Chapter 089: The World of Ratfolk

At exactly midnight, a grim and sinister voice sounded in Su Cheng’s ear.

“Game initiated. The system is creating the instance. Please wait patiently...”

A moment later, a familiar line of blood-red text appeared on the game screen.

“Instance creation complete. Loading player data...”

Current scenario: The World of Ratmen

Difficulty: Three-star, Hard

Game mode: Faction battle

Number of participants: 7

Background: No one knew when it had begun, but beneath Tokyo there had emerged a horde of mutant rat monsters infected by a virus. At first, these sewer-dwelling aberrations drew no human attention. It was not until one day, when the police discovered that the surface population had been dropping sharply and that large numbers of people were vanishing almost daily.

After a series of investigations, they finally learned that these dreadful ratmen fed on human flesh. Worse still, the ratmen had spread plague and disease across the surface, causing the deaths of millions.

But by the time humanity realized the truth, the mutants’ astonishing rate of reproduction had already swelled their numbers to an inconceivable level.

Even more shocking, these ratmen had established a vast kingdom in the underground world.

In response to the threat posed by the mutant ratmen, the national security authorities sealed off the underworld and created a violent force known as the Rat Extermination Squad, tasked with eradicating the ratmen roaming below.

And you are an ordinary member of the Rat Extermination Squad, responsible for searching out the trail of the subterranean ratmen.

“This setup is pretty bizarre. Besides me, there are five other players taking part in this instance.”

At that moment, the scene before Su Cheng shifted, and he seemed to be inside an extremely cramped space.

“I’m in an elevator? Looks like this elevator is the passage leading to the world of the ratmen.”

Su Cheng noticed that even the clothes on his body had changed. He was now wearing something like a firefighter’s protective suit, and a gas mask covered his face. He could hardly be called anything but fully armed.

A sensation of weightlessness swept over him. Su Cheng felt the elevator plunging downward at terrifying speed.

About a minute later, the elevator came to a halt.

Ding.

The elevator doors opened from the inside, and when Su Cheng stepped out, the elevator behind him vanished into the darkness.

“What does that mean? I’m not allowed to go back?”

An eerie, chilling atmosphere spread out around him. Everything beyond was pitch-black; there was no light, nothing could be seen clearly. The temperature in the underground world was far lower than on the surface, and the air was damp and cold.

The protective suit he wore offered only meager defense, but it was still warm enough to keep him from freezing to death in the sudden drop in temperature.

After walking forward for a dozen meters or so, Su Cheng came upon an iron fence.

Through the bars, he saw shadows gathering in the darkness.

Suddenly, a pair of blood-red eyes appeared. A giant rat let out a low, bestial growl and lunged toward him.

Su Cheng stepped back a few paces. The giant rat slammed hard into the iron fence, producing a thunderous crash.

“Ratman?”

A flash of steel cut through the air. Su Cheng severed half the mutant ratman’s head with a single strike and then examined the corpse closely.

The mutant ratman looked much like an ordinary rat at first glance, its whole body covered in black fur. But its size was far greater than that of a normal rat; standing upright, it could reach over a meter in height.

Its body was covered with wounds, some already rotten and suppurating, and more than a dozen white maggots crawled and wriggled out from within the sores.

At that moment, one blood-red gaze after another rose behind the iron bars and fixed greedily on Su Cheng.

A rough count showed at least a hundred mutant ratmen had gathered nearby.

Even through the bars, Su Cheng could see the saliva dripping from their mouths, their expressions as though they were dying to swallow him whole.

If not for the fence, these mutant ratmen would likely have already charged forward and torn the human before them to pieces.

Su Cheng ignored the drooling mutant ratmen behind the fence and walked its length once around.

Before long, he was surprised to discover that it was not the mutant ratmen who were trapped beyond the fence. It was he who had been locked inside a huge iron cage.

This immense cage covered roughly a hundred square meters, and its exit was a locked iron door.

Around the cage’s perimeter gathered more than a hundred mutant ratmen. It seemed he had been surrounded by them.

Clatter!

At that moment, the iron door at the exit was suddenly opened from the outside.

A massive figure squeezed through the doorway. It was a mutant ratman of beastlike proportions, its body absurdly enormous.

“Hey, hey, what kind of show is this supposed to be?”

