The plan to sneak into the pharmacy went swimmingly, and what Feng Bujue did was merely run up and down the corridor before the pharmacy and screamed as excitedly as he possibly could, “Hey! Guys, there is a Batmobile parked at the entrance of the hospital!”
Then, everyone who heard that rushed out excitedly to see the real deal. The most ridiculous thing was, even the few workers inside the pharmacy rushed out to follow along the crowd, and they did not even remember to close the door behind them when they left.
Even Feng Bujue himself thought the plan was rather preposterous. This method of yelling about a Batmobile had been used many times by Cartman in season sixteen, episode seven to clear a building, and so far, the record of it failing was a surprising zero. As absurd as the plan was, one had to admit it worked out just find. After entering the pharmacy and having a look around, Feng Bujue felt rather disappointed. This was because most of the drugs inside the pharmacy were quite useless. They were items that did not have an item description. There were many drugs, but despite their different packaging, they had the same item description.
———
Name: Antibiotic (30/30)
Item Type: Consumable
Quality: Normal
Function: Neutralize the state of poisoned and infected
Can be taken out of the scenario: Yes
Remark: Common anti-inflammatory medicine, for internal use only
———
The drugs all came in bottle form, and the effect worked on specific statuses only. Just from one glance, Feng Bujue knew that they were nothing valuable. What Feng Bujue wanted the most was morphine. Yes, the drug came with its own item description too, but the effect was very different from the one he expected.
———
Name: Morphine x5
Item Type: Consumable
Quality: Normal
Function: Lower the Terror Points by thirty percent within a specific period of time.
Can be taken out of the scenario: Yes
Remark: Constant overuse of this drug within a short period of time might cause a poisoning reaction.
———
Feng Bujue was not unfamiliar with this kind of psychological drug. When he was hospitalized, he was given quite a number of these drugs, and in fact, he was put on many new drug trials that came from oversea labs, so morphine was not something unfamiliar to him. But due to the addictive nature of the drug, the game company was probably too sensitive about its impact on most of its youth playerbase, so they changed the property of the drug to this form.
Feng Bujue even purposely went looking for Vicodin, and the man really found it. But the medicine did not even come with an item description. In other words, it was viewed by the system as something that had no effect. With an intention of trying it out, Feng Bujue flipped open the cap and tossed several capsules down his gullet like he was consuming some herbal mints.
“Hmm… As expected, I do not feel any different…” As he walked out from the pharmacy, he mumbled to himself. “I did not find any medicine that can recover Life Points or Stamina Points either… Looks like I will have to go and find some food. Perhaps consuming food will be able to recover some of the missing life points.”
After searching the place for the things he needed, Feng Bujue left the hospital and made his way toward the shopping mall. After all, other than guns and medical products, he could basically find anything else that he would need there.
…
Back at the Peruvian Flute Band quarantine camp, the temporary command center and the quarantine camps were only cordoned off by a wall of metal wires, and one could look through the wires to see the Peruvians who were stuck inside easily. At that moment, there was some commotion at the entrance to the command center. There were workers wearing casual outfits, and there were soldiers in military gears and there were government officials in suits. The commander of the camp looked like a man over fifty years old. The man had ‘half a head’ of gray hair, and the other half was completely bald. He wore a sharp black suit and coupled it with a red tie. He was not only the highest commander at this place, he was the one who started this whole search and capture of the Peruvian Flute Bands.
“Sir, great news!” Two soldiers ran to his side to report. “Looks like we did it. Every major city is reporting zero Peruvian Flute Bands. We got ’em.”
Hearing that, the people around them burst into happy cheers.
“Alright, we did it!”
“Yay!”
“Good lord!”
“Thank God!”
However, it was quite unclear why this group of people was so happy and in such a celebratory mood…
“Calm down, people,” the balding commander said. “We have work to do. We have to take out the place these flute bands came from so that they never come again…”
A worker who held a report stood next to him came forth to report, “But sir, we don’t know where they came from.”
He lowered his head to look at the document he was holding. “Sir, we have been researching this issue, but we can’t figure it out.”
The balding commander’s expression at the moment seemed to be saying, ‘What the f*ck…’
He raised both of his arms to hug his head. Then he raised them high and shouted loudly, “Well, think about it, idiot. Where else would ‘Peruvian’ Flute Bands come from?”
