This Game Is Too Real
Chapter 635: Deep into Hell!

Chapter 635: Chapter 635: Deep into Hell!

"Incredible."

Giant Stone City.

Standing atop the massive wall, Yibers stared in the direction of the city center, his face filled with unbelievable surprise.

He saw the spore clouds, shaped like a giant tree, restlessly churning as if swaying in a tempest.

Clearly,

someone had angered that thing.

His expression of surprise gradually turned into one of amused interest, and Yibers, standing there enjoying the view, couldn’t help but click his tongue.

"It’s been so long since that thing threw such a big tantrum... When was the last time?"

Was it twenty years ago, or thirty?

In his memory, a group of not-so-sane residents of the refuge seemed to have gone there, and their minds became even more deranged after coming back.

It was Shelter No. 117, wasn’t it?

But it doesn’t matter now.

"This is going to be a good show!"

Excitement sparkled in Yibers’ eyes, the kind that comes from watching eagerly-anticipated chaos unfold, like awaitng a longed-for movie.

Rivers of blood!

Hurry!

...

Yibers wasn’t the only one watching toward the city center. At a distance of dozens of kilometers from Qingquan City, a research ship was stealthily observing.

At this moment, Yang Kai was collecting data on the Mucor Nest using the ship’s devices while maintaining contact with the Academy’s Research Department, reporting the situation in Qingquan City in real-time to his superiors.

"A small ground force from the Alliance has entered the city center... yes, it’s the one composed of Awakeners. They cleverly diverted the evolutionary bodies around the North Second Ring Road through a series of maneuvers, avoiding combat and entering that forbidden zone of life."

"However, their progress doesn’t seem to be going well. The bait team encountered the Titan left behind by the 111th Orbital Division, and the squad that went deep into the city center made contact with the Lair as soon as they landed."

"Speaking of which, I’m also curious about how they located it so quickly."

Looking at the scanning images projected on the holographic screen, Yang Kai’s face was filled with a strange expression.

A long time ago, exploration teams directed by the Post-War Reconstruction Committee had searched for the position of the Lair, but they had never pinpointed its exact location.

After all, the center of Qingquan City isn’t just a point on a map; it’s a fairly large area, not to mention the surface is in ruins, and underground it’s even more complex, like a three-dimensional maze.

The mutant mucor mother nest in Qingquan City hid in that maze, releasing spores to the surface through the underground transportation network and the city’s drainage system.

Indeed, the difference in spore concentration can roughly indicate the general area where the Lair is located, but pinpointing its exact coordinates using only this method is almost impossible.

Only by deploying sufficient numbers of ground forces to comb through the area where the Lair is suspected to be could one possibly find it.

The Defense Department, responsible for exploring the center of Qingquan City, had suffered heavy casualties in the process and only managed to come close to It.

But now, judging by the changes in the spore clouds above Qingquan City, those guys had clearly approached the Lair, and they had even made contact with It.

If this were a coincidence, it would be too convenient.

Yang Kai was utterly baffled.

How did they manage it?

...

Honestly, Fang Chang hadn’t expected that following the coordinates provided by Xiaoyu, they would land directly on top of that Lair.

What surprised him even more was that less than half a minute after landing, they were swallowed by a gaping maw dozens of meters wide.

"...%￥#@!"

Those in the falling Feather planes above were dumbstruck.

Suddenly, a pit that resembled a deep abyss appeared out of nowhere on the empty ruins!

Bright-red fungal blocks, like the mouth of a man-eating flower, emerged from underneath and closed together in an instant, swallowing up two ten-men squads from the Burning Corps!

The entire ground shook violently, as if boiling water was bubbling.

"Old White!"

Hang in there, brother!

Falling Feather gritted his teeth and maneuvered the plane to reverse course, aiming the canon at the closed giant maw.

After a brief barrage, dozens of tracer rounds poured down like hail onto the closed giant mouth, splashing up a mass of shattered rocks and broken fungal blocks.

"Wuuu—!"

A somber and prolonged moan rose from the ruins, like the deep sound of a ship’s steam whistle.

Watching the black blood and tissue debris scattered on the ground, Falling Feather realized that his attack had been effective, and a wave of elation washed over him.

However, just as he was pulling up the plane’s nose and ready to make another strafing run, he saw the closed giant mouth slowly sinking downwards toward the ground below.

This thing was trying to escape!

Falling Feather saw he was almost too late, so he quickly stopped the ascent and turned the nose ahead of schedule to return.

Yet, as if the Lair had prepared for this very moment, a massive swarm of dark figures suddenly burst from a half-collapsed building not far away and charged straight toward him!

Carefully looking, that turned out to be a swarm of quad-copter drones eroded by the slime fungus!

There must be at least a thousand!

Seeing this scene, Falling Feather’s face changed dramatically.

