This Humble One, Reincarnation Stream Player Chapter 19

The truck jolted violently as it rolled over the tire spikes, yet instead of spinning out of control, it surged forward with even greater speed.

Bang—

The police car blocking the path was sent flying, crushing the SWAT officers who were firing incessantly like a spinning top. Yet, these men acted as if they were drugged, completely disregarding their own lives.

They turned around with expressionless faces, firing wildly at the truck charging onto the bridge, only to be struck and sent airborne by their own comrades rushing up behind them.

Madness, pure madness.

Yuki saw a man wedged into the windshield, his eyes bulging and his face covered in blood, staring right at him. The man's fingers were still twitching until a stray bullet pierced the cabin and blew his head apart.

Damn it, lunatics.

Yuki kicked the corpse out of the vehicle. His body leaned back as if climbing a slope, and with a roar of the engine, the truck took flight.

Time seemed to freeze in his eyes. Yuki saw Hayasaka Ai huddled in the driver's seat, saw Mai Sakurajima breathing against his chest, and even saw bullets striking the hood, exploding into sparks before ricocheting away.

His mind went blank, reminding him of that desperate leap from the city walls. A moment later, with a dull thud, his entire body sank, and the groaning of twisting steel filled his ears.

The truck soared over the bridge and slammed heavily onto the opposite bank of the canal. The tires bounced, and the vehicle drifted like a wild horse, while Hayasaka Ai gripped the steering wheel tightly, doing her best to stabilize their trajectory.

The Reinforcement Magecraft was still active; the suspension actually held up against the impact, but the enemies chasing them like madmen were not so lucky.

Thud, thud, thud.

The bridge deck shook as over a dozen cars landed, rolled, shattered, and ignited, scattering limbs and mechanical parts everywhere.

It was like flowers scattered by a celestial maiden!

Chapter 26: Where Did It Go Wrong? (Revised)

Thud—

The moment they hit the ground, Yuki felt as if he were about to fall apart.

They made it through!

The surroundings were littered with car parts, and the gunfire behind them remained dense, sending sparks flying from the ground. The small truck, emitting white smoke, chugged into a narrow alleyway.

There was no blockade, and the sound of gunfire began to fade. Yuki finally relaxed his clenched toes.

Across the canal lay the port district, home to warehouses and buildings of all sizes. Beyond that was the sea, and no one knew what lay on the other side.

Precisely because it was so desolate, no enemies were lying in wait here.

"Is anyone hit?" Yuki shouted, patting himself down. Aside from cuts caused by glass, he found no bullet holes.

The adrenaline was fading, and the pain was returning. Mai Sakurajima finally managed to lift her head from his thigh, her face drenched in sweat.

"No, but I was about to suffocate." She touched her neck; Yuki had pressed down too hard earlier, and her cervical spine throbbed, but there was no blame in her eyes.

"Hayasaka, your driving skills are better than I imagined." Yuki turned his head to shout at the panting Hayasaka Ai. The scene just now had been more thrilling than any movie.

"My driving skills are at a professional level, and that was an over-performance," the blonde girl said, the corners of her mouth curling slightly as she struggled to maintain her stoic expression. "Your Reinforcement Magecraft is also impressive. Without that, even if we strapped rocket boosters to this piece of junk, we wouldn't have made it across."

In that instant, the small truck had not only exceeded its horsepower limits, but its shell had also hardened significantly. From her perspective, the hood was embedded with bullets.

"It was everyone's collective effort. Let's skip the mutual flattery."

"Who's flattering you?" Hayasaka Ai glanced at the man. Just as she prepared to wipe the blood from her forehead, a bandage was wrapped around her brow.

Mai Sakurajima wasn't just sitting idle; she had immediately found something to do, growing increasingly accustomed to this game.

Hayasaka Ai thanked her. As she steered the dying truck into a warehouse, she asked without turning her head, "Did you notice anything along the way?"

"There are too many red flags; I don't know where to start." Yuki shook his head with a bitter smile. The reason he let Hayasaka Ai drive was not only because of her skills but so he could focus on observing.

"First, those police officers are just living corpses with brains; they are determined to kill us at any cost."

"Yeah." Both women's expressions tightened; they had experienced it firsthand on the road.

Aside from killing players, the law enforcement of this modern city had nothing else in their eyes, and the destruction they caused was ten times greater than what the three of them had inflicted.

"Second, game rewards are crucial. Never hesitate when using them."

There was no argument there. The Reincarnation Game provided the experience for using skills directly, so there was no need for players to practice. Any hesitation was a crime.

"Third, this city is more dangerous than the ancient castle. The Reincarnation Game is very good at exploiting a player's tendency to let their guard down."

Yuki let out a long breath. If he had truly treated this as the real world, happily flirting with girls, or thinking that surviving the first breakout meant everything was fine, he would have sealed his own fate.

