The smell of Blood is in the air

So while I was taking a break due to IRL reasons we reached 100k views on scribbleh*b!!! Now that is a big number if I've ever seen one, Thanks for reading!

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Returning from the Yukimura household and dojo was rather uneventful since Tomomi was mentally exhausted to deal with anything else. While Tomomi was more cheerful and sociable than in her last life, her social battery was completely drained after spending 7 hours with true extroverts that talked loudly.

[It was still a pleasant experience]

"Did you have fun~?" Her mother asked her while she set the table for dinner.

"Yes!!! It was awesome to see all the samurai and sword stuff, I actually got to see a real sword duel" Tomomi exclaimed as she started to dig into her food, she was pretty hungry because she held her hunger in someone else's house.

"Really~" Aiko simply listened to her daughter while Takeshi started eating, he was silently listening to the conversation since it was the first time Tomomi went to someone's house.

"Yeah! but It felt a bit..." Tomomi tried to think of a word fitting her situation.

"A bit?" Aiko and Takeshi paid attention since she seemed a bit lost.

"Eye-opening I guess?" she finally said.

"Oh~ and why is that?"

"IT was AMAZING to see a sword clash and those varied techniques, but they were... Too fast" She explained with a thoughtful expression.

She never expected that a swordsman could move a sword move so fast that it disappeared from her view without the help of some speed-enhancing quirk, the swordmen were that fast by relying purely on physical strength.

"I barely saw the blades, they were simple blurs that flew from one side to the next, If I faced either of Oka's parents of them I would end up eating dirt" She finished with a sigh. Aiko looked at Takeshi while signaling him to talk.

"Tv might make it seem like all fights between heroes and villains are 'viewable' but in reality, some of them are slowed down to be even visible for the common folk, learned that the hard way" Takeshi explained while eating his food without much of a thought.

"You will develop the reflexes necessary to keep up with such fights the more you speed and experience you gain. The Asano and the Yukimura clans are the pinnacles of swordsmanship in their own right anyways, so you probably won't go against someone like that any time soon" He finished by taking a sip of his cup.

The diner moved onto lighter topics since there was a lot more than fighting that she did in Oka's house, but she overall got a decent understanding of how real fights would go down when she eventually encountered them. She was in an anime world so concepts such as fate and extreme swordsmanship beyond human comprehension were a given here, but there was still a smidge of logic on everything to anchor it in reality.

She at least understood that fights would go down the same way as they did in anime, it was just that they were extremely slowed down to be appealing, like how the news of this world portrays it. It made sense since she remembers a lot of animes where they would say something like 'the planet would explode in 5 minutes' and then it would take 13 episodes for that to actually happen.

[It was still awesome though. I wonder how that works though? Adrenaline? Time being relative?]

[...]

[Well who cares anyways, I need to put my attention into more productive activities]

Tomomi had noticed her lack of money and wealth compared to what she saw in the Yumura household, not a lot of people even could afford those wooden houses in recent times with the exception of the wealthy and rich.

She of course wasn't poor by any stretch of the imagination, she could buy her food at school every day, buy stuff at the mall on a whim, and eat more than the average person daily while preserving her hobbies, that was more than she could dream on her last life. But she was still below her friend Oka.

So she decided to accelerate her plans to become rich through imitating popular works that this world lacked, or in other words interdimensional pirating.

[Fitting!]

This world was extremely similar to her old one if one ignores the knock-off brands and products, it really starts to deviate in the 2000s with the appearance of quirks, from there on out the world froze for a century before slowly picking its pace back up. This is obvious once one looks that, after three entire centuries, the technology of the world has barely advanced compared dot the 2000s.

Of course, robots, compact technology, specialized equipment, the discovery of new 'organic materials' such as organic metals, and advancements in mathematics and scientific theories. All of that was new and more developed here due to quirk naturally pushing those things to the forefront of necessities.

There wasn't a shortage of quirks that shrunk objects or that simply made the user smarter, so the deviations in technology mostly seemed from quirks, biology, chemistry, physics, and even genetics and biotechnology, in general, were the most beneficial in terms of advancement since quirks are inherently a biological mutation.

