A Survival Game Where You Have to Fall in Love with a Madman - Chapter 22

A childish voice abruptly cut through Chen Yiyi’s delicate, fragile display. The skateboard youth kicked his feet up onto the table, speaking with immense irritation:

“Li Luoyu. 12 years old. This is so annoying, getting dragged into this trash place just for skateboarding in the middle of the night.”

His facial features were as exquisitely carved as a porcelain doll’s, yet his eyes gleamed with the raw ferocity of a wolf pup. “Anyone else stares at me, and I’m breaking your face.”

“Oh? Quite fierce, aren’t we?” Seated right beside him, He Yanqing let out a playful, mocking chuckle, clearly finding the kid’s bravado entertaining.

Upon hearing the remark, Li Luoyu whipped his head around to glare death at him, but ultimately bit his tongue. He was entirely aware that he was outmatched by this guy. For now, he would endure.

The live stream bullet-chat (danmaku) flared up instantly over the interface:

[User ID: Yingying Begonia]: Hahaha, this kid’s facial expressions are absolutely hilarious! [User ID: Jinhua Xinci]: What’s so funny? Even the anomalies sweat when they see God He, let alone regular players. [User ID: Shut_Your_Peace]: Wow, look at him still completely unbothered as always. I love it.

At that moment, the woman with the shoulder-length hair sitting next to Zhang Wei timidly raised her hand. “My name is Lin Xiaoyu. 25 years old. I’m an engineer… I-I was in the middle of calculating structural data when suddenly…”

Her voice trailed off into a whisper. A heavy bow strap began to slide off her shoulder, and she frantically adjusted it back into place.

“An engineer?”

Pei Baiyang, who had remained silent until now, straightened his posture. His sharp gaze locked onto her behind his gold rims, heavily laced with clinical scrutiny. “Then why exactly are you equipped with a recurve bow and a quiver of arrows? That seems entirely contradictory to your stated profession, doesn’t it?”

“B-Because I designed it myself,” Lin Xiaoyu stammered, her voice trembling as she buried her face downward, completely unable to withstand the weight of the table’s collective suspicion. “I had no idea the System would register it as my personal weapon upon entering the instance.”

The explanation did possess a marginal baseline of credibility. Since her profile indexed her as an engineer, it wasn’t mathematically impossible for a custom blueprint to be recognized by the system architecture as a unique deployment weapon.

Observing Lin Xiaoyu’s profound distress, Liu Xin felt a wave of sympathy wash over him. He decided to intervene and disrupt the table’s line of interrogation to bail her out.

“I’m Liu Xin, 24 years old, and I’m an intelligence scout,” he announced with absolute composure, adjusting his glasses. His eyes methodically swept across the circle. “I assume most of you are already familiar with my title across the instances: The Information Collector.”

Lin Xiaoyu threw a glance of immense gratitude in his direction, causing Liu Xin to rub the back of his neck in slight embarrassment.

Seeing this, Pei Baiyang pressed no further. The collective focus of the room naturally gravitated toward the final participant who had yet to speak You Yan.

“Hurry the hell up, you’re the last one!” Zhang Wei urged, his face twisted into a furious scowl. His hostility toward You Yan stemmed not only from the fact that You Yan’s past operations had indirectly caused his teammates’ demises, but more fundamentally because You Yan’s presence had stripped away his safety net, forcing him to face this volatile instance entirely isolated.

You Yan’s fingers, which had been tapping rhythmically against his knee, abruptly ceased their movement. The cessation was stark, yet it failed to register with the panicked crowd.

His eyes slowly panned across the assembled players, dispassionately indexing their micro-expressions. When he spoke, his voice was entirely cold, detached, and utterly unbothered by the stakes:

“I am merely an NPC with a capability evaluation score of absolute zero. I assume nothing further needs to be elaborated.”

Though brief, the statement radiated an undeniable baseline of clinical confidence and absolute indifference. He harbored zero concern regarding their evaluations of him, nor did he require a fabricated narrative to validate his utility. After all, the high-tier players had already scanned his baseline metrics through the blue wrist interfaces prior to the introductory phase. Attempting to construct an elaborate lie would only introduce unnecessary variables.

The table fell into an abrupt, heavy silence. No one could formulate a counterargument; You Yan was, by all quantifiable data metrics, the absolute weakest link among the eight of us.

