Game

WTF??

That was the three letters and two punctuation marks conveyed through the rich facial expressions of the orc brother standing before Mo Tan. If mentally unstable people were practically the only ones who could play games, this guy was probably already wondering which hospital this kid had escaped from.!

That face covered in a mosaic, that furtive expression, and that underground-agent-like tone of voice—no matter how he looked at it, he didn't seem like a mentally sound person.

Besides, he didn't know this guy at all, did he?!

Unfortunately, the guy before him really was a fish that had slipped through the net, whether as far as the hospital or the police were concerned...

"Come on, stop pretending~" Mo Tan said with a lecherous grin as he elbowed the orc player's arm a few times. In a low voice, he said, "I saw through you ages ago. As expected, you look pretty much like what I imagined. By the way, about mixing erguotou into plain water..."

This handsome orc with a head of fiery red hair—yes, he really was an orc—didn't wait for him to finish. Without a word, he turned and walked away, muttering something under his breath as he went. The content seemed to contain some fairly discriminatory remarks toward gay people.

"Uh, wasn't it?" Mo Tan scratched his hair, then glanced around. Suddenly, he burst out laughing. "Ha! So it was you!? I knew that kid's aura was way off from what I expected. I really did pick the wrong person!!"

Excitedly muttering to himself, he charged toward an ogre player not far away. The guy was built like a steel tower, and for some reason had molded his face into something especially bizarre, like a stitched-together monster that had just finished poking a hornet's nest. Even his own kind would probably be scared into stumbling when they saw him.

At that moment, Shuangye, who had been glaring at Mo Tan through narrowed eyes from a distance, finally couldn't take it anymore. She ran a few steps, grabbed him by the collar, and dragged him back. Rolling her eyes, she snorted, "It's me!"

"What about you?" Mo Tan glanced at her with extreme disdain and waved impatiently. "I made plans to meet my buddy here. Can't you see he's waiting for me to go over and say hi?"

He jerked his chin toward the stitched-together... er, ogre, then waved frantically in that direction. "Buddy! I'm over here! By the way, about that erguotou mixed into plain wa—"

"It's me! Me! Me!" Shuangye grabbed Mo Tan by the collar and pulled him in front of her. Her eyes practically spat fire as she stamped her feet and hissed, "I was the one who tracked down that company selling fake alcohol! Imperial Jade Nectar Company! They sold water mixed with erguotou, which cost less than one and a half yuan, for 1,888 a cup! I planted the crash program! You stole the internal data! We released the information together! And you even blew up that skinny boss's monitor! Got it now?!"

The girl had almost fallen apart just now. Standing at a distance, Shuangye had listened to the entire process of Mo Tan mistaking an orc for her. She had already been furious that he had imagined her as that kind of person, only for Mo Tan to immediately focus on someone even uglier after realizing he had picked the wrong target!

Who could stand that?!

If she hadn't been unable to use force in a public space, she would have hurled a massive fireball straight into this guy's face!

"Ah..." After hearing that, Mo Tan looked at Shuangye helplessly, then glanced at the nearly naked ogre brother, who was wearing nothing but a pair of underpants. He curled his lips. "So that's how it is. Tch, what a disappointment..."

Shuangye gritted her teeth as she stared at him. "What kind of disrespectful expectations did you have of me before!?"

"At least~" Mo Tan suddenly changed from his previous neurotic manner and said with a light chuckle, "the little girl in front of me should calm down a bit."

"Who are you calling..." Shuangye instinctively retorted, but she suddenly froze when she noticed the teasing look in his eyes.

Although Mo Tan's face had become severely distorted to others after being blurred, Shuangye could still sense his faintly mocking smile, as well as the other meaning hidden behind his words.

Not calm enough...

She wasn't calm enough...

Exactly where wasn't she calm enough...

Wait!

Shuangye looked up in shock at this man she had worked with for years but had never met in person. Her expression suddenly darkened. "You knew it was me from the start?!"

