So Many Losing Heroines

Bai Luoming didn't rush to accept Silver Wolf's request to play. First, he checked the delivery status of the order he had placed.

He had specifically chosen expedited delivery, but the tracking information on his terminal was covered in conspicuous red exclamation marks.

"Due to functional adjustments in the space station sector, your order is awaiting reallocation of delivery capacity. The estimated delivery time has been postponed."

It seemed the aftermath of the Antimatter Legion's attack was more troublesome than expected. A large number of delivery robots had been requisitioned to transport repair materials.

Bai Luoming looked around. There wasn't even anywhere to sit in his room.

Not wanting to disturb March 7th in her room again, Bai Luoming slipped over to the package receiving area at the rear of the train and dragged back a few sheets of cardboard.

He spread the cardboard along the wall, sat down cross-legged, and propped his terminal on his knees.

"The conditions are a bit rough," he muttered to himself, "but at least I've achieved housing freedom."

On the terminal screen, Great Love Wolf Venerable had sent another message.

"Join the party and lie back. I'll carry you."

Bai Luoming looked at the message and could almost picture Silver Wolf's smug expression as she sent it. He didn't expose her disguise, instead playing along as he replied.

"Roger! You do the carrying, and I'll stand on the sidelines shouting 666."

The next second, Silver Wolf sent him another game invitation.

It was a currently popular two-player cooperative puzzle game. Its mechanics were interesting: both players had to control characters with complementary abilities and work closely together to get through the cleverly designed levels.

Silver Wolf chose a support character who could generate "force-field bridges" and "energy shields." Bai Luoming scanned the character list and picked a melee character with the skills "Charge" and "Smash."

He had only one reason: the character's skill description said he could solve most obstacles with his fists. He thought the character's skills suited him well.

The first chapter was a tutorial level and wasn't very difficult. As soon as the game began, Silver Wolf demonstrated her terrifying gaming ability, instantly plotting the optimal puzzle-solving route.

She set up bridges while Bai Luoming charged ahead to clear obstacles. Despite it being their first time working together, their gameplay was as smooth as a speedrun video, and they cleared the level well ahead of the average time.

The results screen popped up, giving their teamwork a perfect "S+" rating.

[Your teamwork was decent. Keep it up.] Her message followed immediately.

Bai Luoming looked at the highlight reel, which showed his character charging around out front for almost the entire time, and replied politely.

[Got it, got it.]

The second chapter began, and the puzzles became much more complicated. Less than a minute in, they reached an area where both players had to stand on mechanisms at the same time to pass. But Bai Luoming's attention was drawn to a mushroom nearby that could be hit repeatedly to produce funny sound effects, and he left his position on his own.

Silver Wolf immediately marked the correct mechanism on the screen.

[Stop playing with that useless thing. Come here.]

Bai Luoming acted as if he hadn't seen the message and charged into the mushroom again. This time, instead of making a sound effect, the mushroom went "pop" and sprayed a cloud of spores from its cap. A vine sprang up on the nearby cliff, creating a shortcut that bypassed several complicated trap areas ahead.

The party channel fell silent for a moment.

Silver Wolf's character silently walked over to the base of the vine and placed a marker above it.

[...You're lucky. This way.]

Bai Luoming requested to start party voice chat. Silver Wolf connected, but her voice had been processed through a voice changer. As soon as she spoke, she sounded as if she'd been vaping for ten years, making it impossible to tell her real age or identity.

"Whoa, that electronic voice of yours," Bai Luoming teased her deliberately. "Is it because you've been hitting the RELX 5 too much?"

"It's called basic internet security awareness. Do you even get it?" Silver Wolf replied coldly, then urged him to get ready for the next level, giving him no chance to probe further.

The third chapter was an intense boss fight. The boss had a skill that required one player to draw its fire while the other took the opportunity to attack the weak point on its back.

Silver Wolf's instructions were clear and direct. "You tank the damage. I'll deal damage."

After tanking two attacks, Bai Luoming spotted several statues at the edge of the arena that could be broken with Smash. He didn't act rashly. Instead, in the gap after tanking the next wave of attacks, he quickly said over voice chat, "There are statues on the side. They might be part of the mechanics."

"Three seconds. Break one and come back. I'll shield you." Silver Wolf quickly laid out the plan.

Bai Luoming immediately changed direction, charged at the nearest statue, and shattered it with one punch. The instant it broke apart, a string of debuff notifications indicating "defense down" appeared over the boss.

"It worked!" he shouted, turning and charging back in front of the boss.

Silver Wolf's shield landed on him at just the right moment, perfectly nullifying the boss's counterattack. Immediately afterward, her character moved, pouring a smooth combo into the boss's defense-reduced weak point. Huge damage numbers popped up one after another.

With that one coordinated attack, they took out nearly half the boss's health.

"Change of plans." No emotion could be heard in Silver Wolf's electronic voice, but her instructions grew bolder. "I'll draw aggro. You clear the statues while I do, then we'll focus fire together."

"Got it."

