“Team Member: Atobe-sama, dead.”
“Team Member: So hard to find a name, dead.”
The system audio announced their deaths, and Wang Tanzhi quickly opened the game menu to take a look. Both of their names had the status ’dead’ next to them. After recovering from his brief shock, Xiao Tan opened his lips to ask, “Big Brothers, do you think they could have died inside this building’s underground lab?”
“Oh? Why would you think so?” Pan Feng continued to move forward and replied without turning his head. From his tone, it sounded like he did not care so much about the deaths of the two players, like their deaths would not have affected their success rate. Then again, with the combined forced of Pan Feng and Hwa Xiong, there was a basis for that confidence.
“Well, think about it, one of them is level fourteen, and the other level is level twelve. They’re at least stronger than I am, and I am not afraid of the BW Zombies on the street, so they couldn’t have fallen victim to them. If they came to this Allerbmu’s building, saw the layout map, and went to the underground lab…” He paused before continuing. “We’ve not been to that place yet, so there might be great danger. It might even be guarded by a boss. Could it be that they ran into a Zombie Werewolf?”
“Hmm… You have a point,” Hwa Xiong said, but his tone implied that he had considered that as well and was merely saying that to brush Xiao Tan off. “But since they’re already dead, we won’t be able to do anything if we turn back now. Plus, we’re already so close to the top floor, so why don’t we finish clearing our way to the top and then…”
“How about this?” Xiao Tan interrupted him. “Big Brothers, you can continue to move toward the top floor while I go back down to the ground floor.”
He took out the baseball bat from his inventory. Since he had been free from battle, Xiao Tan had even put his weapon away. “The remaining player is my friend, and he might not have arrived at this building yet, but I’m sure he’ll eventually arrive here. I’ll go wait for him at the ground floor, and when I meet up with him, I can warn him from going to the basement. Then, we’ll come to meet up with you.”
The two stopped moving and turned to look at Xiao Tan before exchanging a look between themselves. Hwa Xiong shrugged. “Okay then. Little buddy, you’d better be careful. We’ll go on ahead.”
Xiao Tan nodded and turned to retrace their steps. He turned around the bend and rushed into the emergency staircase. He had no idea that Feng Bujue was already inside the underground lab and did not realize that his prediction for the location where Atobe-sama and Ming Zi had died was wrong; he was merely acting on his instinct.
After he wandered away, Pan Feng suddenly used a serious tone to say, “Before the two players died, they stayed at the same coordinates for a long time, and that place is very far from this building.”
“Ah, I noticed that as well,” Hwa Xiong replied. “The place shouldn’t have a mini boss, and before night falls, there will only be a handful of BW Zombies that roam the city. Plus… their time of death is only several seconds between each other… So, unless they jumped off the building together…”
“So, it is the work of the ’anomaly’,” Pan Feng said. “They’ve reached out toward the players so soon… We should work faster to prevent the other two players from encountering the anomaly.”
“In that case, it’s a good thing that the little buddy has gone. Now we don’t need to hold back. After all, the way back is relatively safe since most of the mobs have been killed already, so he should be safe for now,” Hwa Xiong said. “But the status of that ’Feng Bujue’ is not that good. Even though he still has 73% of his Life Points, but he’s infected. When he reaches the transformation stage, the system will deem the player as dead. We’d better settle this before that happens.”
He took a deep breath. “Four players are arranged into this scenario, and we can’t do much for the two dead players, but if three or more players are killed before the scenario is cleared, then our work will fail.”
“Hmm…” Pan Feng nodded. “You’re right. We must ’kill’ Ashford as soon as possible. As long as we enter that ’path’ of the plot, we’ll soon clear the scenario. No matter what… we must send the players out of the scenario so that we can focus on dealing with the anomaly.”
…
Feng Bujue travelled down the corridor of the lab with his Winchester. The lighting system there was operating just fine, and there was not that many zombies around. Other than the ambush at the elevator, the rest of the time, it was no different from the experience he encountered on the surface, one or two zombies at every three to five corridors.
Feng Bujue’s shotgun was very effective inside this small corridor. As long as he waited to shoot until the monster was close, no matter how bad a shot he was, it would end the battle there and then. After all, even if he just hit the limbs, the monsters would fall; but should he hit the torso, the monsters would be sent flying or riddled with bullet holes.