Holy moly.

This freaking works?!

"Yi wu!"

Falling Feather heard Xiaoyu’s urgent warning in his ear, having already spotted the threat, he yanked the nose of the plane up sharply.

Almost a second before colliding with the swarm of drones, the Lingyun Fighter he was piloting drew an upward arc in the sky, narrowly opening the distance as it grazed the edge of that densely packed shadow.

"Damn... Has this slime fungus freaking become sentient?!"

Even though it was in the game, because the experience was too realistic, Falling Feather still broke out in a cold sweat.

The giant maw that had previously protruded from the ground was now gone, and the smooth ground was left with a large sunken crater.

Falling Feather couldn’t help but feel a subtle sinking in his heart, unsure of how his teammates were doing.

"Yi wu..." (Something’s... not right.)

Hearing the voice at his side, Falling Feather quickly asked.

"Did you find something?"

"...Yi wu!" (...It has its sights on us; we’d better get out of here quickly!)

Falling Feather was taken aback by these words.

It has its sights on us...

Wasn’t that obvious after such a long fight?

Perhaps Xiaoyu’s expression was too subtle, and he failed to grasp the profound implications within those words.

And just then, something unexpected suddenly happened!

The tail flame of the engine began to flicker wildly, like a candle snuffed out by the wind, and the ascending plane lost its power at once.

Falling Feather’s face went completely pale, the situation was exactly like a jet plane losing its engine fire in the stratosphere.

But here, less than a thousand meters from the ground, how could that be possible—

Wait a second, the spores that suck away oxygen!

Falling Feather suddenly realized and mentally exclaimed "Crap!" but the drone swarm behind him had already caught up.

Those rotor-powered drones couldn’t possibly catch up to a fixed-wing aircraft.

However, as his vehicle lost power and its speed steadily decreased, his seat turned nearly into a hanging target in mid-air.

As the densely packed drone swarm was about to catch up, and the engine failed to reignite, he had no choice but to grit his teeth, turn the nose of the plane, regain speed with the pull of gravity, and charge towards the roaring swarm.

"Die for me!!!"

As he faced the surging onslaught of drones, Falling Feather roared out loud, his index finger pulling the trigger all the way.

"Boom—!"

With a deafening roar, the machine gun spit out flames like a bayonet, piercing through the dark cloud of drones with merciless resolve.

Big chunks of drones were torn to pieces by the concentrated machine gunfire, and streaks of orange tracer fire carved a vacuum strip through the sea of onslaught drones!

However, there were just too many of them.

A single 20mm cannon was not enough to shoot down all the drones rushing towards him.

Soon, several drones that slipped through the net hit his plane, then stuck onto its body like gum.

The weight of the Lingyun fighter suddenly increased manifold. More drones clung to it, almost covering the entire cockpit.

Having fired the last bullet in his machine gun, Falling Feather released the missiles under the wings, just before the wings were completely entangled, and braced for a crash-landing towards the direction of the nuclear crater.

That was the only possible place to land.

A nuclear explosion 200 years ago had cleared all obstacles in the entire area.

Just as he was about to land successfully, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a black shadow coming straight at him.

It was a swinging tentacle.

Just like the giant maw before, it drilled out of the soil, lying in wait for him to rush in.

Gripping the joystick tightly, he instinctively stomped the rudder hard.

The tentacle, coming head-on, narrowly missed the side of the cockpit canopy and slammed into the left forward-swept wing of the Lingyun fighter.

The one advantage of Goblin technology was fully evident in this moment—the stainless steel forward-swept wing, like a sharp razor, sliced the tentacle that emerged from the soil in two pieces.

The remaining half of the tentacle, like a bisected earthworm, twisted in agony on the ground as black liquid gushed from the severed end like a fountain, spraying all over the ground.

Yet, Falling Feather had no time to rejoice.

This gorgeous slicing, while severing one of the lair’s tentacles, also completely disrupted the balance of his vehicle, which flipped over and crashed down towards the center of the nuclear crater, breaking the beautifully made forward-swept wings during the tumble.

But thanks to this, the large pieces of the fungus attached to his vehicle were also crushed into bits during the roll, leaving debris all over the ground until the rolling chassis finally came to a halt.

At this point, what was left of the entire Lingyun fighter was nothing but a bare cockpit. The stainless steel body was battered and dented, barely a square inch of its outer shell remaining intact.

For any ordinary pilot, after this series of maneuvers, even leaving a complete corpse would be a medical miracle.

However, the pilot Falling Feather was far from an ordinary pilot, or even an ordinary human.

Just two seconds after his heart stopped beating, the pale red fungal mass adhered to his chest suddenly contracted inward twice.

About half a minute passed.

