Chapter 17: Mr. S
“H-he’s dead!” The doctor scrambled backward in absolute terror, slamming his head against the massive storage rack.
The glass bottles and jars on the shelves violently toppled over, shattering into pieces across the tile floor. Strange, brightly colored chemicals spilled out. The moment they hit the air, they released an overpowering, toxic stench. Some of the liquids were highly corrosive, leaving scorched, bubbling craters in the tiles wherever they flowed.
Su Qiong noticed a handful of human teeth soaking inside a puddle of the exact same purple liquid he had just been injected with.
Help! The little clean-freak marshmallow was utterly disgusted! His entire puffy body was a pristine, snowy white. Getting stained was his worst nightmare.
Feeling deeply nauseated, Su Qiong secretly peeled open a slit in his outer bandages and literally squeezed the unknown purple liquid right out of his hollow body, wringing himself like a wet sponge.
At the same time, he sneakily wiggled his squishy form until two of the electrode pads strapped to his stomach shifted closer together.
The instant the metal pads collided, they triggered a massive short circuit. A surge of unstable electricity blasted through the system, causing the fluorescent lights overhead to flicker and pop.
The melting doctor watched the vital monitors frantically spike up and down before flatlining completely. The patient on the bed lay perfectly still, clearly dead beyond saving.
The two liquid-faced nurses had never seen anything like this. Screaming in terror, they bolted out of the treatment room. Long after they disappeared down the hall, Su Qiong could still hear them shrieking that the punishment room was haunted.
Watching from the corner, A was utterly speechless at Su Qiong’s little magic tricks.
He remembered the last time he had been dragged into Treatment Room No. 2. That deranged doctor had brutally electrocuted him, stabbed him with giant needles, and broken three of his ribs. A had been one agonizing breath away from dying on the spot.
A’s mental defenses crumbled slightly. Why don’t I have a convenient body like Su Qiong’s?
Meanwhile, the crooked-faced doctor barely managed to hold himself together. Retreating a safe distance from the bed, he stretched his melting arm out as far as it would go, his fingers trembling as he tried to check Su Qiong’s breathing.
Sensing the doctor’s sheer terror, Su Qiong once again found himself questioning the system’s logic.
Gangan Village had been actively haunted, yet the villagers still feared the police and debt collectors. Everyone in this hospital had transformed into a puddle of melting goo, yet they were terrified of vengeful ghosts.
Su Qiong stared flatly at the doctor’s face. Out of sheer panic, the man’s eyes and mouth had melted completely together into a single, sticky mass, while his nostrils had widened into two massive, swirling pits.
…Instead of worrying about ghosts, shouldn’t you find a mirror first? Su Qiong thought.
He really couldn’t understand IF. The game always prioritized “realism” in the absolute dumbest places. Still, the fact that the medical staff was afraid of ghosts played perfectly into Su Qiong’s hands.
Bzzzt. Bzzzt.
The lights flickered again. Su Qiong stiffly raised his puffy white arms and slowly levitated off the treatment bed.
“A ghost! There’s a ghost!” The doctor’s legs gave out, and he collapsed backward, knocking over another shelf of bottles.
Because Su Qiong was basically a weightless, featureless shape wrapped in gray fabric, he already looked a lot like a floating shadow. Paired with the eerie, blurring effect of the Mimicry Cloak, there was absolutely nothing unnatural about him pretending to be a spirit.
Floating ominously toward the doctor, Su Qiong rasped out the only horror-movie line he knew.
“Giiiive~ me~ baaack~ my~ liiife~”
A turned his head away, unable to watch. Hearing a little marshmallow monster use a sugary-sweet, adorable voice to try and sound terrifying was the real supernatural event here.
Yet, the doctor fell for it hook, line, and sinker. His fused eyes widened to the size of fried eggs, and his squishy body vibrated at a wildly inappropriate frequency.
A moment later, a foul, sour smell filled the room. The doctor had wet himself in terror.
Su Qiong pinched where his nose should have been and quickly floated backward. The room was far too filthy now. He wanted to finish this interrogation as fast as possible.
“Tell me,” Su Qiong demanded. “What is this hospital’s full name?”
“I don’t know!” the doctor sobbed weakly, his melted eye unfocusing. “A major accident happened here a long time ago. Everyone who knew the full name died!”
“Are you certain they all died?” A asked coldly from the corner.
The doctor jolted, hurriedly correcting himself. “No! One survivor is left, but he’s basically no different from a dead man!”
“Where is he?”
“Third floor… inpatient ward.” The doctor numbly stammered out a specific room number.
Hearing the location, A and Su Qiong exchanged a look.
“That’s my room,” A said.
“So you’re the survivor?”
“Is that even possible?”
Su Qiong floated closer, trying to scare more information out of the puddle-man, but the doctor was too terrified to form complete sentences. Annoyed, A kicked the doctor twice to vent his frustration. Before security could arrive, he grabbed Su Qiong and dragged him back to his hospital room on the third floor.
The room looked exactly the same as when they left it. Su Qiong meticulously checked every corner, even squeezing his squishy body under the mattress to look around. Nothing.
A stood rigidly in the center of the room, rubbing his chin in deep thought.