He explored a large area, and most of the electronic doors could be opened. Most of the rooms only had metallic shelves, and they were filled with paper boxes that contained paper documents and files. Feng Bujue naturally read through the files, but the content was meaningless. The files had a lot of repetition, and the important details were blacked out by markers.
Some rooms had large computers with big monitors and control panels, but all of them were broken, and Feng Bujue could not even switch them on. In a way, it was quite convenient because Feng Bujue did not need to spend time looking through such rooms.
After some walking around, Feng Bujue finally found a door with a higher security clearance. The door needed to scan both someone’s retina and fingerprints to open, and the game was kind enough to provide a zombie in a white lab coat not far away from the door.
Feng Bujue shot the enemy on its waist and the zombie crumpled to the floor with its intestines spraying everywhere. Feng Bujue grabbed the baseball bat from his inventory to break the bones of the zombie’s legs and arms. Then, he changed into the kitchen knife and cut off the zombie’s head and one of its arms. He even took the opportunity to look through the zombie’s outfit and only left when he discovered nothing.
After the scan was done, the door opened. Feng Bujue tossed the head and arm away since he had no use for them anymore.
This was obviously a space that was connected to the plot. On the wall facing the door, there was a large metallic valve, not dissimilar to the one at the bank safe. On the left side of the wall was a row of glass tubes. They were one meter tall and around thirty centimeters in diameter. They should have been filled with liquid, but since the glass casing was shattered, the content had flowed onto the ground. It was a kind of half-transparent liquid that was light green in color. The floor of the room was stained with the substance.
The few computers in the room were broken, and the monitors were all black. Next to one of them lay two dead bodies in lab coat. Feng Bujue approached them cautiously and, after some observation, confirmed that they were normal dead bodies, not monsters lying in ambush.
They were both males, and one of them looked over fifty, with a balding head and wearing spectacles. The other had gray hair and small goatee. Both of them were advanced in age. The balding guy had a gunshot wound in his skull, and the goatee had two gunshot wounds on his chest and torso. They were left unmoved after death; the positioning of their dead bodies proved that.
Feng Bujue tried to reconstruct the assault in his mind. The killer should be someone they knew. He entered the lab through the door and suddenly pulled out the gun. At a close distance, he fired the bullet at the balding guy’s head. The bullet entered the skull and killed him on the spot. The balding guy was sitting in the chair, so after his death, his body slipped down from the chair and was lying on the ground.
With the first shot was fired, the goatee, who was several steps away from the computer, was facing away from the door. He turned around when he heard the gunshot, but the killer did not give him any chance to react. He instantly fired two more rounds to kill the man. The goatee’s body was leaning forward as he fell. Before he died, he even grabbed the edge of the table for support before collapsing to the ground.
From the pose, blood stains, and expressions of the dead bodies, Feng Bujue came up with this hypothesis. As a crime novel writer, he was good at reconstructing the criminal process from the crime scene. He had acted out such scenes who knew how many times in his mind. Sometimes, to write out specific murders, he would conduct related experiments. It might sound troublesome, but at the end of the day, they were strategies that came from his mind, so it would be quite meaningless if they could not be replicated in real life.
Feng Bujue looked at the two bodies and laughed. “Since they’re not infected, they must have taken the serum already…”
He faced the bodies and talked to himself. “There are so many people in this base, and I believe that only researchers who have to deal with the virus directly would have a privilege like that.”
As he reconstructed the case in his mind, he said, “No matter the purpose, if we make the assumption that the killer is a researcher with the serum, he killed these two people, broke the container with the virus, and then escaped the room with a miniscule amount of the serum. Out in the corridors, he continued to kill and used the virus to cause the zombie transformation. Then, he escaped from the lab and allowed the virus to spread to the surface, but for some reason, the people on the surface transformed into a different kind of zombie.
“Or rather… the killer didn’t have a chance to escape the lab and was killed by security or something. The BW Zombies outside the lab have nothing to do with the virus here, and they’re caused by a completely different thing.”
At that point, Feng Bujue was reminded of another thing, and he mumbled to himself, “But the guy at the door had the qualification to enter this room, so he should be a researcher who had taken the serum, so why did he zombify?”
Feng Bujue needed more information to understand the situation, so he inspected the two bodies again and found a key inside the pocket of the goatee.
There was an office table several meters away. Feng Bujue walked over with the key and opened all the drawers. He found two syringes, a stack of papers, some stationery, a stapler, pins, and so on. Only the lowest drawer was locked. He tried the key that he found, and the lock clicked open.