“Why?!” Cheng Feng cried out, thoroughly indignant, her voice full of wounded grievance. “Why is nobody coming to pick me up?!”
There was a few seconds of silence on Xiang Yunjian’s end before he replied, “I told you just now, but you weren’t on the team channel. There are too many people moving around at the foot of the mountain. I searched for a while and couldn’t find anywhere suitable to spend the night, so I changed directions. Just play it by ear. Get down the mountain and come over as soon as you can.”
Yan Shen laughed out loud. “Because I’m the sniper,” he said matter-of-factly. “Have you ever seen a sniper riding solo across a thousand miles?”
Jiang Linxia sighed. “In the end, the guys who know how to act cute always have it easiest. Cheng Feng, you should learn a thing or two.”
Xin Kuang gave an on-the-spot demonstration. “Xiang Yunjian, my legs hurt. Carry me. I’ll wait for you.”
“Get lost!” Jiang Linxia shouted, unable to take it anymore. “Xiang Yunjian, come to my side first! We can loot the supply crate together!”
Cheng Feng was still rambling away. “I killed seven people! I’m the team’s biggest contributor!”
“Okay, okay, I got it. Cheng Feng, you’re awesome!” Jiang Linxia replied perfunctorily before immediately adding, “Xiang Yunjian, if you still want to be brothers, come to me first!”
Things didn’t seem to be going too smoothly on Xiang Yunjian’s side. After a long pause, he answered with a single concise word:
“Wait.”
Cheng Feng stared mournfully at the map for a while. After confirming that this bunch of fair-weather teammates had no intention of coming to help her, she decided to rely on herself and make her way down the mountain alone.
Then she’d show them what the strength of the MVP really looked like. Once that happened, all past grudges would be wiped clean, the red-envelope ban would be lifted, and financial freedom would finally be hers.
The southern slope was relatively gentle and open, making it easy for someone to snipe you from a distance.
To the north was a cliff that looked as though it had been sliced clean through by a giant blade. It wasn’t exactly the safest route. Even if you managed to survive the jump, there was no guarantee someone waiting below wouldn’t put a bullet in you.
The safest way down, then, was to wind through the middle of the mountain, using the terrain as cover, zigzagging from side to side, passing through the forest until you reached the suburban residential area, where you could find a nearby place to spend the night.
Perfect.
Having settled on her plan, Cheng Feng slung her rifle over her shoulder and strode off confidently. Halfway there, however, she realized something was wrong.
The central mountain path had been blocked.
A group of examinees had been stopped on the mountainside and were cursing through loudspeakers.
The people blocking the pass were just as arrogant – because they had overwhelming numbers on their side.
Cheng Feng didn’t go any closer, so she couldn’t tell exactly how many there were. But according to eyewitnesses, anyone who had tried charging down the mountain had been beaten to a pulp, without even the slightest chance to fight back. There had to be quite a few of them.
Even if she threw five smoke grenades, she still wouldn’t dare try passing through there.
Cheng Feng turned around with her rifle and left.
She was simply too recognizable. On top of that, being the MVP of the solo combat category made her attract hostility like a giant pair of high beams blazing down the middle of the road at midnight. The moment she appeared, everyone wanted to kill her. Wandering around the mountain carelessly was out of the question.
After cautiously circling the area for quite a while, she finally found a quiet spot with no one around. She buried herself beneath a pile of leaves, planning to wait until the crowds thinned out.
As the characters’ fatigue meters continued to climb, many examinees who realized they couldn’t get down the mountain came to the same conclusion.
From her hiding place, Cheng Feng watched several people pass right by her. After looking around for a while, they either climbed into trees or squeezed into narrow gullies. None of them even bothered to erase the traces they’d left behind, and their camouflage and ambush skills were, frankly, pretty amateurish.
Cheng Feng lay perfectly still, thinking rather miserably that maybe she should just sleep here for the night, let her character’s fatigue recover, and wait until dawn to go harvest another round of kills.
She brought up the control panel, ready to log out and grab something to eat, when she heard hurried footsteps racing toward her. They stopped beside a boulder barely a meter away.
Startled, Cheng Feng prepared to back away and trigger her explosives. Then she caught the group’s hushed conversation.
The voices sounded strangely familiar.
