Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Feng Luo pinpointed the location of the Sniper by identifying the source of the gunshot. However, by the time he looked over to the suspected location, Sha Lang, who had been on the roof of the opposite building, had already left.
He had, after all, used a weapon; it would undoubtedly be troublesome if he was spotted by the guard soldier NPCs. Thus, it would be unwise for him to stick around.
“Huh?”
After seeing neither hide nor hair of Sha Lang, Feng Luo was about to turn away when he caught sight of several people out of the corner of his eye. Standing by the window of a room on the second floor of the building Sha Lang had been on were Young Master Lin and his followers. Their faces took on ghastly expressions as they watched what happened on the street through their window. Although the streetlights were fairly dim, with Feng Luo’s sharp vision, he immediately singled out the binoculars clasped in Lin Aotian’s hands.
Initially, the window was blocked by thick curtains. Thus, the interior of the room could not be seen from the outside. But obviously, due to what was happening in the street, Young Mater Lin and his followers had forgotten all about remaining undercover. Currently, all three of them were standing right next to the window, peering down at the street.
“So that is where they’re staying. But what’s with the binoculars?” Feng Luo murmured, feeling bemused.
Before this, when Lin Aotian and his companions left the hotel, they had not told anyone else where they had gone. Now, it appeared they had not gone far at all, as they had been staying in the opposite building all along. Feng Luo recalled that the building was supposed to be a hotel. It was also suspicious that their room provided a very clear and direct view of Feng Luo’s building.
Seems like there’s some ulterior motive to this.
As Feng Luo was pondering, he tried to refrain from looking directly at them. Instead, he chose to observe them out of the corner of his eye. Nevertheless, it seemed that Young Master Lin and his people still managed to realize that their location had been exposed. The Earth Energy Manipulator glanced in Feng Luo’s direction, then whispered something in Young Master Lin’s ear. After that, they hastily drew the curtains.
“That look in their eyes was definitely panic. Hmm… Something smells fishy!” Feng Luo said aloud as his suspicions grew.
He reached out with his mind. In his room, there was a silver briefcase lying on the desk. A beetle about the size of a fingernail slowly crawled out of it. It then buzzed its transparent wings and flew through the gap between the windows, heading toward where Lin Aotian and his people were located.
Feng Luo decided not to switch his view to the vision of the Scout Beetle yet. He turned his eyes back to the street downstairs, to the young man who was seriously injured and the skinny guard soldier whose leg had been bitten.
Of course, his gaze also fell upon the female NPC teenager who appeared to have died.
The T-virus would not activate immediately after entering the human body. It would depend on how long it took for the immune system of the infected person to become compromised and cause the victim to lose their mind and their natural bodily instincts to go haywire.
Generally, if it was a minor infection through contaminated water or air, even victims with frailer constitutions could survive for at least a day or two, whereas stronger people could actually be completely immune to the virus. However, if the victim was injured, especially in cases of severe injuries, then the time of infection would be reduced to a few dozen minutes. As for people who had already been bitten to death, the onset time would generally be less than a few minutes.
Of course, this information was all based on the data of the T-virus in Feng Luo’s memory. In War, the T-virus was supposed to be a mutated species of another highly evolved virus. He was unsure of the exact effect it had. As a result, up until now, he could not even confirm yet whether this virus was the T-virus. Nevertheless, the possibility of it being the T-virus was extremely high!
In the present moment, everyone could agree that the scene on the street outside was horrifyingly bloody. The fact that there was one dead and one injured was not overwhelmingly scary, but the gruesome thing was how the female NPC had died. Not only were her intestines torn out, but one of her hands and both of her legs had been ripped off completely by the Zombie Dog, with only a mangled right hand still attached to her body.
Moreover, the disaster was not only confined to this street. From all over Roguetown, awful screams, cries for help, and gunshots could be heard. It seemed that this was not the only place where the Zombie Dogs were wreaking havoc.
From the room windows around the hotel, the heads of many tourists and native townspeople could be seen sticking out to investigate the commotion. However, most of them shrank back in fright after seeing the situation downstairs and hearing the sounds of gunshots around them.
Only a few people rushed out of the surrounding shops and the hotel, running onto the street to help the injured young man and the guard soldier. Luckily, at this critical moment, there were still people who were selfless in extending help.
“Brother Feng, this can’t be the thing that you said would happen, can it?”
The sudden words blurted out by Mu Zi made the players—who were initially curious or stunned by the happenings downstairs—regain their bearings. Many of them lifted their heads to look at Feng Luo. They recalled that they had been discussing whether to act at night when that discussion was abruptly cut short by the emergency downstairs.
The ironic thing was, right before this, the Heavy Armor Warrior “100,000 Volts” had just been challenging Feng Luo’s prediction of a mission-related event happening during these three days. As a result, the situation downstairs was like being slapped in the face by the facts.
100,000 Volts looked slightly awkward. He tried to defend himself after seeing a lot of people looking at him. “It’s already past midnight,” he said, “so it’s been more than three days! Moreover, the situation downstairs might not be related to the mission, anyway.”
