"Looping Flight": We Returned to the Second Before the Plane Crashed

The attack came very suddenly.

Aleksye's pupils suddenly contracted.

She subconsciously looked up to see behind the other person.

Itanu and Yansheng, equally startled, also looked over.

The Table Knife practically grazed past them.

Under the flickering lights, the familiar food cart slid out from behind the curtain as the plane rocked.

The plane tilted again, and the rusty food cart wobbled over, several pieces of tableware heading straight for them.

Not good!

Aleksye pulled Manya's arm upwards with his backhand, simultaneously grabbing her shoulder and using his shoulder to brace her body.

Manya's face, contorted with pain, froze abruptly the next second.

After being stabbed multiple times, one of the forks struck her right in the heart.

Aleksye crouched down, using the cover to lunge through the gap between the seats.

Yansheng reacted almost simultaneously.

He was already standing to the side and slightly behind Itanu, and when several knives and forks came flying at him, he grazed past their backs without hesitation and slid to the side of the aisle under a seat.

But Itanu stood frozen in place, his eyes filled with anger.

At the critical moment of life and death, he was suddenly bound by a powerful force.

*

Xu Xi gripped the edge of the porthole tightly, her body swaying violently with the jolts.

Fortunately, the seatbelt around his waist held him firmly in the seat.

He turned his head and found that the turbulence of the plane had no effect on the passengers who had undergone the strange changes.

Aside from decaying along with the fuselage, the passengers continued with their own activities, seemingly unaware of the changes happening to them.

When the clanging and jingling sound came from behind, he looked back.

Really.

The deadly food cart slid out from behind the curtain again, colliding back and forth in the middle of the aisle.

He immediately looked away and slid down.

In the previous shift, when the aircraft and passengers began to change shape, he also immediately moved away from his seat and stood in the aisle.

Unsurprisingly, he was closest to the food cart and ended up riddled with holes from a pile of cutlery.

Catching a few streaks of silver light out of the corner of her eye, Xu Xi couldn't help but shrink back, completely obscuring her figure from the chair back.

Immediately following were several crisp, short tinkling sounds.

Huh?

He was taken aback.

In the middle of the passageway not far away, a ball of golden light shone brightly.

*

Itanu's skin shimmered with a faint golden glow.

When the pieces of tableware touched this layer of light, they seemed to hit an invisible wall, making only a clinking sound before being mercilessly bounced away.

He used one of his Item in an emergency, a tool called "Hard as Iron".

As the name suggests, it can temporarily make his skin as hard as steel.

He was imprisoned by some unknown force, but fortunately, this Item of his was a perfect match.

The force that imprisoned Itanu did not last long.

As the force dissipated, the food cart finally overturned upon hitting a seat armrest, scattering the remaining cutlery across the floor in a chaotic mess.

At the same time, the turbulence on the plane subsided.

Gradually, the aircraft finally stabilized.

Itanu stood there, and after a while, the golden light on his skin quickly faded.

"Are you alright?" Yansheng observed for a moment, and after confirming that the attack had ended, he crawled out from under the seat.

But Itanu's gaze towards him carried an undisguised scrutiny.

Yansheng paused, then asked, "What's wrong?"

"You did this?"

Yansheng paused for a moment, then asked, "What?"

Itanu carefully observed the expression on the face of the man with a mole on the corner of his mouth.

Yansheng let him look him over.

Why don't you tell me what I did?

"... It's nothing." Itanu looked for a while, then finally looked away.

His gaze fell to the other side.

Yansheng narrowed his eyes, but didn't ask any further questions. He looked in the same direction as Iwao.

The plane's flight seemed to have returned to normal, and the overhead lights stabilized.

However, the once bright light had now turned dim and gloomy, large areas of the paint on the cabin walls had oxidized and peeled off, and the corpses of the passengers and the smell of rust in the air all told the story that this Dungeon had entered the next stage.

Not far from them, the player with dark brown skin lay silently in the middle of the passageway, his body covered in blood and pierced by several pieces of cutlery.

The Blonde Woman with a low ponytail crouched down, taking the pulse at the other person's neck.

Two breaths later, the Blonde Woman stood up and shook her head at them.

It's obvious the person is gone.

"What a pity," Yansheng said calmly.

As the only player among those present with the ability to tell time, he was clearly very valuable, yet he became the first victim.

Aleksye lowered his eyes, stood up calmly.

Da, da--

The three of them instinctively looked in the direction of the sound.

Then a young man with black hair and black eyes walked towards them unhurriedly.

Unlike them, the other party remained seated and motionless throughout the entire ordeal.

The young man stopped three steps away from them. His gaze paused for a moment as it passed over the corpse, then naturally moved away.

Itanu's eyes flickered slightly, and his lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but in the end he remained silent.

"... If my perception is correct, from the moment we entered this Dungeon to the moment the plane started to shake, there was about half an hour, and the shaking lasted for about ten minutes," Aleksye suddenly said.

"This is the data; your perception is correct," Yansheng affirmed.

Not only was Aleksye silently calculating the time, but he was doing it too.

Itanu glanced at someone quickly and discreetly, then spoke up, "I have an idea."

His words drew the attention of the others.

"... For the previous half hour, we might have been in the moments before the plane crashed," Itanu added, forcing a smile despite someone's gaze. "In other words, we were frozen in that moment."

"Your idea confirms my suspicion," Aleksye continued, "I suspect the first half hour was specifically Dungeon for us to find a way out, while the last ten minutes of turbulence were the moment the plane crashed."

The plane's flight status was frozen in the second before the crash, and this frozen state lasted only half an hour. After half an hour, the plane crashed within ten minutes.

Within seconds, Yansheng understood what the two meant and couldn't help but ask, "So, the current situation is... a reset? Or a loop?"

"A loop would be a bit more fitting," Aleksye said. "We've gone back to the second before the plane crashed."