The Peerless Garlic Chapter (9)
"What kind of joke is that?" Feng Bujue said, "the doctor we need to rescue is the true villain?" Something flashed in his mind combined with the Quest and a little more reasoning, seconds later, a strange light flared up in his eyes. "Perhaps this Ashford guy is the murderer who has poisoned everyone. So, the true details of the plot is that Ashford came to the top floor of the building after he had escaped the underground lab and used some device to spread out his mutated virus? And that’s how the virus instantly expanded throughout the city leaving no living people for me to meet now." He couldn’t help but curse, "This asshole must be Doctor Curt Connors the Lizard!" (1)
He was the only one here at this moment, and there were no surveillance and control devices near him. Thus, the system didn’t censor his cursing.
"Wait a minute—" Feng Bujue suddenly recognized something, "the other two players, Pan Feng and Hua Xiong, what kind of gods are they? They got it straight right when they had entered the building. Looks like they knew well that they didn’t need to check out the underground lab to pass the round." He mused, "Hm, normally, the way the plot should have been developed is that after players have entered the building, they would come to the lab, find the serum and kill a small BOSS, etc. Then, they would find the clues, which said that Doctor Ashford is a villain. From those clues, they would go upstairs. What the heck are these two doing? Directly exposing the BOSS’s identity and then beat it up until it came back to its original form?
"Little Tan is still alive. Basically, he is with these two. But he doesn’t like or know now to control other people. And, he would have no reason to ask them to go to the top floor. Moreover, they are powerful players as it’s impossible that they would listen to him."
"Thus, the other two are doing on their own wills. And, they are strangely right about everything."
Feng Bujue found this scenario wasn’t alright at all. He got himself together from a little bit overexcited state, took out the Winchester, reloaded it and stormed out of the room.
Although he had rushed in here, his mind had automatically remembered the routes he had traveled by. Also, there were zombies acting as the traffic signals that aided Feng Bujue in finding his way back quickly.
Since his speed was improved with the Dance of the Knight, he almost consumed nothing to reach the speed that other players had to run madly and recklessly to achieve. He then ran towards his target.
10 minutes later, Feng Bujue had reached the elevator that ran to the ground and the first level. As he had rushed out of there, the piles of dead bodies were still blocking the elevator’s doors, and they were still stuck there. It took him more than three minutes to move seven or eight bodies from the elevator to the corridor. Then, he went up to the first ground and met Wang Tanzhi in the lobby.
"HEY! Little Tan!" Feng Bujue called out for him.
Little Tan turned around, "Eh? Jue-Ge, how did you come here from behind me?"
"Don’t babble," Feng Bujue stopped him, walked forward and took out a tube of serum in his bag, "drink it."
"What’s that?" Little Tan received the serum and checked out its properties. "How did you get it?"
"I’ve just checked the lab underground," Feng Bujue answered.
"Hey, the other two players—" Little Tan hadn’t finished, yet Feng Bujue understood what he wanted to say and answered him directly, "They died in another place."
They exchanged the information briefly then headed to the top floor of the building. On the way there, they told each other about their experiences and the situation they knew.
What Little Tan narrated to Feng Bujue had proved his reasoning, leaving him suspected that there should be something strange about the Peerless General Pan Feng and the Executioner Hua Xiong. To Feng Bujue, those two were still within his scope of acceptance. The problem mainly laid in their actions. They hadn’t done anything to collect the clues, but they directly went straight to the top floor of the building to find Doctor Ashford. This was the ‘amazing luck’, or they had known beforehand some information that normal players couldn’t access.
Feng Bujue followed Little Tan straight to level 51. From the ground to level 47, they had followed the path that Little Tan and the other two had traveled. For the last four levels, even though Little Tan hadn’t come there before, with the landmarks of the dead bodies on the ground, they were still able to track down their predecessors.
When they were about to reach the top floor, Feng Bujue asked, "The first time you’ve been here with them, did you travel on the same road several times or met a dead end?"
"Oh," Little Tan tried to remember, "Not really," Little Tan immediately answered, "But now we are walking on the same route. We’ve changed the elevator several times and climbed some staircases at different levels," he paused for a while, "eh, yeah, how did they know in which level we should change to use the emergency staircase?!"
"They know the route too," Feng Bujue mused.
While they were talking, they reached level 52.
There was a long corridor that lead to the interior of the floor from the staircase. Along the corridor, there was a big flowerpot every 1o meters. A transparent glass wall stood opposite the corridor which printed the Allerbmu’s Logo. Inside, there was a large office that occupied the whole space of this floor. The office had countless cubicles with a typical arrangement of desks, chairs, computers, kettles, and stationaries. Also, there were some separated offices at both ends of the place.
Just from the first glimpse, they knew this was exactly the zone marked ‘Office Area’ on the map at the lobby. Nothing more.
They walked along the corridor, getting into the large office area through an automatic sliding door. This floor didn’t have any traces or blood streaks to prove that zombies had been here. This wasn’t a good sign since it was the sign of a big BOSS-level monster.
Feng Bujue had scanned through the room just once. He hadn’t deployed any reasoning, and suddenly, he felt the ground under his feet was shaking as a large section of ceiling around dozens of meters ahead of them was falling off with a loud, shattering sound. An ugly human-shaped monster came into the room from the hole it had broken. A big section of cement ceiling grumblingly fell on the ground, diffusing a dense mist of dust.
Then, there were two more figures who plunged down from the hole. Needless to say, they were the two Gods Pan Feng and Hua Xiong.
Inside the mist of rolling dust, the three figures were tangling, struggling with each other. The light reflected from the axe and spear constantly flashed as they could hear the sound of sharp weapons piercing through flesh. Gradually, black blood expanded on the ground.
After one minute of fighting, the dust started to disperse. The monster turned around and dashed towards the glass wall as it saw the situation was too difficult to parry. Pan and Hua also knew its intention of running away. Of course, they didn’t want to let it go. If not, their plan of completing the scenario here would be over.
Hua Xiong bent then ran to the front of the monster, turning and sweeping his spear to the monster’s head as the handle of the spear turned into a fading shadow. Since Pan Feng’s weapon was much heavier, his speed was slower. He could only step forward to approach the target, then hack his Mountain Splitting Axe on the monster’s back.
The two of them were chasing after the mob non-stop, forcing the mutant Ashford to a dead corner. At this moment, in an attempt to run away, the monster didn’t hesitate taking a hard strike from the spear. The spear then pierced through the monster’s skull from its left eye socket, dragging out a mess of substance.
However, this kind of wound couldn’t kill the mutant monster. It curled up its body and successfully dodged Pan Feng’s axe. The monster then came to the glass wall, using its elbows, which were aided with sharp bones like spikes, and smashed the glass. After making a crack there, the monster balled its body and broke the glass wall, jumping off the building.
Pan Feng and Hua Xiong dashed to the wall, looking at the mutant body falling in the air. When the monster was about to reach the ground, it immediately used the suckers and mucus on its body to stick its body to the wall and quickly descended to the ground, fleeing away from their visions.
"Tsk, it’s gone," Pan Feng said.
"Indeed, under circumstances of the absence of other players, when the two of us attack the BOSS, it will trigger changes in its intelligences and reactions," Hua Xiong replied.
"You guys," Feng Bujue’s voice arose behind them, making them startled.
As they turned around, they could see Feng Bujue’s unfriendly eyes and the inexplicable face of Wang Tanzhi.
"Could you please tell me," Feng Bujue asked directly, "who the hell are you?"
(1) Doctor Lizard: The Lizard (Curt Connors) is a fictional character, a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character is usually depicted as an enemy of Spider-Man.