Falling Feather, who was unconscious, suddenly coughed violently twice, spit out a few mouthfuls of blood mixed with bits of flesh, and woke up from his coma.

"Yi wu!"

The sound of surprised joy reached his ears, and he knew it was Xiaoyu who had saved him once again.

"Thank you..."

"Yi wu!" (I’m glad you’re alright.)

Forcing a faint smile on his face, Falling Feather took a deep breath and unbuckled the safety belt pressing against his chest.

Looking at the reflection of his face on the cockpit glass, now handsome only by half, he reached out his index finger to touch the pale red fungus and could not help but chuckle bitterly.

This buff that sped up his recovery was indeed useful, the only downside being that he was becoming less and less human-like.

But it wasn’t exactly unsightly, either.

Maybe it was due to getting used to it, at first he wasn’t very comfortable with Xiaoyu’s physical form, but as time went by, he felt it was actually quite fine, and even thought it looked quite beautiful at times.

Part of it might have been that his own aesthetics were subtly changing, and another part could be due to Xiaoyu adapting towards human beauty standards.

As a wholly different life form, in a way, it was like the bionic people and AIs living in the Alliance—it was slowly becoming assimilated by the society of the Alliance.

Just like the little cats and dogs that had come to live near human settlements more than ten thousand years ago.

Cooperation was always easier than conflict when it came to surviving in this dangerous universe.

But that might be a matter for the far future...

Xiaoyu was a one-of-a-kind exception among the millions of evolutionary paths of mutated slime fungus. Right now, the monster entrenched in the Qingquan City Center was no tame cat or dog.

It was a blood-sucking, tooth-gnashing wolf!

The plane’s cockpit was stuck. Falling Feather tried opening the canopy, found it immovable, then took out an emergency hammer from the toolbox under the ejector seat, and hammered furiously at the glass.

After shattering the glass, he grabbed a submachine gun, crawled out of the cockpit, and chambered a round.

This was near the center of the nuclear crater.

All around was a bare wasteland, and the raised edges of the crater could be seen in the distance.

As he was trying to make contact with headquarters using the airplane’s onboard radio, the ground suddenly shook violently again.

Falling Feather’s face changed slightly.

Just as he thought the lair was going to repeat its trick and swallow him as well, a cloud of dust kicked up on an open space about twenty meters away from him.

A giant, Venus-flytrap-like maw burst through the loose soil like a breaching whale.

Falling Feather’s initial reaction was the creature had misjudged his location and missed its bite. He was about to fire the gun in his hands, but he quickly realized something was wrong with the creature.

The giant maw let out a painful, long moan, its body twisted within the rising billows of dust, as if it were dry heaving, continuously spewing sand and pebbles outward.

Witnessing this scene, Falling Feather stood dumbfounded.

"What the hell?! What’s going on!?"

Is this...

Food poisoning?

It seemed that way at the moment, as the immense maw continued to vomit ceaselessly, as though it was trying to spew all of the subterranean sand to the surface.

Seeing the gushing debris and clods of earth hurtling towards him, Falling Feather hastily dodged backward to avoid them.

And just then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a figure flying out from the billowing dust and crashing heavily onto the open space about 5 meters away from him.

The person was clutching a short axe smeared with black blood, lying spread-eagled.

After a while, there was a smack as something else dropped beside him, upon closer inspection it appeared to be a severed hand.

Falling Feather hurried over, lifted the helmet off the person, and saw it was Old White.

Seeing Falling Feather’s face, Old White gave an embarrassed smile and said sheepishly,

"I know it’s a bit embarrassing, bro, don’t laugh at me... cough, how did you get down here?"

And with your face looking like that.

Falling Feather smiled bitterly.

"Don’t even mention it... This lair’s cheats never stop coming, and they’re all different. I’ve been flying planes for so many years, but this is the first time I’ve gone up against something so outrageous."

"Pretty outrageous, indeed..."

Getting up from the ground, Old White reached out to wipe the black blood off his face, but as his hand was also covered in the black goo, he only made his face dirtier.

Realizing this was futile, he gave up trying to clean his face and instead went to pick up the severed hand of the Gale Brothers.

This guy had the worst luck.

As soon as the giant maw shut, he was impaled from below by a tentacle, leaving only this indigestible mechanical hand behind.

Ever since the Burning Corps was established, they had been involved in countless operations, big and small.

Such severe casualties were likely a first-time occurrence.

Watching the highest-leveled, strongest Strength Type creatures in the entire server suffer in such distress, Falling Feather couldn’t help but swallow hard.

"What exactly did you encounter?"

"Just like you saw, swallowed by that thing." Looking toward that twisting huge mouth, Old White grinned with his broken lips, "This guy probably wanted to crack our skulls open to see what was inside, so he took us deep underground... but this beast clearly underestimated us."