One could relax, but they had to be ready to tense up again at a moment's notice, focusing their attention to find every possible solution.

Hayasaka Ai didn't hit the brakes; the white-smoke-spewing truck simply couldn't move anymore.

The atmosphere was oppressive. These past dozen hours had been enough to drive someone insane. Fortunately, the three of them were huddled together for warmth, occasionally cracking jokes to relax their frayed nerves. Even better, whenever a crisis arrived, Yuki could instantly get into the zone.

Setting aside his observational skills and intelligence, this ability to switch personalities was even more precious.

Clang.

With a light kick, the door fell to the ground. Yuki jumped out, feeling his legs still trembling slightly. He noticed a bullet hole right next to his head—it had missed his skull by a mere five centimeters.

After walking two steps, he felt something was wrong.

"We broke through the encirclement, so why is there no reward?"

Hayasaka Ai was also stunned. Based on their previous experience, every time they took down a mini-boss or completed a sub-stage, there should have been a reward.

"I don't know. Could it be that it wasn't thrilling enough? Did we fail to complete a side quest?"

I was nearly shot in the head; how could that not be thrilling?

Yuki couldn't put his finger on it. Since he wasn't the host of the Reincarnation Game, he could only assume that things inside and outside the ancient castle were different.

"Let's go. We need to find a safe place to wait for Li Dan to rendezvous with us. We can't handle this level of search and pursuit." Yuki turned his head, only to see Mai Sakurajima leaning against the car with a strange expression on her face.

"Senior, don't tell me you're mourning the ice cream? How about I grab you a few later?"

"Who is your senior?" Mai shot him a glare and pointed. "Come look at this. Tell me my eyes aren't playing tricks on me—this thing wasn't in the car."

What kind of nonsense was she spouting?

Full of confusion, Yuki returned to the car, and his pupils constricted instantly.

A tablet-like device was sitting exactly where he had just rested his feet. Yuki looked up, locking eyes with Hayasaka Ai.

"That's not right. There was a radio here just a moment ago, the one we stripped from the police car."

Hayasaka Ai knew a thing or two about appliance repair; she had dismantled the radio herself, so she couldn't possibly be mistaken. They had even used it to eavesdrop on police deployments along the way.

"In other words, just now, an eighties-era radio turned into a modern tablet. Oh, and it's connected to a police network." Yuki picked it up, examined it, and looked stunned.

The tablet was covered in moving blue dots and real-time information, increasing the efficiency of the search by dozens of times. He also noticed new blue dots appearing from the edge of the city, some moving at high speeds—clearly police helicopters.

Three stars, and now people are just morphing into thin air, are they?

"It's truly magical. It's like watching a documentary where someone suddenly hit the rewind button, and reality changed without a sound."

Mai Sakurajima and Hayasaka Ai exchanged glances. Having seen too many miraculous things since arriving at the Reincarnation Game, the word "impossible" was no longer in their vocabulary.

Magic? Sci-fi? What was the principle behind it?

These things didn't matter. What mattered was that their trouble was growing, and blending into the enemy ranks like before wouldn't be easy.

"This change is very sudden," Hayasaka Ai said coldly.

"Sudden is an understatement; there wasn't even a warning. Have you noticed? Since leaving the castle, the difficulty curve has spiked," Mai remarked with a sigh, looking around as if she felt an invisible pair of eyes watching them.

The quality of the police was undoubtedly higher than that of the living corpses. If they were also becoming infinite, what was the point of the living corpse setting?

The difficulty had spiked.

Yuki's eyelid twitched. He had two theories. He tossed the tablet to Hayasaka Ai, then grabbed his blade and walked outside in silence.

"This relates to Hint Five. Tell Li Dan: if we can win with wit, don't use brute force. These people can't be killed off, and they shouldn't be killed."

Yuki strode out of the warehouse, his cheeks beginning to twitch slightly once he was out of sight of Hayasaka Ai and Mai Sakurajima.

From the castle to the city, he had become preliminarily familiar with the style of the Reincarnation Game, and now a question churned repeatedly in his mind:

Even without the difficulty setting, this dungeon was far too absurd. The survival rate for an ordinary person was incredibly slim.

He couldn't forget the anomaly when he unlocked his trait, nor Mai Sakurajima's confusion.

Where exactly had things gone wrong?

Chapter 27: He Is Lying (Revised)

Woo-woo--

The shrill sound of police sirens drifted down from overhead, causing everyone to look outward with tension every few seconds.

The feeling of being a piece of pork tossed into a pack of wolves was terrible; the slightest rustle made one's hair stand on end.

They were in the pipes beneath the port district. Yuki had long since figured out a way to evade detection—as long as they kept moving, it didn't matter if they were above or below ground. The only downside was crawling through the cramped, foul-smelling pipes.

