Editor: Elanor
There was dead silence around for a few seconds.
When this kind of thing appeared, the atmosphere of the entire surroundings would become different. You could feel it in the sound and the air, a sound that was infinitely closer to the breath of death, approaching you.
Everyone quietly stood there, staring at the behemoth above.
After a long moment, someone cursed, “Fucking pervert…”
No one had any doubts; it was quite obvious he was cursing the organizers.
Bai Jingan said dryly, “Try to disperse.”
Someone took a few steps back . At this moment, its tentacles probed in the air and rushed towards Xia Tian without warning. The monsters in the Killing Show innately knew how to kill people.
Xia Tian dodged awkwardly as it brushed against his hair and rushed past him. It changed direction once in the middle and hit someone behind him.
The guy didn’t move away in time, and the giant insect’s pincers clipped his carotid artery and half of his neck. Xia Tian didn’t know his name, only knew that he was a mechanic. He was silent and pessimistic all the way. Now the pessimistic prediction had finally come true.
The mechanic fell to the ground, but no one had time to care about him because the insect turned around and continued to attack; they were all in a difficult position, trying to defend themselves.
Fang Youtian grabbed a stone and threw it over, hitting the insect right in the head. As expected of a sniper.
In the midst of chaos, Xia Tian heard Bai Jingan’s voice, which was quite calm, making people feel safe in the chaos.
Bai Jingan said, “It’s not poisonous. Try to attack its head.”
That wasn’t easy, but was a direction nonetheless, and that was what was needed the most then.
But the monster was extremely dexterous. It stopped for a moment, suddenly changed its direction, and rushed towards Xicheng. The man escaped a blow, but in the confusion, the other end of the big insect’s body rolled over, and its long legs cut his calf. Xicheng cursed and fell to the ground.
It rushed towards Xicheng again, and Xia Tian shoved the remnant sword in his hand into its mouth. It couldn’t bite for a while, twisting frantically, every part of its body was as sharp as a blade.
Xia Tian did not see who it cut again, but the network logistician grabbed the stone that just bounced off and smashed it hard on one of its eyes. He smashed its armored shell and it let out a hiss of injury. What a good network logistician.
Xicheng stepped back, preparing for the next attack. Bai Jingan grabbed a discarded bone spear and viciously nailed a part of the insect’s body deeply into a stone crevice.
Xia Tian grasped the rusty hilt with force and controlled the position of its head, waiting for Xicheng to attack again.
However, there was no time to wait.
No one noticed that the mutant rat had crept back in from the darkness.
It must have some kind of wicked intelligence. It kept wandering at the edge of the battlefield, but didn’t come closer, only watching them fight the big centipede. At the moment when Xicheng’s right leg was injured and he was about to make a detour from the battlefield… probably, no one knew anymore.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
When Xicheng entered a dark area, it jumped out and bit his head.
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Xia Tian only heard a muffled curse, and the sound of shattering bones. He turned his head to look, and saw the huge mutant rat—that was right, with half of the sword in its eyes and a big gaping hole in its nose—biting into Xicheng’s head, and dragging him into the darkness like a little toy figurine.
Xia Tian released the sword and rushed in that direction. Xicheng’s feet were still kicking, but…
He was beyond any hope of saving, obviously.
At that moment, Xia Tian saw the monster’s eyes staring at him. It was a pair of intelligent eyes, full of hunger and violent pain.
Behind him, several other people rushed up and crushed the head of the big centipede into a mush. Its body was still writhing, but soon it stilled.
Xia Tian stared at the darkness, but finally stopped in his tracks and didn’t pursue the rat.
From the depths of the darkness came sounds of dragging and something that suspiciously sounded like chewing. The sound persisted for a long time, echoing in the building.
He felt a wave of resigned powerlessness. This feeling wasn’t unfamiliar, like a large piece of raw iron sinking into his stomach, arousing a burst of cold anger. He clenched his fist; he didn’t even have a sword.
Everyone looked in that direction, but no one rushed to chase it recklessly. Things happened so quickly that there was no chance… Probably even at an earlier time, there was never a chance.
