Chapter Ninety-Three: A Battlefield of Ruthless Slaughter and Sudden Death

This is truly... a case of the expedition failing before it even began.

The snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses froze stiff, both reaching toward the place where Old Ox Two had been crushed, like a pair of statue-like women gazing from afar for their husbands.

Only when a faint cry for help came from beneath the stone did the two finally thaw out and rush forward to inspect the scene, thinking Old Ox Two had simply been lucky and not fully hit.

In the end, he had been smashed quite thoroughly. Only his head, half an arm, and the glass bottle were left outside, as if he were the Monkey King pinned beneath the Mountain of Five Fingers. “H-help... help... I think... I think I can still be saved,” Old Ox Two said with his head tilted crookedly.

Where did this confidence come from? Yexian? Or Tong Wei? The snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses looked skeptically at Old Ox Two, whose body was clearly flattened, his flesh and blood squeezed out as if a millstone were grinding beans into soy milk.

“There’s still hope!” said Alpha Girl, who had finally caught up.

“T-this, this, this can still be saved? Are you kidding me?” the man in sunglasses shouted, pointing at Old Ox Two, who looked like a burst packet of tomato sauce. “Just because you’re pretty doesn’t mean everything you say is right.”

“Exactly! Exactly!” the snake-headed man hurriedly echoed.

“What’s impossible about it? Isn’t there still a sliver of health left?” Alpha Girl pointed at the health bar above Old Ox Two’s forehead.

What... what was that? The snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses exchanged a bewildered look.

“Anyway, I’m sure that isn’t Thadmir’s health bar. He can definitely last more than five seconds,” Alpha Girl said, curling her lip and uttering something even less comprehensible to them. “In short, as long as the health bar hasn’t gone to zero, there’s still hope. Find a way to move the stone first.”

And that did make sense.

The quest was right there, and the man was lying flattened on the ground. Whether he could be saved or not, they had to try.

They looked at the stone, which weighed at least several dozen tons. The snake-headed man stepped forward. “Hehss...” He strained with all his might, veins bulging even on his snake head, but the stone did not budge.

The man in sunglasses came up to help, yet it still stood immovable.

One shouted a count, then two shouted a count, but even working together, it was useless.

“Why aren’t you helping?” The snake-headed man glared at Alpha Girl, then blushed and turned away.

“I don’t mind at all,” Alpha Girl said with a shrug and a spread of her hands. “It’s pretty nice here. I don’t want to leave, so why should I help?”

This was the first time they had ever heard someone say that a spacetime bubble was nice and that they did not want to leave it. The snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses exchanged another dumbfounded look.

“Then why did you come in with us?”

“I forgot!” Alpha Girl replied carelessly. She strolled up and down the street, looking here and there, touching this and that, until her eyes suddenly lit up. She picked up a tender blade of grass from the ground and put it in her mouth, savoring it with interest. “So this is... the taste of bitterness? Pah! Pah! Pah!”

The snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses had lost track of how many times they had exchanged bewildered looks. This woman’s way of speaking in the third person, referring to herself as “this palace,” was strange enough, and whether “gong” meant male or “job” made no sense either. Her thoughts were even stranger. Was she really... a crazy lady?

Hmph. Shaking their heads, they stopped paying attention to Alpha Girl and tried to think of a solution on their own.

“Your abilities? Your fireseed weapons? At the very least, could you find a crowbar or two? Are you just going to try to push it by brute force?” Seeing how green the two were, Alpha Girl could not help but remind them.

At first she had thought these two looked rather suspicious, and that the black curtain they had made in the prison cell might mean they were dangerous people. But now it seemed it was probably just a misunderstanding...

Even if they were truly bad guys, they were more the sort from a children’s comedy than from a serious film.

Alpha Girl gave up on asking the man in sunglasses for the password to the Sky Forum and simply treated this as a pleasure trip.

Come to think of it, this was the first time she had ever come to a strange place as her real self to play around;

and also the first time since her rebirth that she could escape Ye Chao’s gaze, at least without having to see that annoying face of his! Hmph!

The snake-headed man and the man in sunglasses, having taken Alpha Girl’s reminder to heart, finally shook themselves free of the various tangled negative emotions and were able to think calmly about the whole matter.

Spacetime bubbles usually worked like game instances: you entered and exited from the same place. But there were exceptions, such as the Flower of the Other Shore they had activated.

Beautiful in appearance, the Flower of the Other Shore could unconsciously lure people into a spacetime bubble. But the bubble was not the real point. The point was that when the bubble vanished, all the unwary intruders would be dragged to the place where the flower grew, where the symbiotic creature waiting eagerly would swallow them whole and feast to its heart’s content.

It was a flower that was beautiful, yet terribly dangerous, just like its name.

Of course, since the snake-headed man had the seeds of the Flower of the Other Shore, the symbiotic beast had clearly already been controlled. They were merely using the flower’s ability to pull people through instances as a form of teleportation.

For the instance generated by the Flower of the Other Shore, they must have been fully prepared as well, if not for certain odd fellows suddenly barging in...

“Hehss, I’ve got it!” The snake-headed man patted his snake head. “We can use this!” He pulled a few seeds from an inner pocket. “If we plant them in the right place, then maybe...”

Before he could finish, an abrupt change struck!

“Monsters here! Monsters here!”

A shrill alarm suddenly rang out.

The next second, a whole squad of heavily armed soldiers appeared, as if by magic.

Some leaned out from behind corners, some had been lurking on rooftops, and some vaulted over walls. The one thing they had in common was that every one of them held a gun, some even more than one. “Rat-tat-tat! Rat-tat-tat!” Gunfire erupted in waves. The snake-headed man, his face turning pale, did not even have time to dodge before he was riddled with holes and killed on the spot.

The man in sunglasses was quicker-witted than the snake-headed man. He crouched, sprang, turned, and slipped away like a snake, ducking into a corner in a flash, his heart pounding in terror.

“Target eliminated! Target eliminated!” The soldiers rushed over, confirmed that the snake-headed man was indeed dead, and did not even spare the man in sunglasses a glance. They simply said coolly, “This is already a battlefield. Civilians, get out at once!”

So, in their eyes, the snake-headed man was the enemy, while the man in sunglasses and Alpha Girl were not.

Well... that was a normal move, all right.

“Hey, I’ve got it!” Seeing that the soldiers were not enemies and detecting no hostility on the psychic network, the man in sunglasses steadied himself and quickly said, “Um, could you maybe help with—”

He wanted the soldiers to help push aside the stone pinning Old Ox Two down and save him if possible.

Not a bad idea!

His fireseed weapon was the sunglasses, and his ability was transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves. In combat, he was a little stronger than Ye Chao, but not by much. However, dealing with all sorts of NPCs was his strong suit.

Unfortunately, the soldiers did not even wait for him to finish. Their expressions suddenly changed. “Retreat! Retreat! Everyone hurry—aaagh!”

Amid the scream, a gorilla six meters tall, with an elephant’s back and a shark’s waist, leaped down from the air. With a pair of crashing stomps, its left foot flattened one soldier and its right foot flattened the man in sunglasses. It then bounced twice, like a mortar grinding garlic, pounding them furiously as though beating a war drum, while roaring like a rock band in full fury.

At this point, only Alpha Girl remained among the players.

Damn it! This instance was vicious; one careless step and people died!

Though Alpha Girl was not trembling with fear, she still jumped several times from fright.