Chapter 139
Chapter 139: Good and Bad News
Ten minutes ago.
Death Wheat Field.
Zhao Yan and the Iron Wall Squad had just stepped through the Teleportation Gate, and were now staring up at the sky.
Because just moments ago, the Sky Screen had slowly revealed row after row of large text.
【Hello~Welcome, lucky warriors, to this Bet Trial!】
【Seeing each and every one of you looking so full of confidence, I'm truly delighted!】
【So, to reward you all, I've brought both good news and bad news!】
【First, the good news: the rewards for this trial are unprecedentedly generous!】
【As long as you clear the trial, every member of the winning team's Shelter—】
【—will receive the privilege of returning to Blue Star for 12 hours every day!】
The moment those words appeared, the Iron Wall Squad, who had been tense with nerves, instantly erupted!
"Yes!"
Hu Xiaoxiao was so excited she jumped on the spot, her eyes turning red.
"Finally…finally we can go home!"
"Nice! Nice! NIIIICE!!!"
Mai Zijian, who was responsible for defense, was cutting down the surrounding wheat stalks while pumping his fist over and over.
"I haven't ground dailies in years!"
"If we can go back this time, I'm going to play my heart out!"
"My Delta Isle!"
"Bear League!"
"Ape God!"
"Calling Blaze!"
"Collapse Railway: Devious Path!"
"And Yesterday's Ark!"
"Hu Hasan is back!!!"
"Tch, you shut-in."
Vice-captain Lu Qi rolled her eyes from beside him and dumped a bucket of cold water straight on him.
"Every human on the planet got transported to the Savage Realm."
"There's not a single living person left on Blue Star—where's a server going to come from to run your games?"
"Are you going to go back and throw punches at a black screen?"
The wild joy on Mai Zijian's face instantly froze: "Oh damn, forgot about that."
"But it doesn't matter! I've still got those games to play! Those are offline!"
Lu Qi stopped paying attention to this clown and turned to look at Captain Xin An, who was standing to one side.
From the moment they arrived until now, Xin An's expression had been grave—one could even say it carried a trace of sorrow.
"Still thinking about that?"
Lu Qi stepped forward and asked quietly.
"Yang Wei is a common enough name—the one who died on this island might not be him, right?"
"You're absolutely right, and I hope it isn't him either."
Xin An crouched down, fingers lightly brushing a wheat ear, her eyes filled with a grief too deep to dissolve.
"But my instincts are telling me…"
"He was here. He died in this godforsaken place."
Lu Qi let out a quiet sigh, her expression complicated: "Captain—was it worth it?"
"Don't forget, his mother once tried to poison you! You were a detective back then!"
"If you'd drunk it, your career, your entire life—all of it would've been finished!"
"And yet here you are, grieving over her son's death?"
"No—you don't understand."
Xin An shook her head, her voice hoarse.
"Yang Wei was nothing like them. He was a good kid."
"He never touched a single coin of the dirty wealth his mother stole."
"Instead, he bore pressures and contempt that no one his age should ever have had to carry."
Xin An slowly rose to her feet.
"That's exactly why I wanted to give him a hand."
"And precisely because I was a police officer—"
"—I wanted to show him the good in this world. I didn't want him to spend his whole life trapped in the dark."
Lu Qi pressed a helpless hand to her forehead "Sigh—there you go with that great speech of yours again. You really are something else."
She lowered her hand and thrust a fist toward Xin An.
"Whatever you say goes."
"Since that poor soul called Yang Wei died at the Scarecrow's hands—"
"—then we'll avenge him one more time, right here in this wheat field!"
Xin An froze for a moment, then extended her own fist and bumped it against Lu Qi's.
Thunk.
At the exact moment their fists connected, Zhao Yan spoke up.
"Stop reminiscing! Look at the Sky Screen!"
Everyone's hearts clenched as they snapped their heads upward in unison.
The small squad, which had just been bubbling with joy, saw the second block of text on the Sky Screen—and every single expression instantly went rigid.
【Next, the bad news~】
【Oh my, I accidentally forgot to mention this at the start.】
【That is…for this trial, the Sky Screen will no longer provide participants with any death-protection whatsoever.】
【In other words—if you are killed during this trial, you are truly, genuinely dead.】
【The kind where your soul scatters and vanishes!】
【Now…let us begin this carnival of flesh and blood…brave ones…】
The sound of the wind sweeping through the wheat field, in that moment, sounded exactly like Death's sneering laughter.
"Oh, go f*** yourself, you piece of s*** Sky Screen! Playing dirty again, are you?!"
"Your son was born without a backside!!!"
Hu Xiaoxiao, who had been putting on a tiny dainty voice just a second ago, instantly transformed into a raging maniac.
"F*** you! Refund!!!"
Mai Zijian was cursing beside her too.
"Shut up! Everyone be quiet!!!"
Zhao Yan let out a single roar, and his overwhelming pressure silenced both of them on the spot.
As for the Sky Screen putting on one face while hiding another behind it—he, as a veteran, was long used to this.
After all, according to the historical records, the Sky Screen pulled this kind of stunt all the time.
He turned to Xin An.
"No time to complain! Open the map!"
"Understood!"
Xin An's eyes shut.
Full Map Unlock—activate!
Hum!
A pulse of mental force burst outward from Xin An as its epicenter, radiating madly in every direction.
Inside her mind, a three-dimensional map viewed from a God's-Eye View was rapidly taking shape.
Blue dots representing humans, and red dots representing monsters, were the only markers on the map.
