Chapter 114: Accelerated Time |
Neither Bai Mu nor Misty Rain expected a man dressed in black, holding a gun, to be standing inside their apartment.
His appearance came without a single warning. Before opening the door, Bai Mu hadn't even sensed another presence behind it. It was as if this guy had suddenly spawned the exact moment the door swung open.
Faced with this sudden crisis, Bai Mu reacted on pure survival instinct honed over years of experience. He moved faster than the man in black. While this guy was still reciting his villainous lines, Bai Mu pulled a revolver from his inventory and fired first.
Bang!
The bullet was fired almost at the exact moment he finished his sentence.
A bloody blossom exploded from the center of the man's forehead. At such close range, it was impossible for Bai Mu to miss. There were only about five meters between them, less than seven paces.
As everyone knows, outside of seven paces, a gun is fast. Inside of seven paces, a gun is both fast and incredibly accurate.
When both sides were armed, it came down to a quick-draw contest. Just like a Wild West duel, being a single millisecond slower meant the difference between life and death.
Yet this guy had actually wasted time reciting a monologue. The result was obvious.
If Bai Mu had been doing this job, he definitely wouldn't have spoken before shooting. A professional killer would turn the target into a corpse first, light a cigarette, stare coldly at the body, and declare, "Traitors to the organization have only one path: death."
But this man had committed the most basic mistake. Then again, he couldn't really be called a professional killer—he was nothing more than a fictional character from an anime Script.
For characters designed to perform for an audience, realism was secondary. Keeping the audience entertained was always the top priority.
In short, the man in black died before he could even finish his lines.
In Misty Rain's eyes, everything happened in a flash. First, she saw a man pointing a gun at her head when the door opened, blabbering some nonsense. Then, with a loud bang, the man took a bullet to the forehead and collapsed onto the ground.
"Brother, aren't you a little too decisive?" Misty Rain asked, staring at the corpse on the floor with lingering fear.
"The first time our attention level rose, the police dogs disappeared from the force. So, a second increase was bound to trigger something else. I actually guessed this might happen, so I was somewhat prepared for it," Bai Mu explained. "Let's go inside first. Good thing there are no cameras in the hallway. We need to dispose of the body, or our cover will be blown."
Misty Rain truly admired Bai Mu. Compared to the man in black, Bai Mu was a real professional killer.
The two quickly entered the apartment and locked the door behind them. Although the gunshot was loud in the dead of night, this building had a history of deaths, so there weren't many actual residents. No neighbors came knocking in the middle of the night to investigate the noise.
Using paper and cloth, they carefully cleaned up the blood. Since it was a clean headshot, the corpse hadn't bled excessively. After a quick cleanup, they dragged the body into the living room and searched it for belongings.
At the same time, Bai Mu picked up his Camcorder and snapped photos of the man in black to gather "news."
Aside from the handgun and bullets, they found car keys and a blister pack of pills in the man's pockets.
[Name: APTX4869]
[Type: Consumable]
[Quality: Rare]
[Effect: Upon consumption, there is a 50% chance of entering a poisoned state, and a 50% chance to shrink the user's body into an elementary school student.]
[Note: The Black Organization has always used APTX4869 as a deadly poison, unaware that this substance cannot kill anyone at all. It simply creates one elementary school student after another.]
"Is this the same kind of pill Conan took?" Bai Mu wondered, holding the blister pack that looked like ordinary cold medicine.
God knows how it worked. Making an adult regress into a child completely defied the law of conservation of mass. There was a difference of dozens of kilograms in weight between an elementary school student and a full-grown adult. If something this absurd existed in the real world, the level of technological advancement behind it would be terrifying.
But Beika Town cared for neither science nor logic. Since there was a narrative need for something that could shrink an adult into a child, APTX4869 simply came into existence.
"Do you recognize this guy?" Bai Mu crouched down, pointing the lens at the man's face.
The man had no ID or phone on him, making it impossible to uncover his true identity.
Misty Rain shook her head. "I'm not really into this stuff. That anime was a kids' show, made for children. But considering how easily he was killed, he was probably just a minor extra."
"If he were a named villain from the anime, I bet he would have narrative rules protecting him, just like Conan and the others," Bai Mu observed.
"Exactly," Bai Mu agreed. "It would be too boring if the main antagonist got one-shot by a gun. It's highly likely he was just a temporary character invented specifically to deal with us."
"So this really is the result of our attention level rising?" Misty Rain asked. "He just called us traitors, but I definitely don't remember our characters having that kind of backstory..."
"Our character settings must have been modified," Bai Mu concluded.
"What do you mean?" Misty Rain furrowed her brows in confusion. "The character settings provided by the Script can be changed?"
"In this Script, aside from the core elements, all the minor details can likely be altered," Bai Mu explained. "Because I used the police dog to solve the case before Conan last time, the setting was easily tweaked—just like casually changing a few words with a pen. Turning our characters from two extra Forensic Doctors into traitors of the Black Organization probably required no more effort than snapping a finger."
"After all, we aren't main characters like Conan or Mouri Kogoro."
"Extras really have no human rights!" Misty Rain complained.
"There's one more thing I need to tell you. The time has changed, too," Bai Mu said.
"Hasn't the time here always been shifting?" Misty Rain pointed out.
"I mean the actual flow of time," Bai Mu corrected. "My skill cooldown suddenly jumped forward by a massive chunk. Before we went to investigate the Hot Spring Inn tonight, it still had about 20 hours on its cooldown. Now, it only has two hours left."
"Doesn't that mean 18 hours have passed! Oh, wait, if the ratio is 10 to 1, that's 180 hours. 180 divided by 24..." Misty Rain counted on her fingers, doing the math. "That's about seven and a half days?"
"What's going on now?" Misty Rain felt a headache coming on. "Wasn't the flow of time always extremely slow before? Why is time suddenly accelerating?"
"Probably because 'uncovering a traitor' takes time," Bai Mu reasoned.
"Are you saying... this accelerated period of time was also caused by the modified settings?" Misty Rain pondered for a moment, beginning to understand his logic.
"Exactly." Bai Mu nodded. "Last time, the police dog wasn't directly connected to us, so the shift in time didn't affect us. But this time, since we've been labeled as traitors, we're forced to experience the time acceleration firsthand."