Chapter 1 Team Wipe

[Team Member: Atobe-sama, Deceased.]

[Team Member: Hard-to-Name, Deceased.]

The system notification rang in his ears, and Wang Tanzhi quickly opened the game menu to check. Sure enough, the words "Deceased" were displayed next to the two names. After a moment's thought, Xiao Tan spoke, "Brothers, could they have died in the underground laboratory of this building?"

"Oh? What makes you say that?" Pan Feng continued forward without turning his head. Judging from his tone, he didn't really care about the two's life or death, it was as if... whether those two lived or died, it wouldn't have much impact on his completion of the level. Of course, with the combined strength of him and Hua Xiong, he was indeed qualified to be confident.

"Think about it. One of them was level fourteen, and the other was level twelve. They're stronger than me, right? Even I'm not afraid of the Blood Wolf Zombies on the street, so they couldn't have died at the hands of those monsters. But if they also came to this Aerobics Building and saw the floor plan, and went to the underground laboratory..." He paused, then continued, "We haven't cleared that place yet, so there might be danger there, maybe even a Boss. If they encountered a Zombie Werewolf..."

"Hmm... makes sense," Hua Xiong said, but judging from his tone, he seemed to have already thought of this. Saying "makes sense" was just a perfunctory response to Xiao Tan, "However, since they're already dead, there's nothing we can do by turning back now. Besides, we're already very close to the top floor. Let's just clear our way to the top first, and then..."

"How about this?" Xiao Tan interrupted him, "Brothers, you continue towards the top floor, and I'll go back to the ground floor alone." As he spoke, he took the baseball bat out of his knapsack (because there had been no room for him to intervene in the battle, Xiao Tan had even put away his weapon), "The remaining player is my friend. He might not have come to the building yet, but I think he will definitely come. I'll go to the ground floor to wait for him, so I can tell him not to go underground, and to come and meet up with you first before acting."

Pan Feng and Hua Xiong stopped and turned back to look at him, exchanging glances. Hua Xiong shrugged and replied, "Alright, then little brother, be careful yourself. We'll go ahead."

Xiao Tan responded and turned around to return the way he came. After turning into a corridor, he rushed into the fire escape. At this moment, he didn't know that Feng Bujue was already in the underground laboratory, nor did he know that his judgment on the location of Atobe-sama and Xiaoming's deaths was wrong. He was simply acting based on his own deductions.

After he had gone far away, Pan Feng suddenly spoke in a very serious tone, "For a long time before those two players died, they were in the same coordinates, and that place is quite far from this building."

Hua Xiong replied, "Ah, I noticed it too. There wouldn't be a small Boss in that kind of place. Before dark, there would only be a few stray Blood Wolf Zombies wandering around the city. And... their deaths were only a few seconds apart, hehe... unless they jumped off a building together, otherwise..."

"So it really was a 'Derivate' who did it..." Pan Feng pondered, "They're already attacking the players so quickly... we should speed up our actions too, we have to prevent the other two from coming into contact with the Derivate."

"It's good that that little brother left, we can go all out now. Anyway, the way back is relatively safe, the monsters have basically been cleared, he should be fine for a short time," Hua Xiong continued, "The situation of that player named 'Feng Bujue' isn't good. Although his Survival Value is still at 73%, the problem is that he's already been infected. Players will be judged as dead when they reach the mutation stage, we better get things done before that happens." He took a deep breath, "There are only four players in total who were put into this script. Forget about the two who died, but if three or even all of them die before we complete the level, our work would be too much of a failure."

Pan Feng nodded, "Yes... you're right, we have to hurry and 'kill' Ashford. As long as we enter 'that' storyline, we can complete the level quickly. In any case... let's send the players out of the script first, then we can concentrate on dealing with the 'Derivate'."

…………

Feng Bujue was walking through the corridors of the research institute with the Winchester in hand. The lighting here was working normally, and there weren't too many zombies. Apart from the group encountered outside the elevator doors, the frequency of encountering monsters at other times was similar to that on the ground. He would only encounter one or two monsters at most while passing through three or five corridors.

The shotgun in Feng Bujue's hand was very useful in this narrow corridor. He only needed to wait for the monster to get a little closer before firing, and he didn't need to be very accurate to resolve the battle. Anyway, as long as he hit their hands or feet, they would directly lose a limb, flip over, and fall to the ground. If he hit their torso, they would either fly out or be torn apart on the spot.

He searched a considerable area, and most of the electronic doors could be opened. Many rooms only had a few rows of iron racks, and the racks were filled with cardboard boxes containing paper documents and file bags. Feng Bujue certainly looked at some documents, but the contents were basically meaningless. Many of them were identical experimental reports, and the key content of the documents had been blacked out.