It was safe, but it was also miserable.

"Little Brother Yuki, do you mean to say that those pursuers are essentially living corpses too?" As a veteran player, Li Dan had clearly endured every kind of hardship, and his expression remained largely unchanged.

"That's right, Brother Li. Even though these people are wearing uniforms, it doesn't make any sense. If they were real police, they should be prioritizing the protection of civilian lives." Yuki followed behind him, his face full of sincerity, though he inwardly cursed his terrible luck.

If he had known, he would have let Hayasaka Ai take the lead. Who wanted to stare at a man's backside?

"Brother Li, haven't you noticed?"

"I had my suspicions, but they were pursuing us so closely that I didn't dare hold back." Seeing they had crawled far enough, Li Dan raised a hand to stop the team. He curled up against the pipe wall and cast an appreciative look at Yuki.

"Your observation skills are indeed meticulous. Don't worry, I don't mean to doubt you. Aside from individual Ego Traits or Chaos Items that provide enhancements, intelligence and observation skills are about the same for veterans and newcomers alike."

The Reincarnation Game had no attribute point system; it was impossible to suddenly become smarter under normal circumstances.

"When people are pushed to the brink, they tend to unleash their potential. I didn't even know my own brain was capable of this before," Yuki said with a bitter expression.

"Don't sell yourself short. Anyone who can study medicine isn't a fool. Someone like me, a bottom-tier university dropout, only survived this long by pure luck." Li Dan gave a self-deprecating laugh, took some stolen compressed biscuits from his storage space, and passed them down the line.

"It's only six-thirty in the evening, and it's going to be a hell of a long night. The port district isn't large; it's only a matter of time before the enemies find us." He looked exhausted, glancing at the other four with his peripheral vision as he pondered.

While crawling, everyone had laid their cards on the table, especially regarding their core skills—their Ego Traits.

Yuki had told the truth; extracting concepts sounded powerful. The blonde girl's hacking skill was likely just from playing on her phone too much. Mai's invisibility was interesting, though—it could prove very useful in this dungeon.

But it's not enough. Their Ego Traits alone aren't enough to break through the encirclement. They definitely didn't tell the whole truth.

His gaze rested on Yuki's face. This was the only newcomer he couldn't quite figure out—he felt both familiar and strange.

The familiarity lay in how much he resembled those newcomers who, when pushed to the brink, became the key to breaking a deadlock. Such people seemed unremarkable at first glance, yet in a certain sense, they were perfectly compatible with the Reincarnation Game.

The strangeness lay in how much he resembled someone else; from his initial panic to his current composure, the traces of growth were far too obvious, and the process of breaking the deadlock was filled with coincidences.

Furthermore, the difficulty of this dungeon was bizarre. The dividing line was leaving the ancient castle; once the team split up, the rewards diminished significantly while the difficulty spiked sharply.

Something must have gone wrong somewhere. The team was divided into three groups; I am certain there is no issue with the new players by my side, so by process of elimination, only those three remain.

Therefore, what did they obtain when they separated? What did they trigger?

As his experience clashed with reality, Li Dan's gaze gradually turned dangerous.

"Brother Li?" Yuki had been chatting idly with Rich Brother, but he turned his head, his eyes filled with the naive clarity of a student who had yet to experience the ways of the world.

"My apologies, I'm just a bit tired after fighting for so long." Li Dan shifted his gaze and nodded approvingly. "Little brother Yuki, you truly are a genius. Perhaps the one who will lead everyone to survive will be you, not me."

"You're joking. Besides, I don't want to be this kind of genius. I should be lying in bed playing games right now, but instead, I'm stuck here in this smelly, cramped pipe, staring into space."

Yuki began to complain, and this complaint struck a chord, causing the others to grit their teeth in frustration.

Who wants this damn supernatural power? Give me back my peaceful daily life!

These were newcomers, having never experienced the thrill of transcending humanity, that wild abandon of doing whatever one pleased.

A flicker of contempt crossed Li Dan's face, but he quickly returned to his mature and steady demeanor.

"We have no choice in this matter. By the way, what was it you said earlier about breaking through the encirclement?"

"The Ego Trait! I drew something called 'Akina Mountain Racer,' and then, the moment I gripped the steering wheel and slammed on the gas, my body just reacted automatically!" Yuki grew excited, spittle flying as he spoke, as if he were reliving the moment, leaving Rich Brother listening with a face full of envy.

Guns, cars, and sports—the three great hobbies of men; everyone wanted to be that cool.

Li Dan nodded in satisfaction, though he muttered to himself:

It's fortunate that this Ego Trait can only be drawn once a day and cannot be retained.

This fits the style of the Reincarnation Game perfectly; otherwise, his Ego Trait would be far too heaven-defying. But as the old saying goes, why was it such a coincidence? Why didn't it even leave me a chance to verify it?