A Guide to Humanity’s Extinction

Once they arrived at school, Ke Mingqing and Jiang Qingzi parted ways in the academic building corridor.

Jiang Qingzi was next door in the elite Class Two, while he was in Class Three. Just as Ke Mingqing shoved his backpack into his desk, Kuroki Hitomi walked into the classroom.

He sat in the second row by the window, separated from Hitomi by a single aisle.

During class, he occasionally zoned out, resting his chin on his hand to mockingly admire the player ID floating above her head.

Ke Mingqing thought it looked completely idiotic. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have one for much longer; his exclusive talent, Disguiser, would hide his player ID.

Hitomi occasionally caught his eye and blinked, seemingly assuming he was staring at her.

Whenever the bell rang, Ke Mingqing would drop to the floor and do a few push-ups before the break ended. By the time the afternoon rolled around, he had finally met the requirements for his weekly mission.

[Congratulations, you have completed Weekly Mission 1: ”Complete one hundred push-ups in a single day.”]

[Mission Reward Obtained: 1 Attribute Point.]

Ke Mingqing looked at the prompt, clapped the dust off his hands, and climbed to his feet.

The other students in the classroom shot him weird looks. They all seemed to think he was holding a grudge, training his body so he could beat up Rain Crow the next time they ran into him on the school bus.

Ke Mingqing paid them no mind. He simply opened his attribute panel and allocated his newly acquired stat point with a flick of his finger.

[Congratulations, your attribute ’Strength’ has increased from ’E Rank’ to ’E+ Rank’ (↑1 Point)]

[Your current attributes are: Strength: E+ Rank; Agility: E+ Rank; Spirit: E Rank.]

Time slipped by quietly. The final period for Class Three was physical education.

With summer vacation approaching, PE classes rarely had any structured activities. The students were currently sitting on the athletic field grass, aimlessly soaking up the sun. The setting sun outlined their silhouettes in a faint golden rim.

Meanwhile, the classroom was dead silent, leaving Ke Mingqing and Hitomi inside as a pair of solitary figures.

Both had called in sick for the period. They stood with their backs flat against the wall, a small distance between them.

Hitomi offered him one of her earbuds. Sharing the pair, they listened to a piano piece playing on her MP3 player.

Hitomi said it was her favorite piano piece, titled Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

Since this parallel world didn’t have the song, she had played it on her piano at home the night before, recording it herself and saving it to the player.

According to her, the composer of the piece had already passed away.

Ke Mingqing wasn’t particularly interested; he just listened in silence. The setting sun shone through the windows, casting a tangerine halo over their faces.

She played beautifully—exactly as expected of someone who had received an elite education since childhood.

Still, only a privileged young lady would have the luxury of feeling melancholic when her life was hanging by a thread with just half a year left.

A moment later, Ke Mingqing pulled out his earbud.

”Right... didn’t you say this morning that you have a magical girl in your house?”

Hitomi removed her earbud and nodded.

”Yes. The magical girl, Little Red Riding Hood.”

Ke Mingqing remembered the name. This Little Red Riding Hood was supposedly his younger sister’s teammate.

The company grouped rookie magical girls into teams for trial training.

Poorly performing teams were demoted to the idol circle and forced down the ’teenage idol route’ to cash in on fans. Well-performing teams took the ’elite route,’ slaying monsters and fighting criminals.

Ember and Little Red Riding Hood were obviously taking the latter route. Whenever they appeared in the media, they were virtually inseparable, tied together like conjoined twins... except for these past few days, of course, because Xia Zili had been put on ice by the Magical Girl Company.

”She’s a maid in my household,” Hitomi said.

”A maid?” Ke Mingqing was bewildered. ”Comrade, this is twenty-first-century China. Are you sleepwalking?”

”To be accurate, she’s a servant. She followed us over from Japan.”

”Oh, that makes sense,” Ke Mingqing said in sudden understanding, thinking that the word ’Japan’ alone was enough to explain away most absurdities.

Hitomi leaned against the window frame with her hands behind her back. Looking down, she said softly, ”One of her parents was Chinese, the other Japanese. After her father died of an illness, her mother abandoned her. My family took her in, and she became our servant. We’ve known each other since we were kids. She’s very loyal to me.”

”Isn’t that great?” Ke Mingqing said carelessly. ”You got a fiercely loyal bodyguard of the super-human species. Who knows, if you decide to kill her one day, she might even offer up her own neck.”

Hitomi fell silent.

Ke Mingqing also kept quiet. He knew she still couldn’t accept the Exterminate Superhumans mission. Or rather, anyone who had received a normal emotional education would find it hard to accept.

”I told you, my situation is extremely complicated. Anyone who knows my identity could kill me at any moment.” He paused. ”And right now, you’re the only one who knows I’m a player.”

”I won’t sell you out.”

The girl with the tear mole answered quickly and tersely.

”You couldn’t even if you wanted to,” Ke Mingqing warned. ”If I ever get caught, they’ll torture the names of the other players out of me. You’d go down with me.”

”So... we’re accomplices?” she said softly after a moment of silence.

Ke Mingqing wondered why Japanese people loved words like ’accomplice’ so much. Did it evoke some profound sense of mono no aware or something? But he was Chinese; he only practiced Chinese kung fu. He wasn’t about to humor her melodrama.

But a gust of wind blew the classroom curtains up, the snow-white, nearly transparent fabric obscuring the face of the girl with the tear mole. She lowered her eyes and asked softly, ”Are we not?”

Unable to see Hitomi’s expression clearly, Ke Mingqing merely shrugged and gave a dismissive reply. ”I guess so.”

With that, he looked out the window. The distant Ferris wheel was rotating, and the athletic field was empty.

PE class was almost over. A group of sweat-drenched students ran into the classroom, shattering the brief tranquility between the two.

The tall guy in the lead wiped the sweat from his forehead. Spotting the pair, his eyebrows shot up in amusement. ”Hey, so you two took a sick day just to flirt in the classroom? I was wondering.”

The others immediately joined in, hooting and jeering.

Ke Mingqing merely glanced at them, intending to ignore the peanut gallery, but Hitomi dropped a bombshell.

”Yes. We’re dating.”

The classroom fell silent. Even Ke Mingqing was stunned.

The group quickly ran off, hollering excitedly as if they wanted to broadcast the news to the entire class—no, the entire grade.

After all, Ke Mingqing was currently the center of attention in the entire school. With Hitomi adding fuel to the fire, the school bus incident was probably going to be spun into a tale of a power couple teaming up to fight monsters.

Once the classroom was empty again, Ke Mingqing finally looked at Hitomi.

”Do you think this will serve as a good cover?” he asked.

”Yes,” Hitomi said with a nod. ”We might need to interact outside of school.”

”That works. It’ll be easier to explain things to my family if I just say I’m going out on a date with my girlfriend.”

At dusk, once the dismissal bell rang, Ke Mingqing slung his backpack over his shoulder and left the classroom, intending to head home as fast as possible.

After all, he had plans for tonight—he was going to use the Theater Puppet to meet up with the magical girl, Ember.