The pink milk tea car, as usual, roamed back and forth through the rainforest zone.
A green snake coiled on a tree trunk, tensing its body and preparing to strike — but in the next instant, a portal suddenly appeared in front of the milk tea car. The flashy pink vehicle dove straight into it and vanished on the spot.
The snake’s strike hit empty air. It lifted its triangular head in confusion, scanning the area.
Dungeon: Poison Museum, Hard Mode.
Team Seven had once again arrived first to open the dungeon. The last test run at the Botanical Garden had unexpectedly dropped a fragment — a pleasant surprise. Everyone agreed it must have been thanks to their team’s “mascot,” Ji Ou, so as usual, they let him open the dungeon again this time.
Ji Ou, wearing an expression that screamed “I’ve already accepted life’s unreasonable torment,” stood in front of the ticket booth, locking eyes with the ugly toad inside.
After doing some mental math, Ji Ou said gloomily, “Twenty tickets.”
The toad ticket seller, with its weirdly colored skin, bulged its eyes in disbelief and croaked, “So few?!”
Ji Ou’s first thought was, Why does this thing have an accent? His second was to instinctively take three steps back and shout, “Everyone clear out! It can talk! That means it’s carrying a fragment!”
Following their captain’s survival-based instincts, Team Seven’s members immediately retreated, dragging their own leader by the collar out of harm’s way.
The milk tea car burst out of the portal in a blink. Yi Luo’s driving had gotten even wilder lately — Ji Ou nearly thought he was going to ram straight through the ticket gate.
Yi Luo rolled down the window, glanced at the bug-eyed toad behind the counter, and chuckled. “A frog as a ticket seller? That’s almost… fairytale-like.”
Tang Yu smiled as she tried to remind them, “That’s not a frog, it’s a venomous toad, it—”
Ji Ou quickly stopped her attempt at an info dump. He didn’t need to, though — He Wuning had already kicked the door open and stepped out. “Just from the color, it’s obviously poisonous.”
He Wuning said, holding his Tang Broadsword and examining the toad as if deciding where best to cut. “So it just stays in there and doesn’t come out?”
Ji Ou stammered, “N-no! The usual process is to buy tickets from it — one per person. If you give it what it wants, it’ll go easy on you. If you don’t, its attack power increases by twenty percent—”
He Wuning turned to look at the toad. The toad rolled its bulbous eyes at him, a greedy, sinister grin spreading across its face. “You want tickets? How many?”
He Wuning glanced back at the car. It was packed full, with even more people clinging to the outside. The once-cute pink milk tea car now looked like a smuggler’s ferry crammed with dungeon stowaways.
Xing Yue poked his head out. “Headcount!”
“One!” Yi Luo called first.
“2”
“Two!”
……a
“Twenty-two,” He Wuning concluded.
Ji Ou warned, “Be careful! It can speak human language — that means it definitely has a fragment!”
Yi Luo turned to him with a smirk. “Knew your luck would come through. First room and we already found a fragment. Who knows, maybe there’ll be more later.”
“Heh-heh-heh,” the toad croaked, its voice dripping with villainy. Its bulging eyes rolled as it looked them over. “So you think you can just take the fragment off me, do you?”
“Heh-heh, twenty-two of you, huh? Tickets cost eleven lives! Will you pick them yourselves — or shall I choose for you?”
The air froze for a split second. Then, in the next moment, He Wuning’s broadsword shot straight through the ticket window.
The toad let out a screech. Ji Ou quietly crouched at a safe distance to watch and muttered, “Actually, if you just tell it you’re not buying, it jumps out and attacks anyway… but, well, the boss probably doesn’t care.”
He Wuning certainly didn’t care. In his mind, if the toad didn’t plan to come out of its little booth, it might be slightly inconvenient to fight — but not impossible.
The brightly colored toad, furious now, smashed through the ticket booth and landed before them, snarling, “You’re done for!”
The players didn’t bother listening to its threats. A storm of attacks immediately rained down.
The ticket-seller toad was a ranged monster — its tongue could lash out at any player on the field, drag them into its mouth, and swallow them whole. At least, that’s what usually happened.
With over 20 players crowded in front of it, the toad risked not being able to retract its tongue if it extended too far, so it could only target nearby players.
Originally, it planned to wear them down — after all, it had plenty of HP and carried the [Poisonous Skin] trait. Anyone attacking it should get poisoned in return. But it waited and waited, yet the players in front of it showed no signs of being poisoned.
It let out a panicked croak: “What’s going on here?!”
“Ha.” Yi Luo, sitting in the car, raised a cup of milk tea and shook it. “See this? We’ve got buffs.”
“Defense, HP, attack, spirit, speed all +10%, immune to poison and paralysis, plus 3% lifesteal,” Xing Yue added with a feral grin, baring sharp, beast-like teeth — somehow even more villainous than the toad itself. “You’re done for.”
He repeated the toad’s words back at it, unaltered.
