Player Reload
Chapter 275 - 253: Assault

Chapter 275: Chapter 253: Assault

Li Cheng instantly reacted, immediately took out his phone, and searched for news.

The top trending search was a terrorist attack—a man with an unidentified identity, armed with a gun, stormed into the City Center Museum of Toy City, firing indiscriminately at ordinary civilians, killing more than forty innocent people on the spot,

and engaged in a firefight with the Toy City police force that arrived later, resulting in multiple police casualties. The current situation at the scene is unclear, and the criminal is suspected to have escaped.

A large number of videos and pictures spreading online confirmed the horror of the attack.

Many vehicles on the road also heard this broadcast, and the entire traffic flow came to a halt.

It was scary enough that a fully armed terrorist was running wild in the city center, but even more terrifying was that the advertising screens on the facades of skyscrapers flickered and were hijacked.

"Hey, can you see it?"

All the big screens in the streets and alleys started playing the same footage.

It was a clown dressed in a red suit, with green hair, and vivid face paint, standing in an elevator lobby, with a large black canvas bag at his feet, facing the phone camera and adjusting his hairstyle.

"The current time is 5:20 PM."

The clown filmed himself with the phone, speaking in a frivolous and joyful tone, showing the time on his watch to the camera,

while the electronic clock in the taxi Li Cheng was in showed it was 5:40 PM, meaning the footage on the screen was not a live broadcast, but a video playback recorded twenty minutes earlier.

"Good afternoon, citizens of Toy City, let me introduce myself, I am Joker, an insignificant toy."

The self-proclaimed Joker cheerfully said: "You may not recognize me, and that’s okay, you just need to know that, like you, I too have had friends and family taken from me by toy malfunction disease.

The officials at Toy City Hall took away my wife and children, deceiving me that they could cure their toy malfunction disease, but all I got was a death notification, without even their ashes left for me.

I tried to demand an explanation, to protest at their doors, what I got in return was just a beating. I sought help from newspapers, from the internet, only to be met with doubt, indifference, and ridicule."

As he spoke, he unzipped the canvas bag.

Inside were guns and weapons galore, the clown picked up an M16 rifle and smiled, "I’ve got nothing left to lose, and can only use the most primal language—violence, to express my stance."

Ding-dong.

The elevator reached the first floor, and the elevator doors slowly opened.

"Remember, no speaking Russian."

The Clown muttered to himself, stepping out of the elevator, and pulled the trigger on the unprepared toy civilians in the museum.

Among the toys at the scene were LEGO, plush toys, and plastic figures.

Armor-piercing bullets flying through the air, ripping apart plush toys, shattering plastic. Toy civilians fell like wheat, cotton fluff, and plastic fragments scattered all over the ground, bloodless yet with a strange sense of cruelty.

Those survivors who were lucky enough not to die in the first round of gunfire screamed and cried as they fled,

Joker did not rush to chase them but instead took out five photos from his chest and displayed them to the camera, "These are my five other companions. We’ve decided to challenge the City Hall in the next twenty-four hours and shatter all social order.

Nuclear plants, City Hall, reservoirs, schools, subways... every piece of Toy City’s infrastructure is our target.

Prepare yourselves, this city is about to blaze.

Heh heh heh hahahaha."

Accompanied by the Clown’s maniacal laughter, the video was abruptly cut off, and the screen finally froze on the five photos.

Those five photos were unmistakably old photos of Gouchen, Frankenstein, Bartmos, Eugene, and... Li Cheng himself participating in this mission.

"Damn."

Li Cheng’s eye twitched, and because players generally have the habit of wearing action cameras during their script tasks, it’s easy to record the images of other teammates in the same mission,

resulting in the public exposure of those mid and high-level players’ appearances, which are readily searchable.

This Joker from the Wild Laughter Troupe presumably found the photos of Gouchen and others in the offline database and printed them out temporarily.

Using this method, he instantly drew the hatred of the entire Toy City towards him, exposing all players under the spotlight.

Li Cheng had mastered the shape-shifting capabilities of the worm gene quite early on, with a different appearance each time he cooperated in a mission, and his notoriety was only present within a very small circle.

The photograph Joker showed was from a long time ago, from his first cooperative mission, namely the Death Curse, and he was wearing that fetishist Daoist robe.

Entirely different from now, there was no worry about being discovered immediately by the official forces of Toy City.

"The problem is why he’s doing this. The Stormtroopers are just for show in maintaining public order, Toy City’s real defense force is definitely not weak."

Li Cheng thought rapidly, "Unless, he believes that launching an attack and drawing the citywide hatred is more advantageous than disadvantageous.

Possibility one, he believes that people like Gouchen are far stronger than him, and a direct confrontation has no chance of victory, so why not draw in external forces from the beginning.

Possibility two, he has some very strong Concealment Skill, which allows him to stealthily hide while Toy City’s official forces hunt for Gouchen, hoping to last until the end.

As long as the other competitors die first, victory can be claimed.

Possibility three, a combination of the above two..."

————

At the same moment, in the city’s sewers.

Since many of the city’s residents are made of plastic, metal, or cotton, their diets are also light, the smell in the sewers isn’t that foul, occasionally some LEGO bricks in the shape of poop can be seen floating along the surface of the water.

The Joker, in his red suit, stuffed the canvas bag full of weapons into the Backpack, then sprayed Odor Remover on himself vigorously, eliminating any scent.

"Heh heh, I merely uploaded the recorded video onto the internet, yet someone tampered with it in secret, broadcasting the video directly to the whole city’s advertising screens.

The only one with such hacking capabilities is... Bartmos from the Whale Song Guild."

Joker took out that photo with a savoring look. The man in the photo was a world apart from Bartmos on the advertising screen; one was a lean young man, the other an aged, decrepit old man.

Clearly, Bartmos had seen Joker’s video on the internet and decided to take advantage of the situation,

using his hacker skills to hijack the ad screens of Toy City, speeding up the spread of the video and, at the same time, altering his own photo in the video.

He and Joker came to the same conclusion: if this mission were a fair competition, there was no way the other few could win against Gouchen of the Global Supernatural Alliance.

Even joining forces wouldn’t be enough.

The prerequisite for victory was, and had to be, to eliminate Gouchen, taking him out of the game first.

"Tsk, I wonder which of the remaining few snatched the key from that good-for-nothing Cervantes; he still owes me five hundred bucks!"