Chapter 090: Spare My Life, Hero!

In the dim, damp underground passage, endless darkness seeped and spread.

The air reeked of something like expired rotten eggs mixed with spoiled durian.

Drip. Drip.

Water falling from overhead splashed onto a pool of congealed blood, washing away the metallic stench on the floor.

Beside that pool of dried blood lay a heavily decayed corpse. The protective suit on the body had long since been torn to rags, and the flesh exposed to the air had been gnawed away by the rats in the tunnel until only fragments remained.

A head had rolled off to one side, and on its shattered face there still lingered an expression of terror and despair. On closer inspection, it seemed to have belonged to a woman.

The tunnel leading to the underground rat-people kingdom had long since been sealed off by the government, so ordinary people would never appear here. Given the protective suit on the corpse, it was not hard to infer that she had been a member of the Rat Extermination Squad.

No one knew why she had died here, or how even her body had become food for these mutant rat-people.

Squeak.

A rat-people creature, about half a meter long, cautiously approached the mangled corpse. After confirming that nothing was moving nearby, it picked up the head, bared its white teeth, and started chewing.

The ghastly sound of gnawing echoed through the dark passage.

Just as the rat-people was happily devouring the head, it failed to notice two figures creeping up behind it.

The two men behind it were also wearing Rat Extermination Squad protective suits, but the weapons in their hands were a little odd.

The burly, flat-headed one in front held up a round shield that looked remarkably like Captain America’s, while the handsome, slightly effeminate pale-faced man behind him was carrying a pink magical-girl staff.

From their weapons alone, it was obvious they were players of a horror game.

At that moment, the rat-people chewing on the head seemed to catch the scent of living humans. A bloodthirsty gleam flashed in its eyes as it suddenly turned and saw the two players sneaking up behind it.

“We’ve been spotted. Smash it!”

The flat-headed man roared with great force, startling the pale-faced man so badly that he nearly dropped his staff.

Notably, the flat-headed man spoke fluent Mandarin, and if one listened closely, there was even a faint northeastern accent in his voice.

If these had been ordinary rats, they would have fled at the approach of humans. But these mutant rat-people that lived in the underground world were savage by nature and fed on human flesh; the moment they saw a human, they would pounce.

In the next instant, the rat-people blurred and lunged straight at the flat-headed man.

In the blink of an eye, the man shouted, “Shield bash!”

With a furious roar, he slammed the round shield in his hands into the rat-people with tremendous force, sending it flying. It crashed against the wall with a wet smack.

“Now, Long! Your turn!”

Xu Xiaolong shouted to himself for courage, imitating the flat-headed man, though his voice sounded more like the shriek of a girl being molested.

Then Xu Xiaolong rushed up to the mutant rat-people, raised the pink magical staff, and brought it crashing down on the creature’s head.

Blood sprayed everywhere. By the time Xu Xiaolong calmed down, the rat-people’s skull had already been smashed into pulp.

“D-did it die?”

Seeing that the rat-people was thoroughly dead, Xu Xiaolong finally let out a breath and wiped the blood from the staff.

These two players did not look especially strong, but they were more than enough to deal with ordinary rat-people. However, with their current strength, clearing this high-risk dungeon without a scratch would probably not be so easy.

“You like the forest-girl style, and I got an extra chicken, like LOVE with half of it taken away, turning into a loli...”

At that moment, a lively tune drifted down the passage behind them. Xu Xiaolong’s expression changed.

“That’s the phone bomb I set over there just now. Something triggered it!”

As soon as the words left his mouth, an explosion rang out.

“Probably the rat-people tripped it. Let’s go take a look.”

The flat-headed man switched on a flashlight and led Xu Xiaolong toward the blast site.

When they arrived, they found an unfamiliar man lying on the ground, with the shattered remains of a phone bomb scattered beside him.

“Not a rat-people?” Xu Xiaolong looked surprised.

“Looks like this guy might also be a member of the Rat Extermination Squad. Could be an NPC. You don’t think he got blown to death, do you?”

Xu Xiaolong shook his head. The blast from a phone bomb was not that powerful, and the man was still wearing a protective suit, so he should not have been killed so easily.

“There aren’t any wounds on him. He probably just got knocked unconscious.”

“What do we do now? We can’t just leave him here.” The flat-headed man scratched his head. The underground world was full of man-eating mutant rat monsters. If they left this man here, he would surely be devoured until nothing remained, not even bone fragments.

Xu Xiaolong hesitated for a moment, as though he had made some terrible resolve. His face took on the look of someone who had decided to throw caution to the winds.

“You take off the mask over his face. I’ll give him mouth-to-mouth.”