1 kilometer…
5 kilometers…
10 kilometers…
The map kept expanding—and everywhere the eye could reach, there was nothing but an endless, boundless Wheat Field!
No end in sight!
Even stranger—
There wasn't a single red dot representing the Boss!
"Ngh…"
Xin An let out a muffled grunt as sweat began to fall.
The larger the map expanded, the greater the mental pressure crushing her brain grew—geometrically.
'Come out already…'
Xin An clenched her jaw and wrung out her spiritual force to its limit.
16 kilometers…
18 kilometers…
20 kilometers!
She was nearing her absolute limit—blood had already begun seeping from her nostrils.
Zhao Yan, Lu Qi, and the others surrounded Xin An tightly, not even daring to breathe.
"Twenty-one…"
"Twenty-two…"
"There! Got it!!!"
At the instant the map expanded to 23 kilometers, Xin An's eyes flew open, and she gasped for breath.
"Found it?! Found the Scarecrow?!"
Zhao Yan asked urgently.
"No…that expression isn't right!"
Lu Qi had sharply caught the shock buried deep in Xin An's eyes.
Xin An wiped the blood from her nose, her face ashen as she looked at everyone.
"It's not a red dot."
"23 kilometers out—I found a blue dot."
"And…there are exactly 5 of them."
"There's a human squad. They're also inside this trial ground with us!"
"What?!"
Zhao Yan's mind went blank for a moment—then he slapped his thigh, his expression turning ugly to the extreme.
"Damn it! That cursed Sky Screen, speaking only half the truth again!"
"This is absolutely not a single-target suppression battle—this is a Joint Trial of the Battle Royale type!"
"Chief Zhao, what's a Battle Royale?"
Hu Xiaoxiao wiped the corners of her teary eyes and asked, completely lost.
Mai Zijian swallowed a mouthful of saliva and explained "Xiaoxiao, you joined late so you've never run into one."
"Normally we go into solo or independent squad sub-instances."
"But a Battle Royale…"
"…means all participating squads are dropped into the same map together to face a single Boss as one."
"Oh! Isn't that even better then?!"
Hu Xiaoxiao's eyes lit up.
"If the other countries' squads take down the Scarecrow, don't we just win for free?"
"Go home and chill—perfect!"
"Win for free? You must be dreaming."
Lu Qi immediately dumped another bucket of cold water.
"That's the S-Grade Boss, the Watchful Scarecrow!"
"A monster whose power far exceeds its own grade!"
"Even with Chief Zhao leading us, I wouldn't dare guarantee we'd make it out in one piece."
"Let alone—"
"—let alone that this time it's a real life-and-death fight!"
"Those squads who came here only to train or have fun—or to show off—"
"Well, the latter is nearly impossible, unless the Scarecrow decides to play actor."
"But if it's the former—"
"The moment they find out death is real, anyone in the squad with a weak mindset will absolutely fall into panic!"
"Fear before the battle even starts—that's the cardinal taboo of warfare!"
"And Cursed Creatures—the thing they're best at is tearing through the gap that fear opens, and picking enemies off one by one!"
Lu Qi paused, then delivered a piece of information that made everyone's skin crawl.
"Don't forget the intel the base gave us."
"The Scarecrow possesses both Body Seizure and Split Form abilities!"
"If it's clever enough, it will absolutely not come for hard bones like us first."
"It will prioritize hunting the weakest squads!"
"It will slaughter them—then seize their bodies!"
"Splitting off countless Scarecrow clones that carry human Abilities! Rolling the snowball bigger and bigger!"
Lu Qi drew a deep breath: "By that point, our opponents will no longer be just 1 Boss."
"They'll be the body-seized…elites of foreign nations!"
"Uuu~"
"Lu Qi, stop scaring me—I haven't even had a girlfriend yet."
Hearing this analysis, Hu Xiaoxiao's excitement deflated considerably.
Because the other squads participating in this trial—besides them—
Included Blade Squad from the Huaxia 1st Base, Eagle Nation's White Eagle Squad, and Black Shark Squad!
If those Tiger-Grade squads all got turned into the Scarecrow's puppets…
Then what Iron Wall Squad would face was the hopeless nightmare of being swarmed by 15 top-tier Ability users!
"Xiao Lu hit the nail on the head."
Zhao Yan bit down hard, making his decision in an instant: "We absolutely cannot fight alone!"
"We need to immediately locate those 5 blue dots and rendezvous with the other squads!"
"Regardless of which nation they're from—as long as we can form an alliance, we can stop the Scarecrow from rolling that snowball!"
And inwardly, he was cursing furiously.
‘Chief! Oh, Chief! You really are a jinx—this time it actually is a life-and-death fight!’
Even so, he kept a cool head.
Years of warfare had long since made him a stranger to fear.
"Xin An—coordinates! Which direction are those 5 blue dots?"
"We move at full speed right now—forced march!"
Zhao Yan drew his long blade, ready to cut a path through.
However.
Xin An stayed rooted to the spot.
Not moving a single inch.
Her complexion was even paler than before.
"Chief Zhao…"
Xin An swallowed hard.
"I think…we should head in a different direction. We should give up on them."
"Why?!"
Zhao Yan fixed his gaze on Xin An: "Are you saying—?!"
"That's right."
Xin An closed her eyes, a helpless resignation filling their depths.
"If we go now…it's already too late."
Inside her mind, on that holographic map—
23 kilometers away, surrounding those 5 blue dots representing humans—
Hundreds upon hundreds of red specks of light had materialized out of nowhere, dense and swarming.
Like a vast crimson ocean, they surged and swallowed those 5 blue dots…
Engulfing them completely.
Bunny-Bunny