This Probably Didn't Count as a Scam

The Gengetsu in the sky vanished, the dense clouds quickly crowded back in, and heavy rain began falling again.

The enemies who had blocked Wang Shui's escape had all fled. Only the sound of raging flames eating away at steel in the rain remained on the battlefield.

Tonight, Wang Shui had experienced his first battlefield. Though small in scale, it had been brutal enough. Unlike his first awakening world, where he had quickly been abducted for forced labor, this time he could just barely count as a soldier-a soldier who wanted nothing but to escape.

Numbness. Emptiness.

Wang Shui shut off the surviving old hands' field communications and began searching for a vehicle. He had to leave.

Although the system indicated that the battle was over, Wang Shui feared the enemy would discover that their queen had fallen and double back. After all, the fortress was now an empty shell. Even without occupying it, its strategic value was considerable.

The road to escape was devastated as far as the eye could see.

Even warfare in a supernatural world would not revert to the age of cold weapons. Many awakened favored cold weapons only because they let them exploit their superior physical attributes and made it easier to use various abilities.

The most widely used and lethal weapons on the battlefield were still shells, rockets, and various strategic weapons. Cold weapons merely competed with ordinary firearms for the same niche-individual weapons.

Some unknown explosives had scoured the area outside the city, blasting large numbers of non-supernatural natives to pieces. When the small-scale war began, Wang Shui had noticed that his faction had only a little over two hundred people, so most of the rivers of blood outside belonged to natives.

He had yet to find a vehicle, but Wang Shui did find plenty of good, usable guns, large quantities of special ammunition, consumables, cards, energy coins, and other odds and ends. There were also plenty of suits of powered armor that were not badly damaged, but stripping them from the corpses required professional tools.

Wang Shui looted enthusiastically, but dared not linger. As he ran outward, he checked vehicles that looked intact... and then he saw two familiar armored vehicles.

Right. Brother Tu and the others had said they would stay for two days.

Wang Shui immediately recognized the familiar coat and the tall, thin figure in the bloody mud. Brother Tu seemed to have been trying to leap up, but a longsword had pierced him from behind-only scattered fragments of his powered armor remained.

Sadness? Wang Shui was not as sad as he had imagined he would be. All he felt was a sense of loss resembling regret.

He approached his new friend and saw his wood-transformed face-it was indeed Brother Tu.

The things on Brother Tu's belt and inside his inner pockets were intact, but the ring he used as a casting medium was missing. Yet the longsword that had pierced him was still there?

Had the enemy who killed him abandoned the sword?

Wang Shui could not picture what had happened. He collected Brother Tu's belongings, even finding the tin of "Withered Wood Guardian" cigarettes he had given him just yesterday.

Brother Tu had clearly been much stronger than him... everyone in this little nameless hunting party had been. They were all skilled awakened. Without powered armor, Wang Shui would not have lasted two exchanges against any one of them.

Wang Shui searched the surroundings and found the gunman's corpse, as well as White Cat.

White Cat's death looked somewhat strange. She lay on a mound of earth, her white armor badly damaged, a broken blade embedded in her chest. Yet her face was peaceful, as though she were asleep.

Stranger still, there were six little white cats on her corpse! Yes, cats as in the animals. Six pure-white kittens made of energy crouched in various poses on her body.

Wang Shui checked her over. There were indeed no signs of life, and she had even gone somewhat cold. He lingered only briefly before another kitten suddenly appeared! Now there were seven!

How strange. Wang Shui searched online for this phenomenon but found no useful information. He inspected White Cat's belongings, especially the antique sword she clutched tightly, but none showed anything extraordinary.

Wang Shui stopped fiddling with them.

He did not have that much time to spare now. He went to check the vehicles as usual. Good news: the hunting party's armored vehicle still worked! Wang Shui hurried to start it, only for the onboard system to inform him that fingerprint verification was required.

What a crappy old-fashioned lock. Wang Shui got out and ran to White Cat's corpse, preparing to cut off her hand, but that efficient idea passed in a flash. She was, after all, a teammate who had escorted him here. Brother Tu's friendliness stirred a trace of guilt in Wang Shui-he had not thought of burying them, and now he was even considering mutilating a corpse...

With powered armor, moving a corpse was hardly difficult. Wang Shui pulled White Cat toward himself and casually removed the broken blade from her chest. Then white light blazed, and the seven little energy cats suddenly turned into streaks of white light and flew into the big White Cat's chest!

