Chapter 215: Ghost Player: Will Die
She stared straight at Haruto. Several heavy seconds ticked by before she finally broke the silence. "So... the players who supposedly 'escaped' through that passage over the last two years... they all died?"
Haruto gave a single, curt nod. He laid out the grim reality of the escape route, breaking down his analysis of the trap and detailing exactly what he needed her to do next.
Chen Qin kept her head bowed throughout the explanation. Her knuckles turned a stark, bloodless white from how tightly she gripped her own hands, her breathing ragged and uneven. When she finally looked up, the rims of her eyes were red, but the trembling had stopped. Her gaze had hardened into something resolute.
"Okay. I understand."
"Then I'll leave the Blue Staff Members to you."
Haruto reached out, giving the top of her head a casual pat. He pushed himself up from his seat, gesturing for Kaguya and the rest of his group to follow. Without another word, they slipped out into the dim corridors, making their way back toward the Tourists' Residential Area.
Back at the camp, Lin Que had already delivered the bad news. She had informed the surviving players that the supposed escape passage was nothing more than a dead-end covered in writhing eyes, completely sealing off their exit from this instance. Alongside delivering that crushing blow, she had also finished selecting the ten candidates suffering from heavy contamination.
Naturally, the players—acting under the role of Tourists—had been highly skeptical of her claims. It sounded too much like a cruel joke. But the moment they saw Haruto, Kaguya, and the others walk back into the residential zone instead of vanishing from the instance, the last shred of desperate hope in their chests withered away.
The only way out was gone. The suffocating terror and stress they had suppressed for days finally detonated. Panic swept through the crowd. Several players drew their weapons, screaming that they would rather fight the circus freaks to the death than wait to be slaughtered. The chaotic uprising was only quelled when Haruto stepped to the front, raising a hand.
"Calm down," he said, his voice cutting through the hysteria. "I have another way that might get us out of here. I can't guarantee the success rate, but it's better than throwing your lives away right now."
The riotous shouting died in an instant. Dozens of desperate, bloodshot eyes locked onto Haruto, clinging to his words like a lifeline. He didn't bother explaining the complex details of his backup plan. Instead, he simply rattled off a list of strict tasks, assigning each group their roles for the coming night.
Once the instructions were handed out, Haruto gathered the ten heavily contaminated Tourists and led them out of the camp, heading straight toward the Animal Zone.
Kaguya's ability over Eternity and the Instant was a powerful cheat, but the suppression rules of this instance had severely restricted her output. She couldn't maintain the cleansing effect on them indefinitely. Because of this, Haruto's plan was to temporarily stash this 'Suicide Squad' inside the Animal Zone, using the area's unique properties to briefly stall their mental decay. He just needed to come back tomorrow right before the Grand Performance, have Kaguya apply her ability to stabilize them one last time, and throw them into the fray.
However, the group didn't march straight into the animal enclosures. Halfway down the path, Haruto abruptly halted in front of a heavy, rust-stained iron door.
"Big boss... is this the Animal Zone?" asked a young man from the Suicide Squad. He looked no older than twenty, his face pale and twitching from the creeping madness in his brain.
Haruto shook his head. "No. This is the Residential Area for the Red Staff Members."
Right as the words left his mouth, Kaguya stepped back. She had already deftly picked the heavy lock. The iron door groaned loudly as it swung open, revealing the pitch-black corridor beyond.
A collective, highly audible gulp echoed from the ten players behind him.
The heavy contamination had left their minds groggy and sluggish, but hearing the words 'Red Staff Members' acted like a bucket of ice water to the face. As Tourists, their absolute worst enemies in this hellhole—aside from the core Circus freaks—were the Red Staff. Walking directly into the enemy's nest in the middle of the night felt exactly like delivering themselves as late-night takeout.
They couldn't fathom what Haruto was thinking, but they weren't entirely stupid either. They clung to the one absolute principle of surviving an Infinite Flow instance as dead weight. If the overpowered big boss did something suicidal, he definitely had a reason. As mere hangers-on, they only needed to remember three golden rules. Trust the boss. Trust the boss. And goddamn trust the boss.
While the ten contaminated players were desperately repeating that mantra in their heads to keep their legs from giving out, Haruto casually reached into his inventory. He pulled out a massive, dented iron drum, hoisted a heavy drumstick, and began to violently smash it against the metal.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The deafening, obnoxious noise echoed down the dark corridors, instantly ringing throughout the entire Residential Area.
The players stared in abject horror. Were they seriously just here to crash the place and provoke everyone?!
Tents and cabin doors ripped open. Figures began emerging from the shadows one after another. The ten players shrank back, their knees knocking together as they saw the undisguised, murderous rage twisting the faces of the Red Staff Members.
If they were in their peak physical condition, they might have been able to offer some backup. But right now, their sanity was hanging by a thread. Lifting a weapon felt like moving through molasses. If a brawl broke out, it would be an absolute miracle if they didn't actively drag Haruto down.
