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Chapter 55: OP Garlic (IX)
“What kind of plot twist is this?[1]” Feng Bujue muttered, “The doctor we needed to save in the mission is actually the villain?” All the facts he knew and all the mission’s details flashed in his mind. Every piece of speculation was tested and tried with what he knew. Seconds later, a subtle change came across his face, “This prick,” he began to say, “Ashford can’t be the murder suspect, or could he…. Could it be that he was planning on going to the top of the building to use some sort of machine to spread a variant of the virus throughout the city after he escaped the lab? That’s why the virus was able to spread so quickly making it so that this lord was unable to find a single survivor until now?” He couldn’t help but curse, “This fricken prick is that lizard doctor!”[2]
At the moment he was the only one here, and there were also no working monitors, so the System didn’t try to limit or silence these profanities.
“Hold on…” Feng Bujue suddenly realized something, “Those two…Pan Feng and Hua Xiong, where the hell did they come from? It’s like they already knew that it wasn’t necessary to come down to the research lab to clear the level.” He mulled it over, “Based off common sense, the direction of the storyline should have been… after the players enter the tower, they’d first go to the research lab, find the antiserum, fight some mini-BOSS, and then discover a few small clues that indicate Ashford is the villain, after which they’d once again follow the clues and the mission notification to fight their way upstairs…. But what were these two guys up to? Did they directly go up to uncover the BOSS’s identity and use brute force to beat it until it revealed its true appearance?
“Lil’ Tan hasn’t died yet which basically confirms that he’s definitely moving together with those two, but he doesn’t like nor is he good at inciting others and was even more unlikely to prompt them to go upstairs for no reason. Besides, the others were still incredibly strong players, they wouldn’t have listened to him anyway.
“So…those two are doing whatever they want, and they’re completely correct….”
The more he thought about it, the more Feng Bujue felt that there was something wrong about the situation in this Scenario. He composed himself but then somewhat enthusiastically pulled out the Winchester and loaded it before he rushed out the door.
Though he was in a rush earlier when he was exploring, he was still methodical in his rush. The path he took was all mapped out in his head. Besides, there were road indicators still–the zombie corpses–so Feng Bujue was quite quick to find his way back to the elevator.
By relying on【Knight’s Dance】’s boost to running, he had hardly used up any Stamina while advancing back toward to his destination at a speed that other plays could only achieve by dashing madly with maximum effort.
Ten minutes later, Feng Bujue made it back to the elevator that led to the ground floor. When he’d first left the area, he was in a hurry and hadn’t cleaned up the zombies that were piled on the floor in front of the elevator, basically leaving the doors jammed. It took about three minutes for him to drag the seven or eight bodies that were in the elevator out into the corridor. Then he rode his way up and by chance met with Wang Tan Zhi in the lobby after returning to the first floor.[3]
“Hey! Lil’ Tan!” Feng Bujue called out to him.
Lil’ Tan spun his head around, “Eh? Jue Bro, how did you end up behind me….”
“Cut the crap,” interrupted Feng Bujue as he walked over while simultaneously handing over an antiserum he pulled out of his inventory. “Drink it.”
“What’s this?” asked Lil’ Tan as he took the antiserum and looked at the item attributes, “How did you get this?”
“I went to the research lab in the basement just now,” Feng Bujue answered.
“Ah? The other two…” Before Lil’ Tan finished speaking, Feng Bujue already figured out what he wanted to ask and immediately replied, “They died somewhere else.”
The two of them only exchanged a few words before heading to the top floor of the tower. Along the way, the two explained to each other everything they experienced and knew about their current situation.
Lil’ Tan’s recount matched with Feng Bujue’s deductions, only furthering his suspicions that there was something not quite right with【Matchless General Pan Feng】and【Hua Xiong Beheader of Thousands】. In Feng Bujue’s mind, the strength of these two were still at an acceptable range, but what bothered him were their actions. They directly headed upstairs in a situation where they had no clues suggesting that Ashford was at the top of the building. Doing so could either be due to an astonishing amount of “luck” or because they may have received some outside information inaccessible to normal players.
Feng Bujue followed Lil’ Tan all the way to the 51st floor. Up until the 47th floor, the two follow e the path that Lil’ Tan had taken earlier with the Hua Xiong duo. Lil’ Tan hadn’t pass through the last four floors with them, but the two managed by following the previous people’s footsteps: the monster corpses were a convenient waymarker.
As they approached the highest floor, Feng Bujue asked, “The first time you went up with them, did you ever hit a dead end or have to double back?”
“Um…” Lil’ Tan recalled, “No, we really didn’t.”
Feng Bujue followed up with, “But the path we’ve taken wound around in circles. We’ve changed elevators several times, and we also had fought across a few of the floors and switch to a different area to use the stairs.” He paused for a moment, “Eh? Something’s weird… how did they know which floors to use the stairs….”
