Chapter 29-Game Descent: I Am the Sole Player



Chapter 29

Ten minutes after the Position Swap Orders were distributed, the first challenge was issued and it happened between the two most-watched players on the leaderboard, number one and number two. The world channel erupted. People who had just barely recovered from the frantic killing of Phase One heard those two familiar names and felt a dazed, stunned blankness wash over their hollow faces.

This was the first Position Swap battle among human players. No one knew what this fight signified, or what kind of impact it would have on the world going forward.

Aside from the two people directly involved, all other human players could do was wait tensely. The world channel had already launched into fierce debate would Tyrant hold the throne, or would Charlie Anderson slay the king?

[This is insane I was just about to sleep. Can't people get any rest?]

[Anderson has guts! How confident must he be in his own strength!]

[I will keep my eyes open until Tyrant wins]

[What does it matter to ordinary people like us whether these two live or die? Best if they take each other out.]

[The number one reward is Game Authority! I don't know exactly what it does, but do you really want something that important falling into the hands of a mass murderer?]

[Tyrant killed a level-20 monster on the second day of the game and saved at least a thousand people for that alone we have to support Tyrant!]

[Maybe for balance, the Position Swap rules favour the challenger. If Tyrant's strength is only equal to or just slightly above Anderson's, Tyrant is in real danger]

Up on the rooftop, Lin Huijun had been about to follow Bai Shan downstairs when the frenzy on the world channel caught her eye and she couldn't look away.

The top two players on the leaderboard seemed impossibly remote from ordinary people like them who lived or died seemed to have nothing to do with her but Lin Huijun was certain that right now, countless people around the world were joining her in genuinely hoping the winner would be Tyrant.

Charlie Anderson represented the darkest, most utterly inhuman way to play this game. If he became the top human player, his shadow would awaken the ugliest, most selfish side of human nature on a massive scale.

Even though Lin Huijun had no idea who Tyrant was nationality, gender, age, personality, all a mystery compared to Charlie Anderson, Tyrant was an absolute saint.

She stared at the world channel messages flooding in from every corner of the globe, her heart tight with anxiety. Of all the times for Bai Shan to vanish on her if Bai Shan were here offering her sharp commentary, she wouldn't be this wound up.

"Oh, damn it!"

That bastard Charlie Anderson had ambushed her!

Bai Shan couldn't help the outburst. She hastily slung the bag holding her compound bow and arrows over her shoulder. One foot had just stepped into the empty stairwell and then she vanished without a sound.

The ground dropped away. Everything went black. Her body was weightless for one suspended instant.

When light struck her eyelids again, Bai Shan opened her eyes to find herself somewhere completely unfamiliar.

She was standing inside a building that was little better than rubble. Furniture lay buried under broken stone and brick, their edges just barely poking out. A dusty picture frame lay at her feet. To her left, an entire wall had been blown away, exposing bare bricks and twisted rebar. Looking out, the building across the way was in even worse shape reduced to a tottering half-structure on the verge of collapse.

A battlefield? A bombed-out residential neighbourhood?

Bai Shan surveyed her surroundings with careful attention and tugged absently at her coat. The temperature here was uncomfortably high she could already feel the heat pressing in from all sides.

A pale blue panel of light blinked open in front of her.

[Welcome, Player Tyrant, to the Position Swap Battle! Please review the rules!]

[Position Swap Battle Rules: 1. This is a fight to the death, with no time limit. Killing your opponent means victory. 2. The combat zone is the area within 30 square kilometres of the challenger's location. The system will teleport the challenged player into the challenger's zone. 3. Other players may be present within the combat zone, but there is one and only one challenger. If any other player attacks the challenged player in any form during the battle, the system will eliminate them immediately. 4. Once the challenged player arrives, no player may enter or exit the combat zone by any means.]

Reading through the four rules, the challenger was forbidden from having any assistance the greatest advantage was fighting on home ground, and this area was certainly the terrain where Charlie Anderson was most at ease.

Rules one and two were straightforward. Bai Shan turned rules three and four over in her mind a second time and noticed something interesting.

The rules strictly forbade the challenger from having help other players in the zone could not assist the challenger against her. But in the other direction, the rules did not explicitly state that other players in the zone could not help her, the challenged player. That was a loophole she could potentially exploit.

Though if she were Charlie Anderson, she would certainly have swept the combat zone clean beforehand, leaving no one who could threaten him.

And she could not have known in advance that someone would challenge her, nor deployed people on the other side of the world ahead of time that was simply impossible, at least for her right now.

Bai Shan drew a slow, deep breath. She caught the scent of sand and soil, blood, gunpowder all of it rolling toward her in a wave of dry heat.

