Love NPC in Nightmare Game - Chapter 33

Chapter 33: Doll’s House 7

Alvia was standing on the other side of the room, it seemed like he was preparing to hide here during the next shaking, and he didn’t say anything when he saw Zhou Zhou coming over.

Zhou Zhou walked up to him and said to him very sincerely, “I’m sorry.”

Alvia glanced at him, “What are you apologizing to me for?”

“Everyone just told me that when encountering people like that, I shouldn’t be soft-hearted. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that earlier.”

Up until now, Zhou Zhou actually hadn’t gotten angry because of this incident, but he knew that he was just an NPC, and there were many things he couldn’t understand by himself. Everyone told him that this was a mistake, so he would learn properly. At least he wouldn’t make the same mistake again next time.

Alvia wasn’t really angry either, he just felt that Zhou Zhou was like a softie, just like in the previous instance. So how was this kind of person chosen to be the undercover agent to approach him?

Seeing Zhou Zhou obediently standing in front of him, his big eyes blinking and staring at him, as if looking to see if he was still angry, even if Alvia was angry, he couldn’t show it anymore.

“Hmm.” Alvia responded lightly.

Zhou Zhou seemed to understand that this response meant that the other party had forgiven him, and he smiled with his eyes curved. Then he remembered that he hadn’t thanked the other party yet. “Thank you for saving me earlier.” It seemed like Al had saved him many times already.

“So how are you going to thank me?” Unexpectedly, Alvia actually followed up on this.

Zhou Zhou was taken aback, and then pondered for a while with his head lowered. “I’ll treat you to a meal.”

Alvia: …why is it always a meal?

“We already had a meal last time.”

Doesn’t that work? Zhou Zhou lowered his head and continued thinking, “Then I’ll take you to an amusement park to play.”

An amusement park? Alvia didn’t expect that Zhou Zhou would actually want to go to an amusement park with him. Did he mean the amusement park that he had gone to alone before?

During this time in the game, Zhou Zhou had only been to restaurants and amusement parks, so when he offered to treat someone, he could only think of these two places. It was hard to describe.

However, it didn’t seem bad for the two of them to go together. He had never been to an amusement park when he was a kid, and he didn’t expect that he would end up going to a virtual amusement park in the game now.

“Okay.”

Seeing that Alvia agreed, Zhou Zhou nodded and started thinking about who else to invite. Xue Li and Ke Li were definitely going…

“Before the ghost appeared, what were you and Xue Li talking about?” Alvia finally asked the question he had heard part of earlier.

Zhou Zhou looked at Alvia and remembered the question he had asked Xia Yan. Al was lying to him!

“We were chatting.” Zhou Zhou said vaguely. Because Al said that he couldn’t date before the age of twenty, if he knew that he had already dated two people, he would definitely scold him.

“Is that so?” Realizing that Zhou Zhou always dodged and evaded whenever he lied, practically telling others blatantly that he was lying, Alvia didn’t continue to ask. Since he wouldn’t tell the truth, he could try to get it out of Xue Li later.

Ten minutes had passed, and the large ghost started shaking the house again. Alvia protected Zhou Zhou and didn’t let him go near the window again.

This time, everyone had gained experience, and no players were shaken out. After half an hour, the shaking stopped, and the three large ghosts floated away slowly.

It seemed like they wouldn’t come back tonight. As long as they persisted for half an hour, the ghosts wouldn’t continue shaking the house but would leave directly.

Everyone was almost shaken to the point of vomiting, sitting or lying on the floor to rest.

They felt dizzy and extremely uncomfortable.

After resting for a while, the sky had also brightened.

At this point, it had been a day and a night since they entered the instance, and they still had two days left to find the exit.

Xia Yan sat on the sofa on the first floor and said to everyone, “We’d better find the exit today.”

Eddie didn’t understand, “Isn’t there still two days left? Why does it have to be today?”

Xia Yan looked around at everyone, “When we came in, there were a total of five teams, about thirty people, but now there are less than half left. The team that left early is probably also completely wiped out.”

At this point, one person from the team that only had two people left suddenly asked, “How do you know they’re completely wiped out?”

Xia Yan didn’t want to answer such a simple question, but if he didn’t take the time to explain the reason to these people, there might be problems later. It was really troublesome.

“Our first main mission was to hatch the egg, and after hatching, the second mission was to follow the doll to reach this place, and then return the doll to its owner. Everyone here has basically completed these two missions.”