“They even know the route….” mumbled Feng Bujue.
The two of them reached the 52nd floor as they talked.
As they came from the stairs they were greeted with the sight of a long hallway with huge flower pots placed every ten meters. At its end was a glass wall on which the Allerbmu logo was printed. Beyond the glass, it was possible to see one enormous office space. The area had few walls or pillars and had what one would expect from an office: cubicles furnished with common tables, chairs, computers; water dispensers…etc. At the far left and right there were some stand-alone offices.
Looking at it all, this floor was indeed exactly as advertised on the directory on the first floor— “Office Space”.
The two walked through the hallway and passed the set of automatic doors leading to the wide office space. The floor was clean. There were no blood stains or signs of zombie activity whatsoever. This was not good. All signs indicated the presence of a BOSS level monster nearby.
Feng Bujue had only time to scan over the area before he felt the floor beneath him tremble and he heard rumbling from above. There wasn’t any time for further investigation of the room as the ten meter high ceiling above him ruptured with a bang and a deformed human-like monster descended from the roof through the opening. Chunks of cement clattered onto the floor and a thick dust cloud rose up from the rubble.
Soon after, two human silhouettes jumped down from the hole. It went without saying that these two were definitely the two gurus Pan Feng and Hua Xiong.
In the billowing dust, the only thing that could be seen were three figures fighting altogether. The glint of an axe and the shadow of a spear intertwined, layering blows upon blows. From time to time it was possible to hear flesh sliced by a blade and the puffing sounds of spurting blood. The floor too was slowly covered by a layer of blood.
The dust gradually dispersed and after a minute of this pincer attack, it was easy to see at a glance that the monster was having a hard time fending the two off. It actually whirled around and began to charge towards the wall of windows. PanHua were also aware that it wanted to flee. Of course they were unwilling to let it escape, otherwise their plan to end the Scenario here were certain to be dashed.
Hua Xiong stopped and caught up, getting ahead of the monster and just to its side. With a whirl he spun around and swept spear around, pushing the head of the weapon straight at the monster’s head. The spear turned into phantom shadows in a rapid pin. Since Pan Feng’s weapon was rather heavy, his speed was slower. He only took one bold step forward to near his target before bringing down his mountain axe and aiming it at the back of the monster in a vertical slash.
The two of them had been relentless in their pursuit and pressed in harder and harder. They finally forced the mutant Ashford into a metaphorical corner. Left with no choice this time, in order to escape, it unhesitatingly took a spear strike. The spearhead pierced through the monster’s left eye socket, boring through and jutting out the back of the head. With the blow came a spurt of foul fluid out the exit wound.
But this kind of injury was still not enough to kill the mutant. It continued forward, curling in on itself slightly, it doggedly defended against the attack. It successfully escaped Pan Feng’s axe chop and arrived at the exterior glass wall. Soon after, it then used a jagged bone protruding from its shoulder to slam at the thick glass. After causing a crack, it curled its entire body into a ball, crashed through the crack and flew outside of the tower.
Pan Feng and Hua Xiong rushed to the edge exterior glass wall and lowered their heads to watch the mutant’s rapidly falling figure. The subject of their attention fell for a short period, then used the suction cups and sticky bodily fluid to cling to the exterior of the building and quickly skimmed its way to the ground, escaping from the two’s line of sight.
“Tsk…he still got away.” said Pan Feng.
“As we feared… since we triggered the BOSS in the absence any players, its intelligence and reaction were modified,” replied Hua Xiong.
“Sirs.” Feng Bujue’s voice cut in from behind them, immediately flustering the two.
They turned their heads and saw Feng Bujue who held a dangerous look in his eyes and Wang Tanzhi who had a completely baffled expression.
“Can you explain…” Feng Bujue asked, cutting to the chase, “who or what exactly are you two?”
Footnotes:
[1]神展开 Sort of refers to when the plot has this huge non-sequitur leap forward in logic or plot and means to curse the “god” of the story ie. the writer. I couldn’t think of a fancy idiom equivalent in English, so shoot me some if you can think of any.
[2]“这货他喵的是蜥蜴博士吧！” Firstly, this sentence does not actually include a curse, but half of one 这货 which still uses a different character for the actual insult for something like “b*stard” and 他喵的 which literally means “he meows” which is a derivative of 他妈的 which literally means “his mom” but is used more like “damn it/f*ck”. Secondly, the lizard Doctor is in reference to Curt Connors from Spider-Man.
[3]It has come to my attention that in some places the first floor is not the ground floor but rather the next floor up from the ground floor. Please note that in this story the ground floor and the first floor are one and the same.
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Thank you, Vexed, Newt and Snowy 🙂