Chapter 260: Ice Age

Killer Sequence Guild, Lounge.

The Inquisitor of the Gods is slumped on the sofa, drinking water like a madman, next to a man who looks like he's about to be dried up, with a pile of drained bottles of mineral water, stamina restorers, and mental restorers at his feet.

"It's really hot in the desert." A man sitting on the far left had his cheeks red from the baking, and his eyes were dazed as he held a bottle to his chest, "The game pool has banned shops, you can't even buy water, I thought I was going to die of thirst in this copy too."

"We were careless." The Inquisitor of the Counter Gods rubbed his brow, "I didn't expect to be trapped, I didn't work well enough together, and I didn't bring enough stuff."

The man suddenly sat up straight, looked around and wondered, "What's going on, why isn't Spades back yet? He's usually here in the lounge by the time we get out of the game, but where is he today?"

"Bought a whole bunch of strong acid fuel and went into a copy of Ice Age." The Inquisitor of the Counter-God said, smiling, "Playing the [true end] line."

The man next to him instantly understood and went limp again, tilting his head with a long, inexplicable sigh: "How many times has this happened, and he hasn't given up yet?"

The Inquisitor of the Counter Gods shook his head, seemingly amused, "I don't know, quite a few times anyway, every time we'd get a poster of Ice Age before entering the pool, Spades would glance at it twice, and it felt like if anyone missed it, Spades would jump in and leave us behind."

"He's long since hit the [normal end] line of Ice Age." The man puzzled, " Doesn't Spades not give a look anymore for games he's won?"

"What is it about this game's [true end] line that attracts him, it's not just a corpse collection quest, why does he have to fight it out every day when he's running to nowhere?"

The Reverse God poured another bottle of mineral water into his head and took a long breath as if he had been nourished: "I remember that the Spades' corpse collection mission in Ice Age was always short of one piece, and I remember that the piece I was short of was the heart piece, which I searched for many times without finding."

"Anyway, you know how that Spades guy is, he'll keep looking if he can't find it, so let him be, as a tempering of the mind."

The man looked complicated as he chewed on the mouth of the bottle and said vaguely, " Spades, there is still a lot of refinement to be done in that mind, so don't you want me to go back to the furnace and rebuild it?"

The Inquisitor of the Counter-God grips the bottle with a silent look.

This man also fell silent with it.

This comment crosses the line a bit - the Reverse God is the tactician who controls the whole situation and it is not the turn of a player to question his resolution.

Perhaps it is because he has been here for such a short time and his temperament is not very sharp, far less extreme than the other tacticians' personalities and actions, blending in so well with the team that the players often forget the man's identity as a tactician.

But a tactician is, after all, a tactician and does not allow his players to be so offended.

The man opened his mouth nervously, "I'm sorry."

"Nothing." The Reverse God waved a hand without much concern and smiled broadly, skimming over the unpleasant subject, "You've been working with Spades for a year now, can you tell me what match he impressed you the most?"

This wasn't the first time that Spades had been involved in such a routine, as the Reverse God would occasionally pull other teammates in for a long talk and ask them what they thought of Spades after he didn't manage to fit into the team.

The man held the bottle in his hand like Winnie the Pooh in contemplation, "I remember every game, but the one against Russell Cemetery was the most impressive."

The Reverse God recalls a moment and quickly picks up, "Ah, that one, ah, it was a bad fight."

The man nodded heartily, "More than miserable, the most horrible game of last year, I thought I was going to be reunited at the end of the game."

The Russell Cemetery v Killer Sequence game was a sixteen to eight.

By that time Spades' strength had become apparent and all sides were asking about the new player from Buming, but the most prominent of these inquiring guilds was Russell's Cemetery - a guild that did everything it could to unearth Spades' secrets and try to uncover his weaknesses.

Russell Cemetery was the 12th ranked guild the year before, but unlike other notorious teams, this team has no star players and is not strong, with a major turnover of team members every year, and new faces that seem to be timid on the field year after year, nothing seems to stick out.

The only memorable feature of the Russell Cemetery team was their penchant for forfeiting in both single and double matches, hence the name Russell Cemetery, which means that they went into the ring and did nothing but surrender twice to blow up the field.

But this team has a surprisingly solid style of team play, always hitting the ground running in certain games, winning with one hit and even beating star teams.

Last year's killer sequence nearly folded in front of Russell Cemetery.

Spades almost died in that game - Russell Cemetery tailored Spades' style of play to find a player with skills that could limit him and gave him a temporary role as tactician for the game against Killer Sequence.

--This is a skill that is used in a rather brutal way.

As soon as the game started, Russell's team exploded into action, grabbing one of their own players and forcing a kill and sacrifice.

Through this sacrifice, Russell's tactician forced his skill, turning the ground beneath Spades' feet into a large mud puddle - that's what he did.

The mire can nullify all of a player's attacks and slowly kill them by devouring them, making it a tried and true skill with the only drawback being that it is too expensive to use - it requires sacrificing one of your teammates to activate the skill.

