After realizing they could no longer treat their lives as a joke...
These "Fourth Catastrophe" players finally dropped their grinning, fun-seeking act and revealed their most terrifying side!
Extreme competitive tryharding born of their determination not to get banned.
The Mutated Corpse had been having a great time slaughtering them. Its barely functional brain had even wondered why these five prey were like unkillable cockroaches, and why none of them feared it.
But now, everything had changed.
These five baldheads no longer charged forward like idiots. Instead, they became slipperier than eels.
"Roar!"
It lunged at [Ji Li], but [Ji Li] made no attempt to take it head-on, dodging behind a load-bearing pillar with a textbook tactical roll.
The monster rammed headfirst into the stone pillar, leaving itself dazed.
"Now! Pull the rope!"
[Passing Pure-Love Warrior] and [Even Monkeys Have Dignity] had dug up a thick, dusty hemp rope from somewhere. Standing on opposite sides, they yanked it hard.
It caught the monster squarely across its thick ankles.
The three-meter-tall behemoth lost its balance and slammed into the floor with a crash, shattering the church's floor tiles.
"DPS! DPS! Hit its weak point!"
[Ji Li] grabbed the broken door panel with spikes sticking out of it and drove it viciously into the back of the monster's head, as though planting rice seedlings.
[I'm Not Jiahao] stood five meters away, prying fist-sized bricks out of the floor and pelting the monster with them.
The tables turned in an instant.
No matter how strong this First Tier Mutated Corpse was, once it was on the ground facing five players who had absolutely no intention of fighting fair, all it could do was rage helplessly.
Chunks of the monster's flesh flew everywhere under the blows, and black pus spread across the floor.
It let out a shrill, agonized howl, its voice carrying an almost human hint of fear.
It wanted to run, to crawl out of this terrifying church.
These weren't a bunch of frail humans. They were five psychopaths wearing human skin!
But the players gave it no chance!
Let you run away? What would happen to our first kill?!
[Ji Li] leaped straight onto the monster's back and unleashed a frenzy of attacks on the back of its head with a sharp wooden spike.
[Kindergarten Boss] and [Even Monkeys Have Dignity] each clung tightly to one of the monster's legs, hampering its movements!
[Passing Pure-Love Warrior] picked up the wooden panel again and hammered the Mutated Corpse's head with a flurry of wild blows!
"Bam! Bam! Bam!"
"That's for fucking sending me flying earlier! Eighty! Eighty! Eighty!"
The poor First Tier aberration was a monster the locals regarded as a walking natural disaster.
Yet these five baldheads wearing nothing but boxers wore it down in the most humiliating way imaginable.
"Roar..."
With one final, unwilling wail, the monster lost the strength to resist and crashed to its knees again.
"It's done for! Finish it off!" [Ji Li] shouted.
"Here comes the truck!"
[Passing Pure-Love Warrior] leaped from the ruined second-floor staircase. Aided by gravity, the sharp, splintered edge of the half-door panel in hand plunged deep into the back of the Mutated Corpse's neck!
"Squelch!"
Filthy black blood sprayed out.
The monster twitched twice, then its enormous body collapsed with a crash, turning into a heap of foul-smelling rotten flesh.
[System notification: Congratulations! The player team has defeated the Mutated Corpse (First Tier danger level). Main Quest complete!] [Participating players: Passing Pure-Love Warrior, Ji Li, Even Monkeys Have Dignity, Kindergarten Boss, I'm Not Jiahao.]
"We won!! Holy shit, we killed the boss! The first kill is ours!"
The five players hugged one another, jumping up and down in excitement.
Even Jiahao, who had spent the fight hiding in the back and shouting "Awesome!", was so excited that he forgot to stay in character.
Up on the altar, Lin En's system panel instantly refreshed with a long, densely packed list of data.
[Settlement complete.] [First Tier Mutated Corpse killed. Total faith points absorbed: 100.] [The system has automatically deducted 90 points for the host's server maintenance fees and personal profit.] [The remaining 10 faith points have been converted into experience points according to contribution and distributed to the players' accounts.]
Ding!
The five players below received notifications at the same time:
[Quest rewards distributed: You have received 20 experience points!] [Current level: Lv.1 (20/100)]
Looking at the backend Faith Points distribution, Lin En couldn't help marveling to himself.
What a rip-off! A fucking outrageous rip-off!
He had hidden in the back without lifting a finger and pocketed a whopping 90 faith points through his tears, saving his own life in the process.
Meanwhile, each of the five players who had fought tooth and nail received nothing but measly experience converted from two faith points.
This was a textbook case of fleecing the sheep to pay for their own wool!
Even a capitalist would get out of bed in the middle of the night to salute that commission rate.
But Lin En's conscience didn't hurt one bit. In fact, he wanted to laugh.
After all, this was an online game. As long as a progress bar kept filling, players could happily grind away even at hauling bricks.
Sure enough, the moment the five baldheads below saw their experience credited, they hugged one another and started screeching with excitement.
"Holy shit! Twenty EXP! The bar went up by a fifth!"
"First kill! We got the server's first kill!"
"Even the EXP notification sound in this game is amazing! All that frustration from nearly getting banned is gone. This feels awesome!"
The five shiny baldheads bounced around in the middle of the church like a mass reversion to their primal ancestors.
Once their cheering was over, all five instantly pounced on the heap of rotten flesh on the floor like starving ghosts reborn.
For the Fourth Catastrophe, killing a monster without looting its corpse was worse than death!
"Did it drop any gear? Any gold? Does this crappy game not even have loot beams?"
Ignoring the stench covering the floor, [Passing Pure-Love Warrior] rummaged frantically through the black flesh with both hands, even pulling out the monster's intestines and giving them a couple of shakes.
"Not a damn thing! Not even a copper coin. How stingy can this game be?!" [Kindergarten Boss] kicked the monster's severed arm in anger.
However, common sense could never measure these players' imaginations.
No equipment drops?
No problem. Wasn't the monster itself a material?
"Guys, hold off on the complaints."
[Even Monkeys Have Dignity] crouched beside the monster's mangled head, eyes shining as though he were looking at a three-Michelin-star feast.
He dipped a finger into the thick yellow pus inside the monster's skull and held it up for a close inspection.
"Based on my years of experience playing open-world survival games, eating the corpses of poisonous monsters like this usually gives you a hidden buff like [poison resistance +1]."
The other four abruptly stopped what they were doing and stared at him in shock.
Even [I'm Not Jiahao], who had always prided himself on being sophisticated, leaned back defensively. "Holy shit, you're serious?"
"This stuff smells like a pit latrine that's been fermenting for ten years, and you're fucking going to eat it?"
"Other people my age only know how to kill monsters and loot gear, but I've already started exploring the underlying logic of the game's food chain. That's the spirit of exploration that makes a hardcore expert! It's just so... you know what I mean?"
Without realizing it, Even Monkeys Have Dignity had grasped the essence of Jiahao Literature.
With that, under the other four's admiring yet disgusted gazes, [Even Monkeys Have Dignity] shoved his finger, coated in yellow-green pus, straight into his mouth without hesitation. He even smacked his lips.
Dead silence fell over the room.
"Bleeergh-!"
"Holy shit, the aftertaste hits harder than canned fermented herring! Urgh-"
Ma Lou's face instantly turned green. A red [-5] floated above his head, and he began foaming at the mouth and convulsing violently on the floor, his health bar dropping at a visible rate.
[System notification: Player [Even Monkeys Have Dignity] has ingested a lethal hallucinogenic toxin and is poisoned and near death.]
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