The rain poured heavily outside the classroom window. Thunder rumbled, but the sound was drowned out by the jeers thrown at Rei.
"Seriously, you're better at playing games than talking to people," one of the kids said, laughing mockingly.
Rei didn't respond. He just stared blankly at the blackboard, his eyes long since losing focus on the lesson. His mind was filled with "frag...frag...frag...frag...", not math formulas.
It wasn't because he was dumb. It was because this wasn't a world he cared about.
He spent hours in a small internet café near his house. A stuffy place with a broken AC. But to Rei, it was a battlefield—the only place where he felt... alive.
There, he was known as "Phantom."
A name that began to echo in local forums. A name that sent a shiver through the hands of opponents before a match even began.
But at school?
He was just the quiet kid who barely spoke and always got average grades.
When the bell rang to signal the end of school, Rei didn't head home. He walked to the internet café, as usual. Turned on the PC, logged into his account, and entered the server.
In that world, he wasn't just Rei Arisaka, the average kid.
He was a bullet that never missed.