Chapter 206: Kaguya Big Boss Hands-on-Hips.jpg
"Safely escort eight tourists out?"
Haruto rested his chin against his palm, his eyes scanning the crumpled parchment of the Blue Staff Member Rules. He tapped a finger thoughtfully against his cheek.
The quota itself hardly posed a challenge. Between himself, Kaguya, and Chen Qin, they made three. Add Lin Que's five-man squad and that scarred, middle-aged loner, and they sat at a comfortable nine. One extra to spare.
Of course, this entire calculation depended on a rather precarious assumption: that the designated "way out" wasn't a death trap.
If the Ghost Granny stationed at the kiosk hadn't been spouting nonsense, then nobody—not the tourists, not the Blue Staff, and certainly not the Red Staff—was meant to leave this place alive.
Yet, based on the fragmented clues they had scraped together from the player forums, survival instances always adhered to a twisted sense of fairness. No matter how many conflicting identities or contradictory rules the system assigned, there had to be one genuine exit hidden amidst the madness.
Haruto observed the circus grounds for a while longer, his gaze sweeping over the dilapidated tents and flickering neon signs. Nothing new caught his eye. By the time he turned back, Chen Qin had already wrapped up her brief respite, hurriedly scurrying off to fulfill her assigned duties.
With intelligence gathered from all three operational factions, their only remaining option was to bide their time until nightfall before making their next move.
Even though this was merely the second day of the survival game.
Piecing together the tourist guidelines and their current intel, the overarching win condition seemed straightforward: survive tonight's grand performance, keep their sanity values from plummeting past the human threshold, and the exit would likely reveal itself.
Still, Haruto wasn't one to leave things to chance.
He strolled over to the temporary safe zone where Lin Que's squad and Wu Lian had hunkered down.
The sight that greeted him was grim. Two members of Lin Que's team were already displaying mild signs of mutation. Soft, elongated rabbit ears twitched atop one of their heads, while the other's limbs had begun to warp, growing coarse patches of animalistic fur.
Wu Lian's condition was far more severe. The man sat slumped against a wall, his breathing ragged. Both of his hands and his lower calves had completely transformed into the thick, leathery appendages of a silverback gorilla. His eyes were glazed over, his mind clearly slipping into a hazy, primal stupor.
For the first two, Haruto could understand the gradual erosion. The Grand Performance Area was practically drenched in ambient contamination. Simply breathing the air in this cursed circus was enough to trigger mild mutations. But Wu Lian's absurdly high corruption level baffled him. What on earth had the man touched to end up looking like a zoo exhibit?
Currently, the players knew of three distinct methods to purge this psychological contamination.
First: Slowly recover through uninterrupted rest, intense psychological suggestion, and sheer willpower.
Second: Flee to the Animal Zone, where the environmental aura naturally suppressed the mutation process.
Third: Personally slaughter the players who had completely lost their minds and fully mutated into beasts.
The first option was a joke—far too slow for a fast-paced death game. The second was a mere band-aid, treating the symptoms while ignoring the festering root cause. The third was the most efficient, but Haruto highly doubted this ragtag group of moralistic humans had the stomach for it.
As expected, the moment Haruto outlined the three choices, the oldest member of Lin Que's squad—a weary-looking man wearing plain clothes and a tarnished silver crucifix around his neck—vehemently shook his head.
"You kids go on ahead," Uncle Hui rasped, clutching his cross. "I'll try resting on my own. If I don't bounce back before tonight... don't drag yourselves down for my sake. I'll figure something out."
Lin Que cut him off, her voice sharp and unyielding. "We leave together! Those things roaming around aren't human anymore. Uncle Hui, now is not the time to play the martyr!"
The rest of the squad immediately rallied behind her, their voices overlapping in a desperate bid to convince the older man.
"Think about it, Uncle Hui! Even if you spare them, are they really going to survive? The outcome is exactly the same..."
"She's right. Honestly, putting them down is doing them a favor. If I ever turned into one of those mindless freaks, I'd beg a player to end it quickly rather than spend eternity tortured by those ghostly things..."
Bombarded by their frantic pleas, Uncle Hui slowly lowered his gaze, his stubborn resolve fracturing. He opened his mouth, a heavy sigh of compromise forming on his lips.
"There's no need to drag yourselves to the Animal Zone," Haruto's calm, lazy voice suddenly sliced through the heavy atmosphere. "I happen to need to find someone anyway."
The squad froze, turning to look at him in bewilderment. They didn't even know the exact coordinates of the Animal Zone and assumed Haruto was simply tired of babysitting them.
Lin Que stepped forward, her tone cautious. "How about you just point us in the right direction? We can make the trek ourselves."
"No need for all that hassle."
Haruto waved a dismissive hand. A sudden realization had just sparked in his mind.
He had remembered Reisen. More specifically, he remembered the moon rabbit's innate ability: the manipulation of wavelengths, which directly translated to controlling the degree of lunacy in a target's mind.
It was a terrifyingly versatile power. She could stabilize a fractured psyche or shatter a sane mind into raving derangement. Pure, unadulterated mental manipulation.
Since the circus's "contamination" was fundamentally just the erosion and distortion of a player's sanity, Reisen's power was the perfect countermeasure.
Before departing for this instance, Haruto had casually asked the rabbit for a handful of her talisman cards. The moment she heard his request, Reisen had frantically rummaged through her belongings, practically emptying her entire inventory into his hands. She had even tried to stuff her treasured carrots into the pile. He had walked away with roughly forty of them.
He hadn't expected them to become the ultimate cheat code in this specific horror game.
Haruto casually slipped his hand into the empty air. A dark, ominous Gap tore open in the fabric of space. When he withdrew his hand, a sleek talisman card covered in jagged, crimson zigzag lines rested between his fingers.
