She hadn’t expected that the very Young Master Eleven, who’d just been so crass with her, would now step forward to defend her. Could it be that her beauty had finally caught his eye…? But her heart belonged to Fu Jingchuan! He who built a business empire from scratch at eighteen—cold by nature, perhaps, but utterly irresistible to Ye Wanwan's infatuated heart.
Qin Zaozao was just as surprised. Only moments ago, the young master had been so brash, yet now he was standing up for them. Truly unexpected!
Ye Shu rubbed her nose and bluntly asked, “Why? Why stop?”
In her mind, Fu Shiyi was anything but a clueless fool—there must’ve been some reason behind it.
“Yezi-jiejie, if I tell them to get lost, maybe then you can keep fighting, right?”
“If they’re so close, I’m worried I’ll catch a stray bullet myself!” Fu Shiyi hastily explained. He’d already seen what Ye Shu could do with a rocket launcher and had no interest in being blown to smithereens like a piece of flotsam—or worse, seeing all the work on his beloved Ironclad lost in a flash.
Ye Shu fell silent, then nodded in agreement.
Ye Wanwan could only lament her irrepressible charm—no one seemed immune, though it turned out Fu Shiyi’s real concern was for his precious ship, not her.
Qin Zaozao’s mind raced. How in the world had Ye Shu gotten her hands on weapons? Did she have some kind of spatial ability? Not daring to waste another second pondering, she shouted, “Ye Shu, you wouldn’t dare! If you hurt Wanwan, there’s no way our parents will ever forgive you, or let you set foot in either family’s house again!”
“When did you manage to cozy up to a big shot? If all you want is to survive this game, you don’t have to go this far. Our Qin family would never let you go hungry… Why not just settle and get along? The sea’s big enough for all of us. Don’t think you can control where we dock! If you want to get to Wanwan, you’ll have to get through me first.”
Even with Ye Shu aiming a gun at her, Qin Zaozao looked unbothered, certain that Ye Shu wouldn’t actually pull the trigger.
“Huh? Are you even listening to yourself?” For the first time, Ye Shu heard such a challenge. She switched out the rocket launcher for her pistol.
“Bang—”
A toxic bullet pierced Qin Zaozao’s forehead. With a dull thud, she collapsed, dead before she hit the ground. Within seconds, her body bloomed with black and violet patches, pale skin bubbling and melting away.
“Aaaah!”
“Ye Shu… are you insane?”
“Do you know what you’ve just done?”
By the time Ye Wanwan came back to her senses, Qin Zaozao was dead beyond doubt. Staring up in horror at the woman standing atop the icebreaker, panic gripped Ye Wanwan’s heart like never before. Was this really the same Ye Shu, who once would break down in tears at a harsh word?
She dared… to kill. And she killed her own sister. Her flesh and blood.
A pang of regret stung Ye Shu. After all those monsters, high-level sea urchins never showed again, and now she’d wasted precious toxic rounds—only 119 left—on people...
“As you can see, I know exactly what I’m doing. Unlike you… Since you delivered yourself so willingly, I’ll do you the mercy of sending you off with your sister.”
With those words, Ye Wanwan met the same fate—a bullet through the forehead.
The engineered poison could take down a five-hundred-pound elephant in two seconds, let alone a fragile human.
“Another wasted round,” Ye Shu muttered as she stroked her pistol and reloaded two more bullets.
Fu Shiyi gazed hungrily at the neighboring ship. Whatever was on his mind, he blurted out, “Yezi-jiejie, let’s merge this steamer with ours!”
“Alright.”
Ye Shu looked down at the two boys. “Anything you’d like to say?” She’d just killed her own sisters in front of them—were they so unfazed?
After a moment, Fu Shiyi raised both thumbs. “Yezi-jiejie, amazing work! Finally rid us of a pair of noisy pests. If you hadn’t done it, someone else eventually would have—” As he spoke, his usually bright, sunny face was shadowed by something darker. Anyone foolish enough to covet his Third Brother deserved to die. Anyone who tried to steal his Yezi-jiejie deserved no less.
In a great family, there were no truly pure and noble young gentlemen. If he’d truly been as guileless as he appeared, his extended relatives would have devoured him alive long ago.
Ye Shu didn’t notice the young man’s dark flash of expression. She merged the steamer, noticing it barely made a dent in their resources—the icebreaker remained unchanged.
Staring into the blackened seas, Fu Jingchuan’s mind replayed what he’d foreseen with his powers—a ship capsized, Shiyi vanished, himself dragged by a monstrous leviathan into the abyss where no light reached, swallowed whole by the black tide.
“Third Brother?”
“My dear brother, what’s wrong?”
Fu Shiyi munched on noodles topped with crab legs and a dollop of chili paste he’d swiped from Ye Shu, slurping noisily. “Nothing.”
“Shiyi, whatever you do, wear your life jacket for the next few days at all times.”
Fu Jingchuan spoke with unprecedented gravity. His own death was no matter—he still had a resurrection card. But if Eleven died, that was the end.
“Got it.” Fu Shiyi nodded, mouth full, imitating Ye Shu by popping a slice of garlic.
“Ptooey! So spicy—how can Yezi-jiejie actually enjoy this?” He grimaced while chewing.
Fu Jingchuan could only press his palm to his forehead, helpless and a little amused at his brother’s childlike ways. So be it—Shiyi had always been the unpredictable type, best let him be.
……
By day, the Black Sea was as still as a corpse. By night, all bets were off. Da Piaoliang and Xiaobai spent their entire night shifts driving off wave after wave of freakish fish-monsters. The slippery creatures clung to the ship’s sides as easily as walking on flat ground.
They were only level 0 or 1 kalamees, but the sheer numbers! Even Ye Shu went on a midnight killing spree. She’d fight until exhausted, then nap on the deck before getting up to slay more monsters. The more she fought, the stronger she seemed to get, growing ever more ferocious.
[Ding! Congratulations player Ye Shu, +1 point!]
[Congratulations! +0.5 points!]
[+1 point.]
[+1 point.]
[Point.]
As dawn lightened the skies, Ye Shu noticed the fish-monsters fighting with even more vigor. They seemed stronger, too.
With a precise slash of her peachwood sword, she finished off the deck’s sole level-two deep-sea monster.
The sun rose in the east, casting an orange-red glow on the black waters, painting the scene with an eerie beauty. The monsters, who’d died in droves only moments before, now vanished beneath the waves with barely a trace.
Blood and entrails covered the deck, turning it into a grisly slaughterhouse reeking of fish and salt. Ye Shu wrinkled her nose in distaste at the stench, scanning her surroundings.
At the same time, all the deep-sea monsters across the Black Sea seemed to flee for their very lives, vanishing beneath the surface.
The players, battered and exhausted, collapsed in place, too spent to celebrate their temporary reprieve.