Tomomi learned most of that due to her mind wandering off in random directions while she was trying to see if she could safely steal things from her original world and put them into motion here, since most things were already off-brand, things like Anime, games, and such were different, similar but still different.

So she decided to recreate one of the easy ones first, Minecraft seemed to fit the bill, it was easy enough to recreate at a slow pace without too much trouble, had simple graphics and sound, and she liked it. It was perfectly fit to be made by her lonesome self! It also fits a niche part of the gaming market, survival games.

The world had a visible aversion to any survival games and they were barely any of them right now, it was quite the sight since they were one of the genres she actually enjoyed the most. Action, RPGs, FPS, and fighting games were what was popular at the moment. She of course did some research on why would the market just go so basic.

Apparently, making and playing games while the world was on the verge of collapse was not something that everyone did in their free time for the last 2 centuries. The world had barely stabilized a century and a half ago and Japan, the city that DIDN'T have the largest population and the LEAST amount of quirk users due to declining birthrates was barely 'safe' in the last 30 years.

People didn't want to play games survival games when they already fighting to not get robbed in the middle of the day.

[Well times are different and I want money]

Thus Tomomi decided to tackle the gaming market and managed to rope Oka into helping her, Oka had a strange affinity with computers and was very good at using them even though she never really did anything with them. Tomomi was sure that she had a hidden talent at it and she would never use it if she didn't ask for her help.

[Well talent can only be discovered if one has the means to do so... or something]

She did remember that someone said that there were probably genius programmers that were born in the 16th century and just they never knew it since was literally impossible to program back then. So she was going to use some of Oka's weird talent.

The first wall they encountered while making the game was of course the ability to program, she was used to it in her past life since she did it in her past life as a hobby, and of course, she had to learn a new language since the one she was sued to didn't even exist in the world.

An unexpected benefit was that they learned a 'medium level' language, technology had advanced enough so what was considered 'easy' in her previous life was now considered 'medium level'. It wasn't as if she was programming each individual bit via hexadecimal code but it was pretty decent on this world level.

Textures and coding were easy enough, the game was simple and the only complicated part was how everything somehow needed to be interconnected without breaking down on itself. Oka was pretty well at coding for herself and understood concepts easily so Tomomi could focus on more tedious tasks such as bug fixing or creating sound and textures for all the things in the game.

Technically speaking she could change a lot of the game since she was creating it, there were complaints about how the game changed over time and she could 'fix it but she simply decided against it since she was already creating it 'already finished. No one can complain about changing it since it would literally be the first version.

One of the most difficult tasks that she had to embark on for a full-on three months was the music of the game, since the original was extremely iconic so she wanted to recreate it. Her clear memory of her past life also applied to not only music but also to music. That did a lot to help her but the creation of the music was so hard that she had to buy a lot of instruments to actually get it right.

She basically developed a hobby for music while trying to recreate the ambient feel of the music of Minecraft.

She eventually got it right and became pretty good at producing music in synths and samples of weird sounds she had recollected through her time developing the game. The game was made in a year since she had the help of Oka, a solid idea from the beginning, and a lot of free time in her hands since school although tiresome was easy.

The coding was the second hardest part, although the program itself highlights the errors in syntax while coding, it doesn't really understand more abstract concepts and interactions. It only corrected 'grammar errors' and not 'paragraphs' so she needed to fix all those types of errors personally. Thankfully Tomomi had a cheat-like ability that allowed her to skip a lot of the time with a simple minute check.

"Uncle Hamada!" With a smile, she opened the door while looking at Hamada.

"What up pipsqueak! How's life treating you?" Hamada smiled as he ruffled Tomomi's hair, it was once to see her since he doesn't visit the Mizushima household that often unless something important happens.

"Very decent! I want you to see the game I'm making!" She started pulling his sleeve while hiding him from her computer.

"You really are getting your uncle to work before greeting him properly?" He said with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes! Anyways look if my code is all right or if I missed something, I made a big chunk of the game this week!" Without an ounce of hesitation, she continued to pull him

"...You really are as ruthless as your father" Hamada muttered while getting ready to tire his eyes out.