Xia Tian looked back on the battlefield and found that there was another body of a man whose name he couldn’t remember. The long insect’s shell had cut his abdomen, almost splitting him in half, and he had struggled for a while before he died.
In front of the giant dead insect, it felt like they had become smaller.
They were like little toy figurines trapped in the underground palace, tiny and weak, with only primitive plastic sticks, chased by super large rats and centipedes. They ran around, but had nowhere to go. They could only be chewed up one by one by underground creatures.
The toy owners watched with gusto in front of the camera.
With an uncertain, immature, frightened, and whiny voice, Fang Youtian said, “Aren’t we… going after it?”
“It’s useless,” Bai Jingan said.
His voice was flat, as if the disaster he faced was no big deal, it was all just quantifiable data.
Xia Tian turned his head to look at him. Bai Jingan always looked calm, but it was no longer as difficult to understand as it was when they first met. He almost became a comfort.
—He was doing his job. As a tactical planner, in addition to assessing the situation and formulating tactics, he had to be the calmest in the team, make sensible suggestions in the worst case scenario, and remain cold and ruthless.
The darkness was so deep that they needed such a person.
Fang Youtian wanted to say something, but in the end he still didn’t say it. Xia Tian turned around to check the cut on Bai Jingan’s arm—the centipede had swept it just now, and there was blood oozing out.
“It’s okay,” Bai Jingan said.
Xia Tian nodded and turned to inspect the battlefield. Xie Cao had fallen into a coma due to excessive blood loss. Several people turned around and looked at Bai Jingan, and he said, “You can’t bring him, the smell of blood will attract the monsters.”
No one said anything, everyone agreed with this statement, and it was not the first time that the people here had participated in the Killing Show; they knew what kind of world this was.
They gathered the weapons that were scattered on the ground and left the area quickly, in case the sound of fighting attracted something else.
Xie Cao lay there, and Fang Youtian put a bone spear in his hand, but everyone knew there was nothing they could do to help.
The makeshift team continued on, with the fighting and the constant circling, it was impossible to tell where they were. The underground palace was a world of its own, trying to keep all the people trapped in there forever.
For a while, Xia Tian felt that they were getting further and further away from the exit. This was probably not an illusion.
The only thing that would ensure their departure from this place was time.
It was the fourteenth day, and in just about thirty more hours the survival game would be over. The sky would brighten, the music would play, and the host would tell them with a sweet voice that the ordeal was over, everyone had passed the test, and the third fucking round was over.
Xia Tian once felt that the fireworks and the host’s contrived words at the end of the Asura field were full of irony, but now he missed it very much. That was how bad luck changed people’s perspectives.
Along the way, they killed several smaller mutant creatures, and one person died—a sniper. The monster suddenly appeared out of nowhere as passed an underground river and dragged the person into the water. Before they could react, the water was flooded with blood and bubbles, and it was over.
Xia Tian took the bone spear and carefully guarded Bai Jingan from behind him.
Along the way, the man’s expression was calm. This calmness was neither a façade, nor just a hopeless indifference, but stoicism of a warrior.
Bai Jingan was not only very familiar with the mutant creatures, but also familiar with such scenes of danger and menace. It was difficult for Xia Tian to explain clearly how he understood that, it was more like a vague perception of the same kind.
There was no reason for this feeling.
After becoming a teammate, Xia Tian had asked around about Bai Jingan, but almost no one knew him. All he knew was the information on the official website.
Bai Jingan had landed here because there was a contract in the hands of the TV station. But unlike Xu Peiwen, his contract was dependent on the joint responsibility of the children.
In other words, this contract was signed by one of his parents. It might have existed even before he was born, and had controlled his life from then on. Even by the Upper City standards, it was the sickest contract Xia Tian had ever seen.
At that time, Xia Tian was curious about what it was like to be born knowing that you had to be on the Killing Show for the amusement of others. The fact that he didn’t spend everyday getting drunk and high was also a kind of talent.