The Night Phase Initialized

“The introductory phase is now concluded,” the raven-masked entity announced, forcefully snapping the players’ attention away from You Yan. “The game will now officially commence.”

Its deep, authoritative voice carried a localized shockwave that rattled their composure. Stepping back into the shadows, the entity cleared the central space. Simultaneously, a single card materialized face-down on the metal table directly in front of every participant.

The crowd’s focus was instantly captured. They reached out with immense caution to lift the corners of their respective identity cards, taking extreme care to ensure their metrics remained hidden from adjacent eyes. After a rapid, guarded glance, they pressed the cards flat against the table, tracking their neighbors with heightened paranoia.

Throughout the entire sequence, You Yan’s face remained a perfect mask of absolute neutrality. However, his eyes were as sharp as a hunting hawk’s, silently cataloging the minute facial twitches of every player as they indexed their alignments.

You Yan pulled back the corner of his own card a grotesque, snarling werewolf pattern grinned back at him.

His role designation: Werewolf.

Through his peripheral vision, he caught He Yanqing arching an eyebrow, his own card flashing imperceptibly between his fingers.

Once the system verified that all players had indexed their roles, the raven-masked figure casually waved its right gloved hand. The identity cards vanished from the table surface without a trace an effective system measure designed to eliminate any possibility of physical theft or unauthorized line-of-sight exposure, ensuring absolute operational secrecy.

“It is night. Please close your eyes.”

The entity’s voice dropped into a chilling, magnetic register that sounded as though it had been dragged straight out of the underworld, sending an involuntary shiver down everyone’s spine.

Without a shred of hesitation, You Yan sealed his eyes shut. His heart, however, began to hammer against his ribs like a war drum, accelerating rapidly. A profound cocktail of cold focus and underlying excitement coursed through his veins the board was set.

Suddenly, a localized spike of intense heat flared within his left silver earring, the sensation diffusing rapidly across his neural pathways. He was being granted sensory tracking of his pack mate!

Within seconds, his internal tracking system locked onto a definitive target stationed precisely five paces away: Chen Yiyi.

He could clearly perceive a violent shift in Chen Yiyi’s respiratory frequency; her breathing had grown shallow and rapid. She had clearly just realized her own alignment as a Werewolf and was panicking under the pressure.

The Coercive Blindness

Concurrently, the remaining players were locked within an absolute, impenetrable void. The blind phase was stringently enforced by the system architecture; the moment the raven-masked entity uttered the phrase, a localized sensory blackout was deployed. It was a mandatory state—regardless of how aggressively a player attempted to force their eyelids open, they could perceive absolutely nothing but pitch-black darkness.

Zhang Wei’s mind was racing with opportunistic calculations. He reasoned that if he could somehow bypass the restriction and sneak a glance to identify the two Werewolves immediately, he could execute a speed-run clearance of this instance. He would achieve absolute renown across the Main God architecture, and every player would revere his tactical genius. The mere thought brought an internal smirk to his face.

Driven by his ambition, he attempted to force his eyelids apart to audit his surroundings.

To his absolute horror, no matter how much raw physical strength he channeled into his facial muscles, his eyelids felt as though they had been industriously welded together. They refused to budge a single millimeter.

Worse still, a horrific, tearing agony ripped through his ocular nerves, feeling exactly as though an invisible pair of hands was aggressively attempting to wrench his eyelids from his skull.

Terror completely seized Zhang Wei. He opened his mouth to scream, to violently demand assistance from the group, only to discover that his jaw and vocal cords were completely locked down under an absolute system silence filter. He could not emit a single decibel.

“Werewolves, please open your eyes.”

You Yan slowly parted his eyelids, his gaze locking directly into Chen Yiyi’s panicked, wide-eyed stare across the circle.

Chen Yiyi’s lips were trembling violently. She was clearly attempting to articulate something, but under the tactical constraints of the night phase, she could only attempt to convey her message via exaggerated mouth movements.

You Yan methodically traced the shape of her silent syllables, deciphering her query: “What do we do?”

You Yan frowned slightly, running a rapid diagnostic of their operational parameters. If this interface strictly adhered to classic social deduction mechanics, the pack was permitted to coordinate during the night phase without their audio signatures bleeding over to the sleeping Town faction.

You Yan deliberately formed his words, keeping his vocal output low but perfectly legible to her across the distance:

“If we intend to secure a victory condition, our operational directives are binary: we either systematically execute every single Special Role card, or we completely slaughter the ordinary Villagers.”