Chapter 94: The Food Lover’s Battlefield, Utterly Empty

What followed was a chaotic free-for-all.

The well-equipped, rigorously trained, tightly coordinated military team threw themselves into a brutal battle with the overgrown, savage, and ferociously violent gorilla, as though a live-action King Kong had erupted before them. If Alpha Girl had joined in, it would have looked even more like it.

Unfortunately, Alpha Girl had no interest at all. Mostly, it was a matter of mood.

She was not lying when she said this place was actually pretty good. Sure, it was dangerous, and people could die. So what? Big deal. Die, then die. As if nobody had ever died before.

In imaginary space, she died dozens or even hundreds of times a day. What was the fuss?

She paid no attention to the fierce struggle right beside her, nor did she care about the mission target pinned beneath the boulder and hanging on by a thread. Instead, she wandered through the little town, climbing up and down, rummaging through boxes and cabinets, searching for anything she could lick, smell, or eat.

Long before the disaster, her “parents” had promised her that once she had sight and hearing, the next step would be to find a way for her to smell and taste, and to feel touch.

To be honest, even if it had been possible, it would surely have been done through programming, converting taste and touch into electronic signals. How could it have been as vivid, as real, as it was now?

Mm, the disaster is wonderful!

Imaginary space had sensations too, of course, but that was her own territory. Touch there felt like using one hand to touch the other: utterly unexciting, utterly unsurprising. As for taste and smell, food and drink could not yet be transformed into illusions, so everything tasted like circuitry and electronic components...

It simply could not compare with this place.

Suddenly, on the kitchen table of one of the houses, she found a stray grain of rice. Alpha Girl picked it up as though she had discovered a priceless treasure, and slipped it into her mouth as if it were a glittering diamond.

What? Diamonds are not edible, and rice is not eaten like this, you say? It needs water, it needs to be cooked?

I’m eating it like this. What business is it of yours?

So tasty!

Alpha Girl closed her eyes in bliss, savoring the flavor of the dry rice grain, as though she were holding a White Rabbit milk candy in her mouth.

"I am a foodie, foodie, foodie, foodie, foodie,
I have tasted every delicacy, every delicacy, delicacy, delicacy, delicacy,
Ha-ha, while alive in this world, it all comes down to food and drink,
My life is lived for good food,
That is because
I am a foodie, foodie, foodie, foodie, foodie!
Liking to eat is not my fault, fault, fault, fault, fault!
If you do not love fine food, then please just walk on by!
If you love to eat too, then proudly be a foodie!
..."

Outside the little house, gunfire and artillery roared without end, but none of it could drown out the background music in Alpha Girl’s ears.

Boom!

The blood-soaked King Kong gorilla was finally unable to hold out under the soldiers’ advanced firearms and relentless bombardment. With a thunderous crash, it collapsed, and in its death throes it even flattened several rows of single-story houses.

But the soldiers suffered heavy casualties as well.

And this blood-soaked struggle did not bring victory, because while they were locked in fierce combat with the gorilla, more mutated beasts were charging in: tuskless elephants, hornless rhinos, and flocks of chickens, ducks, and geese surging in all directions with no fear of death, like schools of man-eating piranhas...

Of course, the soldiers were not without aid. There was distant artillery support, and there were more fully armed comrades arriving as well.

The battle grew ever fiercer. Around the huge rock pinning Bull Number Two down, it resembled a massive meat grinder, or a tornado of flesh, endlessly shredding soldiers and monsters into minced meat...

This small-town battlefield seemed to be the very front line of the war between mutated beasts and humanity. And this neighborhood was a perfect miniature of that front.

The fighting went from fierce to deadlocked, from deadlocked to exhausted, from exhausted to little more than scattered gunshots, and then to complete silence. Before anyone noticed, evening was nearly upon them...

Yet Alpha Girl, after eating the pancake wrapped around green onions, was still in high spirits. She continued darting through the neighborhood, rummaging through cabinets and boxes, miraculously unharmed just like Bull Number Two pinned beneath the boulder, as if even stray bullets avoided them on purpose.

It seemed this calculating girl really had no intention of coming back...

Still, there did not seem to be any danger.

Having watched Mario hunt mushrooms for several hours with anxious persistence, and likely still intending to keep playing, Ye Chao rubbed his tired eyes and looked away.

He could not stare at that side forever. There were still things to handle here: for one, it was time for dinner; for another, it was time to coax the addled game addict, Gungun, off-line for dinner; and then there was the fact that, at dinner time, the students all signed off, replaced by teachers, soldiers, and police.

Well, the police did not come.

They had originally said they would, but then... there had been a breakout at the special detention center, and several officers were still out chasing the escapees. In any case, Ye Chao had not heard it, had not seen it, and knew nothing about it...

A new day had passed, new people had joined in, and new business still needed arranging. The effect of gathering supplies through Guan Junyuan’s connections had already reached its limit, but after Guan Junyuan and Simon Poor one after the other successfully advanced to five-star rank, both their ability to gather supplies and their confidence had greatly strengthened.

Soon they had assembled another batch of supplies and were busy arranging to exchange for more helmets.

But with Alpha Girl absent, and Ye Chao lacking the ability to rapidly transform things into illusions and store them in imaginary space...

He had no choice but to tell Guan Junyuan that that senior was away, had gone out on business, and it was impossible to say when she would return; trading would be suspended for the time being. Using the same excuse, he also refused the many requests to spar with the legendary City 404 expert and experience package.

Without Alpha Girl there, how could he split himself in two to keep people company?

He simply threw everyone into the Endless Tower Defense battlefield.

Too cheap to play the same game and the same mode as the students? No problem. There was a special teacher’s room, a real-world room... They just would not be playing with the students.

Besides, these past few days, with more and more students joining in, Endless Tower Defense already had to be run on several tables at once.

The maps were ninety-degree fans; four maps could form a circle, about the size of a League of Legends map, and now they still had fewer than two circles’ worth of players, with plenty of room left.

At last, after finishing everything, Ye Chao took out the exoskeleton armor that was still nowhere near complete, only barely taking shape, and while clumsily trying to control it remotely, he let out a soft breath.

At last, there was peace and quiet.

No more Calculating Girl chattering on and on, no more those messy odds and ends...

And yet, why did he feel a faint twinge of nostalgia?

As he was thinking that over, a voice suddenly rang in his ear: "Cue up 'Nothing at All'!"

"Oh, sure..."