Some rooms were equipped with large computers, with walls and desks full of monitors and inexplicable operating rods and buttons. Without exception, these devices were all damaged, and he couldn't even turn them on. These kinds of rooms were worry-free, he could just open the door, take a look, and leave.

After several twists and turns, Feng Bujue finally found an electronic door with a high level of security. This door required both iris and fingerprint scanning to open, and the game was also very considerate in arranging a zombie wearing a white coat a few meters away from this door...

Feng Bujue shot the zombie in the waist, and the monster was knocked to the ground, its intestines spurting out at that moment. Feng Bujue took out the baseball bat from his knapsack and went over to smash the bones in the zombie's arms and knees. After he was done, he switched to the kitchen knife, pressed the zombie's face down, cut off its head, and cut off one of its palms. He also searched the zombie's clothes and pants to make sure there was nothing in the pockets before he was done.

After the scan was completed, the electronic door opened. Feng Bujue casually threw the corpse's head and hand into the distance and stepped into the door.

This was obviously a room related to the plot. On the wall facing the door, there was a huge metal gate, which looked exactly like the kind of gate in a bank vault. On the left wall, there was a row of glass cylinders, one meter high and about thirty centimeters in diameter. They should have been filled with liquid, but now the glass shells had been broken, and almost all of the contents had flowed onto the ground. It was a light green, translucent liquid, and at this moment, a large pool of green stains remained on the floor in that area.

The computers in the room were also out of order, the screens were black, and they couldn't be turned on. Next to an operating table, there were two corpses wearing white coats. Feng Bujue approached vigilantly and observed them to confirm that these two were just ordinary corpses and not lurking zombies.

Both of the deceased were male. One looked over fifty years old, balding, and wearing glasses, and the other had gray-white hair and a small mustache, a few years older. The balding one had been shot in the head, and the mustached one had a gunshot wound each in his chest and abdomen. It seemed that they had not been dragged after their deaths, and the position and posture of the corpses indicated this.

Feng Bujue reconstructed the situation of the shooting in his mind... The murderer should have been someone familiar to them. He entered the laboratory through the electronic door and suddenly pulled out a gun. At a very close range, he pulled the trigger at the unsuspecting balding man, and the bullet entered his head, killing him instantly. This balding man was originally sitting behind the operating table, and after his death, his body slid off the chair and fell to the ground.

At the same time as the gunshot, the mustached man, who was a few steps away from the operating table, happened to be facing away from the door. He turned around in shock when he heard the gunshot, but unfortunately, the murderer didn't give him any chance to react, and immediately fired two shots to kill him. When the mustached man fell down, his body leaned forward, and he grabbed the edge of the operating table with his hand before he died, cushioning the fall slightly, and then falling to the side.

Looking at the posture, blood stains, and expressions of the corpses, Feng Bujue made the above judgment. As a mystery novelist, he should be familiar with the thinking process of inferring the course of events from a crime scene. He had deduced similar plots in his mind countless times, and sometimes he would even do related experiments in order to write some "elaborately arranged" locked-room murders. It sounded quite troublesome, but after all, the mechanisms were racked up with brains to create, so it would be meaningless if they were proven to have low feasibility in reality.

"Heh..." Feng Bujue looked at the two corpses and laughed at that moment, "To not have been infected even like this, these two must have been injected with serum..." He muttered to the dead bodies, "There are so many people in this base, only the core researchers who deal directly with the virus every day would have this treatment, right?"

He reconstructed the course of the incident in his mind, thinking: Regardless of his purpose, let's first assume that the murderer was also a researcher who had been injected with serum. He killed these two people, broke the container containing the virus stock solution, and then took a small amount of liquid out of this room, returned to the corridor and killed some more people, and used the virus stock solution to mutate the corpses... Then he escaped from the research institute and allowed the infection to spread to the ground, but for some reason, the people on the ground all turned into another kind of zombie.

Or... the murderer didn't escape from the research institute at all, but was subdued or even killed by the guards. The virus that produced the Blood Wolf Zombies outside the research institute was unrelated to the one here, and they were completely two different things.

At this point, Feng Bujue thought of another question, muttering in his mouth: "That guy at the door also had access to enter this room, he should also be one of the researchers, and should have been injected with serum, but why did he zombify..."

Feng Bujue needed more information and clues to figure out the situation here, so he went to check the two corpses again, and then found a key in the mustached man's pocket.

A few meters away, there was a desk. After Feng Bujue got the key, he walked over without thinking and opened the drawers of the desk one by one, and successively found two syringes, a pile of white paper, some stationery, a stapler, paper clips, sticky notes, and other sundries... Only the bottom drawer was locked. He tried the key he had just found, and it opened it as expected.