A bead of cold sweat broke out on Su Cheng’s forehead. Something about this situation felt very wrong.

“Main quest triggered!”

“Objective: Defeat the mutant rat giant and escape the death arena!”

The game voice had barely finished when the giant ratman was already charging at him. Its muscles bulged like hard rock, its physique even more exaggerated than a world-class bodybuilder’s, and it swung a fist down with brutal force.

The mutant rat giant’s attack was simple and savage: it relied on sheer strength to pound its enemy into a meat pancake and then swallow the result whole.

With that monstrous power, Su Cheng certainly wasn’t going to let its little fist pound his chest. That would be a matter of life and death.

“Here it comes!”

Su Cheng’s gaze turned icy. He stamped hard on the ground and slipped past the mutant rat giant’s attack, then drew his blade and struck at its abdomen.

The razor-sharp flash of the blade cut into the rat giant’s muscle-packed belly, opening a ferocious wound. Thick green blood burst from the gash.

Through the wound, one could faintly see intestines and other viscera writhing within.

Su Cheng frowned tightly, apparently surprised that this strike had failed to cut the mutant rat giant cleanly in half.

The heavily wounded rat giant emitted a deep roar like some enormous beast. It turned, raised both fists high over its head, and smashed down like falling boulders.

Boom!

The ground beneath Su Cheng shook violently, throwing him off balance.

In the next instant, a huge claw swept toward him.

The moment that claw descended, the human figure before it blurred and vanished from its original position.

By the time the beast reacted, a cold blade glimmering with spiritual light had already pierced its throat.

Green blood sprayed from the wound, but Su Cheng’s strike did not kill the rat giant. Instead, it only stirred its ferocity.

“And it still isn’t dead?”

Seeing that the rat giant had suffered such grave injuries yet still retained strength to spare, Su Cheng’s eyes showed a flicker of surprise.

The mutant ratmen possessed far more vitality than he had imagined, even more terrifying than zombies. But unlike zombies, these mutant ratmen could feel pain—and were even more vicious because of it.

Fortunately, this mutant rat giant’s attack pattern was simple and brutal. As long as one stayed alert, avoiding its attacks was not difficult.

Su Cheng planted a foot on the rat giant’s body, twisted through the air in a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, and landed lightly ten meters away.

The moment he touched down, Su Cheng drew out his 98K sniper rifle, switched on auto-aim, and fired a shot at its head.

Bang!

The rat giant’s skull was struck by the bullet, bursting in a spray of blood. A large half of its head was smashed apart by Su Cheng’s shot. From the torn cross-section, one could vaguely see gray brain matter seeping from the skull.

And yet, even after such a grievous injury, it still did not die at once.

That kind of tenacious vitality made even Su Cheng feel a chill of fear.

If every mutant ratman possessed such terrifying life force, and if they also had the rats’ monstrous rate of reproduction, then this world would already have been taken over by them long ago.

Su Cheng was about to fire again and finish the mutant ratman off for good when the creature suddenly leapt toward him.

Its massive body crashed down from above, unleashing a terrifying shockwave that swept outward in all directions.

Su Cheng was sent flying several meters. Before he could steady himself, the rat giant had already rushed right up to him, its gaping maw opening wide to swallow him whole.

“Now’s my chance!”

A light flashed in Su Cheng’s eyes. He did not try to dodge; instead, he came forward with his blade raised.

A violent slash!

Just before the rat giant could swallow him, countless shadow-like blade lights instantly hacked its enormous head into a heap of minced flesh.

“You killed the elite rat giant. Reward: 1,000 faction contribution points for the Rat Extermination Squad. Ratman faction hostility increased by 100.”

“Warning: if the player’s hostility with the ratman faction becomes too high, there is a chance that a boss-tier mutant ratman will take notice.”

“Quest updated: Find the underground stronghold of the Rat Extermination Squad!”

Su Cheng curled his lip. He had thought this rat giant was some kind of mini-boss, but it turned out to be nothing more than an elite monster. At best, it was only an appetizer.

As for the game’s warning, Su Cheng did not pay much attention.

From the look of this game mode, this instance was probably the sort built for mindless monster grinding.

In that case, he might as well loosen up and grind to his heart’s content.

With one slash, he cleaved open the lock on the iron cage’s door. Gripping Shadow of the Gale, Su Cheng charged toward the surging tide of ratmen and began to kill.