Hamada Hirata, 'Mr. Perfect' or how Tomomi knows him as 'tired uncle', he is one her dad's only friends and his best if what she gets from the interactions between those two points to, his quirk was definitely a nice boon to save a lot of time trying to look at code and make sense of it. She of course also liked the easy-going atmosphere he's got even though his quirks do seem kinda depressing.

"Redundant, redundant, you did not use uppercase in that variable before, that math is backwards on that, this could be optimized, redundant, useless, you made an endless loop there..." He continued listing every error he caught with his quirk as Tomomi noted them down.

"Thanks for helping me uncle!" She said after fixing everything up, it took 20 minutes since Hamada himself doesn't write code but his help already cut down the debugging time from weeks to mere minutes.

"Don't worry kiddo, don't get too caught up on the details though, it looks pretty good to me already" He said while rubbing his stinging eyes.

"I'll put your name on the credits for this!" She said while writing more code, she was very close to completion so she would rather not delay any further.

"Okay, have a good day and try to not sleep too late"

"Un!"

With a nod of acknowledgment, Hamada left her room as he went to relax in the living room. It didn't take long before Takeshi returned from work and saw him lazying around on the couch viewing videos while drinking a soda and chips that he definitely didn't grab from the counter.

"Hoh? The most unexpected man came to see me, what's going on?" Takeshi said as he went to brew himself a cup of coffee while trying to ignore the loud munching.

"Don't hype me up like that Takeshi, can't I visit a good friend?" Hamada said nonchalantly, Takeshi looked at him with narrowed eyes.

"An excuse is not going to work if you yourself don't believe it" He bluntly stated.

"Guh!" Hamada recoiled as he was punched by the hard truth.

Hamada is a lazy person by nature, looking at the world by its 'true' colors had made him into someone who likes imperfection a lot more since it's less suspicious. He would never be caught dead working hard if he could evade it, and Takeshi knew this well, which is why although they are partners they split up when Hamada doesn't want to do extra hours.

"You got me there" Hamada said as he straightened up "But what can I say? I prefer to sleep and be lazy in my bed than visit your house, also your wife punched me last time I got here!" He exclaimed while pointing at Hamada.

"She said that you made me a pervert so a bit of heavenly retribution was up to be dealt... or something like that" Takeshi rebutted with complete confidence while grabbing a chip, in complete contrast with what he said.

"What?! You should have helped me there, you know the rules of best friends!! Bros before ho-" Hamada choked on his spit as he felt real danger for the first time in a long time.

"Go on"

"No. I sense I have made some kind of mistake"

"Good choice" Takeshi nodded at 'the great instincts' of his friend.

They continued with light bantering about their lives, Takeshi was the one who lead most of the conversation like how he would be dividing his time and his concerns for his family, he also commented on how the game Tomomi was making probably stems from him buying her lego sets.

Although Takeshi was the type of person to not talk much, he did talk a lot more than Hamada since Hamada straight up never did anything most of the time, he preferred to have a maximum of one 'event' per day, too bad that an event where things like buying groceries cleaning his house and having an appointment at the doctor.

"Now, what is happening for the laziest person I know to come to my house and wait for me to finish my extra hours of work?" Takeshi finally said after noticing Hamada tense up every time he mentioned work during this visit.

"We got a pretty strong clue for the Big bad wolf himself" Takeshi frowned for a bit after hearing Hamada.

"We already had a lead though? What doe this cha-"

"Our resident hero will confront him in a month at the latest..."

Both of them remained in silence, Takeshi was trying to come up with a few reasons as to why would he do that without so much of a plan. He remained with a complicated expression while sorting his trough and Hamada let him since Takeshi was an analytical person when not fighting, so he needed a bit of time when he was bombarded with information.

"I see... We will have to coordinate a lot of bullshit one way or another even if we are successful" Takeshi let a tired smile at the knowledge that a month was definitely not enough time to plan for the probable complete collapse of hero society and its ramifications.

"I'm crying just by thinking about the number of extra hours I'll have to do!!" Hamada was sniffling while praying for all the good hours of peaceful sleep that are going to be lost.