However, that did nothing to increase the intelligence of the people around him. All of them scratched their chin and assumed the pose of the thinking man. The balding commander was shocked beyond belief. His face turned red, and he roared, “The country is in the name!”
An official in white shirt and black tie then cut in to say, “No, sir, we checked the entire map. There isn’t a country called Peruvian anywhere.”
“Not Peruvian, morons! It’s Peru. It’s right here!” The balding commander walked to stand before the map and pointed at the named country. “It is right here!”
The mistake that was committed by the officials at the Department of Homeland Security was equivalent to looking for ‘Chinese’ on a map, and thus, they were unable to find the location of Peru on the map…
The group of officials reacted like a bunch of babies who had started learning to talk for the first time. They repeated among themselves. “Oh… Peru…”
It sounded like they had heard this term for the first time in their life. The balding commander really did not want to spend more time on this issue, so he jumped directly into another order. “Now! I want to plan a plan to take down Peru once and for all.”
The people around him looked at each other, and one of them asked, “Is that really necessary, sir? Seems a little extreme.”
“That sounds a bit too extreme,” another soldier said.
“Yeah…” another soldier concurred
The balding commander roared at the top of his lungs, “Peruvian Flute Bands will never stop annoying us unless they are stopped at the source!”
At that moment, an African American soldier in military gear ran over to report, “Sir, you’d better come quick. One of the Peruvian Flute Bands has been caught trying to escape.”
The balding commander grabbed the person next to him by his collar. “See, god damn it!”
Two minutes later, inside the interrogation room…
Before a long metallic table, there were five chairs, and on the five chairs sat five students. The balding commander stood on the other side of the table and held a CD in his hand. He looked at the cover of the CD and read the name out loud. “The Llama Brothers, Tapas, and Moodscapes.”
This was a recorded CD that was randomly named by the kids to masquerade as the Peruvian Flute Bands to earn money while performing by the streets.
“This is a mistake sir, Sir!” Stan tried to explain himself. “We aren’t really a Peruvian Flute Band!”
The intelligence of the balding commander seemed to go offline at that moment as well. He looked at the five children carefully and used a sarcastic tone to reply, “Right… You just play flute music at the mall and sell CDs, but you are not a Peruvian Flute Band?”
Stan opened his arms innocently and said with plain urgency, “W-we’re just kids, you know. We… we were just trying to make some money.”
“We just want to go home,” Kyle added after that.
Kenny though used his incoherent voice to beg and plead, “Sir, please, I have to lose my virginity by this Saturday.”
The balding commander turned around to talk to the African American officer. “Which tourist location where they playing at?”
The other officer answered, “An outdoor mall in Colorado.”
“Look, we are from Colorado. We grew up in the United States!” Kyle piped up to claim.
“We speak English,” Stan added.
“And we’re white,” Cartman concluded.
The balding commander turned serious and whispered to the officer standing next to him. “Can I talk to you guys outside?”
The officers then all moved out of the interrogation room.
“Well, what do you think?” the balding commander asked.
“I don’t know what to make of it, sir,” the African American officer answered. “It’s like nothing I have ever seen before. Clearly, they are a Peruvian Flute Band, and yet, they aren’t! They play pan flute music like the others, but they talk and act like… one of us.”
The officer looked and sounded confounded by this discovery.
“I agree,” the balding officer said as he stepped forward. “They are obviously some kind of hybrid.”
“A hybrid?” a white officer asked in shock. “But how is that possible?”
“Perhaps one of the Peruvian Flute Bands mated with one of our females. Who knows?” the African American officer offered.
“Well, no matter how they came to be, they are the only piece of good luck we’ve had.” In any case, the whole shebang was a series of analysis that had zero intelligence whatsoever.
And the conclusion that they somehow managed to reach was—”If they are the hybrid we are talking about, then they can be our way of taking out Peru once and for all.”
…
At the same time, outside the wall of wire surrounding the quarantine zone, a soldier told one of the officers who was next to him, “Thompson, can you come over here?”
The officer by the name of Thompson was an English-to-Spanish translator. After he came over, the soldier continued, “The flute band players won’t shut up about something, and I can’t understand them.”
“Por favor! Please, I beg you guys! We cannot leave!” At that moment, a flute band member shouted through the wire mesh at them in Spanish. “We came here to protect you guys!”
The guy next to him also added by saying, “Yes, we cannot leave! We have to protect you!”
