Editor: Elanor
Huitian looked at Xia Tian on the screen.
The man looked at An Xiaoyin’s wounded back as she left, and the camera stopped on his eyes for a while, and something in those eyes made her heart palpitate.
That… was too real. This kind of real heartbreak was still something you couldn’t find in movies. It was also the gimmick of the Killing Show all along: that there really was a person in the world who had experienced such anguish and trauma.
These days, fans had reacted strongly and given strong feedback to the executions and the first kill by Xia Tian’s team in the fourth round. The third and fourth executions occurred one after the other in a matter of days, and the number of sacrifices in the virtual space “God of War Temple” was also increasing rapidly.
Huitian remembered running into the head of the planning department of Floating Gold 7 yesterday when she had gone to the headquarters, and the other party smugly told her about how “stars are the alter egos of their fans.”
“When they identify with his pain, they identify with their own pain,” he explained, “and we can profit from that pain.”
They had indeed made a lot of money. The marketing department’s data showed a steep upward trend, and the media was ecstatic, with breaking news every day, the level of estatic response was similar to the time when a Killing Show superstar bombed the Floating Gold TV station’s office building.
Now, Huitian looked at Xia Tian’s face on the screen and thought to herself, maybe she felt so sad and invested enough to gnash her teeth over this because she identified with his pain. Because she, too, had lost important people, felt despair, powerlessness and anger that she had nowhere to vent.
So, would there be many people who identified with such pain, with such powerlessness and injustice, and feel angry over it?
Would they offer tribute to it?
Jakowski felt that if Xia Tian really survived, he would want to kill all of them.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, operating the virtual reality of the ‘God of War’ Temple, so he seemed to be sitting in the wilderness surrounded by corpses.
On the channel in his ear, the planning group was shouting, their words intertwined, becoming indistinguishable, yet the words betrayal, death and rape were clearly audible.
Jakowski remembered that during the opening banquet of the fourth round, several people from Xia Tian’s planning team were excitedly discussing the banquet. When a newcomer approached him and asked if he was going, a colleague winked and quickly pulled him away. Jakowski never met the stars he planned.
He stayed alone in the quiet office area, and opened another bottle of wine, thinking coldly that one shouldn’t look at the way these people talked about Xia Tian with joy. He didn’t believe that they would dare to stand in front of Xia Tian when they arrived at the venue.
Even though the planners would inevitably be starstruck, they all instinctively knew that it was one thing to say hello and have a drink at a banquet—if the other party was usually very friendly—but they must never be alone in a room with those stars where there were no cameras.
They planned, approved, and executed the torture of these people… When An Xiaoyin’s proposal had reached Jakowski, he had thought about it for mere six seconds before approving it.
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.
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Jakowski sat among the corpses on the floor of the Temple of God of War, took another sip of his wine, and looked up at the statue.
Here, the knife-like hot wind licked away the flesh and blood of the corpses, leaving the bones as clean as sacrifices. The devotees, whom they called fans, claimed to have found it in the olden days. It must have been an era as cruel and simple as these bones, Jakowski thought, where the rules of death were still dark and immense, unseen and ruling over everything.
Every time he saw the “Safety, Caution, and Sanity” talk on the Internet, he found it utterly ridiculous. They were in the Upper World, where that stuff never existed.
They deserved a ruthless God like this.
As Eric had said previously, this was the situation right now:
They had come to a horror story, located on an island in the deep sea, where an evil ghost looked at every living being with malice. It tortured them mercilessly to test their humanity. In the end, it would choose the one with the least humanity as the heir…
Thinking back to the medieval evil god from the previous round, their new Boss this round seemed to want to make a horror movie in which everyone died in a horrific manner.
Xia Tian sat on the sofa, holding a glass of wine in his hand, and staring at it for the past twenty minutes.
Bai Jingan sat next to him, wanting to console him or change the subject, but he had no idea what to say. He pondered for a long time before finally saying, “Who do you want to kill next?”
Xia Tian continued to stare viciously at the glass as if he hadn’t heard him, but Bai Jingan knew he had. After a while, Xia Tian said, “The ones in the bar yesterday.”
He continued with an icy expression, “The ones who kept pulling the waiters to sit on their laps.”
“That’s just letting off some personal steam, isn’t it?” Eric said.
Xia Tian ignored him and remained silent.
“Which of the two teams do you want to kill, or do you want to kill both of them?” Bai Jingan said.
“Both.”
“Alright then, let’s plan.”
It didn’t take much effort to dispose of those two teams. They split up and spent the night finishing them off in two different locations.
Xia Tian didn’t even dodge the sword attack from the guy behind him. He just stepped back and stabbed him through his belly. The guy on the other side tried to rush over, but Xia Tian’s expression made him stumble. He tried to retreat, but Xia Tian slashed his blade, blood splashed out in an arc, and the tip of the sword pierced straight into his chest.
The sword blade pierced deep into the wall, pinning the man to it. “She said, she is ‘not interested’, are you deaf?” He asked, staring into those hollow eyes.
Bai Jingan approached Xia Tian from behind and placed his hand on the other party’s shoulder. Xia Tian had finished off most of the enemies by himself, leaving him with no chance to make a move.