The stronger the ability of the player being swallowed, the slower the mire swallows.

Spades lasted seven days in the game with the negative buff of not being able to attack in the mud puddle, shifting his status from [Attack] to [Shield], grinding his opponent into submission, and trapping him in a game shock map.

But at last the time has come for the mire to swallow Spades whole.

Half of Spades' face was stuck in the mud and his teammates did everything they could to get him out, kneeling beside the crisis-ridden puddle and digging for him with their bare hands, fighting off adversaries who came to attack them as they did so.

At that time, the look on the faces of everyone in the Killer Sequence was so grim that it was unforgettable to the audience at the time.

Grimace, fury, fear and dread intermingled, filling the room with an intensity of emotion that could not be resorted to in words, muddy tears streaked their twisted faces, and a low, maddening hiss erupted from the knot of their throats - a pure, unadulterated awe of the [death] to come.

Every single one of them knew beyond doubt that if Spades died here, they would definitely be in this game.

And Spades had no such trepidation; he simply looked calmly at the men, the mire swallowing him up bit by bit, while he said, "You may run."

Still, no one ran, some tore their hearts out and howled as they fought like mad against their opponents for blood.

Spades still won that game.

The team's collective burst of fear resisted Russell's incoming line, and after one of them burst and severed the opposite tactician's arms, disarming him and rendering him unable to use his staff, the mire skill that had trapped Spades lifted.

Spades who can attack are invincible, and victory comes as a matter of course.

The crowd erupted as Spades climbed out of the bottomless swamp, whip in hand, bathed in mud and blood, and stood on their feet screaming and cheering for Spades, the demon who had climbed out of the abyss.

He was covered from top to bottom in mud, and the seven-day tug-of-war had left Spades with a striking array of filth and horrific wounds, several broken bones exposed and sticking out sharply from his skin, mud and water mixed with blood clots hanging on the bones and solidifying.

Even with such a woeful gesture, no one doubted that the final victory would go to this woeful fellow.

Ten minutes later, Spades stands in front of the routed and kneeling team across the street, his face sparse, his bloodied whip in his lowered hand, the central prop of the game, a symbol of victory, held in his right hand, mud dripping from his jaw and knuckles.

The Russell Cemetery team trembled as these first time rookies begged incoherently for mercy and cried out.

Spades, also a newcomer, watched them without a word, separated by the distance between the winner and the loser, the gap between life and death.

It was a game of life and death, and they had done everything they could to backstab Spades, who was perfectly capable of killing them for spite.

There was a chorus of excited leaps from the audience, with some hissing at the top of their voices, "Kill them!"

"-Kill them!"

The Russell Cemetery procession closed their eyes in despair, having paid for victory with the lives of others, only to end up paying for defeat with their own lives.

They thought they were bound to die, everyone thought they were bound to die.

Finally Spades asked them a question.

Spades, his eyes obscured by his mud-covered forehead, spoke: "You inflict death on your teammates, and our teammates try to avoid my death out of fear of death."

"But when you place your lives on the backs of others." Spades looked down at the group, a hint of emotion in his eyes hidden beneath his hair, "Can't you see that the fate of your death is equally bound together?"

The group stared up at Spades in disbelief.

Spades waits quietly for an answer.

So the tactician with both arms chopped off tilted his head arduously and replied, "...... that's not how it works, one death and we all survive, it's our tactic and it works, didn't you get stuck in at the beginning even with Spades? "

"This was done to protect more of the team! One death will save so many!" He droned on, tearfully and excitedly explaining, not sure if it was to convince others or to convince himself.

When he had finished, Spades nodded calmly as if he had received an answer: "I see, you cannot see your own destiny."

"I will not kill you, you have your destiny, your death does not belong here, nor is it bestowed by me." Spades went on without a ripple, "You will die in your own mud."

The tactician looked at Spades, who had turned away in dismay, with tears in his eyes.

Spades didn't end up killing them either.

But shortly afterwards, Russell Cemetery was about to repeat the same trick of sacrificing a teammate in their next league match when they were killed by the enemy Team Fang Wood.

The tactician drowned in the mire skill he was about to unleash.

The man recalled the match and sighed, "I couldn't figure out what was going on in Spades' head from that point on, I would have just killed the guys in a fit of rage."

"But I think it's because of this." The man looked to the Inquisitor of the Reverse God and said from the bottom of his heart, " Spades has finally realised the importance of the team and that's why he's poached you this year."

The Inquisitor of the Counter-God pondered, and he suddenly said, "I actually asked Spades why he chose me to be your tactician."

The man asked curiously, "How did he answer?"

The Inquisitor of the Counter-God smiled, "He said that I saw that your fate was to work for me as a tactician and then die on the field."

This guy squirted: "He said that directly in front of you?! That's too ......"

Threatening death in front of a prophet like that ...... True to form, Spades!

