Chapter 145

Chapter 145

Once they had thought through every link in the chain, the room fell silent for a moment. Then Rao Lin asked, “You two still haven’t completed your Murderer Mission, have you?”

With a flashy sweep of his hair, Rao Lin said, “I know where the Notary Office is now, but we’ll need to find our dear Teacher Bao Yi to do an experiment. Since your Murderer Mission still isn’t done, this is the perfect chance to take care of it.”

The words had barely left his mouth when the prey delivered itself right to their door.

At this moment, Bao Yi still thought he was the hunter. Holding a bowl of chilled mung bean soup perfect for summer, he knocked on the door from outside. “Number One Swordsman in the World, the crystal cores your team brought back were pretty high quality. Boss Ding sent me over to bring you a bowl of mung bean soup.”

The moment the door opened, he discovered that everyone he had been looking for was inside.

The prey who thought himself a hunter grinned. “So you’re having a meeting? Have some mung bean soup.”

As he set the last bowl on the table, Ning Wang reacted in a flash and locked down his arm from behind. Ning Shuo subdued him in a single move, and the dagger instantly pierced through Bao Yi’s throat.

Blood splashed into the mung bean soup. He stared at them in disbelief. Qin Genan muttered that the soup had gone to waste just like that, and Rao Lin laughed as he cursed, saying, “Nan-ge, you really dared drink soup brought by this bastard?”

In the end, his world was washed over in blood-red before sinking back into darkness.

[Congratulations, Player Ning Banxian. With your boyfriend’s assistance, you have successfully completed the first step of your Murderer Mission.]

[Congratulations, Player Ning Banxian. You finally remembered your Murderer Mission. Do the other Players still remember they’re supposed to find Zone A’s Murderer?]

[Congratulations, Player Ning Banxian. With your future husband’s assistance, you have successfully completed the first step of your Murderer Mission.]

[Next, witness the birth of several Oscar-winning actors.]

[No, guy upstairs, keep the formation.]

[Have they all gone completely insane because they know they can’t get out?]

At present, the only person who knew Bao Yi would come looking for them was Ding Pan. While Ning Wang went to complete his own Murderer Mission, he also took Bao Yi’s corpse with him and dumped it elsewhere. He only came back half an hour later. Ten minutes after that, the base alarm rang out: “Boss Ding has been murdered!”

The group put on an act and ran outside, shouting along the way, “What happened to Boss Ding?!” But when they reached the crime scene, they discovered Bao Yi lying next to Boss Ding as well, so everyone immediately launched into exaggerated performances again. “Oh my God! How is Bao Yi dead too?”

A forensic examiner inspected the bodies. “One fatal strike. Death occurred within the last hour. The killer must be a master with knives.”

“But Boss Ding’s fatal wound is strange. Bao Yi died from a knife wound, but Boss Ding’s was caused by a sword.”

There was a definite difference between sword wounds and knife wounds. The person sent to check the armory came running back, panting. “It’s true… it’s true, several swords are missing!”

Among the people in the team skilled with swords and knives, the choices were either ordinary people or ability users. But the ability users’ blade skills were nowhere near enough to kill two ability users using only swords and knives, especially when one of them was the leader of the Zone X base.

That narrowed the suspects down to ordinary people skilled with swords and knives, and nearly all people of that type were in Team F.

Zheng Chigao waved a hand. “Take the members of Team F into custody!”

That was utterly unreasonable and indiscriminate. Qin Genan shouted, “Every bit of supplies we brought back was handed over to the base. Where would we even get weapons? And why would we kill them?!”

Zheng Chigao let out a cold snort. “Lock them up first.”

Aside from Song Zhu, who had a healing ability, everyone in Team F was “ordinary.”

Some tried to prove their innocence. Others opened with mockery first. “Idiots.”

Ning Shuo’s character setting wasn’t meant to be that clever, but Ning Wang could be the one to sneer.

When facing accusations already colored by prejudice, there was no need to go along with the other side and try to prove your own innocence. That would only make you fall into the trap of having to prove yourself innocent, because no matter how you argued afterward, the other side would always be able to seize on something in your words and use it to refute you, no matter how absurd that refutation was.
Ordinary people were already at the very bottom of the base’s hierarchy. The pecking order had always existed. Even that competition with Team A over who could kill more crystal cores had been the base’s way of sending “the fiercely competitive Team F” to die in a zombie horde.

Now that they had a chance to get rid of them, of course they were going to move as quickly as possible.

And besides, Zheng Chigao had been at the base for so long, always stuck as the second-in-command, always being kept under Ding Pan’s thumb. Now that Ding Pan was dead, he was probably overjoyed.

Not to mention the zombie experiments the base had been conducting. As the second-in-command, Zheng Chigao may very well have known about them.

Nominally, they were locking up Team F without bothering to distinguish right from wrong.

But in reality, who knew whether they were planning to seize Team F’s members-people with physiques far stronger than ordinary survivors-and use them for experiments?

When filthy water is being dumped on you and there’s no washing it off, there’s no need to explain yourself.

You just have to curse the other side until they get mad and get some satisfaction out of it yourself.

People who get defensive are the easiest to expose flaws. And once flaws appear, even an idiot can tell their logic doesn’t hold up.

Zheng Chigao immediately snapped, “What do you mean by that?!”

Ning Wang looked puzzled. “I’m insulting you. Couldn’t tell? Then apparently you’re not just stupid, you can’t even understand human language.”

“I thought you were at least human. Turns out you’re not even that.”

No matter what, the Number One Swordsman in the World was still Team F’s Captain. Just how terrifyingly strong he was could be seen from those bags and bags of crystal cores he had carried down in full view of everyone one morning.

More importantly, Ding Pan had been one of the top espers in the base. If even he could be killed in a single blow, then who present could possibly restrain the killer?

When he saw that no one dared step forward, Zheng Chigao shouted, “He’s just an ordinary person! He doesn’t even have a weapon on him! What are you afraid of?!”

The moment the words left his mouth, he realized something was wrong.

Ning Banxian, the Number One Swordsman in the World’s number one supporter, immediately stepped forward. “So you do know we don’t have any weapons, huh? Then you’re still trying to arrest us? Are you brain-dead or what?!”

Even if some ordinary people had been taken away and turned into zombies, refugees were still arriving in Zone X wave after wave. By now, there were more ordinary people around than espers.

Gradually, other voices started speaking up.

“Yeah, the Number One Swordsman in the World is already the strongest among ordinary people. If he really could’ve killed Boss Ding in one hit, why would he still be standing here letting us arrest him? Wouldn’t he have just gone berserk and killed all of us instead?”

“Captain Zheng is being way too careless about this arrest.”

“And a one-hit kill doesn’t necessarily mean total suppression, right? What if it was someone Ding Pan knew?”

“What if the killer was actually an esper, and the reason they didn’t leave any traces of a power was because they wanted to frame ordinary people?”

“Holy shit-then Captain Zheng, who came straight for Team F from the very start, doesn’t that make him…? He was close with Boss Ding too.”

A vacuum slowly opened up around Zheng Chigao. He took a deep breath and sent people to search the entire base to see whether they could find a murder weapon.

While looking at Team F, he said, “Especially their rooms. Search them carefully.”

The Players stood there calmly watching, and some people who were afraid of them even proactively brought over chairs.

Thank goodness for the all-purpose Backpack. It could store anything as “evidence,” including that mung bean soup and the murder weapon.

Ning Shuo gently thanked the girl, and she immediately blushed and said it was nothing.

The atmosphere over there was warm and harmonious.

Which made Ning Wang unhappy.

Damn dogshit System, giving him a character setting like this!