“What’s going on? Are the people down there crazy or what? Which university are they from?”
“I asked around. Apparently someone on the mountain killed… fifteen, maybe sixteen or seventeen examinees. There were even two seeded competitors from universities among them. Now all the teams from those dozen or so victims have gathered together – more than fifty people in total. They’re blocking the mountainside, saying they’re going to avenge their brothers.”
Cheng Feng thought for a moment before recognizing the speaker.
It was Zhong Yijie.
“No way!” Zhong Yijie said firmly. “We already made a full sweep of the mountain. Apart from those idiots up north who were deadlocked forever before half of them got wiped out, where are all these bodies supposed to be? There’s no way everyone in that free-for-all was killed by the same person!”
“Who knows?” someone replied. “Maybe the story’s been exaggerated a bit for dramatic effect. But one person definitely swooped in and cleaned up the leftovers, making an absolute killing. Otherwise those guys wouldn’t be this pissed off.”
Zhong Yijie fell silent.
After a moment, the young man beside him said hesitantly, “Could someone have pulled off something this big… Xiang Yunjian, maybe?”
“No chance.” Zhong Yijie knew his longtime rival too well. “At a time like this, Xiang Yunjian should be running all over the mountain picking up the dead weight on his team. There’s no way he’d be out here roaming around free as a bird.”
The others thought about it and agreed.
If Xiang Yunjian wasn’t heading down the mountain to stabilize the situation, the rest of his teammates had probably already managed to get themselves into deep trouble.
Another teammate lowered his voice and said, “Just saying… this ambush style feels kind of like Cheng Feng.”
Zhong Yijie shook his head just as seriously.
“That can’t be Cheng Feng either. She’s the MVP. Their team should be running a four-protect-one strategy around her right now. They wouldn’t just leave her alone on the mountain. They’d have picked her up ages ago.”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
Hidden under her pile of leaves, Cheng Feng nodded along as well.
See? Exactly! Everyone knows it should be four protecting one. Everyone except Xiang Yunjian!
What an infuriatingly headstrong guy!
Zhong Yijie grew tired of standing and sat down against the boulder. The three of them let out a collective sigh, their silhouettes looking especially forlorn in the night.
The young man on the left slapped his thigh and complained, “This is ridiculous. We were finally about to get the whole team together, and then we run into a pack of wolves and tigers.”
“So what are you supposed to do when you run into a problem like this?”
The young man on the left answered without thinking, “Write ‘Solution:’ first.” [1]
Zhong Yijie patted him on the shoulder. “Every field in this country needs talented people like you.”
Just as the three of them were about to delve deeper into the philosophy of writing “Solution,” Cheng Feng shook a layer of leaves off herself and crawled out.
At that hour of the night, the sight was practically indistinguishable from a corpse climbing out of the ground. Even the hot-blooded students were so startled their souls nearly left their bodies. Zhong Yijie’s rifle was already up, ready to administer some physical damage, when Cheng Feng hurriedly stopped him.
“It’s me! Don’t hit me, don’t hit me! It’s Cheng Feng!”
“Holy shit!” Zhong Yijie’s brain was still buzzing from the rush of adrenaline. He couldn’t keep his voice down as he cursed, “Are you a ghost?!”
Cheng Feng raised a hand in a calming gesture, signaling him to relax, then sat back down.
She had been hiding inside a tree pit completely filled with fallen leaves, making it impossible to notice. Once she sat down again, only the area above her shoulders remained visible.
The three of them instinctively took another step back, still shaken, clutching their weapons tightly.
Zhong Yijie eyed her warily. “That person… was it you?”
“They’re lying!” Cheng Feng protested, holding up her fingers to count. “I only killed seven people! The rest were obviously killed by each other!”
The moment Zhong Yijie heard that, the breath he’d just managed to catch lodged in his throat again. For one brief moment, he genuinely felt it might be better to send her peacefully to the afterlife with his rifle.
Suppressing the urge, he shot her a sidelong glance and asked, “Where’s Xiang Yunjian?”
Cheng Feng sighed dramatically. “He ran off with someone else.”
Zhong Yijie felt a strong, and very well-founded, premonition of something ominous.
Although killing the MVP would be an extremely honorable achievement, as fellow students there was an unspoken rule in the school’s collective honor system: “Protecting the MVP is everyone’s responsibility.”
