We aren’t talking anymore, the group of four is silent and there is a tense atmosphere. I harvest the 2 crystals from the zombies I defeated earlier and used crystal refinement on the corpses, it really did give me two additional crystals! And it didn’t even take a lot of blood out of me. I put the crystals in my backpack and we carefully head towards the girls dormitory.

*DING*

“A mission appeared: Recruit a woman to the pack with a potential of grade C or higher. Reward: 2X item wheel draw”

“OEWA!” – That notification startled me – “Did you see something Ren?” – “N-No don’t worry about it Mary, it was probably just the wind ah-ha”

I activate ‘Mate Scout’ and look at Mary, a screen appears above her head with the letters: Potential C | Cup-size B. Why would it display their cup-size? But hey... I'm not complaining. People probably don’t have any dormant genes if their potential is F, but it looks like Mary does have the DNA for awakening.

Aoi displays a potential of A and a cup size of DD… damn… were they always that big? Goddammit you can’t seriously be asking me to recruit my ex-girlfriend to the group right? She broke up with me, I’ll seem like a stalker if I ask her to join me. I should try my luck with Mary first, besides she seemed like a nice girl.

Out of curiosity I activate ‘Rival Scout’ and see that Tanaka has a current strength of G. I don’t know what else I expected from him, but that still sounds very weak, I thought F would be the weakest, but I guess the average zombie is stronger than the average human.

We arrive at the girls dormitory in the early evening.

“Look… the door is wide open… looks like they got some unwanted visitors.”

Aoi looked at me with a scared expression.

“R-Ren you don't think they got eaten by zombies right?”

“No I don’t think so, if there were zombies we would have smelt more blood and I don’t think they have the intelligence to open doors…”

*SNIFF* *SNIFF*

We hear crying coming from the closet in one of the dorms, we open the doors and see Rina crying in the fetal position.

“UWaaahh A-Aoi yyyoouuurrree f-f-finalllyyy bbbaaackkkk!”

After Aoi manages to calm her down she begins to explain what happened.

“So then suddenly Miyu was at the door of the building and we were all like, really glad to see that she was still alive. But when we opened the door to let her in she smiled and said we were ‘naïve’. Then suddenly like, 5 guys jumped out from behind her and forcefully entered the building”

“I told you not to let anybody in!”

“yeah sorry Mary but Like, it was Miyu yeah? So then these boys were talking about how it is so much better in the guy’s dormitory and that they will take care of us and stuff. We said that we wanted to stay here and wait for you guys, but then they forced us to come with them. Obviously they were guys so we couldn’t really fight back, I luckily managed to hide in the closet!”

I take a peek at her with my ‘Mate Scout’, it displays that she has a potential of B and a cup size of…. G ?! “holy shit!” – “Oh you’re also here Ren?” – Rina just noticed that I was also standing behind Mary.

“Haha yeah I encountered them in front of the supermarket… Anyway do you want to join my group and go rescue your friends?”

“uuuh, your group? How can you be the leader of this group? Didn’t Aoi break up with you? Why are you still harassing her?”

Yikes that hurts my feeling… Is it so hard to believe that I could be the leader of a group? I mean I know the mission wasn’t going to be that easy, but come on!

“Rina don’t be rude, without Ren we wouldn’t be here!”

“Yeah right Mary, he probably just tricked you guys, I bet that Tanaka is more of a man then Ren is.”

“GYAAAAA!!”

A zombie suddenly grabs Mary from behind and bites her neck, some blood squirts on Tanaka’s face who is standing right next to her and is frozen stiff. Rina yells at him.

“OMG quick Tanaka do something”

But instead of trying to rescue Mary, He just starts screaming, which attracts even more zombies and makes him run out of the building in a panic.

“Tanaka you cowa-“ – “ Kya! Get away from me.”

I quickly activate my blood talons and insert one of my blades through the eye socket of the zombie that was biting Mary, with the blades on my other arm I dismember the hand of the zombie that was trying to scratch Rina.

The zombie that was biting Mary falls to floor and I finish off the other zombie with a blood spear to the head

“W-what the hell was that Ren? What were those red blades?”

“We’ll talk later Rina, go find a safe space together with Aoi, I’ll hold off the zombies for now!”

I start to feel a bit nauseous and light headed. Must be the lack of blood…. Let’s use syphon on the zombie I just killed.

I grab the zombie by the head and activate my syphon ability, I feel a strong power getting sucked up through my hand, it fills my entire body. But just after I thought that I couldn’t absorb any more of this zombie-blood, I can suddenly see the zombie corpse drying up a lot faster. Must be the blood storage.

I fire a couple of Blood spears, but only manage to hit and kill 2 more zombies. I quickly retreat back into the dorm room were the girls are hiding and lock the door.

“H-How’s Mary?”

“I’m afraid she… I couldn’t save her anymore.”

Fuck man, I was overconfident. What’s the use of all these abilities if I can’t even protect one girl… Goddammit Mary… You didn’t deserve this.

Losing someone… it hurts more than I thought…

The death of Mary reminded me of the grim reality of this new world, I was naïve to think that this was just like the games I played… When you die here… You don’t get a second chance.

“Let’s get some sleep, we’ll try to rescue the girls in the morning when the zombies are hopefully les active”