Chapter 153
[Warning! Warning! Hunger has already set in! The Cannibal invasion is 100% guaranteed—please take cover immediately!]
Normally, everyone would have banded together to fight off the cannibals. But with red-name players among them, suspicion ran high. Each group merely added the Captain to their communicator, then left the mess hall in pairs and threes. Only a handful remained behind.
The Captain had earned that trust through his skill: [Captain: As the captain, you cannot be assassinated during a trial. As long as you have companions by your side, no red-name or green-name player can kill you. You can only win the calamity by helping the good faction prevail. This is a passive skill that activates automatically. This class cannot be upgraded.]
That skill made him the sturdiest existence in the good faction. The good players could safely hand him information, and what he provided in return was essentially never tainted.
Lin Tu grabbed Guan Suixing and quickly left the mess hall with the rest of her team.
Back in the dormitory, after setting up items at the doorway, everyone received a message from the NPC in the final five minutes of the countdown—
[Cannibal Invasion Event Started]
[Duration: 1 hour (The cannibals' first appearance lasts 1 hour; each subsequent wave will increase by 1 hour.)]
[Cannibals will chase the crew members closest to them! Each time you are attacked by a cannibal, the survivor will gain an additional "negative status." This status is always related to insufficient food consumption and can stack continuously. The more severe your negative status, the more damage cannibals deal to you!]
[Map Update: The underground storage room is now open to you. During the "Cannibal Invasion Event," completing the decryption puzzles in the ship's eight major systems will open the storage room, granting each person 1-8 servings of reserve ingredients. (Distribution depends on the number of people in each faction who complete the tasks. For example, if seven decryptions are completed total—green completing four and red completing three—then each member of the green faction receives 4 servings, and each member of the red faction receives 3 servings.) Decryption will attract the cannibals' attention. Players who complete decryptions will also earn bonus experience points to raise their class level.]
[Note: Since cannibals are our common enemy, both good and bad players can deal damage to them.]
Instantly, the ship's alarm blared. The shrill, piercing siren made everyone's heart skip a beat.
Kou Lin used her skill [Camera Hack], saving Lin Tu from having to expend her own cameras. Her tablet split into dozens of small surveillance feeds. In one clearly exterior view of a snowfield, a cluster of black dots was rapidly approaching.
They didn't look like the typical cannibal—bodies smeared with white paint. Instead, they were a group of crew members in tailcoats. Their suits were perfectly respectable, and the leader even had an elegant floral pattern embroidered on his lapel. But the blood smeared around their mouths and the brown-stained collars and cuffs, worn and soaked through with gore, gave away their aggression.
Lin Tu noticed their weapons were strange: three-meter-long oxhide whips.
The Captain had already warned those with special classes to pull up the ladders and lock the doors, but that did nothing to slow the cannibals down.
Like seasoned sailors, they swarmed up onto the deck. Seeing the empty deck, some charged toward the forecastle, while others ran below.
This group of cannibals burst through a door to the first level and quickly found a few players hiding in the security room.
The security room sat just below the stairs and was cramped—the only hiding spot was under the bed. These three men and one woman had thought locking themselves in would turn the most dangerous spot into the safest one. They hadn't counted on the cannibals being intimately familiar with every room and fixture on the ship, already slamming against the security room door.
In the dormitory, Lin Tu and the others watched the monitor, hearts in their throats for those four.
Finally, the door broke open.
About three cannibals flooded into the security room, scanned left and right, found no one, and turned to leave.
Just then, the bed shifted.
Outside the monitor, everyone clearly saw the four people packed together under the bed—the space was far too tight. One man's leg stuck out. Afraid of being spotted, he secretly inched it back, but accidentally kicked the bed frame.
The already flimsy iron bed creaked. The cannibals turned and slowly walked toward the bed.
Even though they couldn't hear a thing, the silent image made everyone's hearts stall for a few seconds.
The next moment, a shield popped up from under the bed. The four scrambled to their feet, hands linked, and bolted for the door.
A cannibal, knocked aside by the shield, tumbled to the floor, staring at the sudden appearance of the four with fury and excitement.
Its companion, standing nearby and untouched, lashed out with a whip. The oxhide cracked hard against the shield—a sharp *crack*—and the shield shattered.
