Shen Yi, completely unaware of what she was about to experience, was pacing around the school corridor.
Calling it pacing wasn't quite right; she was more like a startled cat, pressing herself against the base of the wall. She took every step with extreme caution, her eyes darting around and her ears perked up.
The atmosphere in the school had visibly shifted from its usual liveliness to an eerie silence.
She and Zhao Shumin were like two little mice, hugging the walls and walking on tiptoe, carefully looking for a place to hide.
Zhao Shumin tugged at her sleeve uneasily.
"Is this really going to work?"
Shen Yi didn't look back.
"I don't know. Let's hide and see what happens. It's definitely less safe to keep wandering around out here."
She led Zhao Shumin away from the direction of the security cameras and found a classroom.
The door was unlocked.
Shen Yi gently pushed it open a crack and peeked inside.
Empty.
She pulled Zhao Shumin inside and quickly shut the door behind them.
The two young girls crouched down and curled up to hide beneath the teacher's podium.
The space was tiny. Squeezed together, their knees bumped against each other.
The podium's front panel concealed their figures, leaving only a narrow slit through which they could observe the outside.
Zhao Shumin's eyes were red. "It sounds chaotic out there. Have we really run into some kind of desperate outlaws?"
Shen Yi gave a casual hum of agreement. "Probably something close to it."
How could it not be chaotic?
In just half an hour, it felt like more than half the school had been emptied out.
Just as the two were whispering, a muffled bang echoed from outside the door.
Shen Yi had sharp ears and immediately recognized the sound.
A gunshot.
Immediately following it, a man's gruff shout rang out in the corridor, faintly audible through the wall:
"Hands on your heads and squat down! Anyone who tries to run, this is what you get!"
Shen Yi felt the blood freeze in her veins.
She instinctively gripped the stun baton in her pocket, her knuckles turning white. "They have guns."
Zhao Shumin tried to comfort her, her voice trembling. "Don't be scared. They probably aren't here to massacre us. They're just after money. They'll want us alive, they won't kill too many people."
What she said actually made sense.
Right now, the majority of the students were completely unaware of the situation, and the kidnappers were busy rounding them up all at once.
As for the clever ones, the fast runners, and those who had hidden away, no one would bother with them in the short term.
Shen Yi and Zhao Shumin were considered lucky, having temporarily dodged a bullet.
Time ticked by, minute by minute. The noise outside gradually faded.
Shen Yi's taut nerves relaxed slightly.
She began to ponder.
Should they go out?
Find a new place to hide?
This classroom was too obvious. If someone searched room by room...
The thought had barely crossed her mind.
The next second,
The classroom door was violently kicked.
The entire doorframe shuddered.
Zhao Shumin's breath caught in her throat.
Shen Yi clamped a hand over her mouth and gripped the stun baton tightly with the other.
"Bang."
Another kick.
A third kick.
The door crashed open, and footsteps rang out.
One step.
Two steps.
Three steps.
Shen Yi kept low and peeked through the slit in the podium, spotting a man's legs walking in.
Listening to the approaching footsteps, the girl gently held her breath.
Those legs swayed in her line of sight, getting closer and closer...
She tightened her grip on the stun baton.
The moment she saw those legs near the podium, she swung the baton out.
The surging electric current instantly made him collapse to the ground uncontrollably.
He struggled to lift his head, meeting a pair of amber eyes.
"Fuck!"
He cursed loudly and reached out to grab the girl's hair.
Shen Yi didn't retreat.
She grabbed a heavy stool nearby and smashed it hard into his face.
Smack!
He screamed in agony again.
"What's going on?"
Another voice came from the doorway.
Shen Yi looked up and saw a second man rush in.
"Damn, why are you so useless?" The man looked at his fallen comrade, his tone laced with shock. "You actually got taken down by a kid?"
The man on the ground was in too much pain to speak and could only groan.
Zhao Shumin huddled under the podium, trembling all over. She clamped her hands tightly over her mouth, not daring to make a sound.
Shen Yi agilely climbed onto the desks. Seeing the second man lunging at her, she reacted swiftly, stepping across several desks in a row to carefully dodge his grasping hands.
The large man and the small girl engaged in a back-and-forth struggle for a long while.
Finally, the man grabbed a stool beside him, aimed it, and brought it down toward her head.
Unable to dodge in time, Shen Yi caught the flying stool. Then, just as he tried to grab her leg, she used her height advantage from standing on the desk, raised her leg, and delivered a fast, vicious roundhouse kick right to the man's neck!
Crack.
A crisp sound, like a bone dislocating.
"Aghhh!"
The intense pain in his neck made his whole body go limp. Clutching his neck, he slumped to the floor, screaming in pain.
Shen Yi immediately jumped down from the desks.
"Run! Zhao Shumin!" she yelled urgently to the girl under the podium. "Don't hide here, it's not safe!"
With that, ignoring whatever reaction Zhao Shumin might have, Shen Yi dashed out of the classroom.
The man, whose neck had been kicked crooked on the spot, suppressed his urge to howl, pulled out his walkie-talkie, and yelled his report to the others: "I saw that little girl named Shen Yi! She's on the third floor, everyone come block her off!"
...
Shen Yi ran out of the classroom, glanced left and right, and realized there were figures moving at both ends of the corridor.
Damn it, why are there people everywhere?!
She had no idea she had been sold out by Song Yi, nor did she know she had become the kidnappers' primary target.
Shen Yi's mind was completely occupied with figuring out how to escape.
There were at least five people rushing over...
The girl's eyes darted around.
Suddenly, her gaze locked onto the railing at the edge of the corridor.
Third floor.
Below was the first-floor terrace.
She frantically called out in her mind:
"Are you there? System?"
The system remained silent.
"System! System!" she chattered incessantly as she ran toward the railing. "Do you think I'll die if I jump?"
The system still didn't speak.
"System, System, will I die?!"
She had already climbed over the railing.
"System!!!"
The system was finally worn down by her harassment.
[No.] A mechanical voice echoed in her mind. [You can jump without worrying.]
[This height is nothing to you now.]
It had benchmarked Shen Yi against Wen Ya, after all.
Shen Yi would definitely become a formidable woman like Ms. Wen Ya in the future.
"Thank you, you're such a good person." Having received a confirmed safe answer, she no longer hesitated. Grabbing the cold edge of the railing with both hands, she swung herself out, suspending her entire body in midair.
The wind whistled past her ears.
She gritted her teeth and let go.
Upon landing, she stumbled two steps, her knees bending slightly, and surprisingly managed to steady herself.
"..."
Shen Yi looked up at the height of the third floor.
Then she looked down at her slightly weak legs.
She couldn't help but mutter, "...That was thrilling."
System: [You're just too timid. Even if you jumped from the fifth floor to the first floor, you wouldn't have any major problems.]
Shen Yi: "But under normal circumstances, I wouldn't just go find a building to jump off for no reason."
Under normal circumstances, casually jumping off a building would absolutely kill a person.
Anxious to escape, Shen Yi turned around decisively after landing, only to unexpectedly run into a familiar classmate.
He also noticed that the other guy looked completely dumbfounded, staring at him with an expression like he had just seen a ghost.
"Holy shit, Shen Yi," Li Mingyue couldn't hold back and cursed right then and there. "Did you just jump down from upstairs?"
Before Shen Yi could even reply, Li Mingyue's expression grew even more dazed as he muttered to himself, "Holy shit, holy shit... have you secretly been Superman this whole time?"
Shen Yi: "???"
