled mockingly at him.
'Not good!'
Stella used his own momentum, her body twisting like a viper.
Neo dodged the initial fist, but not the follow-up grapple that locked around his nape as they hit the dirt in a tangle of limbs.
Stella's lock was iron-tight, depriving him of oxygen but not enough for him to lose consciousness.
And when his vision started to black and blur, panic stirred up in him.
'Tap! I need to tap!'
Neo's right hand was pinned beneath him, became useless. His left hand flailed wildly, slapping at her side, her back, the hard ground—any surface to signal his surrender.
In his blind, oxygen-deprived panic, his palm finally found a surface and pressed hard.
A collective gasp sucked the air from the arena.
The surface wasn't hard ground.
It was soft, and unmistakably rounded.
Neo even heard someone shouting 'Lucky bastard!'
"Pervert!"
Stella screamed, her grip vanished instantaneously, and crawled sitting atop of him, raining fist on Neo's surprised face, that always finds a gap in his defense.
The Instructor tried to halt the fight, stopping Stella from murdering Neo who couldn't move from the onslaught he endured from the monstrosity he thought that he could only found in movie.
And lastly, the kick to Neo's ribs was the last clear thing he felt before a wave of boos and stinging blows washed over him.
"Let me kill that molester! He's the bane of all us!"
Stella's voice shrieked from somewhere above.
It wasn't the beating that made Neo feel like he was losing consciousness, but the sheer, gut-wrenching injustice of it all.
***
A few minutes after Neo survived the duel.
Neo found himself standing in front of a desk, his eyes looking at his reflection from the shiny head of the dean.
The bald man was scrutinizing a folder, where the contents of Neo's grades since he started learning in Basic Combat School at the age of fourteen were laid bare in front of his wrinkled eyes.
"Neo Spark, an above-average student molesting a fellow student... and from a prestigious family at that."
The bald man slammed the folder on his desk and pushed on it, helping himself to stand; his considerable gut, a testament to a retirement spent in comfort rather than combat, jiggled with the motion.
"It's a good thing that tomorrow is your birthday... it's either you die inside the Tutorial, or you 'die' by the hands of her father.
"B-But I did nothing wrong?! It was her fault to begin with; she should've surrendered when her pellets were gone—"
"Silence!"
With a loud bang of his fist on the table, Neo instinctively stepped back from the impact.
'As expected of a retired player.'
Players are the people who had finished their Tutorial that started from the Age of Chaos, when people who turned eighteen suddenly vanished for six hours.
Some returned to having a system of their chosen game after successfully completing their tutorial, while those who failed it became a rift... bringing monsters out that spread havoc and almost destroyed the past civilization.
And only after six months of endless chaos came the new announcement from the system itself that even normal people who hadn't gained a system could read.
Placed above the Massive Gates throughout the world, a portal leading into the 'Ludoverse'—a bizarre and endless amalgamation of all games known and unknown.
[World Synchronization 3%]
A hundred years had passed, and the world still held its breath.