"How can you tell?" Mo Tan didn't answer the girl's question. Instead, he responded with another question.

"I was observing everyone in this area earlier." Shuangye recovered her composure at incredible speed. She curled her index finger and lightly pushed up her glasses, speaking in a deep voice. "At least for the past two minutes, you weren't among the people around me. Yet when I noticed you, you were already standing at a distance where I could hear you even with your voice lowered, chatting up that burly orc man."

Mo Tan let out an awkward laugh. "Could you not use the word 'chatting up'? It's a little too ambiguous..."

"Both the timing of your appearance and the distance between us were too perfect." Shuangye ignored him and continued. "Even if those two points could be explained as coincidence, your somewhat exaggerated behavior was far too targeted."

"All right, I'll give you a little praise for the moment." Mo Tan clapped his hands. "Although this belated perceptiveness really isn't worth praising, as a gentleman, I should still be more tolerant toward beautiful girls, shouldn't I?"

Shuangye pressed her lips together and remained silent for a while before looking up at that blurry face. "How did you know?"

"You find it unbelievable?" Mo Tan's eyes looked as if he were staring at an idiot.

Shuangye became furious again, but this time she quickly calmed down. She said indifferently, "I do have a theory, but I need to hear your answer before I can make a judgment."

The look in Mo Tan's eyes grew even stranger. Suspiciously, he asked, "Are you really Sun?"

Shuangye gave a chuckle. "It's fine if you don't believe me. How about you reveal a little information and give me a chance to prove myself?"

"Forget it." Mo Tan spread his hands. "I just noticed that a large number of fake files with very similar conditions had suddenly appeared earlier. I investigated a little, and after finding that they were all meaningless, I stopped paying attention to them. But then..."

He snapped his fingers. Half the life in the universe instantly vanished into oblivion... Sorry, wrong channel...

He snapped his fingers again and raised his brows at Shuangye. "I never expected someone to follow the remaining traces straight here. Their tracking methods and certain habits were extremely similar to those of someone I know. That undoubtedly proved that those fake files had to be related to you to some extent..."

"I understand." Before he could finish, Shuangye drooped her head and said helplessly, "Then you discovered just now that I was the only person in the entire area who matched the descriptions in the countless fake files. So you came over to test me on the off chance that you'd gotten lucky, and then..."

"You gave yourself away." Mo Tan grinned. "Like an innocent little girl who had been wrongly accused by her teacher of dating."

Shuangye rolled her eyes. "How did I never realize before that your personality was this fucking awful?"

"Because when it comes to an unseen rival, we tend to unconsciously beautify them in our minds." Mo Tan held out his right hand to Shuangye. "Now that the distance is gone, the beautiful image we imagined out of thin air has disappeared too. So, nice to meet you, Sun~"

Shuangye slapped his hand perfunctorily and snorted. "From what you just said, it seems I'm also quite different from the Sun you imagined."

"People have it hard~" Mo Tan shrugged. "I have no intention of continuing to damage your self-esteem, buddy... No, should I call you 'ma'am' now? Or something else?"

Shuangye curled her lips. "Call me whatever you want. Let's move on to the next topic. Have you also tried attacking Innocent Company's system?"

"Sure thing, Pudding."

"What did you say?!" Shuangye's slightly cloudy expression immediately grew even gloomier.

Mo Tan looked at him innocently. "You told me to call you whatever I wanted."

"Just keep calling me 'buddy.'" Shuangye said coldly, "So you also suffered a setback at Innocent Company?"

"I don't want to talk about it." Mo Tan's voice suddenly turned extremely gloomy. The barely contained anger and frenzy in his voice, mixed with his inscrutable and complicated temperament, made Shuangye shudder.

In the girl's eyes, the answer was already obvious...

He had probably hit the same wall she had. It seemed he had taken quite a blow, and perhaps because of that unreasonable thing called male "pride," his sense of defeat was even more severe than hers...

