Chapter 380 - 380: (Saga 2) MANHUNT

The carved hall and the oiled annex latch went out like a bad lamp.

No second body on the floor. No packet. No court. Morning was a classroom window and a phone in his hand. The name that fit was his own.

Aoi Aoi. College. That was the whole of it.

MANHUNT was a smash-hit smartphone game. You pointed the camera at a real person, the app turned them into a card, and you fought with those cards.

When you shot someone, the system picked them apart and stamped on stats. A ridiculous game. Of course it exploded.

The 3D models were so good people said they beat real life. Ordinary photos came out detailed because of a new AI they had jammed into the thing. Even so, it was a leap.

Shooting people without asking turned into a social problem, so asking permission started to settle as manners. Hidden shots still never stopped. If you got carded from a sneak photo, you usually never knew, so most of the time nobody cared.

What blew up was a man who secretly shot a celebrity, rolled an SSR, racked up wins, got noticed, and got sued for portrait rights. After that, scared users took their matches private.

Anyway. Me.

Aoi Aoi. A stupid name for a college student. Net-obsessed otaku. Home club through middle school and university. Game-brain? Phone addict. Who cares. Nobody talks to me at break or at lunch. What else am I supposed to do with a phone.

I got bullied in elementary and stopped going. Making it through middle school and university with no late days and no absences is a miracle. Grades are nothing special. Sports are below average if I am being kind.

Online I am someone else. As the hacker Blue I have a name. I say "somewhat" to sound modest. I am one of the so-called Top Ten.

Defacing a homepage is too easy to be fun. I have broken into clouds, peeked at patents, front-run a stock climb, and walked off with money. I have rewritten game code, pulled rare items, and sold them. My parents do not know. I am fairly rich.

Money got boring. If I need more, I can take it.

Even for me, MANHUNT hit hard. It had been the topic for half a year. I missed the beta and stewed. Clips online looked too real and the hype only got worse. The second it dropped I downloaded it. I actually felt excited installing something again.

Then I sat there stuck on who to shoot first. Your first target is locked at R rarity. That card carries the early game. The tutorial runs off it too. You live with it, so I wanted the choice to be careful.

I picked my childhood friend, Akie Omoi.

Childhood friend sounds like youth and summer. In practice we just knew each other when we were small. She did not look out for me. She did not even give me chocolate. Nothing sweet.

When I got bullied in elementary she stood there and watched so it would not splash on her. In middle school and university she treated me like air. We were close only in the lower grades of elementary.

In middle school I used deep learning to fake videos of idols, celebrities, and the girls at school people called pretty. I sold them to other boys so no one would tie it to me, and made a little cash. Maybe I wanted someone to admit I had skill. Akie was a long-haired beauty, so of course I made her videos. I did not sell those.

Then the school-beauty fakes leaked. The principal tore into morning assembly, said the culprit was in the building, told them to stop. They even called an emergency parent meeting.

The girls kept saying it was disgusting. They called the culprit a pervert. Akie was in that crowd. She said the guy had to be broken in the head.

So I made a new fake of Akie and had her say she wanted a broken man to rape her. I had her slapped over and over and made her say she loved the broken man.

I got bored of how stupid the fakes were. They are compressed and archived now.

How many universities still have a summer make-up attendance day. It is pointless. They should kill it. I still had to go. Skip and they drown you in calls, then make you come in alone on another day. Ugly system. Schools hang onto dumb traditions.

I am a loner. Nobody said "long time no see." Classmates made noise about being back together. I sat there and checked sites about World.

World still had holes in it after Liner, the one who did the most, went underground. People who played it dumped notes on combat and the setting. I skimmed.

Me, I never fought and never adventured. I spent the whole time doing dirty things with Akie. That is why I poured myself into rewriting it. Combat and quests did not interest me.

Akie walked into the classroom. Cute as always. Real Akie does not smile at me.

Fine.

When I get home I will slam her cunt, piss in her ass, tie her tight, and make her lick it.

That was in my head when the words MANHUNT and World drifted into my ear.

—-

I glanced over without letting them catch me looking. The guy group that sat at the center of the class. One of them had gotten into the beta, so the room treated him like a small-time hero.

I am not jealous.

At this point I really am not.

Still, World being talk even in a class like this was something. The rewritten program sits behind our permission lock. Ordinary people are not supposed to get it. We tried to keep the info from spreading. The net leaks anyway.