Honestly, they had indeed been caught off guard, but that was all it was.

Right after Wild Wind was taken down in an instant, the others quickly reacted, focusing their attention on the ground beneath their feet and their surroundings, while opening fire with their rifles into that closing mouth.

After realizing that regular rifle bullets could not penetrate the lair’s mouth, Fang Chang was the first to pull out the Dawn Longbow and fired a charged Explosive Arrow overhead.

The arrow that detonated after embedding in the fungal mass caused a decent amount of destruction, and the lair that had swallowed them soon showed symptoms of indigestion, as the walls of its digestive sac violently trembled.

Everyone’s morale was immediately boosted, and the others also started attacking the crimson fungal masses around them with their various devices and weapons.

The most ruthless, without a doubt, was Night Ten.

Previously, the guy had been transformed into a mechanical body by the academy researchers, and the lair’s digestive fluids had little effect on him; his defensive powers were even more out of this world.

A tentacle poked at his crotch, and despite the force that could pierce through a person, aside from sending him flying, it did not do much harm.

Following that, Night Ten, quick to react, grabbed the tentacle and activated the electrodes installed by a certain researcher on his body, delivering electrotherapy directly to the lair’s digestive system.

The electricity discharged in an instant nearly drained his exoskeleton’s batteries, but the effect was astonishing.

After taking a hundred thousand volts, the lair’s cavity walls spasmed as if it had taken a laxative; soon, the debris and sand under everyone’s feet began to spurt upward.

This act was clearly a sign of defeat.

The lair had given up on assimilating them and was trying to expel them from its body.

While the two were talking, Fang Chang was also ejected from the huge mouth, landing near them.

"Holy shit, Fang Chang? You made it out too?"

Old White’s face registered surprise as he watched Fang Chang curse and struggle to rise from the ground. Fang Chang had just fired an arrow before getting targeted by a flurry of tentacles, and Old White thought he was dead.

"That was a close call..."

Removing his cracked helmet, Fang Chang looked annoyedly at the twisting giant mouth.

He had nearly been boxed in upon landing; after playing Game for so long, this was his first time being in such a sorry state.

Old White walked over to his side, helped him up, and asked.

"What about Night Ten?"

Recalling the scene he saw before he was spewed out, Fang Chang paused for a moment before responding.

"He’s probably still holding onto that tentacle... but I guess he’s running out of power by now."

Right then, Fang Chang suddenly noticed Falling Feather next to Old White and fixed his gaze on his half face corroded by the mucor, momentarily taken aback.

"Falling Feather..."

Falling Feather coughed lightly.

"Don’t ask, I was shot down. As for my face... it turned out like this after Xiaoyu healed me."

But Fang Chang didn’t care. In two steps, he reached him, delighted. He extended his hands and grasped his shoulders, "I’m not asking about that—I can tell what happened. How are you feeling now?"

Feeling somewhat awkward under the intense gaze, Falling Feather took a half step back, nervous.

"I... I’m okay, why?"

That look was all too familiar.

Just like when Mosquito invited him to test drive Goblin Technology’s new fighter plane!

Noticing Falling Feather’s unease, Fang Chang cleared his throat and, with a serious expression, said.

"Night Ten probably won’t last much longer... and I’ve realized that conventional weapons can’t kill that thing."

"Can’t kill it as in..."

"It means just what it sounds like! It has become one with this land, its body spread beneath the entire city center. To think about it differently, our weapons couldn’t possibly be stronger than those of the Post-War Reconstruction Committee... So, if the data compiled by Ah Guang is a mess, then the idea of using dynamite to destroy the lair from the beginning was unworkable—it’s not on one particular spot of land, but everywhere!"

Perhaps this was why the Reconstruction Committee’s Exploration Army had failed to pinpoint the lair’s exact location.

Every coordinate they discovered was correct, but they only found parts of it.

Whenever they destroyed a part, it would lie dormant for a while, only to return soon after with memories and experiences from its previous battles with them.

By the same token.

Falling Feather watched him in disbelief.

"How could this be? I thought you had..."

"Managed to inflict damage, right?" guessed Fang Chang, eyeing him intently as he continued seriously, "It’s useless. Those damages are like flea bites on it. Even if we give it our all, at best we can make it lurk underground for two or three years, like the Post-War Reconstruction Committee did... Now there’s only one last way to finish it for good."

Falling Feather knew what that method was, the Plan B provided by the Manager—

In the event that they found the lair and discovered it could not be destroyed, he, who carried Xiaoyu’s essence, would eat it.

However, there was a premise to this plan: they first had to get close to the lair.

Sensing the confusion in Falling Feather’s eyes, Fang Chang cast a glance at the huge mouth vomiting stones.

"We’re right above the lair, and it’s right beneath our feet."

"There lies the nearest entrance!"