Chapter 652: Mirror Maze |
After dealing with the player in front of her, the Painting Woman conjured a piece of paper, quickly folded it into a frog, wrapped the button signal device inside, placed it on the ground, and let it hop back and forth down the hallway.
After crouching on the ground watching the frog hop for a while, she used paper to roll up the player's corpse, stuffed it into a cabinet in the adjacent room, then turned and pulled open another door.
*
Xu Huo and the SDF scouting team were trapped on the third floor.
There was a mirror maze on the third floor.
This wasn't part of the building's original layout, but when they came up, mirrors were everywhere in the hallway. They tried to bypass the third floor, but a massive mirror blocked the stairwell, making passage impossible.
"Blowing up the stairs won't work either." They had tried the corridor, ceiling, and walls.
"Looks like they're trying to trap us on the third floor," Captain Wang said, his tone hostile. "Pretty arrogant of them!"
"When will the second batch of SDF players enter?" Xu Huo asked at that moment.
Xu Huo nodded. The players from Country Y hiding in this building probably weren't too numerous, but they might have high-grade items, which was why he had sent the Painting Woman up first while he stayed below.
Following behind the SDF players also served to buy time—first, to distract the enemy players and create an opportunity for the Painting Woman, and second, to get a read on this batch of players' methods.
"Since we can't blast through the stairwell, we might as well enter the third floor first," one team member suggested. "We're just wasting time here anyway. Taking out one enemy at a time counts."
The other team members agreed.
No one asked Xu Huo's opinion. After the Captain nodded, more than a dozen people filed into the third floor.
The moment they stepped in, a mirror as tall as the floor appeared before them. It seemed to capture their reflections, then rapidly flipped left and right as lights flickered on the sides.
Learning from their earlier lesson, the SDF players didn't fire blindly this time. Captain Wang threw a sticky rubber pad ahead. The moment it stuck to the mirror, a crisp "crack" rang out. The large mirror shattered on cue, shards scattering across the floor.
Captain Wang shielded his chest, and only after confirming no one was hiding behind the mirror did he step through the frame.
Xu Huo glanced down at the mirror shards on the floor, then slowed his pace, falling behind the group.
Behind the large mirror was a corridor made of rectangular mirrored panels. Every surface was covered in mirrors. The moment someone stepped inside, their own reflection surrounded them on all sides—front, back, left, and right. The visual chaos made it impossible to tell where they actually were.
"No path ahead," Captain Wang said, stopping to shine a flashlight around. "This section seems sealed off."
"Just pick one at random."
He did the same as before, throwing another sticky rubber pad at the mirror in front of him. But this time, the mirror didn't crack when the rubber stuck to it.
"What's going on?" Captain Wang hesitated, then stepped forward to retrieve his item. But the moment his hand touched the rubber, the entire mirror rippled like water and sucked him in!
"Captain!" The team members behind him lunged to grab him, but two of them were dragged in together.
After the two figures vanished, the mirror returned to normal.
"What the hell!" The other team members immediately fired at the mirror's edges, but the bullets ricocheted wildly inside this enclosed mirrored space, wounding two of their own!
"Stop shooting! Can't you see this is a Special Item?" Xu Huo cut them off. "Each of our reflections is isolated on a separate mirror."
The light was dim here, and even with evolved vision, it was nearly impossible to track which mirror had gained or lost a person in this sea of reflections. In fact, as Xu Huo said, among nearly a hundred mirrors, only one showed the reflection of just one of them.
"So one mirror corresponds to one person?" A shorter player asked in confusion, then used his own destruction item, but still couldn't break the mirror where Captain Wang had vanished. Another player touched the mirror directly but wasn't sucked in like the Captain had.
At this moment, the mirror was a solid wall—impossible to break or open no matter how they hammered it.
"Captain! Captain!" The team members called out a few more times, but there was no response from behind the mirror. The two who had gone in had vanished without a trace.
"We're trapped," the shorter player said. "If each mirror corresponds to one of us, we won't find a way out unless we split up. We'll just be stuck here."
But everyone knew how risky splitting up was.
"What are you doing?" After a moment of silence, the shorter player suddenly turned to look at Xu Huo, who was continuously throwing a marble at a mirror.
"I'm testing whether other things can pass through the mirror," Xu Huo replied without stopping. The marble bounced back into his hand.
The others didn't immediately dismiss him. The shorter player said, "Didn't we just try that with bullets?"
"It doesn't hurt to try," Xu Huo said. "Even though the mirrors are splitting us up, this is still just one floor. Even if the space is divided, it won't actually get bigger."
Even if they created a separate path for each person whose reflection appeared on a mirror, the enemy probably didn't have that many people. That meant their separation couldn't be more than a few mirrors apart.
When Captain Wang was swallowed by the mirror, he had also dragged someone in with him, which showed the mirror wasn't that strict about personnel allocation.
Raising the flashlight, Xu Huo stood in the middle of the corridor and gestured for the shorter player to stand in front of the mirror that only showed his reflection.
"You want us to test them one by one?" The shorter player frowned in disapproval. "I think we'd better not split up, or we'll run into danger."
As long as they stayed here, they were buying time against the enemy players.
"How will you know if there's a way out without trying?" Xu Huo said. "Even if you don't want to make a move, you should at least consider Captain Wang's safety. Besides, I think our luck can't be that bad—there probably isn't a second sealed space like this."
"I'll try it." A burly player pushed through the others and stepped forward. "But the Captain took someone in with him earlier, so we can try the same."
"I'll go with you." Another person stepped up.
The two switched to a different mirror. When the burly player touched the surface, the mirror rippled just as before. After extending one hand and one foot through, he turned back to nod at the other players behind him—only to see Xu Huo suddenly slam into them all, knocking everyone over!
Several players were sent tumbling in a heap, bodies piled on top of each other. Without the flashlight to guide them, they couldn't tell if they had passed through the mirror or not. In the chaos, they only saw a few fist-sized patches of light floating and flying toward them from ahead!
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