Zhou Zhou turned to look at the little yellow duck he had placed on the chair. His mission wasn’t completed, the little kid forgot to bring the doll.

In Alvia’s pocket was also the iron frog. The person who came into his room wasn’t a child but Zeus, and that guy said a few words and left, completely forgetting to complete his own mission.

Xia Yan continued, “If that team also hatched the egg, then they should have followed the doll to reach here as well. But it’s been a day now, and there’s been no movement at all. And if they can’t get here, the second mission can’t be completed either, so I’ve judged that they’ve probably been eliminated.”

Indeed, no matter where they ended up, after hatching the doll, they should have received the same mission to reach this house. But in reality, those people had completely disappeared.

“Then why does it have to be today?” Eddie asked again.

“Because tonight, there might be more than ten ghosts appearing outside,” Zhou Zhou said. He imagined that scene and looked at his own little arms and legs, wondering how he could possibly catch those large ghosts.

More than ten!

That’s right, each ghost corresponded to a dead player, and there were only twelve of them left, meaning there would be more than ten ghosts. If they still hadn’t found the exit tonight, they would be facing more than ten large ghosts shaking the house together. Could that even be called shaking? With that many ghosts, they might be able to push the house around on the ground, or throw the house back and forth.

Just imagining that scene made them want to vomit.

Everyone immediately became energized, determined to find the exit today!

Everyone was like they had been injected with chicken blood, searching all over the house for clues, and no one dared to slack off.

The two players in a single team would occasionally glance at Zhou Zhou and mutter in low voices, “If he hadn’t thrown Akko out to feed the ghosts, we would have had another helper.”

“Not only would we have had another helper, but there would also be one less ghost.” His companion agreed.

Although the two of them didn’t speak very loudly, Zhou Zhou still heard them.

He walked over to the two of them and stood in front of them, looking at them.

As soon as the two turned around and saw Zhou Zhou standing very close to them, they were almost startled. “What are you doing, standing so close all of a sudden?”

“I heard it.”

“Heard what?” one of them asked guiltily.

“I heard what you said just now.”

“So what if you heard it? We didn’t say anything wrong. It’s just a game. Why did you have to throw Akko out there? Isn’t that too cruel?”

Zhou Zhou frowned and looked at them, as if contemplating some major issue.

“Some people are just bullying the kind but fearing the tough. They clearly made the mistake themselves, but they have to blame others, thinking they didn’t do anything wrong.”

“And they’ll choose those who seem easy to bully, yes, just like you.”

“When they encounter someone formidable, they don’t even dare fart, ahem, sorry for the dirty language. When they encounter someone formidable, they don’t even dare breathe a sigh.”

“There are too many people like this, so you have to be tougher than them, or you can tell us, and we’ll help you deal with them.”

Thinking about what Xue Li and the others had told him earlier, Zhou Zhou suddenly realized that these people were bullying the kind but fearing the tough! It was clearly Al who threw him down, but they didn’t dare find Al, so they secretly complained about him because he seemed easy to bully.

And he wasn’t cruel at all.

“Heya,” Zhou Zhou called out.

Heya, who was never far from Zhou Zhou, immediately came forward. His height of over two meters made him extremely intimidating, and the muscles all over his body made people feel timid just by looking at him.

“What’s the matter?” Heya stood beside Zhou Zhou, and with Zhou Zhou’s tall and slender figure and exquisite features, Heya appeared even more towering and ferocious.

Zhou Zhou pointed with his hand, “They scolded me.”

Damn! This guy has no martial ethics, how dare he actually told on them.

Heya immediately glared at the two of them. Having been a mercenary for many years, he looked extremely aggressive. “Shall we go over there and have a chat?”

The two of them were immediately scared like quails, trembling in the corner, unable to say a word, completely different from their earlier righteous attitude when facing Zhou Zhou.

Wow, it really was just like Xue Li and the others said!

Zhou Zhou was shocked. People really were so complicated.

Heya let out a cold laugh, stretched out his big hand, and grabbed the two people cowering in the corner, one in each hand. The two of them immediately became panicked and even started screaming for help.

Among those present, apart from Zhou Zhou’s team, there were only the four people from the Sharp family. Xue Li and the others didn’t care at all about what Heya was doing. Seeing Zhou Zhou telling on them, they even felt quite relieved.

The Sharp family members were also busy looking for the exit. Apart from Zhou Zhou, Heya, and another skilled man, they didn’t pay attention to anyone else present. It didn’t matter if there was one more or one less.