The [Breathing Bracer] struggled to sense any natural force in this place. The earth here had been ploughed over and over by explosives barely a trace of living energy remained, saturated instead with the smell of death.

Fwip a faint sound from across the sky. Before Bai Shan could identify it, she had already leapt down from the broken four-storey wall!

Heaped rubble was swept aside by an invisible force, scattering in both directions. Bai Shan's feet landed cleanly on a flat slab of stone amid the wreckage.

Without a moment's pause, she sprinted forward off the rubble at full speed. Behind her, a bomb dropped from above detonated the crumbling building black smoke swallowed the clear blue sky.

Level 50, Strength Enhancement 400%, Agility Enhancement 300%, Body Enhancement 200% Bai Shan didn't need to think. Her body moved ahead of her mind, executing the fastest possible response.

Without even exchanging a glance, this Anderson had already sent an explosive greeting her way. He had to be watching from somewhere nearby.

Her body ran and leapt through the ruins in fierce bursts. Her mind remained cold and detached, pulling back to take in the whole situation.

Bai Shan recalled that a local source had once risked their life to post Charlie Anderson's ability on the world channel he could control firearms and heavy weapons. The ceiling and floor of that ability depended entirely on the environment. In some remote tropical rainforest, Anderson might only have a few hunting rifles to play with. But Bai Shan had already recognised this place from the graffiti on the shattered walls this was an area where international forces, rebel factions, and militant groups had all traded fire.

There was no shortage of weapons here. No shortage of the dead. No shortage of firepower.

This was Charlie Anderson's perfect battlefield.

Bai Shan ran into a slightly more open stretch of ground and stopped suddenly. She swept a look around something was watching her, making the back of her neck prickle.

Broken buildings stood all around her. The blast holes punched through their walls were black as open mouths like so many eyes lying in wait in the dark.

Well. If someone wanted to snipe her, this was quite a good spot for it.

Bai Shan thought this with dry amusement, and a plan began to take shape.

"Stopping here, Tyrant that's a mistake."

From somewhere high up in a residential tower, a man in camouflage lay flat on the ground, rifle braced before him.

Challenging Tyrant the moment the Position Swap Order arrived that had been a carefully considered decision on Charlie Anderson's part.

Phase One of the game had a level cap, so he and Tyrant were both at level 20. His talent, [Bloodshed Resonance], was SS-rank the highest known grade. He would not be outmatched there.

His game level and talent were on par with Tyrant's, and before the game began he had already possessed world-class individual combat skills. The optimal move was to challenge Tyrant now, before she had any chance to use the game rewards to widen the gap further.

Every moment he hesitated, Tyrant would use her existing advantages to pull further ahead, making victory less and less likely.

But if he won this one gamble killed Tyrant, absorbed her experience and all her items he would stand above the entire world.

The rifle's red dot settled on a young, vivid face. Through the scope, Anderson wound tight with excitement finally saw the true face of Tyrant.

His first instinct was to wonder if some random person had wandered into the zone by mistake.

He couldn't be wrong about this. The person in the distance had a slightly young-looking East Asian face. Though Westerners weren't known for reading East Asian features and ages, Charlie Anderson had run enough high-stakes covert operations and spent enough time in intelligence work to judge at a glance this East Asian was twenty years old at most.

The world was not short of prodigies who had stood out on a battlefield in their teens, but this person was clearly not one of them. At a glance, she was an ordinary student with no special training whatsoever stance loose, equipment laughable.

She was even wearing a floral coat that stood out as a blazing target in any combat zone, standing completely obliviously on the most perfect sniper's position imaginable.

God, was he being told that this was the Tyrant who had bested four hundred million players worldwide and shoved him into second place?

He had imagined every kind of identity a seasoned soldier like himself, a billionaire, a head of state, a militant commander How could it possibly be an ordinary student?

Anderson wrestled his surging emotions under control. Even deep undercover in a terrorist cell, watching his comrades get beheaded before his eyes, he had never felt anything as intense as finally laying eyes on Tyrant as if he were confronting something that simply should not exist.

He waited no longer. The silenced rifle shuddered once. A supersonic round tore through the air with barely a whisper.

This bullet had been blessed by [Death God's Blessing]. Even if the target had a high-grade defensive item, she could not refuse the Death God's embrace.

Anderson watched through the scope with electrified focus. The figure standing on the perfect sniper's position flickered and vanished. The Death-God-blessed bullet struck empty rubble.

He froze for only a fraction of a second before recognising his mistake. He immediately rolled behind cover, preparing to relocate.

Damn it she was Tyrant after all. He should have been more careful.

But the mistake was already irreversible. The direction of his shot had given away his position to Bai Shan.

The bullet's trajectory had told Bai Shan exactly where Anderson was. Following the path she had sensed, she moved almost instantaneously to the base of a building five hundred metres away.

