Haikyuu!!: The Disaster of Gamers

When the bus entered Miyagi Prefecture, the interior was as quiet as a morgue.

The only proof that this was a vehicle carrying living beings was the intermittent snoring. Hyuga Shoyo's head bounced with the vehicle, repeatedly hitting Kageyama Tobio's shoulder, drool staining his black tracksuit jacket with a dark patch. Kageyama slept like a log, his brow furrowed, probably still agonizing over that poorly passed correction ball in his dream.

Lu Ren sat in the last row, the faint light from his phone screen illuminating his expressionless face.

He wasn't asleep. Or rather, his cerebral cortex was still in the cooling-off period after the excitement of clearing a difficult level, making it impossible for him to fall asleep even if he wanted to.

"System settlement in progress..." he muttered to himself, his fingers flying across the memo.

This Tokyo training camp yielded more than just the wins and losses of a few practice matches. More importantly, Karasuno's old, cobbled-together computer was finally forced to install a next-generation operating system. Although it currently runs with the fan spinning wildly, occasionally lags, and even occasionally emits black smoke, at least—it works.

"Lu Ren, still awake?"

Sawamura Daichi, sitting in the front row, turned his head, his eyes swollen with dark circles, and his voice hoarse as if he had swallowed a handful of sand.

"I can't sleep." Lu Ren put his phone back in his pocket and looked out the window at the streetlights rushing past. "I'm thinking, if we don't have a powerful cooling system to keep the CPU burning out when we get back, will our 'Chimera' system burn out?"

Sawamura rubbed his temples and gave a wry smile: "Don't use such a terrifying analogy. You mean to say that everyone's stamina can't keep up with the tactical expenditure, right?"

"Physical strength is a hardware issue, easy to solve, just eat more meat and sleep more." Lu Ren changed his posture, putting his legs up on the empty seat. "The trouble is software compatibility. In Tokyo, we were hanging on by adrenaline and the spirit of 'not wanting to lose,' but once we return to daily training, all the bugs that were covered up in the competition will be exposed."

Sawamura was silent for a moment, then looked back at his teammates who were sleeping in all sorts of crooked positions.

"Then let's fix it." The captain of Karasuno said calmly, but with a fierce determination. "There's still time before the Spring High School Qualifiers. As long as we don't die from training, we'll train like crazy."

Lu Ren whistled: "That's why I like this game too. There's no pay-to-win aspect; it's all about grinding."

……

As it turned out, Lu Ren's prediction was shockingly accurate.

On Monday, the stadium was filled with a strong Salonpas smell.

"Stop! Stop! Stop!!!"

Ukai's roar nearly lifted the roof off. He slammed his tactics board down, pointing at the chaos on the field: "Is this what you learned in Tokyo? Huh? You call this 'multi-point attack'? This is more like a 'total train wreck'!"

On the court, Hinata Shoyo was crouching on the ground, clutching the back of his head. He had just collided head-on with Tanaka Ryunosuke, who had made a run from the back row. The volleyball lay forlornly on the floor, rolling twice mockingly.

Kageyama Tobio stood at the net, his face so dark it could drip ink. He had originally intended to pass the ball to Hyuga, but Tanaka suddenly appeared to launch a tiered attack, causing their paths to completely overlap and paralyze the game.

"That's the problem I was talking about." Lu Ren stood on the sidelines, holding a water bottle, with an expression that said, "I knew it." "The system's processing speed is too fast; the graphics card can't keep up."

"Speak like a human being." Sugawara Koji was panting heavily beside him, sweat dripping down his chin.

"Overthinking." Lu Ren pointed to the players on the court. "In Tokyo, we were forced to move by the strong teams. Now that the high-pressure environment is gone, everyone wants to show off their newly learned moves, so everyone wants to play and receive the ball, and in the end, nobody gets to hit it."

It's like a group of players who have just learned a new skill, and when they're playing a raid, they don't pay attention to their positioning. They just keep mashing the keyboard and spamming their ultimate skills, and end up ruining their teammates' game.

"What should we do then?" Sugawara asked.

"Downclocking, rebuilding." Lu Ren tightened the bottle cap, hung a towel around his neck, and said, "Since everyone wants to be the protagonist, someone has to do the dirty work. I'll be the one to fix this."

After saying that, he threw down the water bottle and walked onto the stage.

"Coach, I request a substitution!"

Wu Yang glared at him: "What kind of mischief are you up to now, kid?"

"It's nothing, I just thought it was too noisy and wanted to cool down this overheated machine." Lu Ren walked over to Kageyama and patted the genius setter on the shoulder. "Hey, you dictator, can you spare some of your CPU's computing power for defense? If you had called out earlier on that ball, that idiot Hyuga wouldn't have run into it."

"I shouted!" Kageyama retorted, his neck stiff. "He was too slow!"

