The King's Avatar

When Steamed Bun finally figured out what was happening and rushed to the entrance of Dark Palace, Tang Rou had moved ahead of him. Ye Xiu’s Lord Grim followed Soft Mist to figure out the situation.

The cleric present revived Loulan Slash right away, so he was present as well. Right now, he was ordering everyone to start a hunt, “That guy was pretty strong. Make sure you stay with your party. Don’t confront him by yourself.”

When Ye Xiu heard his command, he hastily spoke up to stop Loulan Slash, “Scatter! Scatter around!”

“But that guy was pretty strong!” Loulan Slash stated his point again.

“Being alone can drag him out, so it’s a good thing. If this drags on for too long, then he’ll leave combat be able to log out. It’ll be too late by then.” Ye Xiu explained.

Upon hearing this, Loulan Slash changed his orders immediately while lamenting over the shrewdness of the experienced experts.

“Isn’t he your friend? What’s going on?” Loulan Slash was nowhere near as composed as he appeared to be. He rushed forward to pick up the loot the moment the boss died. While he was still counting the rewards excitedly, someone else suddenly labeled him as a boss and killed him when he least expected it. When one got killed in the game, a few items from the inventory would also drop. Therefore, most players wouldn’t carry anything important on themselves. Just now, when he picked up the loot, Loulan Slash had turned himself into a mobile treasure vault. When he died, he lost more items from his inventory than equipment on his body. Three items from his inventory dropped, while only one equipment on his body had dropped.

While his equipments were flashy, the items in his inventory were much more rare. After all, they had came from a level 70 wild boss, which was usually hoarded away by the big guilds. The items he lost, especially the materials, couldn’t even be bought with money. Their value far surpassed the equipments he had. Right now, he lost all of that to a scrap picker. There were no words to describe the bitterness he felt.

“We just know each other. Don’t worry. He hasn’t run too far yet. I’ll take full responsibility if I can’t get the stuff back.” Ye Xiu replied.

Loulan Slash had some doubts. Apart from Deception’s reputation, Loulan Slash had seen Lord Grim working with him last time. The thought “did he act on Lord Grim’s order?” surfaced the moment he got killed. Still, he quickly realized that this kind of betrayal was meaningless. They had originally agreed to divide the loot by half. This assassination would earn him less than half, so what would be the point?

Loulan Slash didn’t think too much about it, but the thought was still there. He simply pushed it to the back of his mind. Ye Xiu’s words not only crushed his doubts, it also embraced him a little, “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I was just wondering. Aren’t the two of you friends? Is there some misunderstanding?”

“No. That is just what he does.” Ye Xiu answered.

“Oh, he…” Loulan Slash was going to follow up with an explanation of how Deception had killed him, but Ye Xiu interrupted, “Just tell me where he ran off to. That’s much more important than how you died. This way?”

Lord Grim pointed with Myriad Manifestations Umbrella towards the direction where players were gathering.

“Yeah…” Loulan Slash agreed.

“Start attacking with AoE attacks!!!” Ye Xiu called out, while going over, “Attack with your group! Those who aren’t in the same group, don’t crowd together!”

“Don’t stand around too loosely! Try to cover more area with your attacks! Start attacking!” Ye Xiu was too busy giving out commands to chat with Loulan Slash.

Loulan Slash thought about it. There really was no time to chat. Once Deception leaves a combat state and logs off, he can’t have everyone here wait until he comes back. It didn’t take long to leave combat: only 3 minutes. This was determined by the system. If no skill hit Deception within 3 min, he would be considered out of combat. Then, he could simply log off and escape this hunt with ease.

Ye Xiu’s plan right now wasn’t focused on killing or even finding the opponent. All he wanted to do was ensure that Deception couldn’t log off.

“Open your eyes! That guy’s a ninja. The ID is Deception! He’s a professional scrap picker! His greatest strength is being shameless! Very shameless!” When Ye Xiu’s voice echoed across the hall, Loulan Slash, as the guild leader, decided to stay silent to let Ye Xiu take full control.

The players from Heavenly Justice responded in kind. They were quite enraged by the fact that their guild leader got killed out of the blue. They simply couldn’t allow the fruits of their hard work to be stolen so easily. They couldn’t accept that they had beaten two large guilds with Clubs behind them, but lost to a lowly scrap picker.

The peace and quiet that had settled down in the Darkness Palace with the end of the boss fight was quickly shattered. Players of all classes took out their AoE skill. No one knew if the skills had hit Deception, but they had aggroed quite a number of monsters.