He looked at Bai Jingan again and imagined what this person had experienced. He always looked dull and uninteresting, but when you looked in carefully, you couldn’t see the bottom and depth of his emotions.
After crossing a corner, Bai Jingan stopped, turned his head and looked at the darkness behind.
“Still following?” Xia Tian said.
“What?” Fang Youtian said.
“Something is following,” Xia Tian replied.
“I had told you there was a sound,” the network logistician named Qiao An remarked.
“Wait a minute, what are you guys talking about?” Fang Youtian asked.
“That rat,” Xia Tian said, “has been following us all the time.”
There was silence all around and everyone was a little unnerved. Finally, Xia Tian said, “We have to get rid of it.”
“How?” Qiao An said, “We only have two bone spears, but they’re so primitive. This monster is so shrewd. It’s waiting for us to get into trouble, just like Xicheng…”
“Fortunately, we’re humans and have advantages,” Bai Jingan said, “We have brains.”
Xia Tian turned his head to look at him and Bai Jingan said, “We have to make a trap.”
The final plan was simple.
Several of them argued. The reason didn’t need to be too logical, anyways, the rat couldn’t understand them… shouldn’t understand. However, if the genetic technology of Floating City continued to develop in this way, a BOSS rat that was so smart that it played with everyone in the palm of its hands would show up sooner or later.
One of the two popular themes in the film and television industry recently was “dominance of the world by mutant creatures”. This was much more reliable than another popular theme—the people in the Lower City revolutionizing and destroying the world.
In any case, the plan needed Xia Tian to leave the group alone and pretend to be lost, in order to lead the rat to a specific location.
For the group that didn’t even have a sword, the plan to bait the mutant rat was dangerous enough to be on the death hot list.
This was also why the bait needed to be Xia Tian; he was the only fighter left in the group of four. Other than human intelligence, they had no advantage, so they couldn’t afford even the slightest mistake.
Human IQ also told them that the main target of the mutant rat’s hatred was Xia Tian. It never forgot that Xicheng was the one who had stabbed its nose, and would never forget that Xia Tian had stabbed one of its eyes.
Before the plan started, Bai Jingan drew a map for Xia Tian, telling him the way to turn the corner to accurately return to the marked spot, where they would lie in ambush and wait for the rat to arrive for a surprise attack.
Bai Jingan couldn’t draw on the ground because he was sure the rat would see it, so he drew on Xia Tian’s palm which felt very intimate. It also made the palms of Xia Tian’s hands so itchy that he had to hold back from laughing out loud.
He could feel that Bai Jingan was uncomfortable and distracted. It was probably because he must have never been so close to others from a long time in the middle of a serious talk.
Xia Tian desperately wanted to tease him.
He stretched out his hand to touch Bai Jingan’s lock of hair that had curled up again, thinking that it must have been curled up because of tension. When he was calm, his hair would remain flat.
Bai Jingan swatted his hand away, gave him an annoyed look, and continued to talk about the plan.
Xia Tian listened to him patiently as if he was babysitting a restless child. After Bai Jingan repeated it for the third time, Xia Tian finally couldn’t help saying, “You know I grew up in the Lower City and I’m not a road idiot, right?”
“You would at least have a fruit knife when you were in the Lower City,” Bai Jingan said.
“It’s okay, I can handle it,” Xia Tian said, showing him a fearless smile. He was certainly not fearless, but he was quite skilled in pretending that the world was peaceful.
Bai Jingan wasn’t like his little sister who could be fooled easily; he knew what they were up against.
The tactical planner was staring at the palm of his hand, and there was still a blood mark from the battle just now, and Xia Tian couldn’t see his expression clearly from this angle.
But Bai Jingan didn’t say anything, just took a breath and stood up, preparing to execute the plan.
Time was running out.
I seem to start liking that lock of hair which keeps curling up lol …
Thanks for the chapter ♥️♥️
In our minds we are all a bit of that drunk content maker
Thank you for new chapter
Bien ni cuanta intimidad me esta comenzando a gustarealizar jajajaja
aw Jingan is so cute
Thanks for the chapter ❤️❤️