"Is that shouting? That's launching a projectile." Lu Ren rolled his eyes. "From now on, I'm not participating in the first wave of attack. I'll clean up your mess."

Kageyama was taken aback for a moment: "Huh?"

"Don't look at me like I'm trash. I mean, I'll be the 'filter'." Lu Ren took his position as the backup, but he stood further back than usual, almost parallel to the free agent Nishiya.

The training session took a dramatic turn.

When Kageyama and Hinata tried that extremely difficult "stop pass" again, unsurprisingly, the pass went awry and the ball went too low.

In the past, the ball would have either landed directly or been blocked.

But this time, just as the ball bounced back from above the blocker, a figure appeared at the landing point.

Instead of using the conventional ball-passing technique, Lu Ren directly used his hand to lift the ball high into the air with an extremely gentle motion.

"Correction!"

It's not for anyone in particular; it's simply about raising the ball to give everyone a chance to reset the cooldown time.

"Senior Dongfeng!"

With this buffer, Dong Fengxu was able to take a running start, jump from the left wing, and unleash a powerful smash.

"Bang!"

The ball landed.

"This feels..." Sugawara's eyes lit up as he watched from the sidelines. "Much smoother."

Previously, everyone was racing against the clock, like listening to a rock song played at double speed—it was chaotic and gave everyone a headache. Lu Ren's move was like forcibly inserting a slow interlude, calming everyone down and allowing them to breathe properly.

"See that?" Lu Ren pointed to the floor and said to Kageyama and Hinata, "You can fly however you want, but if you fall, remember to check if there's a net below."

Hinata's eyes sparkled: "Lu Ren, do you mean you'll catch us?"

"No, I mean I'll clean up the body so it won't trip anyone." Lu Ren coldly shattered the boy's fantasy.

Although he was sharp-tongued, his actions spoke louder than words. Over the next week, Lu Ren practically trained himself into an all-around backup machine.

When Kageyama went to save the ball, he went to cover the setter position; when Nishiya fell to the ground while receiving the first pass, he went to cover the defensive position; when there was an opening in the front row block, he went to cover that gap.

He doesn't spike the ball much, nor does he exert much force; he's like a repair program operating at the bottom of the system, fixing whatever errors occur.

Under this subtle and gradual "maintenance," Karasuno, this ferocious machine, finally began to show its true performance.

Targeted training on Wednesday afternoon.

Hotaru Tsukishima stood in front of the net, holding a bottle of water, looking at the other side with a somewhat subtle expression.

Across from me is Tadashi Yamaguchi.

"Ayumi, I'm about to make a fortune!" Yamaguchi took a deep breath, the volleyball in his hand becoming slightly deformed from his grip.

"Serve it," Tsukishima said, adjusting his glasses. "Don't serve those soft, mushy balls; it's a waste of time."

Although he said that, Tsukishima had already lowered his center of gravity. He had been bombarded by Tetsuro Kuroo and Kotaro Bokuto in Tokyo, and his defensive model had been completely rewritten. Before, he was a "blocker who observes the ball"; now he was a "blocker who observes the player".

Yamaguchi throws the ball, takes a running start, and jumps.

His serve lacked the power of a typical high-flying jump serve; his movements were even somewhat unpredictable. It seemed as if half the power was absorbed the moment his hand struck the ball.

The ball goes over the net but doesn't spin.

It drifted over in the air, swaying and wobbling, like a drunken ghost.

Tsukishima judged the ball to be landing at chest level and prepared to catch it. But just as the ball approached, it suddenly dropped and veered to the left.

"Tsk."

Tsukishima reacted extremely quickly, forcefully twisting his wrist to reach the ball, but the ball still grazed his forearm and flew away.

"Nice serve!" Shimada Makoto shouted from the sidelines.

Tsukishima watched the ball roll away, his brow furrowed so deeply it could trap a fly.

"Is this the 'soft' ball?" Lu Ren approached from somewhere, holding a notebook, grinning in an annoying way. "It seems our rational Tsukishima-kun has very low resistance to this kind of magical attack that doesn't follow the laws of physics."

"It's so noisy," Tsukishima replied irritably. "I'm just not used to it."

"It's normal to feel uncomfortable." Lu Ren opened his notebook, which was covered with a few simple stick figures. "Do you know what the biggest problem with your blocking is right now? It's too 'clean'."

"ha?"

"You always try to block the ball completely or perfectly restrict the trajectory. That's true, it's a textbook style of play." Lu Ren tapped the stick figure with glasses on the tip of his pen. "But in a real chaotic game, this style of play is too predictable. What that guy Heiwei taught you was how to make people 'disgusted,' right?"

Tsukishima paused for a moment. The image of Kuroo's ambiguous smile flashed through her mind, along with those hands that always reached out at the most unpleasant moments.

