Players, Please Board the Train

”There are too many of them — we can’t possibly kill them all.” Dai Wenqian stood a few meters behind them. He held a glass vial from which pale green smoke poured; the spiders near him slowed and grew sluggish because of it. Two other players teamed up to deal with the nearby spiders.

People nearby began edging toward him, but those two players blocked the way. One of them, holding a long blade, said, ”If you come any closer, we’ll still kill you!”

Everyone was furious, but they had no energy left to shout because more and more spiders swarmed them.

”Click! Click! Click!” The lighter opened and closed in quick succession, followed by roaring flames. When everyone turned, they saw that the circle of spiders surrounding Xu Huo and the others had been set alight; the spiders burned and scrambled in panic, and the foreign Burly Man kept riding his tiger, finishing off spiders one after another.

”Over there, that side is safe!” The living moved toward Xu Huo. Maybe emboldened, they swung their improvised weapons and killed the spiders that fled toward them. One Young Man smashed a spider’s head with a hammer and said, ”These spiders aren’t that tough…”

Before he could finish speaking, a white silk stuck to his back, and he was yanked up toward the ceiling. Several spiders immobilized his limbs with more threads so he hung in midair while the first spider drained the blood from his body.

Bang! The corpse was tossed back to the floor.

Before anyone could recover from that shock, the ceiling began to rain silk — people below were snatched one after another!

”Help!” Gu Yu shouted at her companions and lunged forward to try to cut the silken lines.

But the threads weren’t only sticky — they were tough. Few slashes from ordinary item blades could sever them.Xu Huo tried to set fire elsewhere, but those silks couldn’t be ignited. At the same time several large spiders lunged at him from different directions. By the time he finished dealing with them and looked up, the spider swarm had woven a fireproof net across the ceiling, and the threads could pass through gaps in that net to keep pulling people up.

”Leave it to me!” The foreign Burly Man jumped forward, and the tiger beneath him charged at the net.

The enormous beast slammed into the center of the web. In its struggles it stuck the net to itself and tore down several of the spiders on the other end of the threads.

Xu Huo seized the chance to set things ablaze. The spiders’ fur was highly flammable, and soon a large fire flared up. Spiders dropped from the ceiling constantly; even if not burned to death, nearby people finished them off.

After more than an hour, the big spiders on the fourteenth floor were mostly cleared. Xu Huo, Kang Hong and the others broke the spider-egg incubator to prevent the fire from spreading; Gu Yu’s group found the main breaker, but with both fire and water present, no one dared pull it, so they could only use phones to check the situation.

In total, forty-seven people on the fourteenth floor had been killed by spiders; three of them had come with Gu Yu and her group.

Staring at his comrades’ mutilated faces, Zheng Liang half-kneeled beside several corpses and pounded the ground with a fist. ”It’s all my fault! If I hadn’t called them out, they wouldn’t have died!”

Gu Yu’s expression was pained. She patted his shoulder. ”You can’t blame yourself…”

Before she could finish, Brother Tie, who had just come to after fainting and had experienced a life-or-death fight, interrupted, ”Of course we can’t blame Zheng Liang — blame him!”

He pointed at Xu Huo, his injured face twitching. ”If he hadn’t led us circling around on the main road, why would we have entered this damned dungeon?”

Players looked toward the man not far away checking spider bodies. He clapped his hands and stood, ”Trying to pin the blame on someone just because you’re less skilled?”

”What did you say!” Zhang Biao snapped, furious. ”Three players on our side are dead!”

Xu Huo wiped the pus and blood from a wound the spider’s leg had torn open and pointed at the ground with his chin. ”The killer’s right here, isn’t he?”

His tone enraged Zhang Biao and the others. Several players shoved past Gu Yu, who tried to hold them back, and advanced as if ready to settle the matter with blood.

At that moment a middle-aged woman stepped between them. ”Have you no shame?”

”I’m a housewife who barely went to school and I know this mess was caused by that broken game. When spiders kill people, why blame the monsters in the building or the ones who raised them instead of pinning it on someone who had nothing to do with it?”

”Do you all just pick on the weakest person because he’s alone?”

Zhang Biao and the others were sprayed with words, stunned and angry. ”Who do you think you are, mouthing off at us!”

”I’m a human!” the middle-aged woman shouted. ”Aren’t you all human too?”

They fell silent for a moment. Then a few more people stepped forward. One older man said, ”Young people, it’s only been eight hours. There are still three days left. If you start fighting among yourselves now, who will face danger with you later?”

”They’re right,” Dai Wenqian said. ”Total game time is ninety hours. The first six hours are on the fifteenth floor. When time’s up, an elevator appears and everyone transfers to the fourteenth floor.”

”So the time might be divided evenly among the levels — six hours per floor.”

”The game mentioned this building breeds fifteen mutant plants and fifteen mutant animals. Running into a situation like the fourteenth floor isn’t surprising.”

”If we lose any player, our risk rises significantly. The game’s danger ramps up the further you get.”

His words successfully stopped Zhang Biao and the others from burning with rage. As he turned, Zhang Biao dropped, ”I hope someone will stick their neck out for you when it comes to your turn!”

Those speaking up for Xu Huo were also acting out of self-preservation. During the earlier spider attack, only a few on Gu Yu’s side had been willing to help ordinary players. Xu Huo hadn’t said much, but his abilities were obvious: of the more than ten who rode with him, only two had died.

”Young man, don’t put too much pressure on yourself,” the middle-aged woman said. ”Everyone has a fate. People who end up in places like this tend to have bad luck.”

Even so, the remaining roughly one hundred people unconsciously edged closer to Xu Huo.

Xu Huo wasn’t focused on that. After counting heads he noticed fifteen people missing.

One hundred ninety-five had come down from the fifteenth floor. Forty-seven had been killed by spiders, yet now only one hundred thirty-three people remained on the fourteenth floor.

He frowned slightly, scanned the area, then went to the elevator and knocked. Sure enough, the elevator shaft had vanished again.

When the elevator had arrived on the fourteenth floor earlier, he had checked the time — exactly six hours had passed. Dai Wenqian’s explanation fit: ninety hours for fifteen floors, six hours per floor. But after coming down from the fifteenth floor, one elevator’s worth of people had disappeared.

The windows on the fourteenth floor were sealed shut; the floor had no dead spots to hide in. Those fifteen people could only have vanished through the elevator.