For a brief moment, the toad thought about running: “…Are you guys playing for real?”
But in the next second, it was swamped with attacks again.
Q-chan shouted excitedly, “Hit it, hit it! Ada!”
He Wuning had already sheathed his broadsword and climbed into the truck, looking disinterested, and crossed his legs in the passenger seat.
Yi Luo looked back at him. “What’s wrong?”
“Boring.” He propped his chin on his blade. “Don’t they have anything else to do? Do they have to follow us around?”
Most of the combat department had levels far above the dungeon, and with about twenty players all buffed to the max, beating a dungeon monster was not difficult at all.
Yi Luo laughed. “There’s a trade-off. Knowing you have this much power, they’ll definitely send people to protect you. Looks like both squads will have to stick with us for a while.”
He Wuning sighed in annoyance.
He was used to moving alone, and suddenly being surrounded by so many people felt a bit uncomfortable.
“If you want to go solo, that’s possible too,” Yi Luo tapped the steering wheel, smiling. “Run away together?”
He Wuning gave him a blank look. Yi Luo grinned. “All you have to say is ‘go,’ and we’ll rush to the second boss. How about it?”
He Wuning hesitated slightly, then reluctantly nodded. “Go.”
Q-chan cried in despair, “Sweetie, you just let him take advantage of you! You sounded like you agreed to run away together!”
Yi Luo slammed the steering wheel, flooring the gas, and the truck shot forward. The other combatants stared in disbelief as he plowed through the ticket gate and raced into the Poison Museum.
The toad yelled, “No vehicles allowed inside! Do you have any manners driving in a building?!”
Xing Yue shouted along, “He Wuning! Yi Luo! What are you two doing?!”
Cao Wu remarked, laughing, “Coming to help? Hilarious. They don’t even want help.”
The pink milk tea car sped off. Xing Yue, fuming, turned to glare at the toad. “Hurry up! Finish up and chase them!”
Toad: “......”
Could a dungeon boss at least get some respect?
The milk tea car smashed into the museum. The second boss at the entrance barely avoided it. Its metallic pincers and spiny, glinting tail reflected the light — a black-and-red scorpion.
Clearly qualified to work in the Poison Museum, He Wuning assumed it was poisonous as well.
The scorpion flexed its pincers and let out a laugh identical to the toad at the entrance. “Heh-heh, you arrived fast, guests. Do you require a tour guide?”
Its tiny, black eyes scanned the two people inside the truck, revealing pure malice. “Just… one life. How about it?”
Yi Luo looked surprised. “Whoa, Ji Ou’s luck is unreal. Two bosses in one dungeon have fragments? Don’t tell me the last one does too.”
He Wuning nodded. “Next dungeon, we can bring him along again.”
The scorpion guide grew slightly impatient and advanced, black-bean eyes glued to the players inside the car. “Heh-heh, you aren’t frozen in fear, are you?”
He Wuning replied, “Do all the monsters in this dungeon like to collect something first?”
“Yes.” Yi Luo knew the dungeon better than He Wuning. “Before, they only asked for game coins. I guess in Hard mode, they ask for something more… deadly.”
He Wuning let out a light laugh. “They want money, huh? But you’d better be careful—money you can spend, life you can’t.”
The scorpion, clearly impatient, circled the milk tea car, its long, sharp tail swaying lightly against the vehicle as if urging them. “Decided yet? Are you going to buy or not?”
Q-chan cried out as if terribly wronged: “It’s touching my car!”
He Wuning raised an eyebrow. “Then treat it to some bullets.”
He kicked open the milk tea car door. The scorpion was overjoyed: “Hey, you’re buying—”
But He Wuning’s broadsword was already inside its mouth. As the scorpion shrieked in anger and pain, He Wuning replied coldly: “Not buying.”
Q-chan jumped onto the roof of the truck, gripping the heavy machine gun with his tiny hands, and shouted: “Ada-da-da-da!”
Yi Luo laughed, revved up the milk tea car, and slammed the scorpion trying to fight back into the air.
After a full clip of bullets, Q-chan shouted from the roof: “Remember this! Don’t touch my car! Very rude!”
He raised his hands in a gesture of international friendship—though his little hands had no fingers, so it just looked like he was raising both arms.
He Wuning smirked, stepped on the scorpion’s back, and drove the Tang Broadsword into the joints of its spiked tail—arthropods always gave the irresistible urge to dismantle them segment by segment.
Amid the scorpion’s wails, He Wuning cut off its most dangerous poisonous tail in a single stroke, then rotated the sword to focus on its pincers.
By the time Xing Yue and the others finished dealing with the toad and hurried over, all they saw was a neatly arranged scorpion-shaped pile of blocks on the ground—still solid, not yet turned to flowing light.
Xing Yue: “……”
-----
The author has something to say:
Yi Luo: Even reporting numbers, I have to be the first! Pride.jpg
----------
No comments:
Post a Comment