Chapter 652: Mirror Maze
After dealing with the player in front of her, the Painting Woman conjured a piece of paper and quickly folded it into a frog. She wrapped the button signal device inside and placed it on the ground, letting it hop around the corridor.
Crouching down to watch the frog jump for a while, she then used the paper to roll up the player's corpse and stuff it into a cabinet in the nearby room before turning to open another door.
* * *
Xu Huo and the team of players from the Special Defense Department were trapped on the third floor.
There was a mirror maze on the third floor.
This wasn't part of the building's original layout, but when they came up, the corridors on that floor were covered with mirrors everywhere. They tried to bypass the third floor, but a large mirror sealed off the stairwell, making it impossible to pass.
"Blowing up the stairs won't work either." They had tried the corridors, the ceiling, and the walls.
"It looks like they're trying to block us on the third floor." Team Leader Wang's tone was harsh. "Pretty arrogant of them!"
"When will the second batch of Special Defense Department players come in?" Xu Huo asked at this point.
Team Leader Wang didn't trust Xu Huo much, but there was no point in lying about this. "If we lose contact after entering, the next batch of players will enter the building in fifteen minutes."
Xu Huo nodded. The number of Y Country players hiding in this building wouldn't be too large, but they might have high-level items on hand, which was why he had sent the Painting Woman up first while he stayed below.
Following behind the Special Defense Department players was also a way to buy time—first, to divert the enemy players' attention and create an opportunity for the Painting Woman, and second, to get an early read on this group of players' tactics.
"Since we can't blast through the corridor, why don't we just go into the third floor?" one team member suggested. "We're wasting time here anyway. We can take them out one by one."
The other team members agreed.
No one asked for Xu Huo's opinion. After the team leader nodded, over a dozen people filed into the third floor.
The moment they stepped in, a floor-to-ceiling mirror appeared before them. It seemed to reflect their figures, then quickly flipped left and right as the lights on the side flickered continuously.
Learning from their earlier lesson, the Special Defense Department players didn't fire recklessly this time. Team Leader Wang threw a rubber adhesive object forward. As soon as it stuck to the mirror, a crisp "crack" sound rang out. The large mirror shattered on cue, sending fragments scattering across the floor.
Team Leader Wang shielded his chest and, after confirming no one was ambushing them behind the mirror, stepped over the frame and walked in.
Xu Huo glanced down at the mirror shards on the ground, then lagged two steps behind the others.
Behind the large mirror was a corridor made of rectangular mirror panels. Every angled surface was a mirror. As soon as someone stood inside, their own reflection surrounded them from all sides. The spatial chaos caused by the visual distortion made it impossible to tell where they actually were.
"There's no way forward." Team Leader Wang stopped, turned on his flashlight, and examined the area left and right. "This section seems to be sealed off."
"Let's just pick one at random."
As he spoke, he mimicked his earlier move and slapped a rubber adhesive onto the mirror directly in front of him. But this time, after the rubber stuck, the mirror didn't crack like before.
"What's going on?" Team Leader Wang hesitated for a moment, then stepped forward to retrieve the item. But the moment his hand touched the rubber, the entire mirror surface rippled like water and sucked him in!
"Captain!" The team members behind him quickly reached out to grab him, but ended up getting pulled in along with him.
After the two figures disappeared, the mirror returned to normal.
"What the hell!" The other team members immediately fired at the mirror's top corners, but the bullets ricocheted wildly within the enclosed mirror space, wounding two of their own!
"Stop shooting! Can't you see this is a special item?" Xu Huo interrupted them. "Our reflections are each individually displayed on one of these mirrors."
The lighting here was dim. Even with evolved vision, it was hard to track which mirror had gained or lost a person in a space full of mirrors. In fact, as Xu Huo said, among the nearly hundred mirrors, one of them only reflected the figure of a single person among them.
"Does that mean one mirror corresponds to one person?" a short player asked in confusion. He tried using his own destruction item, but still couldn't break the mirror where Team Leader Wang had disappeared. Another player touched the mirror directly with his hand, but unlike Team Leader Wang, he wasn't sucked in.
At this moment, the mirror was nothing more than a solid wall—no matter how they struck or smashed it, it wouldn't open.
"Captain! Captain!" The team members called out a few more times, but there was no response from behind the mirror. The two who had gone in had vanished like stones dropped into the sea.
"We're trapped," the short player said. "If each mirror corresponds to one of us, we won't find a way out unless we split up. We'll just have to stay here."
But everyone knew how risky it would be to split up.
"What are you doing?" After a moment of silence, the short player suddenly turned his head to look at Xu Huo, who was repeatedly tossing a marble at the mirrors.
"I'm testing whether other objects can pass through the mirror." Xu Huo didn't stop his movements. The marble bounced off the mirror and back into his hand.
The others didn't dismiss him outright. The short player said, "Didn't we already try that with bullets?"
"There's no harm in trying," Xu Huo replied. "Even though we're separated by mirrors, this is still just one floor. Even if the space is divided, the area won't increase."
Even if they created a separate passage for each person based on the reflections in the mirrors, the enemy probably didn't have that many people to spare. That meant the distance between them was at most a few mirrors.
When Team Leader Wang was swallowed by the mirror earlier, he also dragged another person in with him. This showed that the mirror wasn't too strict about personnel allocation.
Raising his flashlight, Xu Huo stood in the middle of the corridor and gestured for the short player to stand in front of the mirror that only reflected his own image.
"You mean we should each try one by one?" the short player said disapprovingly. "I think it's best not to split up, in case we run into danger."
As long as they stayed here, they were buying time against the enemy players.
"How will we know if there's a breakthrough without trying?" Xu Huo said. "Even if you don't want to earn merits, you should at least consider Team Leader Wang's safety. Besides, I don't think our luck is that bad. There probably isn't a second sealed space like this."
"I'll try." A burly player pushed his way through the others and stepped forward. "But since the captain took someone in with him, we can try that too."
"I'll go with you." Another player stepped up.
The two chose a different mirror. When the burly player touched the surface, the mirror indeed rippled. After extending one hand and one foot through, he turned back to nod at the players behind him—only to suddenly see Xu Huo crashing into several people and slamming them all forward!
Several players were knocked over in one go, piling on top of each other. Without the flashlight's illumination, they couldn't tell if they had passed through the mirror or not. In the chaos, they only saw a few fist-sized spots of light flying toward them from ahead!