Before making his move, Lin Ruoyu had imagined the assassination failing. He had imagined the whole team being surrounded by guards and killed during the operation.
He had even imagined fighting to the bitter end, then, rather than being taken alive, defiantly pulling the fuse behind his waist and detonating the explosives strapped to his back, blowing himself and his companions' bodies to pieces and leaving no intact corpses.
Lin Ruoyu had imagined all sorts of things, but he sure as fuck hadn't imagined losing five out of ten people right as the assassination began. Home Alone and three others had been stabbed to death on the spot, while the fifth lay critically wounded on the floor, breathing out more than he breathed in.
Inside the house, lit by two gas lamps, the five players who could still move exchanged helpless looks. As they stood there at a loss, the critically wounded player on the floor clutched his bleeding wound and complained.
"Fuck me. Should've checked my luck before leaving home. This is some seriously rotten luck."
Lin Ruoyu took a deep breath and looked around.
"Someone bandage him up and stop the bleeding. Don't let him die. Everyone else, spread out, loot the bodies, and search the house. Find the tunnel."
"Huh? We're still doing the quest?"
One player looked utterly astonished. He pointed at the four corpses and the almost-corpse on the floor, then gestured at the other four people still standing.
"He's wounded too. His arms are covered in blood. So the four of us are supposed to do the quest?"
"Are you kidding? We've already come this far. If we don't do the quest, won't those four have died for nothing?"
"No, five. I think the critically wounded guy just died. Look, he's not moving anymore."
The remaining players' bickering left Lin Ruoyu exhausted in both body and mind. He waved a hand weakly and left them to argue, tending to himself first. He took off his clothes and tore up his cotton shirt to bandage his arms.
His duel with that expert had been extremely dangerous, even though Lin Ruoyu's systematic training in the twenty-fifth century had given him the edge in close-quarters combat.
But his enemy's desperate counterattack had still left three cuts across his arms.
The wounds weren't deep, nor had they damaged any vital blood vessels or tendons in his arms. Still, those three cuts, combined with the blood he had lost during the fight, had reduced Lin Ruoyu's fighting capacity by roughly half.
By the time Lin Ruoyu had laboriously finished bandaging himself without help, the other four players had stopped arguing and divided up the work on their own.
That was how players were: always bickering and making a racket.
What reassured Lin Ruoyu was that, for all their squabbling, they hadn't forgotten the important things. The four split into two groups, with one looting the NPCs' bodies and the other three searching the house.
After a little over ten minutes, the four players gathered before Lin Ruoyu again, their haul laid out on the floor. Beside it, eight corpses had been neatly arranged in a row.
"What a haul! Those three NPCs were definitely minibosses. They were loaded!"
Yes, it was quite a haul. Lin Ruoyu wholeheartedly agreed.
Besides melee equipment such as three exceptionally sharp short swords and six pairs of bracers, the items on the floor included three muzzle-loading muskets, five bizarre-looking multibarreled pistols, and dozens of paper powder cartridges.
Well, damn.
Lin Ruoyu picked up a musket and briefly examined its spring-loaded firing mechanism. Then he poked a finger into the barrel, feeling the grooves inside.
"It's a rifled musket."
As he spoke, Lin Ruoyu picked up a cylindrical powder cartridge and squeezed it.
"A round-nosed cylindrical lead bullet and gunpowder. Right, that confirms all three are muzzle-loading rifled muskets. They're more accurate and have better range than ordinary muzzle-loaders, but they're slow to reload."
"Minié rifles?!"
"Similar, but they're not Minié rifles."
Lin Ruoyu explained.
"Minié rifles use spring-loaded percussion-cap mechanisms. This musket has a spring too, but no percussion cap. It uses flint to strike a spark, so it's a type of flintlock.
"Strictly speaking, it's a muzzle-loading flintlock rifled musket."
"So it's a good gun?"
"Yes."
Lin Ruoyu thought it over.
"These three guns would be perfect for assassinating our quest target."
That got the other players interested. They scrambled to grab the muzzle-loaders off the floor. Only two remained there, and four people present had no gun. How could they not fight over them?
The other two were too slow to get a muzzle-loader, so they had to settle for the multibarreled pistols instead.
"What the hell are these?"
Lin Ruoyu walked over, picked up a pistol, and examined it.
"They're multibarreled flintlock pistols. To use one, pour black powder into the priming pan, pull the trigger to fire the lead bullet in one barrel, then rotate the barrels and add more priming powder to the pan.
"This pistol has six barrels, so you can preload six lead bullets. The point is to let you load the bullets in advance, saving you the trouble of loading another bullet after every shot and increasing your firing speed.
"But you still can't skip adding the black powder, and it's only useful at close range. Its range probably doesn't exceed twenty meters.
"In other words, these multibarreled pistols are self-defense weapons. They're useful, but not all that useful. To get the most out of them, you'll need several people working together."
Lin Ruoyu's explanation left the two players a little disappointed, but having something was better than nothing.
"Hey, this NPC has something hidden in his crotch!"
A player suddenly shouted, drawing everyone's attention.
Lin Ruoyu turned to look and saw that the NPC who had fought him almost to a standstill had been stripped naked and was lying on the floor, his eyes still open in death.
"Hey, why did you strip him? He's already dead..."
"So he's dead. He's just an NPC."
The player who had stripped the body seemed unconcerned by Lin Ruoyu's reproach.
"I thought his clothes looked pretty nice. I can take them back, wash out the blood, and wear them... If I hadn't stripped him, we'd never have known he had something hidden in his crotch."
Lin Ruoyu gave another helpless sigh. He had lost count of how many times he had done that tonight.
"Let me see what it is."
Lin Ruoyu took it and looked it over. It was a hand-drawn map with a route and a timetable marked on it.
"This layout... looks pretty familiar."
Lin Ruoyu studied it carefully for a while, then pulled the map of Noble City Connie had given him from inside his clothes and placed the two side by side.
With the maps laid out together, the other players could also see that both depicted the same place.
"It's a map of Noble City. So what do this route and these times mean?"
"They probably mark those three men's objective for tonight. They were going into Noble City to assassinate someone, just like us."
Lin Ruoyu considered it, then looked up at the four players.
"Two of us will take the bodies back. The other two, bring the muskets and come with me. We'll go in and have a look, following this map..."