Dark Palance was nonetheless still a leveling area and all leveling areas had regular monsters. It was just that those regular monsters posed no real threat to the elite teams, so no one really cared much about them. While dealing with the monsters casually, everyone was still looking around, hoping to see Deception.

“There!”

A cry rang from somewhere. When most were still looking around to locate the source of it, Lord Grim had already run off.

“Is he there?” Loulan Slash hastily followed but he wasn’t sure about it at all. This only made him realize the gap he had in comparison to pro even more.

Ye Xiu had Lord Grim charging straight over. Purple smoke exploded, engulfing a number of people in a flash.

Ninjutsu- Smoke Bomb.

Spitfires have a similar thing called Smoke Bullet.

Smoke bombs worked faster than smoke bullets. They filled the entire area in a split second. Using this skill in that moment was obviously for escaping. Ye Xiu immediately gave up trying to find Deception in the smoke cloud. Instead, he started predicting where he would jump out from.

As expected. Deception’s figure quickly shot out of the smoke cloud. Surely, there were people other than Ye Xiu who noticed this and gave chase right away. Ye Xiu, on the other hand, noticed that Deception’s hand moved back as he was escaping and shouted out a warning, “Beware of the nails!”

“Nails” was the name given to the skill by the players. The actual skill name would be caltrops. These tiny spikes are thrown onto the ground. Those who stepped on them wouldn’t take a lot of damage, but it severely decreased a character’s mobility.

Deception hid his action well, so most people wouldn’t have noticed that he threw out the nails. Unsurprisingly, among the many that gave chase, quite a few slowed down suddenly. Clearly, they had stepped on the nails by accident. With another handful of caltrops, he successfully delayed his pursuers to buy himself sometime to jump onto the stone pillar nearby and started climbing upward.

The guns roared away.

Just because the melee players were stopped didn’t mean that the long-range players had to take a back seat. The gunner class players focused their gunfire on him right away. However, Deception performed superbly. He was clearly well-practiced with the climbing skill known to ninjas. In that moment, there was no one to stop him. Ye Xiu knew from his agile movements that he probably hadn’t brought out his trash equipments for this scrap picking. This kind of speed could only be achieved with movement speed buffs from relatively good equipments.

In a few breath, Deception was pretty high up. With a backward jump, he stepped onto a beam and started sprinting straight ahead.

The beam was rather narrow, so it had no space for horizontal movement. Running up there spared him from dealing with the troubles from melee class players, but it made him the perfect target for long-range class players.

Amidst the gun fires, Deception ran straight ahead, swaying left and right to dodge the attacks. These actions demonstrated his incredible mastery over his character’s movements.

“Not bad!” Ye Xiu praised. At the same time , Deception had finally entered Lord Grim’s effective attacking range. The Myriad Manifestations Umbrella shook and Anti-Tank Missile shot straight at Deception.

Boom!

The missile landed on the bean squarely and the shock wave spread out. Deception dodged both with an agile leap, successfully avoiding this calculated move of Ye Xiu’s.

Amidst the regretful sighs of the players around, Deception could feel cold sweat dripping down his back. If he had reacted half a second later, the missile would have hit him.

Deception had been ignoring his attackers up until now. That well-planned attack finally tempted him a glance at the crowd. Immediately, a familiar name stood out painfully to him.

Why is he here?!

Deception buried his surprise in his heart and noticed the guild ID before Lord Grim’s name. It was same as all the other players: Heavenly Justice.

Had he been recruited?

While Deception was still contemplating about it, Lord Grim fired again.

Deception started to worry. If if was a one on one, he was confident that he could dodge the attacks pretty easily. The problem at hand right now was that he was running around in a rain of bullets. If an expert at such a high skill level joined the fray, there was no way his escape would be easy. That jump had indeed been splendid, but that was because he had made a mistake previously and moved one step too slow. How many players could make that sort of prediction?

I can’t drag this on any longer!

Deception made up his mind. Eyeing the stone pillar nearby, he suddenly jumped over.

Just when he seemed to have missed it, he threw out a ninjato, which buried itself into the pillar. Then he swung his character over using the rope attached to the small knife. After some swinging in midair, he successfully hid himself behind the pillar.

“Surround him!!” Loulan Slash ordered loudly, and the players of Heavenly Justice rushed from every direction.

Behind the pillar, Deception used a Ninjutsu · Disappearing Body Technique right away and was planning on taking his time to assess the situation when a roll of racing bullets nicked him

Among the flying debris, Lord Grim’s gun pointed straight at him from below the pillar, “Still hiding?”

Deception was gloomy. Wasn’t that a bit too fast?