The other side.
When Luo Jie saw the suddenly changed mission prompt, he merely furrowed his brow, his face showing not the slightest trace of fear.
He'd long expected that his brazen score-farming antics would inevitably draw the Illusion's attention. The only slight surprise was that this "Balance Mode" had arrived much later than he'd anticipated.
Perhaps it was because [Death Recast] functioned merely as a resurrection item, not causing any abnormal changes to his attributes, that the Illusion had struggled to define his actions.
"Feels like I'm always dancing on the edge of the rules..."
Luo Jie chuckled self-deprecatingly, then used the surveillance screens in his field of view to search for the whereabouts of the USS team.
At that moment, the helicopter emblazoned with the Umbrella Corporation logo had landed on the rooftop helipad of the Lucky City Casino. Six fully armed soldiers jumped out of the cabin one after another, immediately forming a defensive perimeter with practiced efficiency upon hitting the ground.
Crackle—!
The surveillance screen suddenly went dark. Clearly, the other side was well-prepared and had taken out the rooftop camera immediately.
However, from the brief seconds of footage he'd managed to catch, Luo Jie had already gleaned the team's basic composition.
This was a standard USS Tactical Execution Unit, consisting of six members: Assault, Demolitions, Medic, Sniper, Virus Specialist, and Close Combat Specialist.
Beyond the first four conventional roles, the Close Combat Specialist and Virus Specialist were particularly noteworthy.
Under normal circumstances, the Close Combat Specialist doesn't directly participate in firefights. Their primary role is to provide close protection for all team members, typically armed with only a knife and a pistol. Their close-quarters combat skills are extremely formidable, serving as the team's last and strongest line of defense.
The Virus Specialist, on the other hand, was a paradoxical blend of power and frailty. Their individual combat prowess was the weakest link in the team; yet, the various concoctions they carried allowed them to control zombies and even spawn powerful viral mutations.
In fact, many of the USS's specialized tactics revolved around the Virus Specialist. Without them, the team's overall effectiveness would drop by at least a third.
Luo Jie had encountered Balance Mode twice before his rebirth. He knew all too well that in this kind of "purge for purge's sake" death mode, evasion was the worst possible option. The only way was to unite all available forces, repel and cripple the Balancers, and thereby carve out a slim chance of survival.
Speaking of forces he could ally with, Luo Jie instinctively brought up the feed from the shopping street, only to find that Jia Shuai, the sunglasses guy, and the others were long gone.
Not only were they absent, but the hundreds of remaining zombies in the shopping street had vanished too. The hundred-meter stretch of road was empty, eerily silent as a ghost town.
Strange. Where did everyone go?
Luo Jie checked the cameras along the route one by one and finally spotted Jia Shuai and his group near the safe house.
They were engaged in a rather audacious maneuver—using themselves as bait, luring a massive horde of zombies towards the safe house.
Watching the teeming masses of zombies converging from all directions on the screen, the sheer density made even Luo Jie's scalp tingle.
Suddenly, he realized what Jia Shuai and his crew were trying to do.
"Desperate measures for desperate straits... Clever. Jia Shuai must have come up with this idea. I underestimated him."
Despite their past grievances, objectively speaking, Jia Shuai had some real talent. If their situations were reversed, Luo Jie doubted he could have come up with such an ingenious countermeasure so quickly.
It was obvious they intended to use the zombie horde as a buffer zone.
The safe house had only one entrance. To get inside, one would first have to face the enormous crowd of zombies blocking the door.
Not to mention whether gunfire would rile up the horde, simply clearing thousands of zombies would keep the USS team busy for quite a while.
Meanwhile, they wouldn't need to directly confront the USS team at all. They could just hide in the safe house for two hours and return to the real world unscathed.
The idea wasn't wrong, but it was far too optimistic. Clearly, they were unaware that the USS team had a specialized role specifically for such scenarios: the Virus Specialist.
A few well-placed specialized smoke grenades would be enough to disperse the horde in a given area. This seemingly impenetrable defense line was essentially meaningless against a USS team.
One by one, the surveillance screens in his visual projection began to blur. Though he could no longer monitor the USS team in real-time, he could still roughly determine their current position based on the locations of the disabled cameras.
Ironically, his earlier action of clearing out all the zombies in the building had inadvertently created a hindrance for the USS team's advance.
For USS operatives, the greatest danger had never been the zombies, but the survivors hiding in the shadows.
Without the zombies, they were essentially exposed to the枪口 of any survivors—enemy hidden, themselves exposed, and fighting on unfamiliar terrain. This put them at a significant disadvantage.
As a result, the USS team was proceeding with extreme caution, clearing each room thoroughly before cautiously moving down to the next floor via the stairs. Their progress was greatly hampered.
At their current rate, it would be at least an hour before they reached the ground floor.
An hour wasn't that long. If Luo Jie had chosen to play hide-and-seek, they might not even find him within that time.
However, Luo Jie had no intention of doing that.
The building was now empty. For a USS team that specialized in using zombies to assist in combat, this environment suppressed their combat effectiveness to the minimum. If he didn't take advantage of this rare opportunity to cripple them, he'd be wasting a golden chance.
What's more, any "Balancer" in the Illusion was essentially a hidden boss; killing them guaranteed a good drop.
Of course, setting an ambush now was still too early.
While the USS team was still creeping around upstairs, overly cautious, Luo Jie descended the stairs at a leisurely pace to the ground floor shopping street, embarking on a solo treasure hunt.
In the "Zombie Siege" Illusion, the biggest hidden quest was rescuing NPC survivors trapped throughout Lucky City.
Typically, after saving an NPC, besides the system reward points, the NPC would also give the player some "personal treasures" as an extra reward.
However, some NPCs didn't reward physical items; instead, they revealed a treasure location, which the player then had to find themselves.