Within seconds, more than twenty heavily mutated, hostile Red Staff Members had surrounded Haruto's group, blocking the corridor.
The staff members' furious glares quickly shifted. As they noticed the ten heavily contaminated players shivering in the back, the anger melted into a sickening, predatory greed. The hunger in their eyes was so thick it felt suffocating. If Haruto and the girls hadn't been standing at the front, the staff would have already lunged forward to tear the tourists apart like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
"Coming over so late into our territory... what can we do for you?"
A tall woman with rich, honey-colored skin sauntered out from the front of the pack. Her predatory gaze swept over the group, pausing deliberately on Haruto's face. A slow, dark smile stretched across her lips as she licked the corner of her mouth.
"Surely... you're not actually delivering midnight takeout directly to our door?" She let out a low, raspy chuckle.
Before Haruto could even open his mouth to reply, the bloodlust among the other Red Staff Members boiled over.
"What's with all the damn talking? Just rip them apart!" a burly man roared.
"Yeah! I say we kill them all right now. Whoever grabs the most meat gets to eat!"
"Then let's go! There are over twenty of us and only a handful of them. Look at those ten in the back—they're so heavily contaminated they can't even stand straight. They're basically walking corpses!"
That shout acted like a spark in a powder keg. A wave of vicious agreement rippled through the crowd, their roars echoing off the iron walls. To these monsters, ten heavily contaminated players were no different from pre-packaged meals served on a silver platter. There was absolutely no way they were letting this feast walk away.
Haruto didn't even blink at the approaching mob. He simply tilted his head slightly.
"Youmu."
Swish! Swish!
A blinding flash of silver light tore through the dim corridor. Youmu, having already anticipated the command, moved faster than the human eye could track. The air shrieked as her blade cut a perfect arc.
The three staff members who had shouted the loudest didn't even have time to register the movement. In a fraction of a second, their heads smoothly detached from their shoulders. Blood sprayed in high arcs as their headless bodies crumpled heavily to the floor.
The riotous corridor plunged into a deathly, suffocating silence.
The remaining Red Staff Members, who had been salivating and surging forward just a heartbeat ago, instantly froze in their tracks. The bloodlust drained from their faces, replaced by stark horror. They staggered back, tripping over each other in a desperate panic to put distance between themselves and the silver-haired girl standing calmly beside Haruto.
"Before the performance starts tomorrow," Haruto began, his tone entirely conversational as he ignored the fresh corpses on the floor, "I want you to take all the animals from the Animal Zone and move them to the Grand Performance Area. Hide them well. They absolutely must not be discovered by anyone."
He didn't have the time or the patience to play games with these low-level mobs.
If this scheme failed, he would have to resort to his backup plan of simply slaughtering every single ghost in the instance. And if by some miracle that didn't work, he'd have no choice but to throw his pride away and scream, 'Mother Yukari, save me!'
"I don't mind the task." The honey-skinned woman shrugged, stepping over a severed head without breaking eye contact. Her gaze stuck to Haruto, thick and cloying as syrup. "But with so many rowdy brothers here, I can't guarantee they'll all be obedient. How about this..."
She paused, a sickeningly sweet, suppressed excitement leaking into her voice.
"Big sister here has quite a bit of influence. It would be no problem at all for me to suppress the others and make them do the heavy lifting. As long as you agree... to spend the next two days relaxing in my tent, I could—"
Swish!
Before the vile proposition could fully leave her mouth, the cold flash of steel erupted again.
The woman's body was instantly diced into several asymmetrical chunks. Yet, strangely, not a single drop of blood spilled onto the floor. The severed pieces hit the ground with a wet thud, only to immediately writhe and pull themselves back together, smoothly fusing into her original form in a matter of seconds.
The honey-skinned woman rolled her neck, her smile deepening into something grotesque as she shrugged off the fatal strike.
"I can see your little bodyguard is powerful," she purred, "but since I dared to speak up, I naturally have the confidence to back it up. Big sister here... stopped being human a very long time ago."
Her long legs shifted, pressing tightly together as a twisted thrill ran through her. She stared hungrily at the boy standing just a few paces away, her tongue darting out to wet her dry lips.
"Big sister's request really isn't that demanding. Just one night. You just need to help me—"
Her voice choked off in her throat.
This time, it wasn't because a blade had severed her vocal cords. She stopped herself. Every instinct in her mutated body screamed in absolute, paralyzing terror, warning her of an inescapable, fatal threat. Her head snapped toward Youmu's direction.
Silver hair fluttered gently in the stagnant air.
The young half-phantom girl had lowered her stance, crouching slightly against the ground. The short wakizashi she had used to casually butcher the others was gone. In her hands, she now held a beautifully crafted longsword, its gleaming blade carefully engraved with falling cherry blossom patterns.
The arrogant smirk on the honey-skinned woman's face shattered, replaced by an abyss of deep dread.
If she had only felt a faint, thrilling sense of danger from the silver-haired girl a moment ago, what she felt radiating from that cherry blossom blade now was something else entirely.
It was the absolute, suffocating presence of pure death.
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