GAMMT - Chapter 6
Chapter 6: The Plan
Before long, more than twenty people arrived, riding Flying Palm Horses, the fastest mounts on the plains. They were slightly quicker than mechanical horses, but unlike their mechanical counterparts, they couldn't assist in combat, making them far less valuable. Still, they were fast.
Upon arrival, their eyes lit up at the sight of the mechanical horses, but then they saw Captain Adar and his men lying on the ground.
"What happened?"
"The target is gone."
"Strange?! Let's check it out!"
Nineteen bandits dismounted, guns in hand, and cautiously approached…
Underwater, Fu Chuan pressed the fingers of her left hand into her right palm, manipulating the floating hexagram seal and activating it with her thoughts.
"Kill them. Activate!"
Just as a bandit got close to Adar, he saw the guard's eyes snap open. Then, like a fish flopping out of water, Adar leaped up and launched a fierce Arcane attack at them.
"Damn it! They tricked us!"
"It's a trap! This bastard lied to me!"
They had agreed to kill the fat sheep and split the loot, but it turned into a double-cross. Damn it, this Adar had no honor!
At the same time, the other guards suddenly scrambled to their feet, coordinating with the mechanical horses to launch a surprise assault. The bandits were caught off guard, but they quickly raised their guns and began firing wildly…
A brutal firefight erupted between the two sides.
From the water, Fu Chuan could even see bodies rolling into the pool, blood spreading through the water. She watched its color bloom beneath the surface.
A corpse's face sank right before her eyes…
The bloody scene made her a little uncomfortable. She lowered her head and thought to herself: This world is truly cruel. What's an honest person like me supposed to do in the future? Mom, Dad, you were civil servants, you taught me to be kind to others since I was a child…
They forced me to do this.
In truth, ever since the day she had ordered Adar and his men to break those people's legs, Fu Chuan had appeared domineering and confident, but deep down, she had felt a growing unease. This was all part of the adaptation process.
She controlled her breathing and waited for the outcome.
However, after her three attributes had been enhanced, she discovered she could hold her breath underwater for a surprisingly long time. This was likely related to her constitution and agility. An average person's constitution and agility were in the single digits, but thanks to the Devouring Scroll and the S1 Gene Key, her agility was approaching triple digits.
So, she could hold out.
The final gunshot rang out.
Only two bandits were left, barely clinging to life. They exchanged a look, their faces filled with wild joy.
It was all theirs?
They started to gather the valuables, but just then, they heard a splash.
Before they could react, a figure leaped out of the nearby pool, brandishing a sharp blade.
Agility, strength, a sudden thrust!
Fu Chuan was acting purely on the instinct for self-preservation in a moment of crisis.
She was both cunning and swift, stabbing first and asking questions later…
"Ah!"
Someone screamed.
The two men were covered in wounds, far slower than usual. They had been lost in their moment of triumph, even putting away their guns to collect the loot. In the first exchange, one of them was stabbed through the heart. The other had a moment to react and grabbed his gun, but Fu Chuan's agility was higher than his, and she was faster. After killing the first man, she quickly snatched the gun from his hands.
She pulled the trigger.
Bang, bang, bang! Several shots fired in quick succession!
It was her first time handling a gun, and her aim was indeed terrible. She missed his head and his heart, but a wild spray of bullets happened to hit him in the neck…
Thud. The body fell to the ground.
A notification sounded in her mind.
"Killed Bandit Zhang San. Gained +4 experience."
"Killed Bandit Li Si. Gained +6 experience."
Fu Chuan felt utterly drained, covered in blood. She stood there for a moment, dazed, her heart feeling like it was about to explode. She didn't even notice that her experience bar had reached 10/100.
It was different, truly different. Compared to putting on a show and having Adar and his men break someone's limbs, killing someone herself felt completely different.
Fu Chuan, who came from a peaceful world, gasped for breath, not daring to look at the bodies before her. She swallowed hard, and soon, driven by a merchant's instinct, she began to loot the dead.
While searching the leader's body, the system suddenly prompted her.
"Guard Captain Adar dropped a skill book upon death. Please check."
"Guard Captain Adar dropped a bottle of low-grade mental power potion upon death. Please check."
A small, palm-sized blue bottle, exactly like one from a game.
The mental power potion was understandable; after all, he was an Arcanist and would have some in stock. But people didn't usually carry skill books around unless his own Arcane skill had dropped upon his death.
Fu Chuan took a look and saw it was a Level 1 Wind Arcane Missile Skill Book.
It really was Arcane Missile. Fu Chuan was in desperate need of this, so she immediately stored the skill book.
She collected all the copper coins, equipment, and treasures. The system kept sending notifications, but she didn't pay close attention. Her backpack was almost full, so she stuffed it into the lower abdominal pouch of a mechanical horse. After a frantic spree of looting, just as she was about to finish, she felt something was wrong. The nearby Flying Palm Horses were neighing, restlessly tugging at their reins, their heads constantly turning towards the north.
A few seconds later, the twenty-odd Flying Palm Horses suddenly bolted.
Fu Chuan: "?"
Each of those was worth over ten thousand copper coins! My money!
First, she felt a pang of regret, then suspicion. Suspicious, she took the leader's wrist device to check, but the sensor range on the dial showed nothing out of the ordinary.
Still, Fu Chuan felt a sense of panic. "Could there be other bandits nearby? These animals have always had keen senses."
She immediately climbed onto a mechanical horse and fled. She controlled the other mechanical horses to flee in different directions, scrambling their tracks, before having them circle back and follow her from a distance.
