Chapter 191: The Fifteen Who Disappeared
"There are too many, we can't kill them all." Dai Wenqian was just a few meters behind them, holding a glass bottle from which pale green smoke billowed, slowing down all the spiders that approached him. Two other players cooperated to handle the spiders nearby.
The people around saw this and began moving toward him, but the two players blocked them off. One of them, holding a long blade, said, "Come any closer, and we'll kill you too!"
The crowd was both shocked and furious, but they had no energy to argue, as more and more spiders were closing in!
"Click! Click! Click!" The sound of a lighter opening and closing rang out sharply, followed by blazing flames. The crowd turned back to see that the spider ring surrounding Xu Huo and the others had caught fire. All the spiders scrambled in panic, while the foreign strong man, riding a tiger, finished them off one by one.
"Go over there, it's safe over there!" The survivors moved toward Xu Huo's side. Emboldened, they swung their makeshift weapons, killing the spiders fleeing in their direction. One young man smashed a spider's head and said, "These spiders aren't that tough..."
Before he could finish, a strand of white silk stuck to his back, pulling him up toward the ceiling. Several spiders worked together to trap his limbs, suspending him in midair, and the first spider drained the blood from his body!
"Bang!" The corpse was thrown back to the ground.
Before the others could recover from this sudden turn, a "rain of silk" began falling from the ceiling, and people below were snatched away one after another!
"Save them!" Gu Yu shouted at her companions, rushing forward to try to cut the white strands.
But to their surprise, the spider silk was not only sticky but also tough. Their prop knives couldn't cut through it in just one or two swings!
On the other side, Xu Huo tried to use fire, but the silk wouldn't ignite. At the same time, several large spiders lunged at him from different directions. By the time he dealt with them and looked up, the spider swarm had woven a fireproof net across the ceiling, and silk could pass through the gaps in the net, continuing to pull people upward!
"Leave it to me!" The foreign strong man jumped over, and the tiger beneath him pounced at the large net.
The massive beast crashed into the center of the net, struggling and not only tangling the net further but also pulling down several spiders from the other end of the silk!
Xu Huo took the opportunity to set them on fire. The fluff on the spiders' bodies was highly flammable, and in an instant, a large blaze erupted. Spiders kept falling from the ceiling, and even if they weren't burned to death, the nearby people finished them off.
Over an hour later, the large spiders on the fourteenth floor were mostly cleared. Xu Huo and Kang Hong broke the spider egg cultivation tanks to prevent the fire from spreading. Gu Yu found the main power switch, but with fire and water everywhere, she didn't dare pull it. So they had to rely on their phones to assess the situation.
The number of people killed by spiders on the entire fourteenth floor reached forty-seven, including three players who had come with Gu Yu.
Seeing the bloodied faces of his companions, Zheng Liang knelt before the corpses, pounding his fist on the ground. "It's all my fault! If I hadn't called them out, they wouldn't have died!"
Gu Yu looked sorrowful and patted his shoulder. "You can't blame yourself..."
Before she could finish, Tie Ge, his face injured, interrupted, "Of course it's not Zheng Liang's fault. Blame him!"
He pointed at Xu Huo.
"If he hadn't led us in circles on the main road, how would we have ended up in this damn instance?"
The gazes of Gu Yu and the other players turned to the man who was examining the spider corpses nearby. He clapped his hands and stood up. "If you're not skilled enough, you still want someone to take the blame?"
"What did you say!" Zhang Biao said angrily. "Three of our players died!"
Xu Huo squeezed the pus from a wound cut by a spider leg, then pointed his chin at the ground. "Isn't the murderer right here?"
His attitude enraged Zhang Biao and the others. Several players pushed past Gu Yu, who tried to stop them, and stepped forward, ready to settle things with life or death.
But at that moment, a middle-aged woman stepped in front of them. "You people have no shame, do you?"
"Even I, a housewife who hasn't read many books, know this is all caused by that damn game. People get killed by spiders, and instead of blaming the monsters in the building or the people who raised them, you blame someone completely unrelated?"
"Are you picking on him because he's alone, choosing the softest persimmon to squeeze?"
Zhang Biao and his group were stunned, then furious. "Who do you think you are, daring to spout nonsense in front of us!"
"I'm a human!" the middle-aged woman shouted. "Aren't you humans too!"
They paused for a moment, and then a few more people stepped forward. One elderly person said, "Young man, only eight hours have passed, and there are three more days. If you start infighting, who will handle the danger when it comes?"
"They're right," Dai Wenqian said at that moment. "The total game time is ninety hours. The first six hours were on the fifteenth floor. When the time was up, the elevator appeared, and everyone moved to the fourteenth floor."
"That means the remaining time in this instance might be evenly divided, six hours per floor."
"The game mentioned that this building cultivates fifteen types of mutant plants and fifteen types of mutant animals. It wouldn't be surprising to encounter situations like the fourteenth floor again."
"Losing any player increases our risk significantly, because games always get more dangerous toward the end."
His words successfully stopped the enraged Zhang Biao and his group. As they turned away, Zhang Biao muttered, "I'll see if anyone saves you when trouble comes!"
The people who spoke up for Xu Huo were actually acting out of self-preservation instinct.
During the spider swarm attack, only a few from Gu Yu's side were willing to help ordinary people. Although Xu Huo hadn't said much, his abilities were evident, and only two of the dozen or so who had ridden with him died.
"Young man, don't put too much pressure on yourself," the middle-aged woman who spoke first said. "Everyone has their fate. People who end up in places like this don't have good luck anyway."
Even so, the remaining hundred or so people unconsciously moved a bit closer to Xu Huo.
Xu Huo wasn't focused on that. After counting the people, he realized fifteen were missing.
A total of one hundred and ninety-five people had come down from the fifteenth floor. Forty-seven were killed by spiders, but now only one hundred and thirty-three remained on the fourteenth floor.
He frowned slightly, looked around, then walked to the elevator and knocked on it. As expected, the elevator car had disappeared again.
When the elevator arrived at the fourteenth floor, he had checked the time, and exactly six hours had passed. Dai Wenqian was right—ninety hours corresponded to fifteen floors, six hours per floor. But coming down from the fifteenth floor, one elevator's worth of people had vanished.
The windows on the fourteenth floor were sealed, and there were no blind spots in the entire floor. Those fifteen people could only have disappeared through the elevator.