The biggest problem was solved in one fell swoop.
The shackles weighing on everyone's hearts were gone.
Without a doubt, the Free State's Investigation Bureau had used all kinds of methods to ensure that these top assassins obeyed its orders.
And without a doubt, they all knew they were expendable pawns.
Now that problem was solved.
By all rights, this should have been the hardest part of the mission.
It was like every game designed to screw with its players: just when the tower climber thought he had led the assassins to kill those supposedly unkillable superhuman targets... just when he was brimming with a sense of achievement-
Bang. The true villains activated the detonator, and those morally ambiguous but flesh-and-blood companions who had faced life and death beside you... had their heads blown apart.
You might survive by sheer luck, but the designers would throw a question back at you-was any of this worth it? Did you have fun?
Ever since he had begun examining the mission, Wen Xishu had considered several possibilities. He felt that his own suspicion was the most likely.
Of course, were these assassins good people? Not necessarily. But if they were villains, evil in the absolute sense, they would have had no vulnerabilities and could never have been used as someone else's weapons.
Expendable pawns were often those whose humanity had not yet been extinguished.
In a normal playthrough, dealing with Zoe without triggering the detonator would surely have been extremely difficult. Wen Xishu could imagine having to rack his brains over it.
But now, with the Netherworld Sovereign's authority, he had done it effortlessly. There was no pressure at all. This round felt even more like... stomping noobs than the Eerie Competition had.
After Wen Xishu spoke, the assassins, now free of their