Chapter 3 – TRAINING FROM HELL WITH A TRASH-TIER TUTOR

My head felt like a cracked egg.

Sunlight stabbed through my eyelids. I was lying on a floor. It felt familiar. Too familiar. I pushed myself up, my muscles screaming in protest. Every inch of me ached from yesterday’s divine electrocution therapy.

My room. It was my room.

The same anime posters were on the wall. My gaming console was collecting dust in the corner. My unmade bed looked exactly as I’d left it. It was a perfect replica. A wave of relief washed over me for a split second.

Then the blue screen flickered to life in front of my face.

《Get up, you lazy piece of crap.》

The text scrolled with a new, aggressive speed. It was different from the calm, clinical AI from before. This one had an attitude.

“Who the hell are you?”

《I’m the Purity System, dumbass. But you can call me Systema. Now get your butt in gear. Training starts now.》

A jolt, small but sharp, shot through my spine. A warning shot.

“Training for what?”

《What do you think, perv? We’re gonna fix that cesspool you call a brain. Rule number one: no more dirty thoughts. Ever.》

I scoffed. That was impossible. My brain produced dirty thoughts like a factory. It was my entire personality.

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

《Figure it out. That’s the training. I’m just here to deliver the voltage when you screw up. Which you will. A lot.》

The screen glitched for a second. An image of a cartoon thumbs-up appeared, dripping with sarcasm. I could feel the smug energy radiating off the stupid blue light.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

《Watching a moron like you get zapped for thinking with his junk? It’s the best show in the cosmos. Now, let’s start with a simple test.》

A new image popped up on the screen. It was a picture of the goddess who sent me here. She was in a relaxed pose, her silver hair flowing. She wore a simple white dress that did absolutely nothing to hide her perfect figure. My mouth went dry.

My brain, the ultimate traitor, went into overdrive.

It helpfully supplied a dozen scenarios. Each one was more detailed and less pure than the last. I could practically feel the synapses firing, forming a conga line of perversion straight to the danger zone.

《Aaaaaand you failed. Predictable.》

The world vanished in a flash of white-hot agony.

It felt like being struck by lightning and shoved into a toaster at the same time. My teeth slammed together. My body convulsed on the floor, a puppet having its strings cut by a sadist. I couldn’t even scream.

The pain subsided, leaving a dull, full-body throb behind. I lay there, twitching. A thin line of drool trickled from the corner of my mouth.

《Pathetic. Your score was negative five thousand. That might be a new record for trash-tier perverts.》

I managed to lift my head a single inch off the floor.

“What… was that?”

《That was level one punishment, genius. You get one of those every time your brain goes to the gutter. Think of it as motivation.》

Systema’s blue screen hovered over me, an unblinking, judgmental eye. I hated it. I hated it so much.

“How am I supposed to go outside? To live my life?”

《That’s the fun part. You don’t get a special, curated training ground. You get to use the real world. Your house, your school, everything. It’s all the same.》

Wait. School? A cold dread, colder than any electric shock, washed over me.

“My school is the same too?”

《Yep. Same building, same teachers, probably some of the same students. The goddess is lazy, she just copy-pasted your old life. The only difference is the people in it. And you, of course. You’re a work in progress. A very, very flawed work.》

School.

A place filled with girls. Girls in cute uniforms. Girls laughing and talking. My brain was a minefield, and I was about to walk into the most concentrated section of it. This was not a training program. It was a death sentence.

“I can’t do it.”

《Too bad, so sad. Get dressed. You’re gonna be late. And try not to think about what a girl’s uniform skirt looks like when the wind blows.》

A preemptive jolt, sharp and nasty, spiked through my neck.

“I wasn’t!”

《You were about to. I can see the gears turning in that tiny brain of yours. Chop chop, loser. Hell awaits.》

The screen winked out of existence.

I dragged my battered body off the floor. Every movement was a fresh wave of pain. I got dressed with the speed of a sloth in molasses. I picked the blandest clothes I could find. Nothing that might accidentally trigger a stray thought.