This time, nobody went along with him, not even the Scout with the ID of “Gunfire,” who was too embarrassed to utter any words of support now. Everyone here was an elite player. Of course, they would understand right away that the emergency downstairs was not entirely a coincidence. It definitely had something to do with the mission.
However, while everyone was paying attention to Feng Luo, Feng Luo, on the other hand, had drifted off again. He had not been listening to what they were talking about whatsoever. It was because, at this time, Feng Luo was connected to his Scout Beetle through the “Mental Link” skill and was eavesdropping on the Earth Energy Manipulator.
“Damn it! Young Master Lin, monsters suddenly appearing out of nowhere in this town and killing off the NPCs?” he exclaimed in a tone of chagrin. “This can’t be related to the mission, right?”
“I’d say it is!” Lin Aotian sounded slightly calmer, but his voice was tinged with annoyance.
“I just did not expect that this Feng Zhi Luoye person would actually be correct in his prediction. Before Gunfire had sent us a message, he was so close to persuading everyone to infiltrate the sanatorium…”
“The situation is unstable now, so it is unlikely that they will risk going there tonight,” said the Heavy Armor Warrior who was with them. “After all, they had disguised themselves as tourists. In such a case, logically, they should be cowering in their rooms, not wandering about the streets.”
“If this is the case,” said Young Master Lin, sounding slightly annoyed, “our earlier plan of using them to draw the attention of Umbrella Corporation and the guard soldiers while we sneak in undetected cannot be carried out anymore. Use the communicator to ask Gunfire about it!”
“Yes!” the Earth Energy Manipulator said and scrambled to comply.
Not one of them was aware that everything said had already been picked up by the beetle that was perching on the window, its body color blending in seamlessly with its surroundings. Not only that, but the information had even reached Feng Luo’s ears, who was on the opposite building dozens of meters away.
Listening up until this point, Feng Luo glanced behind him at the Scout player who was conversing with Brother Ling and the other players about their next move. None of them could have expected that Young Master Lin was not as impulsive or brainless as he appeared to be. In fact, he was deviously tricky and cunning, ready to manipulate and use everyone here to his own benefit.
He had even gone so far as to plant a spy among them.
However, after waiting for more than ten seconds, the communicator of the Scout player named Gunfire did not ring at all.
“Huh? This is weird!” came the confused voice of the Earth Energy Manipulator through the Scout Beetle. “The communicator is disconnected! The communicator failed to connect!”
At that moment, some of the players in the room had also noticed that something was wrong.
“The communication networks are blocked by interference!” said a female Wind Energy Manipulator whose life profession was Chip Expert. She removed her tech glasses and gave them two solid whacks. “There is a strong source of interference in this town!”
Finally, someone voiced what everyone was thinking: “What do we do now?”
They had not even reached a final decision from their previous discussion when this unexpected situation had occurred. Now, everyone was forced to consider the impact of their communicators being out of commission.
However, this did not include Feng Luo. After learning that Young Master Lin and his followers were just bluffing and that they would not go to the sanatorium tonight, Feng Luo turned his attention back to the street below—to the dead female teenager who had been bitten to the point where her internal organs were exposed. It seemed that her face was slowly turning a pale greenish color. Feng Luo couldn’t confirm whether or not it was a hallucination, but he could have sworn that he saw her wide, lifeless eyes move the slightest bit.
It was such an inconspicuous movement that the young man lying on the ground and the guard soldier, both of whom were not far from her dead body, did not notice it.
Feng Luo glanced at the time, noting that about four minutes had passed since the moment she’d been bitten.
It takes around four minutes for the virus to take effect in a dead body?
However, just as he thought the plot of Resident Evil would take place and the dead woman would be resurrected and hug her boyfriend… a siren suddenly wailed, followed by a white medical ambulance rounding the corner of the street, speeding toward them. It pulled up next to the victims. A few men, encased head to toe in protective suits, got down from the vehicle. There was a logo of an umbrella in red and white painted on the ambulance.
“Umbrella Corporation?”
Feng Luo was stunned. He wondered why the people from Umbrella Corporation would be here.
The men picked up the female teenager’s “corpse” and sealed her in a huge black sack.
At the same time, one of them discreetly injected something into her body. After that, her eyes, which had been starting to move, went back to being blank and rigid within seconds. The action was so subtle that no one had noticed it. But Feng Luo, who had been staring at them with razor-sharp focus, had caught it.
Other than the men in the protective suits, there was also a middle-aged man in a white lab coat who was in the passenger seat of the ambulance. He seemed to be a researcher, and he was trying to explain something to the guard soldiers who were trying to stop them.
By reading his lips, Feng Luo got the gist of it. Due to many places in the town being attacked, the local hospital was struggling with a lack of emergency response personnel, so, as a part of the community, the Umbrella Corporation had generously dispatched their own medical team from the sanatorium to help treat the victims.
Finally, two injured victims, plus one deceased, were all hoisted into the ambulance. The men employed by the Umbrella Corporation returned to the vehicle and drove away.
However, no one noticed that a translucent beetle had snuck into the ambulance.
