NOVPUBChapter 180: Chapter 179 Twisted Reality
Chapter 180 -179 Twisted Reality
In the cold moonlight, the damp deck reflected a dim silver sheen. The sound of the ocean’s waves was not loud, rather it seemed to come from a distant place. The hubbub of people, their panic-stricken shouts, all faded away, leaving a silence here like that of a battlefield.
Or rather, this place was indeed about to become a battlefield.
At the end of the stern deck, which was roughly twenty meters long, stood a figure who claimed to be the “Divine Envoy” of the Order of Causality. Behind him was an iron chain railing, and beyond that, the profound sea—it appeared he had no way to escape.
Zhang Zhiyuan and the others were standing at the exit of the bridge, spreading out in a line, facing him directly. Their weapons were already targeting all of the enemy’s vital points.
“Fire the flare,” said Zhang Zhiyuan in a deep voice.
Only then did Zhou Zhi remember what he had to do. He quickly took the signal gun out of his backpack and pressed the trigger twice in succession. A red and a green flare shot up one after the other, conspicuously vivid against the pitch-black sky.
With the flare as a guide, the city guard’s armed speedboats would be able to locate the position of the Goddess of Joy in the night.
“You still have time to surrender now,” Zhang Zhiyuan yelled to the Divine Envoy. “Jumping into the sea at night, even an Evil God couldn’t save you, right?”
“Qianyuan Mingzi, keep an eye on the rear, the other Aibuvich is gone,” he whispered, turning his head to the side.
“I got it,” she nodded and cautiously moved towards the edge of the deck.
The Divine Envoy turned around, his gaze slowly sweeping across them all, seeming to size up this group of pursuers who had suddenly sprung up. “You’re not city guards, nor Orthodox Deity Believers, who are you exactly?”
“It doesn’t matter who we are, what matters is that your plan has been exposed, and you’re finished!” Zhang Zhiyuan shouted. “Everyone on this ship who’s associated with you won’t escape. The network you carefully built up, the team you painstakingly drew together, all of it will cease to exist after tonight!”
This was a tactic to be used before capturing someone alive, by demeaning and striking at their ambitions to weaken their will to resist. But his own certainty wavered; who knew if the real leader of the Heretical Cult even had the concept of surrender in his mind.
“You mean those weak-willed, profit and pleasure-filled nobles?” The Divine Envoy’s indifferent tone was devoid of warmth. “Such imbeciles are not worthy of associating with me. It’s rather people like you… Knowing full well that cultists have gathered in large numbers on the ship, you still dared to sneak on board and bare your fangs at me. Your courage and methods are indeed admirable. Are you secretly hired by Shandela Allen? If so, how about considering serving my Lord?”
No… this reaction was wrong.
A strong sense of unease welled up inside Zhang Zhiyuan’s heart.
Why was the enemy so composed? Shouldn’t he be panicking and surprised! Such a reaction was as if he had anticipated someone coming after him, and the entire banquet was just a trap set in advance.
Did he already know about Paradise?
But if it was really to deal with Paradise, he could have acted in the hall instead of fleeing all the way here, still bothering to say these enticing words?
“You’re about to be completely uprooted, and you still have the mind to recruit people? Save it! Surrender and confess everything, and you might have a hope of living.”
“If you have observed the entire event, then you must have heard what I said. If not, I can say it again—” The man smiled. “The war has begun.”
“… What?”
“The city guard has mobilized most of its forces to the Inner City District, leaving their own garrison and the lord’s mansion relatively empty, right? Now that the police stations in the districts are also shut down, I suppose if fiends appear in the civilian district, there won’t be many altruists willing to save the screaming residents.”
This news made Zhang Zhiyuan’s eyes widen. Could it be that this man wanted to stir up a terror attack across the entire city, unconcerned even if he himself were used as bait?
Suddenly, three red flares exploded in the distance, then slowly drifted down, like ominous stars.
Looking at the direction of the flares, they seemed to come from the northwest, the city guard’s garrison, with three reds signifying an extremely urgent situation that required any city guards who saw it to immediately return to their garrison to assemble.
The Divine Envoy was not joking!
By this point, Zhang Zhiyuan had realized that capturing him alive to obtain intelligence was hardly practical; his mission was to initiate a Heretical Cult war against Magnificent Castle.
“Open fire, kill him!”
However, there was no response from his companions.
He turned his head and saw that Anthony, Cui Zhen’en, Zhou Zhi, and Qianyuan Mingzi were still standing in their original places, maintaining their gun-holding positions, but their brains had run out.
Yes, their brains had run out like many-legged worms. Some lay on their shoulders, some squatted on their heads, and some even crawled down to the ground. These brains moved quickly, at least faster than centipedes and scorpions. They looked around curiously, as if they found this world extraordinarily novel.
Was this a dream or a hallucination?
Zhang Zhiyuan was astonished.
If everything he saw was real, then why hadn’t he changed?
And… where was Miss Fiend? Why had she disappeared again?
“Leave…”
“Leave… that place…”
“Don’t stay on deck… the consumption is too great…”
At that moment, the host’s voice came through intermittently, like some kind of warning, but the tone was unusually drawn out.
Then Zhang Zhiyuan felt an itch at the back of his head.
It was as if something was shedding its shell.
Apparently, the host’s warning was too late. He picked up the rifle with the grenade hung on it and fired the grenade at the Divine Envoy—
The grenade went off with a bang right under the target’s feet but did not detonate smoothly. Instead, it pinged off, flying into the sea.
A dud?
He didn’t have time to complain and quickly reached into his waist pack, intending to pull out a new one to load.
However, the grenade he touched was covered in an oily sheen.
At that moment, a brain, unbeknownst to him, had crawled in front of him and suddenly jumped at him, opening a saw-toothed mouth beneath the brainstem.
What the hell, a brain could grow a mouth?
Before he could react, the mouth bit through his neck, and blood from his arteries sprayed out like a fountain, his vision darkened quickly, and then the connection to his consciousness was forcibly severed.
Chaoyang frowned deeply—he had not only witnessed all of this but had also sensed something was wrong the moment they stepped onto the deck: The consumption rate of wishing power in Zhang Zhiyuan’s body had suddenly increased significantly. While it used to be around five points per hour, it was now nearly five points per second. This rate of consumption meant that the body had to operate at an extremely high efficiency to maintain stability.
He could not afford the host’s composure and immediately issued a warning to everyone.
However, except for Ailuodi, who reacted, the others were almost as if deaf, still taking up their surrounding positions according to Zhang Zhiyuan’s instructions.
In less than thirty seconds, he watched, with his own eyes, one player after another disconnect, while their brains, as if they had gained self-consciousness, gnawed through the skull and wriggled out of the body’s prison. 𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙥𝒖𝒃.𝒄𝒐𝒎
“Forget about the mission, get off that ship now!” Chaoyang could only turn his head and shout at Ailuodi.
But the Angel, after spreading her wings, didn’t turn back to retreat. Instead, she flew into the air and summoned the Sword of Gale!
Chaoyang suddenly realized that his mental link with her had also been disrupted. Ailuodi moving back from the deck was not because she heard his warning but because she had detected something wrong and taken measures on her own!
