Players, Please Board the Train

Once the Clown’s smile vanished, his costume and the makeup on his face and hands faded away one after another, like special effects shutting off. What stood before Xu Huo at last was a baby-faced young man in his early twenties. He still wore a stunned expression at how relentlessly Xu Huo had pressed him. After glancing around, he quickly retreated and used an item to send Xu Huo outside the gravitational chaos zone. At the same time, he himself withdrew in the direction of the laboratory.

However, the two players who had stayed out of their fight both chose to move away from the laboratory. Seeing the baby-faced man remove his Clown Set, the Tattooed Player unleashed “Fleeting Meteor Swarm” while floating upside down, forcing him toward the laboratory. With the upper half of the building suspended in midair, and their earlier fight stirring things up, black dust had already drifted out from inside and was gradually spreading the contaminated area. Their current position was not entirely safe.

The Tattooed Man and the Female Player had come out without the living specimen, which said enough. The baby-faced man looked back, and all three of them simultaneously turned their gaze toward Xu Huo, who had his back to them. The laboratory’s living specimen was dead. The South Gate was their only option now!

So, when Xu Huo turned and chased after the speeding vehicle, the three of them headed for the South Gate as well.

“What’s going on?” Zhao Jiahuai, who had already returned to the vehicle, couldn’t help asking.

“The laboratory is heavily contaminated. The living specimen is gone.” Xu Huo had packed away both the Invisibility Cloak and Protective Suit in his item box, then put on a fresh Protective Suit to cover all the contaminants on his body and keep them from spreading.

“Then the South Gate is the only place with a living specimen now.” Shangguan Xi glanced behind them. “They’re following us.”

The building debris suspended around the laboratory gradually began to fall. The deafening crashes startled the entire city. Players near the South Gate were moving rapidly, and it was clear that the disappearance of the living specimen’s signal from the laboratory had set off a new round of competition.

“Go faster!” Ding Wei urged. “Those three behind us aren’t pushovers!”

Compared to the South Gate, there were far fewer players around the laboratory. But those three had been able to make the others back down, which spoke volumes about their strength. Of course, the difficulty of extracting the specimen was also a factor. Still, the other players were willing to gather at the South Gate instead of approaching the laboratory, which meant the danger here was indeed greater.

Just look at Ding Wei and Zhao Jiahuai. They had claimed they would draw the enemy’s fire, but in reality, they hadn’t helped at all. They had probably lost their nerve as soon as they saw the others, which was why the Female Player had arrived so quickly.

“Boom!” Just then, a large mass of buildings suddenly collapsed in front of the vehicle. Teacher Ai swiftly turned the wheel and charged down another street. But the people chasing them clearly had no intention of letting them go. Burning bullets rained down relentlessly on the vehicle, while the Female Player circled around to its front. Keeping pace as she floated backward, she pulled a white thread from her palm. The instant she disappeared from the vehicle’s field of vision, the floating white thread automatically formed a seemingly transparent barrier!

The Manually Operated Off-Road Vehicle swerved sideways in the narrow street. It avoided the risk of its front end smashing into the barrier, but nearly tipped over and still became lodged inside it.

The barrier, which looked like a thin membrane, cushioned the vehicle for a moment, then sealed around it completely!

Ding Wei threw a pair of scissors through the window. The moment they touched the membrane, the scissors automatically cut an opening in it, slicing it cleanly in two.

Teacher Ai turned back toward their original route, but the delay had allowed the three pursuers to catch up!

“Don’t they want the living specimen? Why are they chasing us so relentlessly?” Zhao Jiahuai exclaimed.

Ding Wei immediately looked at Xu Huo. “Did you get the living specimen?”

“If you want to know, you can try killing me.” Xu Huo shot her a cold glance, then left the vehicle. He drew a line behind them with “This Road Is Blocked,” cutting off the Tattooed Man and the baby-faced man’s line of sight. Then he passed through space and appeared beside the Female Player. She had defensive items on her, and they reacted before she could, but all they formed was a spatial barrier. He slipped the newly acquired “Glowing Center” over the Female Player.

The sphere of light, five meters in radius and illuminated by a glass bead, seemed to solidify, trapping the Female Player firmly inside. But since she had spatial items, she naturally had an item capable of breaking spatial restraints too. A sharp spike shot from the ring on her hand, and the effect of “Glowing Center” quickly vanished. Immediately afterward, her palm turned black, and she swung it toward Xu Huo from several meters away.

There was a sharp crack, like a slap. The person who had been standing there vanished, replaced by blood and gore splattered across the ground!

Though she had killed her opponent with ease, the Female Player didn’t relax. She looked all around. The off-road vehicle was racing along a seemingly endless street. The building debris suspended in the sky, along with the players controlling it, had all frozen in place. The Tattooed Man was likewise motionless!

No one could look at this situation and think it was normal. Like the baby-faced man before her, the Female Player first tried to get away from where she was. But as she was about to leave, a transparent box appeared around her. It wasn’t a difficult item to break, but as the box rapidly shrank, she was squeezed hard enough to react with a brief flash of pain. In that momentary opening, her head twisted backward against her will.

“Crack!”

Xu Huo put away his item pen, quickly stripped the items from the Female Player’s corpse, then turned back toward the vehicle.

The vehicle was still moving, but Shangguan Xi and the other two had already gotten out to hold off the baby-faced man and the Tattooed Man.

Without his Clown costume, the baby-faced player wasn’t especially fast. He kept chasing after the vehicle, and his frequent movement seemed to limit his abilities. Although he continued manipulating objects around him, they were nowhere near as large or heavy as before. He also failed to create a complete gravitational chaos zone. Some lighter objects might have been affected by weakened gravity, but nothing came close to turning people upside down.

However, Shangguan Xi and the other two had come out to protect the vehicle and engage the enemy in a drawn-out struggle, giving the baby-faced man room to use his abilities.

“His items are much less effective when he’s moving at high speed!” Xu Huo blocked the baby-faced man’s attempt to put on his Clown Set with the “Crimson Sword.” As he warned Shangguan Xi and the others, he raced ahead and caught up with the vehicle.

Shangguan Xi retreated decisively, but Ding Wei and Zhao Jiahuai got tangled up in a fight with the Tattooed Man. He used a metal ring, only ten meters in diameter, to trap the two of them inside a circle on the ground!

“Bang, bang, bang, bang!” Zhao Jiahuai raised a thick shield to block the burning bullets. Seeing Shangguan Xi run off with Xu Huo, he immediately shouted, “Come back and help us!”