"Try not to be a wall." Lu Ren closed his notebook. "Be a thorn. You don't need to block them out completely. Just make the attacker feel 'there's something here,' and you've achieved your goal."

Tsukishima was silent for a moment, then pushed up his glasses, the lenses reflecting a white light.

"Although your analogy was terrible, I think I understood it."

In the following balls, Yamaguchi's jump serve remained sharp, but Tsukishima's response changed. He no longer insisted on receiving the ball head-on or blocking it, but began to try to interfere with it with his fingertips, or deliberately leave a small opening to lure Yamaguchi to serve in that direction, and then move ahead to intercept.

Although the success rate is still not high, the discomfort of being "seen through" has already made Yamaguchi sweat.

"These two guys..." Sawamura watched from the side and couldn't help but sigh, "They've improved so quickly."

"Yeah," Sugawara said with a smile, "One of us learned how to use a spear to dodge a shield, and the other learned how to turn a shield into a trap. Our first-year students are all monsters."

Friday, tactical debriefing meeting.

Everyone sat around on the gymnasium floor, with the notebook that Lu Ren had brought back, its edges already curled from being turned over, in the middle.

"So, the data you gave Nekoma and Fukutani was really fake?" Tanaka Ryunosuke still looked incredulous. "That's so insidious! But I like it!"

"It's not fake," Lu Ren corrected, "it's 'expired'."

He pointed to a description of Hyuga in the notebook: "[Extremely reliant on the setter, lacking independent attacking ability, and weak in lateral movement to the left side.]"

"This was our state before the qualifiers," Lu Ren explained. "If Akaashi or Kenma had formulated their tactics based on this data, they would have focused on blocking Hyuga's right side and leaving his left side open for him to handle the ball himself. But the current Hyuga..."

All eyes were on the orange-haired boy who was fighting with Kageyama for yogurt in the corner.

Now that Hyuga has mastered aerial combat and out-of-bounds strikes, his ability to break through on the left side has become his new weapon.

"This is what's called a 'version trap'," Lu Ren said, shrugging. "I gave them an old map, and then we dug a new pit on it. When they follow the map, they'll find themselves trapped."

"So dirty..." Yamaguchi couldn't help but mutter under his breath.

"All's fair in war," Lu Ren said matter-of-factly. "Besides, this is just an appetizer. The real trump card is what we've practiced this week."

He stood up, walked to the tactical board, picked up a marker, and drew a large circle on it.

"The core of the 'Chimera' tactic is not variety, but chaos."

"We don't need to be as meticulous as Aoba Josai, nor as violent as Shiratorizawa. What we need to do is keep our opponents guessing."

"Kageyama spikes the ball, I pass it, Nishinoya sets the offensive screen, and Tsukishima baits the opponent."

Lu Ren pressed the pen tip hard on the whiteboard, producing a harsh screeching sound.

"We're going to turn the volleyball court into a giant quagmire. As long as we drag them in and beat them at a suffocating pace, that's our victory."

Looking at the messy lines on the tactics board, the Karasuno team showed no confusion, but rather a strange excitement.

This seemingly unorthodox, even somewhat shameless, style of play strangely fits the temperament of this "ragtag" team.

"A mud pit, huh..." Daichi Sawamura clenched his fist, feeling the thick calluses on his palm. "Sounds good. Anyway, we've been rolling around in the mud for a while now."

"Then it's settled!" Wu Yangxi waved his hand. "Take a half-day off this weekend. Starting next Monday, we'll begin simulation battles against Aoba Castle West and Shiratorizawa! Since Lu Ren has already blown his own horn, if we lose the preliminaries, you'll all have to shave your heads as an apology!"

"Huh?!!!!"

The screams of agony echoed throughout the stadium.

Only Lu Ren calmly packed his things, a faint smile playing on his lips.

Actually, there was one more thing he didn't say.

On the last page of that notebook, he wrote a line of code in very small print. It was an Easter egg that only true "players" could understand.

For grinding.

【Game Start. Waiting for Challenger.】

He believed that the clever cat would be able to understand the challenge.

As I walked out of the stadium, the setting sun had turned the sky a fiery red.

Qingze Yazhi was standing at the door waiting for him, carrying two bottles of sports drinks.

"Finished practicing?" She handed him a drink. "You're grinning mischievously. Who are you plotting this time?"

"What do you mean by scheming? This is called tactical planning." Lu Ren took the drink; the cool touch made his burning hands feel a little better. "I just think the game ahead is going to be very interesting."

"Yes, yes, yes, strategist Lu." Ya Zhi rolled her eyes and straightened his crooked backpack strap.

In the setting sun, the boy's shadow was stretched long.

Behind them, in the slightly old-fashioned gymnasium, the sound of volleyballs hitting the floor continued unabated.

"One more goal!!!"

That voice was full of ambition and desire.

Server maintenance complete.

Server-wide announcement: Karasuno High School Volleyball Club has officially launched.