After hearing that, Thompson translated with some dubiousness in his mind, “They are saying something like… ‘You can’t send us away. We are the protectors’…”
The soldier was confused, but he still asked, “Protect us from what?”
The Peruvian elder inside the wired off area replied, “The Furry Death! The Furry Death!”
He repeated it twice in a heavily agitated tone.
The soldier obviously did not get it due to the language barrier. So he turned to the translator Thompson to ask for clarification, “What does that mean?’
Thompson’s expression turned a little less than pleasant and then he replied, “I think he said… The furry death?”
…
At South Park, the shopping mall. The speed at which the sun moved beyond the horizon was much faster than Feng Bujue expected. Dusk was about to arrive, and the color of orange dyed the sky. When Brother Jue arrived at the parking lot before the shopping mall, he saw a reporter holding a microphone and a cameraman operating a camera in the field. Not far away from them was parked an interview car from CNN. The reporter should be doing some kind of live reporting. Feng Bujue was interested to hear what he had to say, so he silently nudged several steps closer to the news group.
“…Really welcomed silence, Tom. There hasn’t been a Peruvian Pan Flute Band in sight for days now, and everyone is really enjoying the peace. The world can breathe a collective sigh of relief now as we thank the Department of Homeland Security…”
Wu!
Before the reporter could finish, he was interrupted by a strange, loud noise. The sound that was similar to the low growl of a giant monster came from two streets away, and following it was the sound of giant feet stomping on the ground. Suddenly, an explosion happened down the distance, and the sky was lit up by the fire. The cameraman instantly panned the camera over there, and he was just in time to capture the fire and smoke from the explosion.
The people started to wander aimlessly and run for mercy. Echoes for help boomed here and there.
“Oh my God!”
“Oh, God!”
“Ah! Ah! Ah!”
In the shaking camera, a police car with sirens still blazing suddenly soared through the sky, cutting an arc before falling in the center of the field, landing about five to six meters behind the reporter. The reporter was so dumbfounded that he dropped the microphone. He ran to the screen and shouted into the screen with a horrified face, “There is something else here… It is not a Peruvian Flute Band. It is like…”
His words were stuck in his throat, his face frozen in a mask of terror. Obviously, he saw something that was beyond the camera screen. “My god, what is that thing!”
The reporter who was on air at the station shouted at him through the microphone, “Paul, Paul, what do you see!”
“It’s furry. It’s very furry…” Paul shouted twice, but then the line was cut off, and the image disappeared…
The fate of Paul and the cameraman aside, our main character, Brother Jue, had already escaped from the scene. He did not have the time or the heart to help people or maintain the order. This was because he was very clear about the fact that there was more than one monster. At that moment, all over the world, people in major cities were under attack, and the crisis was so big that he was unable to do anything alone.
The moment the low growl echoed through the sky, the system notification had also announced, “Current quest completed. Main quest updated. Survive until the end of the ‘big tragedy’.”
After seeing this quest, Feng Bujue started to run toward the shopping mall without any hesitation. But once he stepped through the front door, there was another notification that travelled into his ears. “Side quest has been triggered. Bring Stan’s parents and big sister safely to the shopping mall.”
“What the f*ck? You had to pick this moment, right after I entered into the shopping mall, to trigger this side quest?” Feng Bujue cursed under his breath. However, one good thing was that this quest had a very clear objective and aid. In Brother Jue’s game menu, there was a window that appeared like a radar; it marked out quite clearly the location of Stan’s family members like the system was luring him into completing this quest. Assuming this was a normal difficulty scenario, this side quest would have been triggered when Feng Bujue arrived at the same town. Then, he would have had plenty of time to navigate and bring Stan’s family members to the shopping mall before the tragedy occurred, he could have done that through lying or by force. But this was a Nightmare Solo Scenario, so the timing of the side quest was when it was most chaotic. Either Feng Bujue chose to abandon the side quest completely, or he had to make the decision to take a huge risk to undertake the quest.
After hesitating for about ten seconds, Feng Bujue said with a dark grimace, “Fine, throw everything you have right at me!”
With a grit of his teeth, he kicked at the ground and pulled on the large travelling bag that was strapped on his back. It was stuffed with medical instruments. Then, he took out a M733 Commando with grenade attachment and made his first step toward the location marked out by the radar. At this point, it would not have mattered for him to race down the street with the gun showing plainly. After all, the people around him were too busy trying to save their own lives to care about him. The police and the military were also busy dealing with the monsters; no one was paying him much attention.