Hmph, serves you right! Who told you to tease me earlier? I wonder if Mr. Fucking Awful will be even more miserable after discovering that the Sun who had always been his rival was a girl like me~

Shuangye thought maliciously.

But in truth, as she grew more and more convinced that this chaotic mess of a man before her wasn't the same person as that clever priest named Hei Fan, Shuangye had been led farther and farther away from the truth by Mo Tan's misdirection...

At this point, the initiative had changed hands.

Mo Tan was, of course, not as angry as he appeared. His slightly agitated appearance was mostly meant to conceal his urge to burst out laughing. Every emotion and expression he showed Shuangye was fake. It was all an act.

Mo Tan's performance had begun the moment he left that message for Sun during the day.

That included the interaction he had with her while playing the Absolute Neutral role, his constant provocation just now, and even the anger he was now displaying, like an arrogant genius who had suffered a blow in his own field. All of it was fake.

Everything was meant to clear Shuangye's suspicions toward the two existences known as "Hei Fan" and "Mo Tan," and lead her farther and farther down the wrong path...

Now, only the final step remained.

"Speaking of which." Mo Tan changed the subject rather awkwardly. "I really didn't expect you to play this game. Looks like I was being too presumptuous when I gave you a hard time about the gaming pod earlier."

Shuangye didn't want to provoke him too much either. It wasn't because of the "softheartedness" common to most girls, but because she didn't want to waste her precious testing time on pointless mutual mockery. After all, who knew when this unpredictable man might suddenly log off and disappear? So she followed his lead. "Same here~ I didn't expect you to have time to play games instead of spending all day with tissues and adult videos like ordinary people in your line of work."

Crap! She seemed to have let the sarcasm slip out again!!!

This time, however, Mo Tan didn't seem to care much. Instead, he smiled bitterly. "I think you must have some kind of extremely unreasonable misunderstanding about male hackers..."

"No, I just thought you were a shut-in." Shuangye smiled.

The atmosphere suddenly became considerably more harmonious~~

"Haha, I do occasionally go out to feed stray cats and do charity work or something~"

"That's nice~ I've heard that guys who like taking care of animals make people feel very safe~"

Of course, this was only an outward appearance. After all, neither of these two was harmless. Though they seemed to get along fairly well, given even the slightest opportunity, both of them would have had no qualms about smashing the other down a well with a rock and then causing several mudslides for good measure...

Shuangye, however, had always intended to give Mo Tan a thorough beating.

As for the latter, he only had such thoughts while in the personality state of Chaotic Neutral, so he was bound to suffer a loss. Having his weakness exposed first was a lesson from experience.

If not for the system bug caused by his dissociative identity disorder, Mo Tan, who had taken the lead in making a blunder and exposed a flaw at some unknown point, might have been the first to lose this game.

Whenever his personality was in the Absolute Neutral state, Mo Tan felt somewhat apprehensive whenever he thought about this...

But the current him...

Only felt pure pleasure and excitement~

As long as it gave him pleasure, he didn't care whether he was shoveling dirt beside a grave or dancing on the edge of a blade...

Having fun was what mattered!

As a pop-up window appeared before Shuangye, the final trace of doubt in her heart was completely dispelled.

Player Tan Mo (Chaotic Neutral) has requested to add you as a friend.

"I feel like an idiot," Shuangye muttered, then happily accepted Mo Tan's friend request. Afterward, she glanced at the other name in her friend list.

Friend: Hei Fan (Absolute Neutral)

Even if this guy had some problems, or was perhaps a fairly skilled hacker, it no longer mattered...

Shuangye raised her head and looked at him. A smile appeared on her adorable doll-like face.

Because the biggest, most troublesome, most difficult prey had already appeared~

She suddenly felt bursting with motivation!

"Although I'm a little flattered that you took the initiative to add me as a friend, don't just stand there spacing out." Mo Tan's irritating voice quickly snapped Shuangye out of her thoughts.

Looking at the petite orange-haired mage before him, he bent down and whispered into the girl's ear...

"I want to play a game with you."

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