"Yeah, we're pretty screwed in this one" Takeshi agreed with him, he liked to do extra hours but he still liked to see his family every day, that would be hard to do for the next month.

"Try not to say that in our next meeting, it will make morale even lower!" If Hamada understood something about Takeshi is that he was reliable, if he himself wasn't confident in something then it was probably hopeless for the police force.

"I do know how to read the room unlike you"

"The number will not go up faster even if you refresh the page every thirty seconds Oka"

"I think it will work though?"

"And think you're dumb"

Tomomi and Oka had already been a week since they published their little game on the most popular platform since it was extremely easy to do without too many legal documents to see, their share of the profit was a favorable 65% so they would be rich if more than a thousand people bought the game.

The people who bought were mostly from Japan but since Tomomi had added the languages she knew from her previous life, those being English and Spanish, there was also a sizable portion coming from countries that spoke them. Oka had been a bit too focused on the number going up that she actually lost sleep trying to refresh the page.

[I know that the likes short term results but this is a bit too much]

"And what does it have to do with what I said?" Oka asked with a raised eyebrow.

"The difference between our declarations is that mine is scientifically proven" Tomomi said without missing a beat.

"Hey!!"

Both of them were bickering during recess since they have nothing to do, it's not like they actively sought something extraordinary to do every day, both of them were kids so they acted like that, on whims they would go somewhere to play or close themselves for training when they had nothing better to do.

[I like this life]

Tomomi appreciated how carefree she could be, experiencing a 'normal' childhood was not on her bucket list at all but she very much enjoyed it to the very core in this second life of hers. She would worry about the supposed plot of this world if it's not already changed by her very presence.

[Well I can worry about this other thing though]

Tomomi was eyeing a banana peel that was on the floor of the playground with interest. She didn't particularly like them, at most she was a bit adverse to them due to their ability to overpower every other fruit flavor on a smoothie, but there was another trait that this kind of fruit could display 'unique' to this second life.

She had already lived ten years in this world and considered it dear to her even if it was 'fictional', unlike the anime or manga, everything was and looked real to her. Seeing her head and arms bend so much without breaking was extremely unsettling the first time it happened but people in this world don't really bat an eye to that type of stuff.

Thanks to the human ability to adapt to many circumstances she managed to get used to seeing weird stuff, but she still got reminded that this was indeed somewhat fictional due to a characteristic that she saw again and again that no one else found interesting.

The Universe had comedic timing and weird logic.

It happened too often to be a coincidence, people running off in a comedic manner and leaving a dust cloud even if the floor is clean, a bad joke making people physically take damage like a punch. She once saw a guy with hearth eyes on the upper grades, and there was apparently a love triangle going on in the school.

Worst of all, her own quirk took part in it! whenever she got hit by something on the head she would grow a bump on her head even if didn't hurt that much! her body would move on her own to make the situation even more fun than it should be and she had little control over it.

[Well the manga had the comedy tag if I'm not wrong, wonder if I'm some sort of main character?]

She was reincarnated after all, but nothing had happened to her yet, maybe they were setting up for something, or was this just slice of life? she really would mind it, but thinking of meta stuff and whenever or not she had any freedom of choice was not what she was gunning for today. She was going to destroy that banana peel today.

[I need tangible proof to know that I'm not making shit up at this point]

She was really going crazy, she was going to step on the banana peel in the most careful way known to man just to see what would happen. she has never seen someone actually slip on one in her previous life, she did slip on a half-eaten burrito but that was at least plausible but a banana peel? on a dirt floor? that should be impossible.

"Wanna go buy something from the vending machine with our Minecraft money?"

"Oh! sure that should be rewarding for our efforts!"

"It sure will"

So the plan proceeded as... planned. Tomomi and Oka were leaving to buy some stuff with the 'winnings' of their games, they technically haven't received them since that happens at the end of the month but two cans of soda and some candy would not exceed their winnings of this week.

As they approached the objective, Tomomi finally stepped on the banana peel and straight up lost her balance as if she just lost friction with the floor and fell on the dirt.

[...]

[I think I heard a sound effect]

"Ow" facing the sky she said indifferently as Oka appeared in her vision looking at her with an amused smile.

