Gamers Are Fierce-Chapter 698 - 696: Mishap

"At this time, she should also be making calls to each room on the eleventh floor in turn. She's about to reach the room you're in."

"We can't let her discover the line is busy, or it will reveal your location."

On the other end of the phone, the being claiming to be Kafei spoke extremely fast. "I am now a Spiritual Body without a physical form, permanently captured by the hotel. So, although I cannot leave the tenth floor, I can still know some of the hotel's hidden rules. These rules can help players survive the designated time."

"What you need to do now is put on your Cat Ear headphones, listen for the ringing of phones in other rooms, then immediately go to the room where the ringing is, unplug the phone there, and throw it into the elevator shaft...."

"Kafei."

Danfei spoke for the first time, his voice hoarse and low, not like his own. "The room next door just had a phone call. It's ended now."

On the other end of the phone, there was a brief silence.

"FUCK!"

Kafei's voice exploded with an expletive. "Bad news! She must have found out you're in Room 1172 on the eleventh floor because the line was busy. Even if you hide in the elevator shaft now, it'll be over for you!"

"The safety time in the elevator shaft only lasts until 06:07. After that, the elevator shaft will no longer be safe. Regardless of whether you press up or down in there, she can break into the elevator and devour you."

"The other players won't help you; they can barely protect themselves. Besides, helping you means they have to open their room doors. No one is that selfless."

"The only way right now..."

On the other end of the phone, the being claiming to be Kafei gritted his teeth. "...is to hide on the tenth floor and use the hotel's rules to constrain her. But doing so would lead to terrible consequences..."

"It's no good! She's coming up! I can hear her footsteps in the stairwell! Dammit, she's seen me! She saw me at the end of the corridor and smiled at me! She knows you're on the eleventh floor! Quick! Quick! Danfei, get out of there fast! Take the elevator to the tenth floor!!"

On the other end of the phone, Kafei's voice was frantically urging, screaming himself hoarse. Inside Room 1172, Danfei, holding the phone and clutching a pen, held his breath.

Whom should he believe?

TAP, TAP, TAP.

In the stairwell of the eleventh floor's left corridor, the crisp and pleasant sound of footsteps arose, getting closer.

「It's over.」

The room's clock pointed to 07:07, and faint morning light shone through the living room window.

Li Ang slowly exhaled a breath of stale air and laid the motionless oil painting on the floor. The green vines that had been dancing nonstop around his body also calmed, retracting into his white lab coat.

The room was still a mess. Tables, chairs, benches, and all sorts of miscellaneous items were scattered on the ground. A white towel from the washroom lay damply on the floor, like a fish out of water.

The seawater in the room had already been drained, leaving only a large amount of white salt crystals on the carpet—traces left after the seawater was extracted.

As for the room's original four paintings...

At 07:07, the old woman in black clothes and the demon child disappeared from the room, reappearing in the paintings. Their poses had changed; they lay scattered across the canvas's floor, each one pallid and motionless. Their bellies were swollen, raised high about a meter, exuding an indescribably eerie and horrifying feel.

The nobleman hunting in the woods... well, there was no longer a nobleman, nor a forest, only a lake with broken trees floating on its surface.

In the painting of the ship in the storm, most of the vessel had sunk into the sea. Only a few crew members remained, standing on the bow—the part of the ship still above water—struggling desperately.

In the last painting, the girl covering her face with a fan sat in a chair, her head hanging low, her status—alive or dead—unknown.

All four paintings were static. It seemed the end of the curfew had also stripped away, or rather, sealed, their anomalous properties.

Can't kill them, can't destroy them. What a nuisance...

Li Ang complained internally, stacking the four paintings together and leaning them against the edge of the fireplace instead of rehanging them on the wall.

After a night of prolonged combat, even I feel somewhat weary and exhausted. Normally, fatigue of this level could easily be healed and recovered with Divine Power. However, this scripted task only mentioned the inability to use any summons; it didn't say that all contact between players and summons would be forcibly severed. So, the swarm of insects living in the Breeding Box can still provide me with a faint Power of Faith. But the recovery speed of Divine Power is still too slow for the nightly onslaught of anomalies. It's best to save it and be as frugal as possible.

Li Ang stretched. He didn't immediately clean up the ghastly room. Instead, he approached the security door and peered through the peephole, continuing to wait inside for a few more minutes.

All night, he had been mentally calculating the time to prevent the anomalies from tampering with the clocks. The clocks showed it was 07:07, but it might not actually be that time yet.

For safety's sake, even after mentally calculating that it had reached 07:07, he waited an extra ten minutes or so to avoid any miscalculation and violating the curfew.

Just as Li Ang was peering out through the peephole, the fifth-floor stairwell door opened. Bai Haozheng emerged, followed by Black Holy Son, Ghost of Hidden Eye, Bob, 13MARK, Yuyi Xinzhong, Plague Doctor, and others.

After yesterday's incident with Kafei, the players had decided not to meet in the lobby every morning. Instead, the player living on the highest floor, Bai Haozheng, would start from the fourteenth floor and proactively seek out the players on the floors below, allowing them to gather directly on their respective floors.

This way, they could prevent a player from being attacked by an anomaly, seriously injured, and unable to report to the first-floor lobby, all while the others remained completely unaware.

Bai Haozheng and the six others arrived at the door of Room 0508 and knocked. Although the room was soundproof, any player still alive inside should have been peeking out through their peephole by then and would be able to see them.

The seven of them, each with their player nickname floating above their heads, looked somber. Bob's face was particularly tense, fraught with deep sorrow and anger. His hands were clenched into fists as if he were forcibly suppressing his emotions.

These seven were residents from floors fourteen down to six. The only one missing should be...

Danfei?

Li Ang raised an eyebrow, opened the door, and greeted Bai Haozheng, "Good morning."

His own player nickname floated above his head, verifying his identity to the others.

"Morning," Bai Haozheng nodded. He casually glanced through the door gap at the grim scene inside Room 0508. "Did you encounter an anomaly last night?"

"Yeah," Li Ang waved it off, indicating it was nothing to worry about. "Where's Danfei?"

"Gone." Bai Haozheng pushed up his glasses and sighed. "When we got to Room 1172, there were traces of a fight. We found Danfei's hand and a foot..."

He glanced at the Plague Doctor, who silently pulled out a clothed, dark left arm and a right leg from behind him. The severed surfaces were very rough, as if gnawed off by a wild animal, and dripped with blood.

"We also found a note Danfei left in the room and a record of what he wrote on paper before he was attacked. He has met with misfortune."

Bai Haozheng took a bloodstained note, sheets of paper, and a pen from his pocket. He sighed and said in a low tone, "For now, let's go find the others."

"Room 1172 has already been sealed off. We've taken pictures of the scene and collected evidence."

"Once everyone is together, we'll head back to the eleventh floor

"to see what exactly happened to Danfei last night."

"Mhm." Li Ang was indifferent to Danfei's death. He simply nodded in agreement, stepped out of the room, and glanced at the clock at the end of the corridor with the corner of his eye. It was consistent with the time in his room.

No mistake.

Li Ang followed behind Bai Haozheng and the others. He didn't rush into the stairwell but squatted down first to meticulously examine the carpet in front of the door of Room 0508.

Some seawater had seeped out through the gap under the door in the early hours of the morning, but now the carpet by the door wasn't damp at all and had no salt residue.

So the corridor and the rooms are indeed relatively isolated... Residues in the corridor disappear quickly, while those in the rooms remain.

He pondered for a moment, then stood up, casually closed the door behind him, and continued downstairs with the rest of the group.