When the instance started four days ago, A had loaded directly into this exact room. Being highly trained, his first instinct had been to thoroughly sweep his surroundings for traps or hidden threats. He was certain he hadn’t missed a single detail. Furthermore, he systematically re-checked the room every single time he entered or left it.
If there really was a hidden survivor stashed in here, A would have found him on day one.
“Oh, right. Mr. S,” Su Qiong wiggled out from beneath the bed, floating up beside A. “That’s the name the nurse used during her rounds.”
He turned to the living weapon. “Can you reenact what the nurse did?”
“Alright,” A nodded, quickly understanding the strategy. He walked over to the bed and spoke to the empty air in front of him. “Mr. S, how are you feeling today?”
“No, that’s not right,” Su Qiong shook his head. “I remember she made a very subtle movement.”
“…You’re right,” A frowned. “I felt something was slightly off before, too. But when I didn’t find any threats after two days, I stopped thinking about it.”
A pressed two fingers firmly against his temple, visualizing the nurse’s exact routine in his mind’s eye.
Suddenly, the realization hit him. He snapped his head up, staring directly at the ceiling.
Every single time the nurse conducted her rounds, her eyes had briefly flicked upward.
“What’s above us?” Su Qiong asked.
“The fourth floor. Logistics and the cafeteria,” A pulled out the tattered hospital map, tracing his finger over the layout to pinpoint the exact room directly over theirs.
When he found the match, A finally felt a wave of clarity.
“The water room.”
Su Qiong looked troubled. “But I remember one of the strict rules on the exam paper. It explicitly said players are forbidden from entering the water room under any circumstances.”
“Mm. So we won’t enter it,” A said, holding the map up to calculate the structural dimensions.
He stepped onto a wooden chair, then vaulted silently onto the small table beside the bed. Curling his long fingers, he knocked firmly against the plaster ceiling, pressing his ear to the paint to listen to the echoes.
“Su Qiong, give me a pen.”
Su Qiong grabbed a plastic ballpoint pen left behind by the nurse and handed it up.
A pressed his left hand flat against the spot that produced the deepest, longest echo. With his right hand, he drew a thick black X over it.
“Move back,” he instructed the marshmallow.
“Oh.” Su Qiong didn’t know what A was plotting, but he obediently floated a safe distance away.
Once Su Qiong was clear, A grabbed the upper edge of the window frame for leverage and planted his right foot firmly on the table.
A split second later, his right leg snapped upward in a terrifying, explosive kick, striking the exact center of the black X.
Crack! Several deep fissures instantly spider-webbed across the reinforced-concrete ceiling.
“Wow!” Su Qiong gasped.
He was incredibly thankful he wasn’t an instance boss. Otherwise, no amount of soft bandages in the world could save him from a kick like that.
“Tsk,” A clicked his tongue, looking genuinely frustrated. “My physical condition has really dropped after being stuck here so long.”
While a living weapon could endure four days without sleep or water, even A couldn’t keep his body at peak absolute performance forever.
Su Qiong: You call that a drop in performance?! Men with abs are terrifying!
Dirty, dark water began seeping out from the cracked concrete. A didn’t kick the ceiling again. Instead, he grabbed the heavy metal thermos issued by the hospital and aggressively hammered the cracks until the steel thermos was totally flattened.
A large chunk of plaster finally broke away, widening the gap.
Water immediately began trickling steadily down into the room, slowly turning A’s hospital room into an artificial indoor waterfall.
A jumped lightly off the table, retreating to stand beside Su Qiong as they watched the hole.
Time ticked by, second by agonizing second.
After ten full minutes, absolutely nothing had happened, aside from the floor becoming a massive puddle.
“Could our deduction be wrong?” Su Qiong asked sadly.
“There’s another possibility,” A reasoned. “The doctor just lied to us.”
“Then I’m going back down there to haunt him again!” Su Qiong huffed, deciding to permanently write the keyword “holds grudges” into his core programming.
Rumble—!
A deafening crash interrupted Su Qiong’s plotting.
Massive chunks of stone violently broke away from the ceiling, plummeting straight down toward the marshmallow.
A hadn’t expected the entire structure to collapse after he only broke a tiny hole. Reacting with lightning speed, he snatched Su Qiong out of the air and dove out the door into the hallway.
From the doorway, they stared in shock at the enormous, horrifying creature dropping through the ceiling.
It looked like a colossal, sticky slime monster, so massive it filled nearly the entire hospital room. As it landed in the puddle on the floor, it began rapidly absorbing the water, its body swelling larger and larger by the second.
A immediately raised his wrist to scan it, but the standard player interface failed to pull any data on the monster.
Frowning, A tapped the screen and spent a chunk of his massive point stash to activate an advanced elite scan. The laser locked onto a dark core buried deep inside the creature’s gelatinous body. A string of red notifications flashed across his screen:
[NPC—Red Name] Mr. S
[Level] 30
[Abilities] Unable to detect while target is in a near-death state.
[Player A and NPC Su Qiong have triggered the side quest: Rescue the Instance NPC and prevent the instance’s destruction.]
[Warning: This instance NPC is an annihilation-type boss monster. Players, please treasure your lives~]