She stood in the rubble, tilted her head back, and looked up at the floors above.

With a blank expression, Bai Shan pulled the slipping floral coat back up onto her shoulder. If this were her own coat, she would have thrown it away long ago.

The outfit was beyond comment but she wasn't here for a fashion show, and Charlie Anderson would not be wasting any attention on her wardrobe.

[Supersonic Movement]

[Heat Imaging Sensing]

[Soil Lord]

[Rhythmic Frenzy]

These were the abilities she had diligently accumulated in Tomorrow's Dominator 1.0 through her third skill, [Admonition]. Since the creatures who bowed had to possess a certain degree of intelligence, it had taken considerable effort to collect even four.

Among them, [Soil Lord] and [Rhythmic Frenzy] had been obtained by killing level-90 Great Sovereign-class monsters.

Her body could not yet unleash their full power but against you, Charlie Anderson, this is more than enough.

The barren ground cracked open. A fifteen-storey building seemed to have its foundation yanked out from beneath it; it crashed downward in a roaring collapse, like a sandcastle kicked over.

[Soil Lord From a certain Great Sovereign-level mole who has bowed to me I don't care about the surface world, I'm the one who rules underground!]

A faint red glow suffused Bai Shan's pupils. The collapsing building threw up rolling waves of dust and debris.

The smoke was no obstacle. Through the infrared heat signatures received by [Heat Imaging Sensing], Anderson's outline and movements were perfectly clear within the haze.

"Tyrant, cough cough we finally meet."

The man in camouflage crawled out of the rubble and ash. His build was imposing exactly as Bai Shan had expected.

But as the dust cleared and she got a proper look at him, a brief flash of surprise crossed her eyes.

The camouflage jacket's sleeves were rolled high, revealing arms of black metal. What extended above the collar was not a human head, but a large black gun a heavy, dark barrel pointed in her direction.

Where a neck should have been was a grip. Where a head should have been was a barrel. The face was a muzzle.

On either side of the barrel, two points of red light flickered perhaps his eyes.

"Forgive the sight this is my second skill. It looks a bit strange, I know, but it's quite useful."

He spoke with an elaborate, performative courtesy.

Bai Shan had no interest in small talk. If the man had a body of steel, then she'd burn it.

She pulled out the compound bow, reached back with one hand and drew an arrow from the quiver on her back. After the previous night's practice, the motion was smooth the moment the arrowhead settled on the string, a ferocious tongue of flame ignited at its tip.

[Inextinguishable Sun Flame (SS) Effect: A flame that does not cease until the target has been completely incinerated. Can be affixed to any object (excluding game items).]

Boom

Bai Shan was about to release when a dull, muffled explosion came from somewhere in the distance. A column of thick black smoke rose at the far edge of the sky.

Sobbing reached her from behind. Bai Shan did not turn around but she could sense someone approaching. From the sound of the footsteps and movement, young. Not very old at all.

Position Swap battles allowed other players to remain in the zone as observers, but not to intervene.

"Don't worry she's not here to help you kill me."

The man across from her spoke.

"She's just very upset. You were proving difficult to deal with, so I had no choice but to blow up a reserve experience depot. Her family may have been sheltering there."

[Congratulations, Player Charlie Anderson has reached Level 30!]

Thick smoke billowed at the far horizon.

Close by tick, tick a faint countdown sound began ticking from the girl's body, carrying to Bai Shan's ears just ahead of her.

"I asked her to keep time for me. Ten minutes that's how long I expect it to take to kill you."

"If I win within ten minutes, I'll defuse the bomb on her."

"If time runs out, or I die the bomb goes off."

Bai Shan understood. Whether in appearance or in nature, this man had drifted very far from humanity.

The man with a gun for a head shrugged. "By the way I have more reserve experience depots."

Shamelessly offloading the weight of human lives onto his opponent's back, locking her in a moral vice even if it didn't make her offer her throat willingly, it would shake her concentration.

Especially an ordinary student. The age of bright youth and full feeling naive enough to believe she could save the world.

Anderson waited inside, savouring it. This was his gift for the righteous Tyrant. The reality of Tyrant had diverged greatly from what he had imagined, but that only made him more certain of victory.

He could almost picture the shocked, conflicted expression she would show, the naive and self-righteous demands she would make, the pathetic opening she would expose

Bai Shan released.

The arrow, wreathed in inextinguishable flame and driven by [Tyrannical Command], split the air with a shower of furious sparks and closed on Anderson without hesitation.

A pair of dark eyes fixed on him with absolute focus so utterly pure that what showed through was a startling coldness.

She said nothing. She did not turn to look at the hostage with the bomb strapped to her.

Boom !

That was Tyrant's reply.

*

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