"Correction, my skill is not prophecy, it's called [Listening to God's Only Words]." The Judge of the Counter-God shrugged, "Sometimes I can barely tell if he's a prophet or I'm a prophet, this guy's intuition is amazingly accurate, it's almost better than prophecy."

"For example, the copy of [Ice Age], we've actually all been there, and that unknown creature X's derivative in there that turns into a human is actually quite troublesome, even I have a hard time telling who's actually a real person and who's a monster, and even if we're not even less capable, we can't move an inch in this copy - -because we can't find the target of our attack."

The Inquisitor of the Gods looked to the team member sitting across from him, "But do you remember how Spades fought his way through this copy when he was with us?"

The team member muttered, "He killed all the replicas except for us once he got in ......"

The Inquisitor of the Gods nodded, "Yes, once Spades was inside, he quickly found Edmond hiding in Fang Xiaoxiao's body, killed him, stopped his plot to use the particle device to affect the global climate, and was able to reach the main global warming quest and pass the level."

"That's the [NORMAL END] of this game." The Inquisitor of the Counter-God spreads his hands, "From the time we entered the game until we found Spades next to a pile of replicant corpses, he cleared it in less than thirty minutes."

"Don't you think it's curious? How is it that this guy can identify who's human and who's a monster so easily? The monster anthropomorphism in this game is to the point where our party would wonder if they were real or not."

The man also rubbed his chin in contemplation and wondered, "Yeah, how did Spades identify it?"

"I asked him." A little helplessness showed on the face of the Judge of the Counter-God, "Do you know what he said back to me?"

The man asked, "How did he get back to you."

The Inquisitor of the Counter-God let out a long, deep sigh, "Intuition - he recognises it purely by intuition."

"As much as I hate to admit his instincts are so good, Spades does never lie." The Inquisitor of the Counter Gods held his forehead and sighed, "But that makes it even more problematic, Spades will have to trust my tactics over his instincts if he's to fit in with the team."

"But his instincts if so accurate, I simply don't have the means or the confidence to convince Spades to give up acting on his instincts and get him to comply with my tactical arrangements."

The man also wrinkled his brow as he listened, "Is there a way for us to go along with Spades' instincts?"

"I thought about it." Judgement of the Counter-God took a deep breath, "but it's no use, Spades simply has no way of accurately articulating his instincts to us, his instincts are usually a split-second feeling to capture, and by the time we react, he'll be running eight hundred miles away from us."

The man also seemed to recall the miserable period of his life chasing Spades in the game, and slumped on the table in a raw, miserable tone: "---- only left us searching in the same place. "

"It's mostly a communication problem, Spades can't say more than a few words to us before he starts to wander off, and I can't even get his attention by banging on a gong." The Inquisitor of the Counter-God's features frowned sadly as he propped his head on his hands and his eyes glazed over, "- can someone enlighten Spades so he can learn how to communicate with people ...... "

------

Inside the game, by the Ross Ice Shelf.

Spades gathered his things and strapped his walking gear to his sled board, tying the safety rope around his own waist and dragging it forward, he looked down and removed the map from the lining of his punching bag, confirming with his eyes the next location to be visited on the map, which was crumpled by the fierce wind.

After visiting the buoy point in the Ross Sea, Spades went to dozens more, and now he has cleared the map of all but a handful of locations.

Eventually his eyes skimmed over the map, landing on the inland point of the South Pole, before exhaling a slow white breath.

Edmond Observatory.

He remembered that this seemed to be the location where the player called Bai Liu had logged in together.

Having identified his target, Spades drew his whip from behind his waist, adjusted the skis fixed to his feet, then leaned forward, knees slightly bent, gazed across the unrelenting blizzard, locked on a certain direction and simply flung his arms left and right down the tart snow.

The whip slammed into the ground, raising a thick layer of snow around him. Spades used the whip as a snowball, using the tremendous reaction force of a quick swing on the ground to glide across the snow, almost as an orange-red bolt of lightning on the blanket of ground.

If the Inquisitors of the Gods were here, they would have to hiss at Spades again for not using such an expensive whip as a sled dog to lend a hand and pull the sled with the force of the whip!

But he wasn't there.

So Spades, with his black goggles on, bowed and swung his whip from side to side, glided smoothly and soon disappeared into the sweeping snow and wind.

Tarzan Station.

Bai Liu only stopped briefly at Tarzan station before they took advantage of the situation and burst out of it, snatching a helicopter parked outside and flying off in it before the Tarzan station crowd noticed.

The wind was howling outside the helicopter, and flying in such weather with visibility of no more than 30 metres was like pole dancing on the scythe of death, with the possibility of death at any moment.

But Tang Erda, the pilot, couldn't disobey Bai Liu - their tactician's eyes were now glowing with the excitement of an imminent billion dollar find, and even his breathing was slightly sharper, his slender fingers tightening and whitening as he gripped the backrest of his pilot's seat.

"Drive to where?!" Tang Erda asked with a hiss.

Bai Liu replied, " Edmond's Observatory."