Chapter 319 Monster Hospital (XVIII)
The fifteen players in Area C who have become patients are still diligently acting as deliverymen, delivering the same dinner to different patients, and receiving good reviews from the patients. At the same time, they are alert to dangers that are hidden somewhere.
But no one noticed that Ward C at this time had been split into two distinct areas at some point. The ward where the players were still enthusiastically delivering supplies was filled with a lively atmosphere, while those wards that the players had already entered, for some reason, revealed a dead silence, as if the brief noisy atmosphere just now was an illusion.
The longer the time went, the more Twelve felt something was wrong. In the blink of an eye, they had already sent all the patients to wards starting with 8. There were one hundred patients in fifty wards, and they had sent them all, and there was not a single problem. She, President Barbie, and Nineteen started patrolling from the middle wards, and did not find anything strange.
"Is this wrong?"
After coming out of another ward and confirming that the two patients were sleeping normally and did not notice any problems, Twelve stopped and mentioned this issue for the second time.
President Barbie and Nineteen both looked unhappy. In such an ultimate copy, the mission was carried out so smoothly, which was obviously not right.
"According to the current progress, we will be able to deliver all the lunch boxes in another hour, and the mission will be completed before midnight. However, the time given by the system is until tomorrow morning. This doesn't make sense at all."
Nineteen stood in the middle of the corridor, looking at the identical wards from front to back. There was no difference in the white walls. They seemed to be standing on a road with no origin and no destination. No matter whether they looked back or went forward, there would never be an end. Just like the feeling of this mission, they had been in a fog with no way forward. If they could not solve the true core of the mission, they would be trapped here forever.
"We have seen nearly one-third of the patients," President Barbie pondered for a while before speaking. "Based on this ratio, something should be triggered, but now there is nothing, which is not normal. I am more inclined to believe that something has been triggered, but we haven't found it..."
"Why don't we go back and look at the wards we've already visited to see if we can find any clues?"
Twelve's intuition was not good either. She always felt that the wards she had visited were a little too quiet. Could it be that the patients received their lunch boxes, ate, and then fell asleep again? Were they that sleepy?
President Barbie was about to respond and decided to check the rooms where lunch boxes had been distributed. When she turned around to ask Nineteen's opinion, she saw that she had discovered something and suddenly turned around and looked behind her. If you ignore her pale face, her behavior is actually absurd and funny, just like a puppy chasing its tail. But Nineteen just turned around and found the truth she wanted.
"We have no shadows here..."
She finally realized where the strange feeling she had always felt while standing in the corridor came from. Everything around her was white, and under the light of the incandescent lamps, it gave her a dizzy feeling.
But this feeling has been there since they entered Ward C. If people are in this state for a long time, their eyes will easily get tired, so they will habitually focus their attention on other players, using the few colors on the patient's clothes and the faces of their companions to relieve this fatigue, so that they can easily ignore some phenomena that are very easy to detect under normal circumstances, such as human shadows.
As soon as Nineteen finished speaking, Twelve and President Barbie stood beside her, one in front and one behind. The former picked up the whip, and the latter transformed his right hand into an iron wall. Nineteen's personal skills were related to the use of poison, and were more suitable for fighting in secret or standing far away, so when the two of them realized something was wrong, their first reaction was to protect her.
But unexpectedly, there was no approaching danger, nor was anything triggered because Nineteen discovered the secret. The entire corridor was still as quiet as usual.
Twelve didn't dare to let down his guard. He just lowered his head to look at the ground and said, "There really is no shadow. Has it always been there? Or did it suddenly disappear?"
She was not as careful as Nineteen. Although her sixth sense from being in combat for a long time made her feel that something was wrong, she could not study her previous actions like a sophisticated instrument like her own president and Nineteen, and find out when the strange situation occurred.
"It should have been from the beginning," Nineteen was very calm at this time. He even had time to observe the incandescent lamp on the ceiling. "It should be because of the light. It is more powerful than the shadowless lamp in the general operating room. There is not a single shadow in the whole corridor."
Twelve and President Barbie both understood the subtext of her words, which was that the absence of the shadow was due to the lighting, and not something caused by the system. If the shadow ran away, it would be very likely that there would be two identical versions of themselves. They both breathed a sigh of relief at the same time, and were about to do so when they heard screams coming from the ward in front of them.
"ah--"
Then, a ward about five meters away from them had a big hole in the door and wall. Then, Mocha Meng summoned a robot at some point. Maybe she didn't want to hide anyone, so the robot summoned this time was only the size of a person. She was holding a person in her arms, looking very panicked, as if she was trying to avoid something.
Twelve immediately saw the neutral player named Xiaodao who was held in her arms. There seemed to be something black on his feet that he couldn't get rid of. In less than a second, she swung her whip over.
