[Mother Cockroach: What’s going on here? He’s just sitting under the flagpole like that? Is that polite?]
Su Bai stared wordlessly at the man below.
Since when did this secretive final boss become so shameless? He clearly knows there’s prey right above him… As a kitchen knife, she genuinely wanted to chop this guy to bits.
But Su Bai couldn’t just jump down openly, and hiding like this left her fuming, trapped between action and inaction.
[Your Father: Definitely not polite. Why don’t you go chase him off, Xiao Bai?]
[Mother Cockroach: Shubao, are you kidding me? Sure, I’m shaped like a kitchen knife, but that hunter’s carrying a gun! He could kill me in a second.]
Ye Shu didn’t answer. She merely stared downward, doing her best to keep her balance and not get whisked away by the wind.
Lin Qingyue, that bastard, definitely knew where she was hiding.
He wasn’t making a move—what was he up to?
Ye Shu couldn’t shake the feeling that Lin Qingyue, this NPC, might actually be able to see the players’ chat logs… Otherwise, how else did the last two players get kicked offline so quickly?
“Bang, bang—”
Gunfire echoed ceaselessly in the distance.
Dozens of players were forced offline at the same time.
There was only half an hour left in the game. Only 2,008 players remained, and every few seconds, someone else would vanish.
……
Lin Qingyue wiped down his gun and took aim at a target a hundred meters out.
With a sharp crack, a toy beetle car half-buried in the dirt was shot clean through.
The toy car scattered in panic, exposing itself further, and was promptly hit again—game over, sent straight to the rest area.
…
Lin Qingyue’s gaze then drifted up toward the flagpole. Slowly, his eyes traced upward.
[Mother Cockroach: H-he’s looking over, Shu! See you in the rest area…]
[Your Father: Are you stupid? Just giving up like that? With your reckless temper, shouldn’t you be charging out with knives swinging? Xiao Bai, are you hiding something from me?]
Although they hadn’t spent much time together, Ye Shu had figured out Su Bai’s personality. She wasn’t the timid, cowardly type. In fact, it was the first time she’d seen her shrink away the moment someone glanced her way.
[Mother Cockroach: Of course not! Shu, I just think this guy has a certain… presence. We probably can’t beat him.]
Su Bai scrambled to cover up the truth.
How could she possibly admit… this guy was Shu’s calamity in her previous life, the piece of trash who’d torn her limb from limb and scattered her bones to dust. No, she absolutely had to stay far away from him.
But as soon as Lin Qingyue raised his gun and aimed at the suspended kitchen knife, Su Bai panicked.
Just for a moment.
Him—him, that damn bastard! To think that scum was now laying eyes on her and Shu! If he dared fire, she’d slice open his throat! She couldn’t let Shu face him head-on. No way could she allow even the slightest connection between them!
Ye Shu: "…"
A certain… presence?
That was an odd way to describe someone like him.
[Your Father: Xiao Bai…]
Lin Qingyue fixed his cold eyes on the kitchen knife. Within those dark irises, a glint of malice flickered. This very woman, clinging endlessly to Ye Xiaoshu—he’d wanted her dead for a long time. With Fu Jingchuan dealt with, she was next on his list.
“Bang—”
Twice, gunshots shattered the silence between Su Bai and Ye Shu.
Two shots. The kitchen knife reacted fast and dodged the first. The rabbit balloon wobbled atop the flagpole. Ye Shu’s gaze froze on the wound punched straight through Su Bai.
A blade polished to a mirror’s shine—now chipped and marred by a bullet.
Outside the abandoned hospital, a kitchen knife could still be seen zigzagging erratically, desperate to escape.
Su Bai, seething at Lin Qingyue’s face, charged straight up with the knife-blade at his throat. Even if she couldn’t kill him, she’d be sure to make him bleed.
Ye Shu wanted to jump down and help, but the rabbit balloon was far too light, hard to control. She didn’t have the power to wield spatial weapons yet—throwing herself in would be suicide.
[A Plain Pebble: Whoa! That kitchen knife’s got guts, going toe-to-toe with the hunter, just like Cluck-chi did back then.]
[A Withered Straw: So epic! Go, kitchen knife! I’d help out if I could, but even the wind could blow me away in my current form…]
[Toothpick: I’m just a few meters ahead at the front lines—man, it’s intense! And there’s a pink balloon overhead. This hunter must need glasses: the target’s giant, and he acts like it isn’t even there.]
[Bench: Does nobody care if I live or die? The hunter’s using me as a seat cushion.]
“Bang, bang, bang—”
Bullets kept ricocheting not two centimeters from the kitchen knife.
Bastard!
Su Bai clenched her teeth. So this was all a game to him—a cat-and-mouse plaything.
Yet, the rules of hide-and-seek forbade her from going more than a kilometer away, or she’d have vanished ages ago.
Su Bai caught Ye Shu’s signal and scrambled upward into the air.
Then—another gunshot. The balloon’s string swept Su Bai up, lifting her higher.
The rabbit balloon wobbled and soared, carried by the wind to even greater heights.
The hunter’s gun could only hit targets up to about a hundred meters away. Maybe if they escaped over the hospital roof, they’d finally be safe…
“Get down here—”
“I’ll only say it once.”
Irritation roughened Lin Qingyue’s voice as he aimed at the rabbit balloon.
But Ye Shu, instead of listening, shot upward even faster. The balloon kept rising—thousands of meters up. Even a sniper rifle might have trouble at this range…
Fortunately, the game issued no warning. That meant the kilometer rule didn’t include altitude.
If only she’d known she was a bug in the system, she would’ve hauled Su Bai to high-altitude safety from the start.
“Very good.”
Lin Qingyue’s face was blank, gun hesitating before slowly lowering again. Shooting now would only worsen things between them—a fire and water impossible to mix, which he didn’t wish to see.
He abstained from firing. After all, crippling the system and entering this game hadn’t been for killing people.
Soon, other hunters noticed Ye Shu.
Thousands of meters in the air, a soft pink rabbit balloon drew every player’s gaze.
“When did that balloon get up there?”
A sharp-eyed hunter glimpsed a faint red spot in the gray clouds above.
“So brazen! Get it down, now!”
“Our guns… can’t reach that high!”
“That’s cheating! There’s never been a balloon in hide-and-seek before.”
A hail of gunfire fell short, as the hunters watched helplessly from below—the pink rabbit balloon and that chipped kitchen knife untouchable.
The episode was quickly uploaded to the game chat.
[Tape: Holy crap! Is that even allowed?]
[USB Drive: I guess so! Those hunters are going nuts.]
[Calendar: For once, I’m not the first one out this round!]
[Steadfast Kitchen Knife: Of course it’s allowed—the one-kilometer safety zone only applies to distance, not altitude… Luck is part of skill too! This is what carrying feels like—miraculous!!]
[Abandoned Hand Cream Tube: Go on, show off… You’ll get your comeuppance soon enough.]
[Mouse Pad: So what? Just ‘cause you got to fly? If I’d known, I’d have just snuck away into the sky too.]
[Clothes Hanger: No, it doesn’t work for anything but balloons. The altitude cap is thirty meters for everything else—tried it last game.]
And so, with a chorus of cheers and envy from the players, Ye Shu and Su Bai rode out the game.