Feng Bujue jogged quite some distance when he suddenly realized his Stamina Points were dropping a bit faster than anticipated. He thought to himself, Looks like it exhausts quite a number of Stamina Points to carry so many items with me. It would appear more efficient for me to find me a car.
It did not cross his mind to run into the middle of the street to block a passing car like one would in Grand Theft Auto. In the city’s current state, the chance of the driver stepping on the gas and running him over was much higher if he did something as reckless as that. Therefore, Feng Bujue ran down another block and found a parked car in an alley. He jogged over to it and confirmed that there was no one inside the car and the car doors were locked. Then he used the gun to knock out the side window. He opened the car door and climbed into it. Feng Bujue used a very expert motion to crack open the control board underneath the driver’s seat and swiftly found the two wires that were needed to hotwire the vehicle. After two minutes, he was backing the car out of the small alley. He stepped on the clutch, changed gears, and stepped on the gas.
By then, the sky had completely darkened. There were many streetlights that had gone out. People were running for safety everywhere, and it was incredibly confusing and chaotic. Feng Bujue switched on the headlights and drove down the streets as fast but as safe as he could.
After driving for ten minutes, and when the blinking lights on the radar came closer and closer to him, he was about to reach his destination after turning another corner. But just at that corner, as he turned the steering wheel, a giant creature appeared to block his way. Feng Bujue instantly stepped on the brakes, but the car kept sliding toward the giant creature, working on inertia.
All drivers, at the moment before an accident, would turn the steering wheel toward themselves out of bodily instinct. However, Feng Bujue was devoid of the sensation of fear. At this crucial moment, he managed to maintain his rationality and effectively made his reaction.
Under the influence of inertia, the car continued to move forward. He was just inches away to ram into the giant creature, but Feng Bujue merely calmly reached out a single arm to undo the safety belt, and his other hand steadied the steering wheel to make sure that the car was still moving forward. After he undid the safety belt, he reached out to grab the backpack and guns lying at the passenger seat. All these actions were completed in just two seconds. And then, the front of the car rammed into the giant monster’s furry body. Feng Bujue was prepared for this impact. He adjusted his posture. He grabbed the gun and the straps of the backpack with one hand while the other hand blocked in front of him to act as a kind of buffer.
After some crackling and crashing… Feng Bujue’s body flew out from his seat, crashed through the windshield, and was thrown out of the car. He slammed into the giant fluffy body. The fluffiness absorbed the impact from the crash, and when the force that hurled him out from the car was neutralized, he slid down and landed right on top of the car’s hood.
Then he swiftly turned his body around, and with pulling weight around his waist, he sat up. The whole series of action was done smoothly. Then he slipped one of his arms through the strap of the backpack, pulled it onto his left shoulder, grabbed the guns by his right hand, and kicked under his feet… Before the monster could attack, Feng Bujue had already escaped more than seven to eight meters away.
Even so, Brother Jue did not waste time to turn back to check the situation behind him. He continued to jog and rush forward to pull further distance between him and the monster. It was not that Feng Bujue did not want to confirm the monster’s appearance with his own eyes, but he had already known about the appearance of these monsters at the beginning of the scenario. After he remembered the content from those two episodes of South Park about the Peruvian Flute Bands, the first thing that came into his mind was actually the images of these monsters.
The appearance of these giants was actually quite easy to describe. They were a bunch of oversized… guinea pigs.
They did not look any different from the pet guinea pigs that many people owned, but they were taller than five story buildings and had a certain hostility to things around them. Some of them wore cotton-made costumes, as if they were dressed as bees, rabbits, and so on…
With regards to where these giant cute creatures came from, and whether they possessed any degree of intelligence, no one could tell. In any case, they just appeared one day like that out of the blue. They attacked people all over the world and started their own series of ‘Attack of Titans: Guinea Pigs Edition’, eating people and crushing buildings.
“What to do now… Should I run around it?” Feng Bujue ran as he observed the geography around him and the radar in his menu. He was trying to find the most suitable route to complete his task. However, at that moment, something changed again, throwing a wrench into his plan. He heard a howling sound coming from above him, so he lifted his head to look. He saw three F-15s cutting through the sky and firing several missiles right around where he was standing.