At the same time, Mocha Meng's urgent voice said, "Don't get on that thing, you'll be sucked in..."
But unfortunately, Twelve's movements were very quick. The moment Mocha Meng finished speaking, Twelve's whip had already accurately hit the shadow, and one end of the whip was instantly eaten up. Twelve decisively let go and watched the long whip he had carefully crafted. In less than two seconds, it was absorbed by the shadow.
But the shadow on the other side did not let go of Xiaodao's feet, but instead had a tendency to drag her further inside. Twelve then saw clearly that the reason why Mocha Meng summoned the robot was to snatch people from the other party, but now it seemed that Xiaodao had been dragged inside a little bit more.
She made a prompt decision and took out a dagger from the control panel, "I'm sorry, please bear with it..."
Xiaodao was in so much pain that he couldn't speak. After he realized what she wanted to do, before he could nod, he felt a dull pain on his leg as if it was cut by a sharp blade. Then he was dragged back several meters by a powerful arm.
At the moment when President Barbie was about to use the knife, she pulled Xiaodao and Mocha Meng one by one and dragged them away from the location of the shadow. With such a loud noise, the players in other wards of course also heard the noise, as well as President Barbie's order to them not to act rashly.
The shadow was no longer as big as a cantaloupe, but the size of a whole watermelon. It had no specific shape, and its body changed shape as arbitrarily as a shadow. It was very obvious under the incandescent light of the corridor.
Nineteen finally understood why the incandescent lights in the corridor could not illuminate their shadows but could illuminate the appearance of shadows. This was a reminder from the system to them, so that they could discover the abnormality earlier, but it was obvious that their discovery was a little late.
Nineteen was shocked when she found that in the wards that they had not had time to go back to check, shadows were constantly pouring out from the cracks in the doors. There were two in each ward. They seemed to have heard some kind of call and rushed one after another into the watermelon-sized shadow. The area of the shadow was gradually increasing. Even in the wards where they had not delivered lunch boxes, shadows were constantly invading.
"This thing is constantly expanding. When it can swallow us whole, even if we add a few more legs, it will be useless," Xiaodao kept breathing in. The wound was too serious. Even though Mocha Meng had given her medicine, the wound could not be healed in a short time. Although her face was pale, she still wanted to provide more information for everyone. "When my foot was swallowed, I felt corroded. This feeling is not good, as if I was being digested. This change is irreversible. It's best not to let this thing touch you..."
"Don't talk anymore, Mocha Meng, take good care of her." President Barbie quickly responded, "Everyone else, pay attention, try to use long-range weapons, don't use these things at close range, twelve, nineteen..."
She called out the names of Twelve and Nineteen at the end, but didn't say anything. However, except for those neutral players, the rest of the players had already gone through several copies of the game and naturally had a tacit understanding with each other. Without waiting for President Barbie to give further instructions, the two of them had already started fighting.
Twelve did not take out her whip again. After all, one had been swallowed just now, and she was reluctant to throw it away again. Without waiting for President Barbie's instructions, she took out a few small iron beads from the control panel and threw them at the largest shadow.
When the explosion sounded, the watermelon-sized shadow was instantly blown into different small shadows, which scattered in all directions but did not disappear.
"It seems that these things cannot be killed, so they can only be dispersed. Judging from the way they want to gather together, the bigger they are, the more harm they can do to people. If they cannot be killed, they can only be dispersed first."
Nineteen took out his own poison and threw it into the shadow, but it seemed to have little killing power on the shadow, because all the players watched as the shadow seemed unable to digest the poison gas and vomited all the poison gas out like indigestion. Nineteen waved his sleeves, and the poison gas was all taken back without hurting anyone.
"Poison has no effect on it. Any weapon with a surface can be swallowed directly. Gunpowder and bombs are the best..."
It took the two of them no effort to find out the weakness of the shadow in a few seconds. The players who seemed to be at a disadvantage seemed to have the upper hand again. All the players touched the small attack-shaped iron beads from the control panel and threw them to the opposite side like shooting a basketball. Those shadows that had not yet had time to gather together felt the threat and no longer moved closer to the larger shadows. Instead, they scattered and hid in the wards, not wanting to be affected.
Soon under the attack of the players, the shadows on the ground became the size of a fingernail, densely packed like spiders, giving a terrifying and weird feeling. They quickly retreated to a far distance, and many of them climbed up the white wall in panic.
Maybe because they were constantly being attacked and at a disadvantage, those shadows made strange gurgling noises, as if they were communicating something with each other. The shadows were getting smaller and smaller, and it became more difficult to attack them with the small iron beads. In many cases, the moment the small iron beads fell to the ground, those small black shadows had already escaped and disappeared.