Color returned to White Cat's corpse almost visibly. Her face grew rosy, and her chest began rising and falling!

She was alive again?!

Wang Shui quickly disengaged his helmet and patted White Cat's face.

"Hey! White Cat! Stinky Cat! Are you alive?! Do you need any medicine?"

White Cat only trembled slightly. In the dim surroundings, her slowly opening eyes resembled deep lakes, tranquil and blue.

"Take... me... away..."

She was alive! Wang Shui hurriedly cleared the fragments off her, carried her into the armored vehicle, and started it. Then he laid her on the rear seat to dry off. After the vehicle completed a quick self-check, Wang Shui drove it swiftly away from this swamp of bloody mud.

The rain was loud. Not long after driving away, Wang Shui stopped in a patch of woods and activated the armored vehicle's [Environmental Mimicry] camouflage. He planned to rest here for a while.

After leaving the battlefield, his intense excitement had suddenly given way to overwhelming exhaustion. The effects of adrenaline were even more pronounced than when he had been an ordinary person.

He could not keep going. He dared not activate the active night-vision system, and both low-light vision and biological radar had very limited warning ranges. If he accidentally wandered into a colony of monsters he did not recognize, he would suffer badly even if he survived.

White Cat had fallen into a deep sleep in the warm air on the rear seat. After eating and drinking a little, Wang Shui looked toward that quiet place in the darkness. The enemy did not seem to have returned, nor had the moonlight risen again.

Wang Shui valued his life, but his personality could hardly be called timid. He was the sort who believed himself fully prepared yet acted recklessly. Just as years ago, he had changed careers with little preparation, then run into walls everywhere until his luck turned and a major company took him in as a drudge.

His caution and recklessness seemed contradictory, but in reality, many, many ordinary people were just like that: blind and confident, easily ending up battered and bruised.

Of course Wang Shui knew his own problem. But becoming cautious and mature was not something he could accomplish on a whim. Just as many people knew that moderate exercise prolonged life and that being too fat was unhealthy, yet even with the threat of death driving them, most still struggled to get moving.

Today was no different. Wang Shui could not talk himself out of it. He opened the door.

Super-mobility was not much weaker in silent mode. In only twenty minutes, Wang Shui reached the vicinity of where Silvia had fallen, then found her without much effort.

She was probably dying.

On a modest-sized rock, Silvia tilted her head back, accepting the rain's baptism. Cool moonlight surrounded her, and she was its source.

Her body glowed. Everything below her waist was breaking apart, turning into motes of light unaffected by the wind and rain, slowly rising into the sky.

"Oh~ You actually survived. Pretty lucky."

Silvia showed neither panic nor sorrow. Instead, she looked quite cheerful.

"Pure luck," Wang Shui replied, approaching her.

"I never expected you to be the last person I'd see, much less that someone with your nerve would come looking for me. I don't know which friend had you deliver that mech, but thank you all. You made my death a little less frustrating."

"I only came to see whether Your Majesty had any powerful belongings to leave behind. Consider it giving a junior a helping hand. As for the helper, do you know Brother Hei from Iron Edge City? Or rather, [Edward Cavendish]."

"I do. A dissolute scumbag, a profiteer who never lifts a finger without something to gain, and a well-known broker on the black market. This was probably a commission he accepted... heh, you actually dare work for trash like him? Isn't that even worse than being a death warrior? Forget it. What does that have to do with me?

"Don't bother hoping to loot my corpse, either. Ten minutes ago, my body was completely destroyed by the burst potions. My belongings have already detached from reality, and I can't open my storage space. What's talking to you now is only my soul, about to dissipate."

Though he had gained nothing, Wang Shui was not disappointed. He had indeed come hoping to pick up a bargain, but now he had a new idea.

"Seeing you off would broaden my horizons, too. But I'm a little puzzled. At tier five, don't you have any unusual means of staying alive? I just rescued a friend. When I found her, her corpse was already cold, with a bunch of kittens crouching on it. All I did was remove the weapon that killed her, and she came back to life as though nothing had happened."

Silvia raised her long, heroic brows.

"That would be [Nine Lives Protection], right? A rare and powerful innate ability. When a lethal effect strikes, a Fate Cat takes the damage for you. As long as the lethal effect is dealt with, the Fate Cat can slowly recover. It can withstand up to nine lethal injuries in succession. The drawback is that if your physical attributes aren't sufficient in the early stages, a lethal injury can easily leave you critically wounded in a state of feigned death. Still, it's already an extremely powerful effect."