With the shield gone, the four stopped holding hands and surged out of the security room one after another. By the time the third cannibal drew its whip, each of them had their own escape trick. The woman must have used a skill, darting ahead quickly while throwing a "barrier wall" item behind her to block the cannibals' pursuit. One of the men had a sheet of iron armor wrap around his body. Another, with spider-sense-like reflexes, lunged backward and actually dodged a whip.
There was too much detail; the people watching the feeds couldn't take it all in.
Just then, the whips from the fallen cannibal reached them.
A cry of pain. The man in the rear failed to dodge and took a lash. Blood immediately soaked through his clothes. At the same time, his legs went weak and he nearly collapsed—the "Exhaustion" negative status!
His companion beside him grabbed him and dragged him away. The other two whipped out a pistol and a poison needle, firing at the nearest cannibal.
But two lashes later, both the bullet and the needle were batted away. Their attacks were effortlessly deflected. The two exchanged grim looks—they knew this was definitely not a genuine A-rank monster.
"—Nearly S-rank ability." Guan Suiyue, the more knowledgeable one at the monitor, said for them. "That girl's poison needle is an A-rank item, specialized in speed—it can hit even an A-rank monster cleanly. If it's blocked that easily, it can only be an S-rank monster."
"Run!" The two in front grew more frantic.
Luckily, the barrier wall the woman had set earlier activated. With a low hum, an invisible screen materialized between them and the cannibals.
If this had been any other time, the woman might have breathed a sigh of relief. But now, she was only worried whether her barrier wall would be shattered by these damn monsters in two whip strikes.
—"It's over!"
At that moment, everyone staring at the monitor heard Kou Lin gasp. They turned to see another batch of cannibals had already found the mess hall.
If they'd been A-rank monsters, everyone could have held the line through gritted teeth. But when the first player struck and realized these were definitely above A-rank, the mess hall's morale shattered instantly.
"Shit! I should have grinded a few more low-rank levels earlier! How are these monsters this strong?!"
Those outside the monitor couldn't hear what they were saying, but watching the cannibals flood into the mess hall and the chaos that erupted, they knew the situation was grim.
A few unlucky souls got lashed. While suffering from their negative statuses, a second whip meant more than just bleeding wounds. The people outside the monitor watched helplessly as one man's leg was snapped clean by a whip, the limb visibly twisted. If his companion hadn't grabbed him in time, another lash—with two negative statuses stacked on him—would have been unimaginably brutal.
"They're outside!"
Just as everyone was glued to the screens, Liu Sheng, crouched by the door, went pale and pressed a finger to his lips for silence.
A set of footsteps padded past. Kou Lin quickly pulled up the corridor surveillance outside the dormitory.
This hallway had too many dormitory doors on both sides. Breaking them down one by one would waste too much time, so this group of cannibals pressed their ears to the doors, sniffed carefully, checked the dust at the thresholds—they were seasoned pros, judging whether anyone was inside through every tiny detail.
The terrifying part? They seemed to read the situation perfectly.
Every door they chose to break down, no one could be sure if someone was inside—and yet, every single time, people came scrambling out in a panic.
The whole ship had turned into a battle royale.
Worst of all, they divided their labor cleanly. Part of the cannibals chased the fleeing players; the rest stayed in the corridor, systematically screening door after door.
Lin Tu and her group's dormitory sat near the back, but the cannibals were fast—and with most rooms empty, they'd likely reach them soon.
"The blade class seems to counter them..." Lin Tu suddenly said, while everyone else trembled in fear.
Everyone turned: "???"
Lin Tu was still staring at the mess hall.
A fierce battle was clearly underway there; the bolted-down tables and chairs had been knocked over in droves. Just as everyone thought the players might be routed, they looked closer and saw several cannibal corpses sprawled on the floor. Facing them stood Kang Lina and her group, faces cold and hard.
"Is that the Black Factory one?" Guan Suiyue asked.
Lin Tu nodded, pointing at the gun in Kang Lina's hand on the screen. "Yes. She fooled us—she's not a [Righteous Enforcer] at all. I just saw her use a skill to kill a cannibal. I suspect she's the [Sheriff]."
[Sheriff (Green): You have the right to kill anyone at any time. But if you kill a good person, you will die as well.]
"She seems to know we're watching. When I looked over just now, she was telling me to go do the tasks."
Lin Tu glanced at another feed and saw the cannibals had almost reached their dormitory door.
Lin Tu made the call on the spot: "Staying here is useless now. We have to move—right now!"