About ten minutes after Fu Chuan escaped, dark figures shot out from the south of the plain, moving with incredible speed. They closed in on the area of the corpses, and soon, the bodies vanished from the plain, skin and bone. Even the blood-soaked patches of grass were devoured, leaving behind only pale red, bald spots on the ground.
Half an hour later, Fu Chuan saw a mountain peak rising from the plain ahead and immediately rode towards it.
It really was like a game. If there was a mountain, there had to be a cave. Being cautious, she had a mechanical horse block the cave entrance with its metal body.
The inside of the cave was damp and cold, something an ordinary person would dislike, but given the circumstances, Fu Chuan entered. She retrieved the large backpack of treasures from the abdominal pouch of the mechanical horse she had been riding and took stock of her haul.
"I've got six or seven hundred thousand copper coins in total. Not to mention the skill book from Adar, the combat equipment from these guys, like the detectors, should sell for another one or two hundred thousand. But the real value is in the mechanical horses; they're worth almost a million copper coins."
She already had eight million copper coins, so adding this up, she now had assets worth nearly ten million. With that, she could get another S1 Gene Key to open the second branch of her 1st Sequence, and her attributes would skyrocket. How wonderful.
"And the first branch gives me three skill slots. Arcane Missile has already taken one. I'll have to spend this money to buy two other compatible skills. They need to match my current mental power root attribute and also complement Arcane Missile…"
Fu Chuan was first and foremost a hardcore gamer, and beyond that, a resource merchant who stood above other players. She was an expert in this area and quickly formulated a plan.
But first, she needed to equip herself.
"This is a breastplate… bracers… whose boots are these? They stink! Smells like feet! Ugh~~"
However, these smelly pieces of equipment provided boosts like +1, +2, or +3 to strength, constitution, and agility. She managed to assemble a twelve-piece set of equipment from the guards' armor. Fu Chuan cherished her life, so she endured the stench and put it all on. Afterward, she checked her stats.
Level: 1 (10/100)
Main Attributes:
Mental Power: 188 (Initial Mental Power 1+99)
Strength: 62 (Initial Strength 1+18)
Constitution: 80 (Initial Constitution 3+15)
Agility: 110 (Initial Agility 2+25)
Fu Chuan felt she could now take on Adar at his peak. After all, her mental power was definitely stronger than his.
"It's a shame Adar and his men died at the hands of those bandits. Otherwise, if I had gotten experience from them too, I probably would have leveled up to 2 directly. With skill points, I could have enhanced my skills."
After acquiring the Arcane Missile skill, Fu Chuan gave it a try. She silently recited the incantation and summoned the wind element… A ball of wind began to condense in her palm, spinning. Then she tried to launch it…
Bang!
Her aim was off, and it was too slow, nothing compared to Adar.
Still a rookie. There was indeed a gap between games and reality.
Fu Chuan didn't dare to practice too much, as she only had the one mental power potion dropped by Adar, which could restore 50 points of mental power.
This was tough.
After sorting everything out, Fu Chuan felt extremely hungry. She hadn't eaten much during the previous meal, and after all this exertion, she was cold and starving. She could only pull out a dry piece of beef jerky and start chewing. She had just taken a bite when suddenly!
The sound of metal clashing, along with snarls and scratching, came from outside. The mechanical horse's command device also flashed a red alert.
Fu Chuan shot to her feet, her body tensing. She quickly checked her wrist device. If the dozen or so red dots from the south had been bandits, then the hundred or so blue dots now approaching from the north—the direction she and the leader had come from—were something else entirely.
What the hell?
"It's Iron-Ridge Wasteland Wolves!"
In that instant, she seemed to understand why she hadn't seen any other beasts or birds on the plains along the way. It was because those creatures had sensed the Iron-Ridge Wasteland Wolves tailing them. Individually, these wolves weren't apex predators; a level one Arcanist could handle one. But the terrifying thing was that they were pack animals. A group of twenty or thirty was what Adar had said his team could handle, but if the numbers were greater…
There were too many!
Over a hundred of them. Even if you bundled Adar's team and that group of bandits together, it wouldn't be enough to feed them.
Fu Chuan's mood soured. She couldn't figure out how they had ended up being targeted by such a large pack of wasteland wolves.
"Wasteland wolves are greedy with huge appetites. When they're hungry, they'll even eat chunks of metal. That's where their metallic claws and teeth come from. Could they be after the mechanical horses? But the outer layer of the mechanical horses has been treated with non-metallic carbonization, so they shouldn't be detected…"
Fu Chuan was completely baffled. She even suspected that Adar had set this trap himself, but if so, would the wasteland wolves have spared him?
If it wasn't Adar, then who was pulling the strings from behind the scenes?
Did she have other enemies?
Fu Chuan didn't have time to think. The mechanical horse's body blocking the entrance was useless; these wasteland wolves could eat metal.
She used her device to check the wind direction inside the cave and found that there was a breeze from the opposite direction. There was an exit on the other side!
She immediately packed her things and ran in the opposite direction.
Water dripped inside the cave, and the ground was damp. Fu Chuan sprinted through the darkness, the searchlight on her helmet switched on. The light bobbed up and down as she ran. She saw a glimmer of light in the distance and was just about to breathe a sigh of relief.
Suddenly!
A dark shadow lunged out from behind a large rock to her side… In an instant, Fu Chuan was pounced upon.
The wasteland wolf was powerfully built, weighing over one hundred and fifty pounds. The force of its pounce was irresistible. She was thrown to the ground with a thud, her metal armor clanging against the floor. The foul, bloody stench of its heavy breath washed over her, mixed with thick saliva. Its sharp claws and teeth tore viciously at her neck.
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