Wang Shui nodded in understanding. White Cat's condition certainly had not been due to her innate ability alone. After he removed the lethal broken blade, her wound had healed rapidly. He did not know whether that had been a skill or an equipment effect.

"As for me, of course I have plenty of life-saving abilities. But my good assistant, my deputy commander, knew me well enough too. He obtained a poison that suppressed my resurrection, then locked me in a dungeon that isolated me from the system and constantly drained my stamina. To be safe, he even colluded with the enemy and called in the Empire's tier five. Fortunately, that one was just a useless fool, or I'd have embarrassed myself today."

"Can you still report your deputy commander now?" Wang Shui asked after some thought.

"It's useless. The assets he took are enough to get him and a dozen trusted subordinates out of this war zone. As long as he's willing to pay, clearing his reputation and culpability and wiping his record clean are trivial matters."

Wang Shui stopped asking. At his level, he could not even cause the man any trouble. At a time like this, he only needed to enjoy the dancing moonlight.

After a long while, Wang Shui suddenly asked:

"Hey, Your Majesty. Do you want to live?"

"Did your Brother Hei prepare some other backup plan? I don't think I can be saved in this state." Silvia pointed at her disappearing lower abdomen. "An item that could save me even like this would probably be worth more than my life, wouldn't it?"

"Have you heard of uploading consciousness into cyberspace?"

"I have. Information on that has been leaking out of the Dream System all along, along with things like advanced construct soldiers. But the technology for scanning and uploading the souls of ordinary life-forms has serious flaws. A cyber-consciousness and a soul are two different concepts. A great deal of data is lost during scanning."

Silvia looked at Wang Shui and said, "However, plenty of warlocks, mages, and special classes can extract a soul. If you want to obtain mine, I'd rather destroy myself."

Wang Shui merely spread his hands and showed Her Majesty his ridiculous panel and a little information on [Mind Lock].

"First, I know absolutely nothing about soul technology. Second, I don't know magic either. This is simply a new soul-conversion mechanism. Its built-in [Soul Translator] can guarantee the soul's integrity. And after this digital conversion, a soul is still a soul, not a cyber-consciousness. It simply gains the traits of digital life. Well, would you like to try, Your Majesty?"

As he spoke, Wang Shui took out the NerveGear and began inscribing alchemical arrays on it.

"You've already died twice. Don't you want to struggle a little more? If you get a chance to make a comeback, wouldn't you be able to meet that good deputy commander of yours again?"

Enticing her with the simplest pitch, Wang Shui handed Silvia the NerveGear and said:

"This isn't a contract. Just a choice."

Silvia hesitated.

Hesitating meant she had made her choice.

"Although I've waterproofed it and upgraded its power supply to our energy coins, the material is still very fragile. Stop squeezing it. I'm afraid it'll break, and I can't reproduce this thing yet."

Wang Shui's words brought Silvia back to her senses. Looking into his clear, calm eyes, she stopped hesitating and put on the NerveGear.

"I didn't expect you to persuade me so easily."

"There's no shame in wanting to live."

As he spoke, Wang Shui activated the [Mind Lock] program in his biological brain and connected to the NerveGear through [Array: Interaction]. The microwave sensors inside the helmet activated, and he immediately glimpsed an enormous cloud of data.

"Good news: I can see the whole body of data. Bad news: it's a bit large." Wang Shui glanced at Silvia's disappearing lower abdomen. "More bad news: a tiny fragment came through just now, and your soul data immediately dissipated. An unknown collapse."

Silvia's silver-gray eyes dimmed a little. "That's normal. Those potions affect the soul too. The destruction is irreversible."

"No, I mean, would you mind becoming a copy? Unlike reading your soul, copying it won't cause it to dissipate, and it'll be much faster."

"Then would I still be me?"

"If you believe you are, you are. Don't resist, or it'll affect the integrity of your memories."

Wang Shui entered the copy command, compressing and packaging the data as he copied it, forming encrypted information that he inscribed into his biological brain.

Half an hour later, Wang Shui stepped forward and caught the NerveGear. The last motes of light rose against the wind and rain, and Silvia's traces vanished.

Putting away the NerveGear, Wang Shui immediately turned and disappeared into the rain.