The flat-headed man shivered. “You’re sure this NPC won’t kill us when he wakes up?”

“Stop dawdling and hurry up. We’re both men; what’s there to be afraid of?”

Just as Xu Xiaolong took a deep breath and prepared to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the man lying on the ground suddenly opened his eyes. A tangible killing intent crashed over them.

Then a pitch-black longsword, glinting with a cold sheen, was placed against Xu Xiaolong’s throat.

Sensing the murderous aura coming off the man, the two players nearly pissed themselves.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Murderous intent churned in Su Cheng’s eyes.

A few minutes earlier, while searching this underground passage, he had accidentally discovered a four-star phone. He had never expected that the moment he picked it up, it would suddenly explode.

An explosion of that level naturally could not harm him, but after the blast, he sensed people nearby. So he had feigned unconsciousness to test what these two were.

Clearly, the flat-headed man and the effeminate one were both players, and they were from the same country as him.

If not for the fact that they were fellow countrymen, the moment the effeminate one tried to give Su Cheng mouth-to-mouth, he would already be a corpse.

“Mercy, hero!”

Xu Xiaolong was drenched in cold sweat and dropped to his knees on the spot.

From the murderous aura blazing off this man, it was obvious he was a ruthless character. In other words, there had been no way he had failed to hear their conversation just now.

“Hero, it was all a misunderstanding. Um... you’re also a player in this game, right?” Seeing Su Cheng’s weapon, the flat-headed man guessed immediately that the man was no NPC, but another player like them—and terrifyingly strong at that.

Su Cheng nodded and gave his name.

“My name is Zhang Wei. This is my partner, Xu Xiaolong.”

Zhang Wei was an extremely common name; most people knew at least one classmate or friend called Zhang Wei.

“Um... could the hero move the blade a little farther from my neck?” Xu Xiaolong forced out an ugly smile. If Su Cheng’s hand slipped even slightly, his head would be on the floor.

Su Cheng sheathed his blade and studied the two of them carefully.

The flat-headed Zhang Wei, based on his weapon, seemed to be a tank-type warrior focused on defense. As for Xu Xiaolong... Su Cheng glanced at the magical staff in his hand.

Could this guy’s profession be magical girl?

That aesthetic was a little hard on the eyes.

“What stage are your main quests at?” Su Cheng asked after some thought. His current objective was to find the Rat Extermination Squad’s stronghold, but with no clues at all, trying to locate a base in a vast underground world was like looking for a needle in the ocean.

Zhang Wei opened the game interface and checked the quest log. Their mission was the same as Su Cheng’s: find the stronghold. But the two of them had no idea where to begin either.

“Just now, I found a map on that corpse,” Xu Xiaolong said, taking out a crumpled map stained with blood.

The map had been torn and was incomplete, and it took Su Cheng quite some time to determine their current location and the direction of the nearest stronghold.

“According to the map, the underground world where the rat-people live is divided into twenty-three regions. We’re in outer zone eighteen. There are six players in this game in total, and the other three may be in different regions.”

The dungeon’s plot was still unclear, and Su Cheng still knew nothing about the rat-people world. For the moment, he could only follow the main quest hints.

On the way to the Rat Extermination Squad’s stronghold, Su Cheng asked Zhang Wei and Xu Xiaolong about what they had experienced in the dungeon.

Unlike him, neither of them had triggered the quest to escape the cage, nor had they been hunted by the rat giant troll. They had encountered quite a few battles along the way, but each had ended without serious danger; they had only lost some health.

After getting to know them better, Su Cheng learned that Zhang Wei and Xu Xiaolong were players in a Chinese guild. They simply had bad luck and had never managed to trigger their class quests, so they were only low-level members in the guild.

“A Chinese guild?”

Su Cheng had heard the names of a few famous Chinese guilds before, but since he had no intention of joining one, he had never looked into them.

“Our guild is called the World Society. Hero, are you interested in joining?”

“Is your guild leader called Xiongba?” Su Cheng could not help but snort at the name.

Zhang Wei nodded solemnly. “Our guild also has three hall masters: Qin Shuang, Bu Jingyun, and Nie Feng. They’re all powerful professional players.”

But they were only ordinary players of the World Society and had never actually seen the three hall masters in person. They only knew that all three had reached Bronze Tier One long ago, and once they cleared the promotion dungeon, they would advance to Silver rank.

As for the guild master of the World Society, he was an old-guard Silver-rank veteran professional.

Following the map’s directions for a little over an hour, the three of them arrived before a locked iron gate.

“Behind this gate is the Rat Extermination Squad’s stronghold, right?”

Just as Su Cheng was about to force the lock open, a spine-chilling scream came from the other side of the iron door.