The gurgling sound suddenly stopped at a certain moment, and then the scattered shadows began to stretch their bodies infinitely, turning themselves into a thin layer, stretched to the size of a palm, and suspended in the air. They were very fast, and in the constant air raid, they soon pulled up a black screen in the air, blocking the players' view in advance.
This was a good thing for the players' attacks, but Nineteen noticed something wrong. The smaller they became, the harder it was for the players to attack them, but now they were standing up so high-profile, as if they were eager for the players to attack them.
The moment an idea came to her mind, she felt that the color of the light above her head seemed to be a little weaker. The moment she looked up, she shouted, "Don't worry about the barrier. Pay attention to the lights above. Don't let them turn off the lights. Leave a few more people to light the lights. Quickly..."
The attack of the small iron beads was the most effective, but the incandescent lamp at the top of the corridor was very fragile. On the one hand, they had to attack the shadows that had run to the top of their heads at some point, and on the other hand, they had to take care not to break the incandescent lamps. They were inevitably restricted in their efforts. After a long time, few attacks were effective. Instead, the lamps above their heads were quickly covered by shadows. At the same time, several explosions sounded at the same time, and in an instant, the entire corridor of the ward suddenly fell into complete darkness from being bright.
Fortunately, Nineteen had just reminded them that almost at the moment when all the incandescent lamps were turned off, several other players had already raised high-power electric lamps in their hands. However, the electric lamps were props in the control panel after all. Although the power was already top-notch among the props, it was still incomparable to the incandescent lamps. Moreover, Twelve discovered almost immediately that the electric lamps could cast their shadows.
"Quick, adjust the formation. The ones with the electric lights should stand at the four corners, leave two in the middle, and then set up another circle at two-meter intervals on the outside."
Nineteen quickly adjusted the position of the light according to their location. Although shadows were still unavoidable, she still left a safe zone outside the circle where everyone was gathered, temporarily ensuring that those shadows would not take advantage of their shadows to get close to them.
The two sides without any lights were completely silent. Although there was no sound at all, everyone was on high alert. After all, they all knew that in the invisible places, there were countless dark shadows trying to drag them into the shadows.
"But I still think something is wrong?" Twelve spoke in silence. She did not forget the key point of the entire mission. "I just took the opportunity to take a look. Whether it was the room where we had delivered the lunch box or the room where the patient was sleeping, they were all empty. I even saw that the black shadow was the patient. In this case, how can we complete our mission? How can we get good reviews if there is no one? What does this shadow have to do with our mission?"
It's like their task is to cook, but the system doesn't provide the ingredients. Even a good cook can't cook without rice. The system asks them to deliver food, but the patient is gone. Who can they deliver it to? How can they complete the task?
"I can't tell for now," Nineteen is considered the think tank here, and the one with the clearest mind right now, "but do you think those shadows really look like the patients here? Although before we came in, we also had speculations that the patients locked up in the Monster Hospital might all have special abilities, but now it feels to me that this doesn't seem like all the patients, but rather like the special abilities of a certain patient. In addition, we haven't seen a single staff member since we came in, which is not normal."
President Barbie had been observing near the lights at the first safety distance set by Nineteen. She did not raise her eyes when she heard the words. "I can't see how the shadow is related to our mission, and there is still no system prompt sound. If the shadow is counted as the first event to be triggered, there may be a second one, which is about the mission itself. We haven't triggered it yet. After all, those shadows are immortal. When we run out of ammunition and food, they will have the opportunity to merge again. We can't stop it, and it will swallow all of us one by one. So now it seems that this event is to create a sense of oppression and life threat to us. In other words, the second triggering event should still be in the ward. We have to look for it room by room..."
Just when they were about to take a look at the room they had entered, those shadows suddenly attacked. From the system's point of view, the shadows didn't want us to find out, and they felt that they had accumulated to a certain level, so they acted rashly. Now they turned off the lights in the entire ward. It was obvious that they were doing this to create convenience for themselves and trouble for the players. President Barbie quickly understood this.
"I agree," Nineteen also had the same idea, "but if we act together, our target will be too big. The ward is narrow, and the shadows will only be bigger under the electric light. Maybe the shadows will have a chance to take advantage of us. In addition, we still have wounded. I suggest that the majority of the troops stay here. As long as we keep watch over the lights, the shadows will not act rashly."
Twelve understood what he heard. After checking his equipment, he stood up and said, "You stay here. I will go with President Barbie. The two of us are enough. We can handle any danger ourselves. You stay here with the main force and pay attention to their safety. Monitor those shadows instantly and keep in touch through the communication channel at all times."
In fact, Nineteen was not satisfied with this arrangement, but since her skills were of no use here, she could only reluctantly accept this plan. In the end, she still gave the other party several instructions before she handed the light to the other party and sent the person away.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
