Insomniac Player

Damien could see the assassins clearly. Nocturnal Eyes made sight the least of his problems. He couldn’t outrun them. He couldn’t change direction fast enough when they actually attacked.

Options carried into a grave are just unused numbers.

➤[Allocate 14 Stat Points to Speed?]

➤[Allocate 10 Stat Points to Agility?]

He confirmed both at once.

Heat flooded his legs and spine. Muscles pulled tight. His balance shifted hard enough that the floor felt like it moved under him for a second, and he took one step, then another, recalibrating his whole body on the fly.

Wei Jian noticed. "You strengthened yourself."

"A sealed granary feeds no soldier while the walls burn."

The captain nodded. "You waited until you knew which stats the battle actually required."

That reading is accurate enough to be uncomfortable. Damien reminded himself, not for the first time, that these people were players too. Just from a different world, with a different way of putting things into words.

The first barrier failed.

Black cords came in through the roof and wrapped around the shrine’s support pillars, and instead of pulling inward, the attackers dragged the whole structure apart at once. Lin Hua hammered formation nails straight into the floor. Su Lei and Wu Kai braced the southern wall with their own bodies. Han Rui shot through gaps too narrow for Damien to even see under daylight.

For eighteen minutes, the unit held. Whoever these people were, they didn’t fight like bandits. They probed every defense, pulled back before a counter could land, and changed tactics the second Wei Jian found a pattern to exploit. Dream suppressant crept up through the floorboards. Thin bells rang outside at irregular intervals, chipping away at everyone’s concentration.

Then a voice spoke through every single bell at once.

"Return the black moon jade, and the masked outsider may leave."

Damien recognized that voice from Saint Mary’s instantly.

Wei Jian didn’t look at him. "The jade isn’t here anymore."

"I know." The bells carried a soft laugh with them. "The offer wasn’t addressed to you."

Every eye in the room turned toward Damien. I’d genuinely like to know why people keep offering me survival right after surrounding me with murder.

He faced the broken doors instead of answering directly. "A hand that bargains with another man’s blood has already confessed its poverty."

Bao Yu smiled without any humor behind it. "He declines."

Accurate. He appreciated the efficient translation.

The second barrier shattered. Assassins poured in from the roof and the floor at the same instant.

Pei Shan died first, a black needle through the temple while he worked on Duan Ke’s wound. Su Lei killed the man responsible, then lost both hands to a wire drawn across the room a heartbeat later. Duan Ke, unable to properly lift his own sword anymore, threw himself at the wire’s owner instead, and the two of them crashed straight through the broken wall together. Neither of them got up.

Yin Tao and Chen Luo held the northern doorway right up until a dream seal opened beneath their feet, and both of them froze inside an illusion only the two of them could see. Two assassins cut them down while their eyes stayed wide open, still watching something that wasn’t there.

Damien moved faster now with the allocation behind him. Fast enough to dodge the first blade. Fast enough to turn the second one into his shoulder instead of his throat. Not fast enough to save a single one of them.

Wei Jian and Bao Yu fought at a level he could barely track, even with Nocturnal Eyes doing everything it could. The captain’s measuring rod changed length with every strike, breaking joints and redirecting weapons off their intended lines. Bao Yu’s spear filled half the shrine with pale arcs of motion. Han Rui fired without any visible draw at all, arrows simply appearing in bodies before the bowstring’s sound had even reached anyone’s ears.

They were magnificent.

They were losing.

The attackers outnumbered them, outleveled them, and knew every hidden formation inside this shrine better than the people who’d built it. Every defense the investigators managed to raise became one more mechanism for the enemy to turn against them instead.

Forty-eight minutes after the first cord had killed Fang Ji, only six investigators remained standing alongside Damien. Wei Jian. Lin Hua. Bao Yu. Han Rui. Qiao Sen. Wu Kai.

The inner shrine doors sealed shut around them. Cooldown notices hung at the edge of Damien’s vision.

➤[Shadow Imitation: 00:11:37]

➤[Shadow Dash: 00:14:52]

They needed fifteen minutes. The enemy needed considerably less.

Lin Hua found a maintenance tunnel under the altar. Qiao Sen tested it and found fresh footprints already leading inward.

"Trap," he said.

Wei Jian glanced up at the collapsing ceiling. "So is this room."

Damien studied the tunnel’s darkness. "When every cup is poisoned, thirst chooses the vessel that can still be thrown."

Wu Kai laughed once, sharp and a little unhinged. "I think that means we take the tunnel." Laughing at a moment like this took genuine insanity, not bravery, and everyone let him have it anyway.

They descended into an old burial channel underneath the shrine, black water climbing to their ankles. Nocturnal Eyes picked out wires strung under the surface.

"The river wears jewelry for the feet of careless guests."

Lin Hua saw the wires and disarmed them on sight. Qiao Sen found powder residue along the walls and picked out three safe turns from it. Wei Jian noticed the tunnel didn’t match its own reflection and broke through a false wall before the assassins waiting there could spring out behind them.

Wounded, exhausted, hunted, and still they solved every immediate problem faster than Damien could think.

The assassins solved the bigger one.

They flooded the tunnel from both ends at once, water roaring in, carrying purple dream suppressant and fragments of shattered moon jade along with it. Wu Kai braced himself under a stone beam so the rest of them could get past, and the beam shifted under him anyway. He held it up regardless.

"Go!" he shouted.

Damien looked back at him once. "The bridge that remembers every foot does not vanish when the river claims its name."

Wu Kai grinned through blood. "Better put that in the report."

The beam fell. There would be no report.

They came up into Black Reed Gorge more than an hour after the ambush had started. Moonlight lay across the broken road. Seven assassins waited among the reeds, four more standing behind them, and a thin man in physician’s robes watched everything from a stone platform, his face hidden behind a smooth wooden mask.

Mo Xian had come in person.

The cooldowns finally cleared. Both skills stood ready.

Wei Jian took in the numbers and understood exactly how much distance was actually left. "Earthling." Quiet. "When we open the western path, leave."

Damien looked at the five investigators still on their feet. Not one of them expected to be following him out.

He kept his voice level behind the mask. "A road purchased with the dead remains their property until the living reach its destination."

Wei Jian smiled, faint. "Then carry ours."

Lin Hua threw every formation nail she had left, and the gorge turned white with fire. Bao Yu charged straight through it. Han Rui’s last arrows followed her spear in. Qiao Sen scattered powder across all eleven remaining enemies, trading his own concealment for a clean read on every one of them. Wei Jian struck the road itself, and a wall of stone rose between Damien and Mo Xian.

Damien stepped into its shadow.

➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Imitation]

Darkness accepted him a second time that night. His presence sank into the stone, and he moved slowly west while the rest of them attacked east, drawing everything toward themselves.

An ordinary opponent would have lost him entirely.

The wooden mask turned directly toward his shadow anyway. He can recognize my consciousness itself, not just the body carrying it.

"There you are," the physician said.

Black needles struck the stone. The shadow buckled, and it forced him back out into the open.

➤[Skill Deactivated: Shadow Imitation]

➤[Cooldown: 01:00:00]