"Is that Reisen's card?" Kaguya leaned in, her dark eyes lighting up with recognition.
Haruto nodded. He channeled a faint wisp of his Demonic Power into the paper slip, silently probing its internal structure to figure out the activation sequence.
"No wonder she didn't have a single card left when I tried to extort some from her last week," Kaguya muttered, crossing her arms and curling her lip in annoyance. "I honestly thought she had burned through her entire stash fighting for territory with those shady medicine sellers."
Haruto's eyebrow twitched. Fighting for territory with medicine sellers? What kind of underground mafia turf wars are Eientei's rabbits getting into these days?
"How many did she actually give you?" Kaguya pressed.
With a flick of his wrist, the single talisman card in Haruto's grasp instantly fanned out into a pristine, overlapping row.
"About forty or fifty. I didn't bother counting."
Under the dumbfounded stares of the survival players, Haruto casually tossed a dozen of the enchanted cards high into the air.
In the next heartbeat, the talisman cards ignited with spiritual energy. Countless slender, glowing threads of Demonic Power erupted from the paper surfaces, darting through the air like guided missiles straight toward the contaminated players.
Lin Que and her squad panicked. Their combat instincts flared, and they threw up their arms to block the incoming projectiles.
It was entirely futile. The glowing threads phased right through their physical defenses as if they were made of mist, plunging directly into their chests.
"What did you just do to us?!" Lin Que demanded, forcing her trembling voice to remain steady.
"It's a talisman card designed to manipulate lunacy," Kaguya chimed in, beating Haruto to the punch. She lifted her chin, her tone dripping with smug superiority. "To put it in terms your tiny human brains can grasp: it forcefully regulates your emotional state and anchors your spiritual stability."
This is my family's rabbit, Kaguya thought proudly. There's no way I'm letting this lazy boundary youkai take all the credit.
Hearing this, Lin Que and the others immediately snapped their attention to their afflicted teammates.
The results were instantaneous. The grotesque animal traits—the twitching rabbit ears, the coarse fur, Wu Lian's massive gorilla limbs—were actively receding, melting away at a speed visible to the naked eye. Simultaneously, a wave of deep clarity washed over their minds. It felt as refreshing as plunging into an ice-cold swimming pool at the peak of summer. The suffocating, maddening whispers of the circus vanished, replaced by an unmatched tranquility.
Gasps of sheer disbelief and joy echoed through the group.
At that moment, Kaguya shot Haruto a very specific, expectant look.
Haruto sighed, his shoulders slumping. Reaching back into the Gap, he fished out ten more of Reisen's talisman cards and tossed them over to the immortal princess.
Kaguya snatched them out of the air. A wicked, playful glint flashed in her dark eyes as a terrible idea blossomed in her mind.
Striking an exaggerated, theatrical villain pose—hands planted firmly on her hips, her chin tilted down to cast a shadow over her eyes—she lowered her voice into a sinister, echoing purr.
"Tell me... if we were to slap these little cards onto the other players, and forcibly reverse the effect to amplify their lunacy... combined with the natural contamination of this circus..." She let out a dark, breathy chuckle. "Wouldn't it be an instant, guaranteed one-hit kill?"
Before the final syllable even left her lips, the temperature in the alleyway seemed to plummet.
Lin Que and her squad turned deathly pale, stumbling backward in perfect unison. Kaguya's casual proposition was utterly horrifying, and given the casual display of reality-bending power they had just witnessed, none of them doubted her ability to execute it.
This girl in the elegant princess dress was an absolute monster. She had openly brawled with a formal member of the Circus and walked away victorious. And they had just personally experienced the terrifying, mind-altering potency of those cards.
Oblivious to their terror, Kaguya threw her head back and began to cackle evilly, her hands still planted on her hips.
Right on cue, thick, ominous storm clouds rapidly converged in the sky above. A deafening crack of thunder violently split the heavens. Framed by the blinding flash of lightning, Kaguya's arrogant silhouette looked practically invincible—a true, apocalyptic final boss.
Haruto's eyelids twitched violently.
If he didn't know for an absolute fact that Kaguya possessed zero weather-manipulation abilities, he would have genuinely suspected she had orchestrated the storm just for dramatic effect.
Taking in the pale, ghost-stricken faces of the trembling players around them, Haruto didn't hesitate. He smoothly stepped behind the cackling princess and delivered a swift, resounding smack to the back of her head.
Smack!
"Cut the crap and stop scaring people!"
"Hiss—!" Kaguya yelped, immediately breaking character. She clutched the back of her head, glaring at him with teary-eyed indignation. "This princess didn't even do anything! Why did you hit me?!"
Haruto rolled his eyes, ignoring her pouting. He turned back to the terrified crowd, offering a dry, apologetic sigh. "Ignore her. She's just having a severe chuunibyou episode. It was a joke."
A collective, shuddering sigh of relief swept through the squad.
They had genuinely been paralyzed with fear a second ago, entirely convinced that a 'Player BOSS'—an entity far more malevolent and terrifying than any ghost in this instance—was about to begin a mass slaughter.
Now that the tension had broken, they found their own panic slightly laughable. How could such a ridiculous scenario actually happen?
Yet, amidst the relieved chuckles of the crowd, Lin Que remained completely silent.
Though she forced her facial muscles to relax, mimicking the easygoing demeanor of her teammates, a deep, icy dread remained permanently etched into the depths of her eyes.
She possessed a razor-sharp, intuitive sixth sense for danger.
And her instincts were screaming at her.
She knew, with absolute, bone-chilling certainty, that the stunningly beautiful girl in the princess dress hadn't just been talking big.
She really, truly dared to do it.
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