Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The enormous red underpants covered all the ghosts beneath them. I heard the Instance Master cursing from underneath. “What the hell! You’re a skeleton! Why are you wearing red underpants?!”

One of Big Skeleton’s legs had been yanked apart too. The huge leg bone fell out, but braked just in time and didn’t smash into the ghosts. When it heard the Instance Master’s words, it even paused shyly for a second before quickly hopping back and automatically snapping itself back onto the skeleton’s body.

Big Skeleton burrowed a little farther into the cave, hiding his head but not his rear.

The Instance Master and the ghosts crawled out and scratched their heads for ages, completely out of ideas.

I was getting impatient from waiting. I stomped my foot. “Come out, or I’ll break your legs!”

The Giant Skeleton trembled, and the mountain trembled with him.

He remembered the terror of last time, when I slapped his skullcap clean off with one palm.

Then, all meek and pathetic, he covered his backside and stuck his head out bashfully. Without his skullcap, he wasn’t all that scary.

He still looked nothing like a proper ghost. That whole skeleton frame of his was so white it glowed, and not scary in the least. I refused to acknowledge him as one of my kind.

I put the bowl back on his head.

The Giant Skeleton touched his head in disbelief, then looked a little delighted. He carefully glanced at me, then reached both hands around me and drew a giant heart on the ground.

The instance’s Ultimate Boss was back in business.

And I was starting my shift too.

Before I clocked in, the Instance Master gave me a crash course.

Our instance was a newbie instance called Bloodthirsty Desert. The sand sucked blood, and that was the main danger.

The ghost NPCs were mainly responsible for pushing the plot forward and creating a terrifying atmosphere.

The Ultimate Boss was responsible for standing around doing nothing.

Doing nothing.

The Instance Master held his forehead. In truth, Big Skeleton was very strong. Because of him, this instance had originally been rated as a high-level instance. But later, people gradually discovered that while Big Skeleton was powerful, his courage was only about this big.

If he hadn’t been so huge that players ran the moment they saw him, they would have realized that as long as they showed even the slightest bit of backbone, they could actually chase the boss around.

So the instance’s rating dropped again and again, until it became the lowest-level newbie instance.

And yet people still failed to clear it.

The Instance Master sighed. “Players get worse with every generation. To guarantee a survival rate of over fifty percent, we’ve worried ourselves sick.”

Behind every newbie player who cleared an instance, there was a whole group of NPCs silently working hard to go easy on them.

“I understand. I need to work hard at going easy on them.”

The Instance Master gave me a look that said I was teachable, then left in relief.

The players entered. Half were total newbies, and half were low-level veterans.

Following the script, I recited loudly, “Oh heavens, do you not know how much I love her…”

I flipped back to the cover and saw that it was actually the romance novel I’d found while slacking off during pre-shift training.

I gave the stunned players a smile that said I wanted to die of embarrassment but was stubbornly continuing to work, then pulled out another booklet.

My smile vanished. I looked at them expressionlessly, my eyelids half-lowered, my voice cold and eerie.

The horror level instantly maxed out.

“Where is my Doll?”

The Doll was the mini boss. In this stage, the players had to turn back, find the cloth Doll, and hand it over to me before I would let them pass. Two people would die while searching for the Doll.

Unfortunately, one veteran player refused to follow the script. He smugly waved a stack of item Card props in his hand. “I have an item that can detect ghost ranks. That Doll back there is the boss. The one in front of us is a low-level White-Clothed Female Ghost. The instance is deliberately misleading us into thinking the Doll is more harmless. Actually, it’s easier to clear this by dealing with the female ghost.”

Then he incited all the players to attack me together.

Fuck.

They started by beating up the ghost.

Who said this generation of players was bad?