In the battle that followed, the two seemed to be of one mind. Silver Wolf consistently used the most extreme maneuvers to draw all of the boss's attention, creating perfect conditions for Bai Luoming to deal damage; Bai Luoming, meanwhile, always returned to her side the moment he finished his task, sharing the damage with her or delivering a crucial blow.

At the final moment, the boss entered its enraged phase and unleashed a skill that required the two players to stand at opposite ends of the arena to avoid it.

Almost the instant the skill warning appeared, without either of them saying a word, their characters charged in opposite directions at the same time, like two sides of a mirror.

A massive beam of energy swept across the center of the arena, grazing the hems of their clothes but failing to deal the slightest damage.

The instant the skill ended, they charged from opposite ends of the arena at the same time, converging on the staggered boss and landing the final blow.

A large [Victory] appeared on the screen.

The communication channel was silent, with only the game's victory music playing.

A moment later, Silver Wolf spoke, inviting Bai Luoming to play another round. "...Again?"

Bai Luoming glanced at the time displayed on his terminal. It was already late. He stretched, his bones giving a series of soft pops.

"No, it's getting late. Tomorrow."

"...Mm." The synthesized reply was just one word.

Bai Luoming exited the game and saw that the other player's profile icon was still lit. After a moment's thought, he sent her a message.

[We played well today.]

It took a few seconds for her to reply.

[Eh, don't mention it, don't mention it.]

Bai Luoming smiled, switched off his terminal, and lay down on the cold cardboard. Outside the window, the river of stars flowed slowly past. That night's game had been much more enjoyable than he'd imagined.

Inside an unknown Stellaron Hunters base.

Silver Wolf leaned back in her gaming chair, staring at the results screen with the corners of her mouth raised high. Sure enough, playing games with him felt different. It was a shame he'd logged off after such a short session today.

Remembering how, before her rebirth, Bai Luoming would play games with her for days on end, playing to his heart's content, Silver Wolf couldn't help laughing aloud.

The poor Silver Wolf had yet to realize just how difficult it would be if she wanted to play games with Bai Luoming again.

Meanwhile, in a train guest room.

Bai Luoming sat on the cold cardboard and, after some thought, picked up his terminal to arrange another game with Silver Wolf. But when he opened his contacts, he found the list completely empty.

Clearly, he had been deleted as a friend.

He tried searching for her ID, but the system only displayed a single message.

"This user is temporarily unavailable."

Bai Luoming was taken aback and somewhat baffled. "We were having a good game. Why'd she run off?"

Meanwhile, in Herta's office.

A background program was conducting a routine security check on Bai Luoming's terminal according to its preset schedule. It detected an unfamiliar communication link concealed beneath multiple layers of disguise protocols, immediately triggering an alarm.

Herta glanced at it.

From the coding habits used to bypass the defense system, she pinpointed the source: Silver Wolf.

Expressionless, she first backed up the record of Silver Wolf's intrusion, then tapped a few times on the console.

Remotely delete the friend connection.

Erase all chat content.

Finally, blacklist the terminal Silver Wolf was currently using, along with all devices from the same source, at the highest security level.

The entire process took only a few seconds.

Once she was done, she buried herself in her research again, as though she had merely cleared out some system junk.

"You've already returned from the future, yet your methods are still so crude. How ridiculous."

Herta wouldn't simply believe that Silver Wolf had just happened to add Bai Luoming's terminal and then, by another coincidence, invited him to play games for several hours.

She had already seen from Asta's attitude toward Bai Luoming that she definitely wasn't the only one who had returned from the future. Unlike certain people, she wouldn't let her guard down because she thought she was some chosen one. On the contrary, this was precisely when she needed to be most vigilant.

Meanwhile, Silver Wolf also discovered that Bai Luoming had disappeared from her friend list.

Her first thought was that the guy had actually dared to delete her first, and her expression darkened instantly. But when she tried to add him again, her terminal displayed a string of mocking error codes she knew all too well—ones only Herta would use.

"Want to get in? Go practice for another hundred years, kid."

Silver Wolf stared at the line, her anger flaring up again, and began working through the night to crack the challenge Herta had left behind.

At the same time, in the space station's master control zone.

Asta was also fretting over a program.

She had only wanted to use the disguised service module she'd left in Bai Luoming's terminal to check whether he was short of daily necessities, but she found that all her remote permissions had stopped working.

No matter how she changed the interface, modified the protocol, or even used her highest-level authority as station master, the program returned only two cold words.

"Access denied."

Thinking it was a network malfunction caused by the Doomsday Beast's attack, she brought in several test terminals and checked repeatedly, even rewriting the connection program to make it more discreet.

But the moment that program touched the outer layer of Bai Luoming's terminal defenses, an irresistible force shattered it on the spot, leaving not even an error log behind.

Asta looked at the entire row of failure messages on the screen and, for the first time, began to doubt her technical skills.

She had no idea that the monitoring plugin she'd originally left behind had long since been completely uprooted by Herta.

She could only contact the logistics department and use her station master's authority to demand priority delivery for everything Bai Luoming had purchased, while continuing to work through the night against that insurmountable firewall.