Players, Please Board the Train

While on the train, Xu Huo had looked up information about this District. The general situation was more or less as described in the game background. However, the base cities that had become quarantine zones and been abandoned were not entirely dead ends. Before they were cut off from other cities, many people had been trapped inside. Most had died for one reason or another, but some had barely managed to survive.

Xu Huo believed the person who had just appeared was a survivor from W18. The signs of activity inside the building proved it.

He did not take off his Invisibility Cloak. Wearing Gentleman’s Bearing, he descended the stairs and stopped at the fifteenth floor.

Someone had set small traps in the hallway, so Xu Huo simply grabbed the piano wire and moved through the air. But he had clearly underestimated the other person’s ingenuity. Just as he reached the corner of the corridor, an electronic surveillance eye fixed to the wall blinked. All the electronic cameras in the places he had passed through had been unable to function, but this one seemed to have been modified into a motion-triggered camera. It had remained motionless until he appeared.

They had picked a good spot.

The person hiding in an apartment on this floor had already woken up. They fled into the distance via the passage from the outdoor balcony. Xu Huo pulled off his Invisibility Cloak, cut through space, and appeared in the room ahead of them. He broke through the door and landed on the balcony!

At that moment, the young man wearing animal skins was running and leaping across the balconies. He skidded to an abrupt stop, turned around, and jumped straight off the balcony!

The apartment balconies did not line up perfectly, so he nimbly landed on the floor below and quickly slipped inside.

Xu Huo followed him down. As soon as he reached the windowsill, several beast fangs flew toward him. He caught one, used it to knock away the others, and sliced through the net coming at him from ahead. When he looked up, the teenager had already vanished.

Xu Huo crossed the room and entered the hallway, only to see the other person peering out from the far end. Their eyes met for just an instant before the teenager dashed to the open space in the middle of the floor and jumped down!

There was a deep hole about fifteen meters in diameter at the center of the fourteenth floor. No one knew how it had formed, but a fairly large living creature lurked in its depths.

Xu Huo appeared above the hole and dropped Balloon String to catch the teenager. As he hauled him up, he also severed the rope tied around the boy’s waist. The teenager pulled out a glowing little ball, ready to throw it down, when Xu Huo called out, ”Turn around and look.”

The boy whipped around, but he was not shocked to see that the rope behind him had snapped. Instead, he stared at Xu Huo with an expression of sheer terror and despair. Of course, that despair was not because he had been captured, but because of the giant Mutant drawn by the sound!

In the blink of an eye, the eight-legged Mutant at the bottom of the hole had scrambled up to the twelfth floor. Its enormous mouth let out a hoarse hiss like the sound of wind, and it leaped to bite the person dangling in midair!

Balloon String reeled in at high speed. As the teenager rose, a flash of sword energy streaked by. With a scream, the injured eight-legged Mutant fell back down. Xu Huo flung Hurt Others, Not Yourself toward the pillar opposite him, wrapped it around twice, and turned it into a rope knife!

The teenager, now out of danger, hurriedly shouted, ”Run! You’re no match for it...”

Before he could finish, the eight-legged Mutant charged up to the fourteenth floor and slammed into Hurt Others, Not Yourself. Xu Huo did not have the strength to hold it back, but he was standing far enough away. When it plunged into the fifteenth-floor landing, the raised rope knife carried him along just in time. A cold glint flashed from Eye of the Dead, slicing open half the Mutant’s abdomen!

Its foul, green innards spilled out like water. Xu Huo raised an air barrier to block them, then retreated, drawing This Road Is Blocked as he went. After severing several of its enormous legs, he tore down the ceiling as well.

The collapsing floor above kept falling, smashing the injured Mutant back down to the fourteenth floor. But just as Xu Huo was about to finish the monster in one decisive blow, he suddenly sensed numerous creatures rapidly approaching from all around.

”The smell of blood attracts scavenger beetle swarms. They’ll eat every living thing they come across!” The teenager’s voice was full of anger and regret.

Even the eight-legged Mutant stopped chasing its prey and dragged its injured body underground.

Xu Huo moved onto the balcony. The exterior walls of several nearby buildings were covered in hard-shelled beetles the size of human heads. They moved quickly, surging in from every direction and heading straight for this building!

He grabbed the teenager as the boy turned to run, then leaped into the air. He pushed Gentleman’s Bearing to its limit, rising above the rooftop, then climbed another fifty meters with the piano wire, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the city.

The teenager dangling below him slowly floated upward like a balloon. When they passed each other, Xu Huo smiled. ”You stopped me from killing the Mutant just now to avoid attracting the scavenger beetle swarm. But with Mutants active here, it seems unlikely you can avoid bloodshed altogether.”

Balloon String was lodged in the teenager’s back. His limbs hung downward, leaving him powerless to remove the item or grab the string and turn himself over. He could only dangle in midair like a piglet, drifting upward as he spoke. ”The scavenger beetles only hunt once a month. Their sense of smell is incredible. Even if a bird falls dead in the city, they’ll crawl up from hundreds of meters underground to eat it!”

”Then they probably can’t fly.” Xu Huo glanced at the ground, where the Mutants had been driven into a corner with nowhere left to run. As soon as the scavenger beetles latched onto one, they devoured it within half a minute, leaving not even a bone behind.

Someone appeared on the roof of a neighboring building. Xu Huo turned and saw Shangguan Xi waving excitedly at him from a hundred meters away. ”Brother Xu! Brother Xu! I’m over here!”

”Shouting will attract flying Mutants!” the teenager immediately said.

”Brother Xu! It’s me, your new friend, Shangguan Xi!” The scavenger beetles were nearly at his heels, so Shangguan Xi could hardly worry about anything else. Seeing that Xu Huo was not moving, he kept shouting, ”My flying item has run out of time! Can you give me a hand?”

”Make him shut up!” the teenager barked.

”You shut up first.” Xu Huo glanced at him, took out Go to Destination, and brought the teenager with him through a doorway like a glass frame to Shangguan Xi’s location. He lowered Hurt Others, Not Yourself through the air and motioned for Shangguan Xi to climb up himself.

The scavenger beetles had already swarmed over the rooftop. Shangguan Xi hurriedly grabbed the item and climbed the rope straight up to Xu Huo’s feet. ”Bro, can you get us a little higher? These damn bugs can jump!”

Xu Huo shifted the piano wire, suspending them in midair between two buildings.

”Did any other players get off here?” Xu Huo asked.

”Yeah! Ding Wei, the one carrying a book!” Shangguan Xi sounded rather indignant as he brought her up. ”She came over and struck up a conversation with me on the train. I thought we might at least be able to team up, but when we ran into a Mutant, she kicked me out without a second thought. If not for her, I wouldn’t have had to use up my flying item so soon!”

”No wonder she carries a book around every day. Turns out she’s had all that practice flipping pages fast enough to turn on someone!”