Even if you copy the data, there is protection. Break that and you still cannot multi-login. Avatar mismatch, instant ban.

One of them talked to me.

I jumped. Stop doing things you are not used to.

"Aoi, right?"

Remember a name, idiot. Die.

"You started MANHUNT too?"

"Yeah."

"How far are you?"

The pack closed in. What is this. What happened.

"You coming to the private arena?"

So that was it.

They wanted a mark. Disgusting. Behind the smiles I could feel the plan to eat a weak player. It made me sick.

I swallowed it and smiled back. It probably looked stiff.

"Arena?"

"You have not done it? You fight with the cards you have. User versus user. You get PvP sometimes in normal play, right? This is that part pulled out on its own."

I know. I will pretend I do not. I have never done PvP. I have never done combat. I have never even played the game properly.

"Huh."

"We do it a lot. Want to try with us?"

Hah. Die. All of you die. Shove a phone up your ass and die.

I have never fought a person in it, but I know the system. In PvP, cards you use can get taken if you lose. To stop that you pay the in-game currency, G, as a substitute.

They wanted my cards or my G.

"I have barely progressed."

"Yeah? What level?"

"Uh. Still 1."

"Eh? 1?"

"Yeah. 1."

"That means you have done nothing. Why even play? Wait, collector type, you only shoot cards? Still, level 1?"

They grinned. Level 1 is free food. You get a fat pile of G at the start. They thought they could strip it.

"Then we will teach you the ropes. Give me your contact. I will message when we have time."

The first person at school to ask for my contact was a classmate trying to farm me.

Reality piles the damage on.

My phone is heavily modded and tuned to hell.

When I shot Akie in secret I killed the shutter sound. Nobody noticed. I did not need max resolution. I shot max anyway because it felt better.

If you get that, raise your hand.

Akie as an R card was cute. The scanned stats were average, same as real life. No. She looked at me shy and smiled, so she was cuter than real life.

I picked healer for her class.

Why?

The nurse outfit was cute.

Put on an HMD and the character stands there in 3D. I used the newest GD glass display, cut down to sunglasses size.

Nurse Akie appeared. I got right up on her neck. I looked up the skirt until I almost had the panties.

That was not enough. I wanted to mess with 3D Akie more. I wanted her dirty.

A MANHUNT rewrite plan went up on a hacker board. Strip the protection. Change the program. A lot of men had the same idea. Everyone is horny. Me included.

I jumped on that rewrite. I have never seen their faces. Together with skilled people we cracked it.

Seven of the so-called Top Ten hackers were in. Of course it worked. We turned MANHUNT into a filthy game.

Log into the rewritten build and a choice that should not exist shows up. World. Enter that and you go into the VR space yourself.

World was built by the Russian genius hacker Liner. I saw a piece of his code. It was in Russian, so I could not read it, and the strings were laid out like a pattern. That is why they call him a magician.

To keep World running he needed a mountain of compute. He hacked farms of machines at a crypto mining company and parked the load there. I did a lot of that break-in work. I am proud of that part.

Every user gets forced into Magician. Fine. What matters is that in World you can do dirty things with the cards you own.

It is just tricking the brain. Step inside and it feels no different from reality.

Because it fools the brain, you get the five senses. Or you get fooled into having them. If the brain buys it completely, that is the same as real.

So, bluntly, once summer break started I spent the whole time doing dirty things with Akie.

Home-club privilege. Time is mine, and time in World barely moves in reality. Same as a dream taking almost no time.

If you do not leave the base, you can fuck Akie as much as you want and almost no real time passes.

Leave the base and go adventure and it has to link to real time. Even then, one real day is twelve days in World. One day in-game is two hours outside.

I am a college virgin with a sex drive and a lot of net knowledge. In World I turned into a stud that would make AV actors run.

I sat at the center of the rewrite, so I cheated. Nothing in World gave me trouble.

A Magician who is a Master gets magic the normal card Magicians do not. Wide-area stuff that dominates a field.

One of those spells is Full Energy. It strips fatigue. That is why Akie and I could keep going.

We did hard SM too. Her Heal covered rough handling. I did not do anything that would actually kill her.

Her stats are still level 1. HP is 2.

Healer is a back-line job, so low HP is normal. Two hits from the first weakest mob would drop her.

Choke-fucking makes her cunt tight and feels good. You still have to watch the pressure.