"You alright?" She said while offering her hand.

"Yeah, just slipped so don't worry" Tomomi took her hand and stood up and dusted herself while noticing that there were some spectators, a lot more than before.

[Well I did fall in the middle of the playground, and pretty comically at that so it only makes sense that there are a lot of people here]

While Tomomi was thinking about the fact that she definitely slipped on a banana as if she was in a cartoon, Oka noticed something and pulled on the hem of Tomomi's shirt.

"Ummm Tomomi" Oka asked with concern.

"Yes?" Tomomi said while looking at her with a raised eyebrow.

"You're bleeding"

"Oh"

Tomomi looked at her right hand and there was a visible cut on it, it wasn't super deep but it was enough to shed a lot of blood to scare anyone, She saw that there were some rocks on the floor and they were somewhat sharp so she guessed that she cut herself with those.

[Well it isn't that bad anyway, with my healing factor it would... Oh wait]

She realized a second later that she spread all the blood on her skirt by dusting herself, even Oka's hand had blood in it. While blood was not good at all she wasn't too surprised and neither was Oka, after all, she did bleed sometimes when she overexerted herself in training so a little blood wouldn't scare her or Oka.

The problem was that they were in public.

"AHH! Are you Alright?"

"You Okay?"

"HOW did you get that cut?"

She was bombarded with questions that she rather not hear right now, but she still answered them since the kids were genuinely concerned for her. She had decent popularity and kid clout and Oka was a big part of it. Oka was going to simply lead her to the infirmary so that she could clean the injury but Tomomi stopped her.

Oka simply question her with her eyes Tomomi simply whispered to her ear.

"Don't you feel that something that something is off?"

Oka thought for a moment and closed her eyes and concentrated, she started humming and even sweating a bit while Tomomi was looking at her with a smirk. Eventually, Oka opened her eyes and her eyes darted through the kids that were still near Tomomi, trying to pinpoint the source.

[She really is a prodigy in sword arts to be able to detect it without much training]

There was a certain sensation that occurs naturally when your body perceives danger that gets augmented when you train it and actively look for it, it more classifies as an aura more than anything.

Bloodlust.

Tomomi was already familiar with the sensation since she trains regularly, but on those occasions, she only felt it passively emitted instead of being directed at her. Even if her dad was capable of emitting a high amount of bloodlust he was psychologically incapable of even thinking of harming her, so she always only felt it in a diluted way.

But now she felt the full brunt of it and it was somewhat uncomfortable but not that dangerous, Her dad did say that killing intent was way more disrupting since bloodlust only really relates towards 'wanting to shed blood'. Tomomi basically was getting a taste of this new sensation since it was her first time sensing it this way.

Both of them found the source of it, a simple young girl with dirty ash blond hair, she was breathing irregularly but that was it, she looked a bit too 'plain' to be emitting such strong bloodlust. Tomomi and Oka both looked at each other and smiled in complete understanding.

"I have to go to the infirmary... Ummm" Tomomi began looking at the crowd before looking eyes with the girl, The girl's breath hitched before Tomomi smiled weakly.

"Could you accompany me and Oka to the infirmary?" she said while purposely showing her bleeding hand and felt the aura hit her face on with more force than before.

"S-sure!" She said while looking at the floor trying to hide her... blush?

"Cool! Let's go"Oka moved on immediately while Tomomi followed.

[She sure is a weird one]

When they reached the infirmary, which had not one nurse at the moment, Oka sneakily blocked the door while Tomomi searched for bandages and the girl simply looked at her. Tomomi wanted to know what was her deal, she probably was some sort of kid that was jealous of her since she was popular.

It was a cliche thing but it could happen in this universe, there weren't many reasons to have hostility towards her and feel happy when she was hurt so she was just going to scare her if she was that to humble her so that she would not mess with them later.

"So what's your name? Mine is Tomomi and y friend is Oka" Oka nodded at that while the girl had a shy smile while giggling.

"M-my name is Himiko Toga" She said in a lovely voice.

Tomomi paused for a second before continuing to search for bandages, she nodded at Toga's answer and faced her with a smile.

[Well this IS interesting after all!]