In previous years, once everyone put on helmets and pulled up their masks, it was impossible to tell who was who. Unless there were special circumstances, this rule was usually just tacitly kept in mind.
This year, though, it was hard to pretend blindness.
And sure enough, the next second, Cheng Feng said pitifully, “Can I come with you guys?”
Zhong Yijie felt his world go dark.
Why did Xiang Yunjian’s burden have to be transferred onto him?
Cheng Feng was absolutely the heaviest “teammate drag” in history – the biggest anchor weighing everyone down.
Trying to stay mindful of the possibility that the school principal might be watching the match, Zhong Yijie struggled to find an excuse.
“We’re out of bullets,” he said.
“I know where there are some, and a lot of them,” Cheng Feng replied quickly. “In the chaos just now, only a handful of people survived in the end. I only picked up two supply packs; the rest were taken by others. Now the middle route is blocked, so those people can’t get down, and they can’t reveal they’re the killers either, so they’ll definitely hide their loot first.”
Zhong Yijie asked, “Where would they hide it?”
“Very easy to find,” Cheng Feng said, pausing slightly before nodding emphatically, as if completely trustworthy. “On the north side of the mountain!”
Zhong Yijie said, “She’s lying.”
He raised his voice and declared with the air of someone who has seen through the world. “She hesitated for one second – that was her conscience struggling!”
Cheng Feng fell silent, but kept her eyes wide open, looking at Zhong Yijie with an expression of unbearable heartbreak. Her acting skills were exquisite – her pupils trembled slightly, full of silent accusation and disappointment. Even through her glasses, it was enough to evoke sympathy.
The others immediately couldn’t stand it anymore. They shoved Zhong Yijie and scolded him. “What are you doing? Why are you being so petty and nitpicking every word? You’re even counting her pauses – are you sick or something?”
“This is your bias, don’t you get it?”
“She’s a junior! You were probably still drinking formula when she wasn’t even born yet. Can you be a bit more tolerant? Just because you’re good-looking doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want, okay? I won’t indulge you!”
Zhong Yijie let out a stifled breath in frustration.
Cheng Feng, completely unceremonious, said, “Did you guys use your smoke grenades? If you didn’t need them, you can sponsor them to me. I’m good at using those.”
The other two happily handed theirs over. Seeing this, Zhong Yijie had no choice but to open his own pack and let Cheng Feng pick freely.
Including the three she had left from before, Cheng Feng now had nine smoke grenades. Rich. Very rich. Very secure.
She climbed out of the pit and called out, “Let’s go. I’ll take you to loot the stuff.”
Zhong Yijie thought to himself: Stealing from other people’s pockets to get your own stuff – what a pro.
Just as he was about to organize the team, Cheng Feng grabbed him and arranged the other two teammates one after the other, then said to him, “I don’t have your team’s communicator. Come with me and help relay messages.”
Zhong Yijie took a deep breath.
If Ye exists, why must Zhong be born too!
Cheng Feng and her three “bodyguards” officially set out.
With people backing her up, Cheng Feng felt much more confident, and her style became bold and almost wild. She immediately went to clear out the hiding spots of those earlier examinees, feeling very satisfied with herself, while also reminding her temporary teammates that places that looked especially good for hiding people were actually the most dangerous – so they shouldn’t go in.
The kill points were taken by the front-running guy leading the group, a young man Zhong Yijie called “Watermelon.” He originally wanted to give the kills to Cheng Feng, but she waved him off, saying she wanted to share the rewards evenly.
The sound of gunfire soon woke up the examinees who had gone quiet again. Figures on the mountain began moving once more.
After only two kills, Cheng Feng started missing targets in the later areas.
She didn’t mind. She looted the two supply packs, then dug out the supplies she had previously hidden and distributed them to the three of them.
The two guys other than Zhong Yijie were deeply moved.
This was the first time a girl had ever given them ammunition. Even real brothers wouldn’t go this far. Those other “beasts” would only come to rob their supplies.
Their friendship continuously deepened through shared profit.
Before long, it was 8 PM in-game time.
Translator’s Notes:
[1] The joke is based on the habit of students writing ‘Solution:’ (解) at the beginning of a math exam question even when they have no idea how to solve it – doing the formal first step before figuring out the actual answer.