Xia Tian’s body was extremely tense under his palm, and his back was injured, which could not be seen in his black clothes, but the blood had spread over a large area. Although he didn’t seem to feel it.
He was suppressing something deeply within himself. If this kind of person didn’t destroy himself, he had to go to kill others, Bai Jingan thought, and then went to find enough people for him to kill to satisfy the rage.
The opponent had stopped breathing. Xia Tian drew his sword out. The corpse fell at his feet. He turned and left.
But after two steps, he stopped again and turned to look at the blood-stained wall.
Bai Jingan said: “What’s the matter?”
“It doesn’t feel right,” Xia Tian said.
When he raised his hand, the “Marshmallow” transformed into a dagger, and he plunged it into the wall with an expressionless slash. The wall texture print was very realistic, and the brick and cement debris splashed down. Bai Jingan could faintly see the metal inside.
He looked at it thoughtfully for a moment before walking over to the corner to check the surrounding cameras next to Wei Xi and dragging over a few nearby screens. Wei Xi came over to look, and Eric inquired, “What is it?”
“This is a video blind spot,” Wei Xi said.
“No,” Eric said, “I mean that.”
Wei Xi looked up as Xia Tian took his sword and cut the wall in front of him to pieces in just ten seconds. A cold, thick piece of metal was embedded deep within the thick shadows of concrete and brick, and Xia Tian wasn’t able to leave a scratch on it.
Xia Tian paced a few steps along the wall, tried two cuts, went back to Bai Jingan, skillfully entered a few parameters into the calculation program, and said, “H-3 series of alloys.”
“Hot weapon…” Wei Xi muttered.
Hot weapons. This was the topic the Killing Show players had been discussing since the first day.
Because the fourth round had a modern backdrop, hot weapons were bound to appear, and everyone was waiting for them. The benefits of getting a head start on weapons, even if it was only for a few hours, were immeasurable.
—At present, it was rumored that “Mr. Shi” had an arms collection room hidden somewhere in the garden. According to their understanding of the planning team’s ideas, clues might appear in a week and then the room would open.
Once the firearms came to the scene, the intensity of the battle would quickly increase to a level that was usually reserved for the second-half of the finale.
Eric’s pupils shrank, and Wei Xi stared at the metal wall embedded on the opposite side. He was filled with the notion that there was something inside… and that there had to be a way in.
It was still too early, so the planning team would not allow the arsenal to be opened so soon. But his heartbeat was still beating rapidly, and he turned around to help the other two with modeling, daydreaming of getting a gun.
These days Wei Xi had seen far too many broken limbs of people who had died deep in the garden in the middle of the night.
He was well aware that the organizers still wanted this kind of brutal hand-to-hand combat for about a week. There was an oppressive atmosphere in the woods. It was his first time participating in the Killing Show, but he was already familiar with how difficult it was to survive here and how there was no such thing as humanity here—it had already been ripped apart and tossed aside.
Just a moment ago, he had seen a scene in the surveillance video. It was a skirmish where the victorious team had left one person from the defeated team alive, broken his legs, and chained him to the edge of the residential area to lure the monsters hidden in the darkness, wanting to see what they looked like.
There were public surveillance cameras nearby. He didn’t know how many people in the garden had watched the brutal killing, but no one said anything against it. Some people even discussed on the public network that this was a public benefit.
Wei Xi shrugged that image off his mind and focused on the hologram in front of him. With a specific location and reference, modeling was easy.
The arsenal was an enclosed area of nearly 1,000 square meters. It was cleverly hidden in an abandoned building in the West Wing, taking advantage of the building’s layout and visual differences. If there was no accident, the entrance should be at the back of the living room on the right side of the path.
Wei Xi adjusted his approach, and hundreds of different ways to open the door swept through his mind. Only, the planning team was teeming with experts, so every way he thought of seemed a little—
After staring intently at the modeling for a moment, Xia Tian suddenly turned to Wei Xi and said: “Announce this place.”
“What?” Wei Xi said.
“Announce it,” said Xia Tian, “The louder the volume, the better.”
“I don’t understand…”
“It’s only the third day of the game,” Bai Jingan said, “so, the firearms won’t be opened.”
Wei Xi stared at him blankly while listening to his tactics. The tactical planner’s tone did not sound like he was trying to stop this crazy move.
Indeed, Bai Jingan continued, “With H-3’s alloy’s full casting design, the door must be fully deadlocked. To open it, there’d have to be a lot of movement.”
“I refuse to believe that so many people won’t be able to get this door open,” Xia Tian said.
Wei Xi’s fingers trembled, it felt like he had touched the faint electric current in the air before the storm struck. The surroundings seemed calm, but everything was turbulent.
Xia Tian, with blood jetting from his injured back, looked fiercely at the metal wall that didn’t even have a single scratch. Bai Jingan whispered something to him. Eric leaned against the wall with a look of anticipation. The air was filled with a murderous aura.
Wei Xi quickly compiled all the information and sent it out.
Thank you for the chapter!
ahhh xia honey needs his back fixed asap!!!
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