Breakfast was a piece of dry toast. I tried to focus on the texture. The bland, scratchy feeling in my mouth. I thought about sandpaper. I thought about tax forms. I thought about the color beige.

It was working. My mind was an empty, boring void.

I walked out the front door into a world that was both perfectly familiar and terrifyingly alien. The street was the same. The houses were the same. But the people were different. A group of guys stood on a corner, shyly whispering to each other. A girl on a bike zoomed past, whistling loudly and winking at them. They all blushed and looked away.

This was so, so weird.

Every woman I saw was a potential landmine. A pretty smile. A laugh that carried on the breeze. A cute way she tucked her hair behind her ear. Each innocent detail was a trigger. My brain, my enemy, tried to latch onto every single one.

A girl walking ahead of me dropped her book.

She bent over to pick it up.

My eyes immediately went to where they shouldn’t. It was instinct. It was a reflex honed by years of being a degenerate. A whole movie played in my head in half a second.

《Zap.》

“Gah!”

The shock was weaker this time, but it still made my knees buckle. I stumbled, catching myself on a lamppost. The girl glanced back at me, an annoyed look on her face.

“Watch it, weirdo.”

She walked off, leaving me hugging a metal pole like it was my only friend in the world.

《You lasted a whole three minutes. Impressive. For you.》

Systema’s text was back, mocking me.

“Shut up.”

《Make me. Look, another one. She’s coming right for you. Try not to drool this time.》

A girl with short, sporty black hair and a confident stride was walking my way. She wore a school uniform, but she’d unbuttoned the top two buttons of her shirt. Not in a seductive way. Just in a casual, I-don’t-care way. Which was somehow worse.

My brain helpfully supplied the thought: I wonder if she’s wearing a sports bra.

《Bzzzt.》

“Nngh!”

My teeth ground together. I squeezed my eyes shut. I focused on the pain. I used it to block out the thought. Think about something else. Anything else. Baseball. My boring uncle’s stamp collection. The chemical formula for photosynthesis.

The girl walked past me. She didn’t even give me a second glance.

I was invisible. A weird, twitching guy on the side of the road.

《Hey, not bad. You almost resisted that one. You only got the mini-shock. See? Progress.》

This was progress? This constant, low-level torture? I felt like a lab rat in a maze where every single path led to a painful shock.

The school gates loomed ahead. They looked like the jaws of some great beast, ready to swallow me whole. The yard was teeming with students. Girls were roughhousing, laughing loudly, slinging their arms around each other. Guys were huddled in small, quiet groups, casting nervous glances.

It was a total reversal of everything I knew.

I took a deep breath. I could do this. I just had to turn my brain off. Empty my mind. Become a walking zombie who only thought about math problems and wallpaper paste.

I took one step into the school grounds.

A girl with bright red hair tied in a high ponytail almost ran right into me. She was laughing, her face flushed and alive. She was beautiful. Genuinely, breathtakingly beautiful.

My brain didn’t just have a thought. It composed a sonnet. It wrote a multi-volume epic poem of perversion. It storyboarded an entire feature-length film in a fraction of a second.

I braced for the agony. I clenched every muscle in my body, waiting for the lightning strike that would send me to the floor, convulsing in front of hundreds of strangers.

But nothing happened.

I stood there, frozen. Waiting.

Did the system break? Did it finally run out of juice?

I felt a flicker of hope. A tiny, fragile spark in the darkness of my new reality. Maybe it was over. Maybe I was free.

I held my breath. One second. Two seconds. Five.

Nothing. No pain. No shock. No blue screen of doom.

A huge, stupid grin spread across my face. I did it. I actually did it. I saw a beautiful girl and I didn’t get punished. I had won.

The blue screen appeared. It was right in my face, the text larger than ever.

《You got lucky, you festering pile of human garbage. Don’t let it go to your head.》

The screen vanished.

I stood there, my victory soured. A small win, maybe. But the war was far from over. And my drill sergeant was a total asshole.

This was going to be a very, very long day.