Even if those two players were really killed due to personal grievances, adding two more ghosts didn’t really make much difference. After all, there were already more than ten, so adding two more would only make things slightly more troublesome, that’s all.

However, Zhou Zhou didn’t really intend to do anything to the two of them. He discovered that these two people were really just like what Xue Li and the others had said, and he also knew that when facing such people, he couldn’t show weakness. He had to either find someone to help or be a little tougher himself.

So he let Heya put them down.

Afterwards, the two of them searched separately and never dared to approach Zhou Zhou again.

They searched all morning but didn’t find any clues. Xia Yan couldn’t help but start wondering if the clue might not be in this house at all, but the area outside was too vast, and it would be impossible to find the exit even if everyone went out to search for three days.

He gathered everyone on the first floor again, planning to have them search around the house once more, since it was also possible that the exit was outside the house.

Suddenly, there was a tinkling sound in the house, and everyone looked toward the source of the noise. They saw a group of dolls coming down the stairs, and the dolls were all very familiar, all of them were the ones they had returned to the children the night before.

The tiny dolls lined up and came to the crowd, with a porcelain doll leading the way. This porcelain doll seemed to be the one that one of the burly men had hatched, but that burly man had already been eliminated.

“Let’s play a game together!” the porcelain doll suddenly spoke.

Looking at the group of dolls that were not even as tall as their legs, Eddie was not afraid and spoke to the porcelain doll as if coaxing a child, “Good girl, why don’t you and your friends play by yourselves? We big brothers and sisters still have things to do.”

They were busy looking for the exit, where would they find the time to play games with dolls?

“If you don’t play the game, you’ll die.” The porcelain doll looked cute, but the words it said were eerie.

And the group of dolls behind it also jumped and chanted together, “If you don’t play the game, you’ll die.”

Some of the dolls here were hatched by the players present, and yesterday they only made animal sounds. Just like Zhou Zhou’s fat duck could only quack, the other animal dolls could only make the sounds of their respective animals. But today, they had all changed to children’s voices, and if you listened carefully, they had the same voice as the little children who had appeared under their beds last night.

Eddie: “……”

It seemed they had no other choice but to play along.

The dolls led them to an open area outside the house and told them that the game they would play was dodgeball.

Xue Li immediately became cautious, “They’re not going to smash us to death, are they?”

Ke Li: “Maybe they are, and if we don’t play, we’ll die too.”

There were twelve players in total, all on the same team. On the other side, there were also twelve dolls that came out, and there were four more dolls standing outside their field, with the remaining ones waiting on the sidelines.

Eddie immediately shouted, “What are those four dolls outside for? Are they substitutes?”

The porcelain doll nodded.

“That’s not fair! There are only twelve of us, but why do you have substitutes?”

The porcelain doll blinked, “Who says there are only twelve of you?”

Zhou Zhou looked at those dolls, then suddenly turned and ran back into the house, picking up the little yellow duck he had placed on the chair and bringing it back to the field outside.

He held up the little yellow duck in his hand and asked the porcelain doll, “Can it be our substitute?”

The porcelain doll seemed not to have expected that the players would still have a doll, and it was stunned for a moment. Then it huddled together with the other few dolls to discuss for a while before saying, “Okay.”

After the porcelain doll finished speaking, the fat duck that had been motionless since last night suddenly seemed to come alive, lowering its head and quacking at Zhou Zhou.

Zhou Zhou seemed to understand and said to the duck, “Yeah, let’s do our best together.”

Then he placed the duck in the substitute position as well, and at the same time, Alvia also walked over and placed the iron frog from his pocket next to the duck.

Porcelain doll: How could there be more?

The game began, and the dreaded event didn’t happen. The dolls seemed to be genuinely playing the game, using the dodgeballs and playing along with the players. Even if they were hit and eliminated, there were no punishments.

The players took the lead from the very beginning. Not to mention that Alvia and Heya had received training since childhood, the four people from the Sharp family were also not ordinary folks. Although it was Zhou Zhou’s first time, his reaction ability was also very strong, and he seemed to be having a lot of fun, with rosy red cheeks.

Although Xue Li, Ke Li, and Eddie were not as formidable as the Sharp family members, they were also considered masters at playing games.

The dolls were gradually eliminated one by one, while only two players were eliminated.

To be honest, although this game was simple, it was quite interesting to play.

Eddie was having fun and even boldly made faces at the dolls on the other side, “Can’t hit me, can’t hit me, you can’t hit me.”

“Smack!”

A salted fish flew over and hit Eddie squarely in the face.

Eddie squatted on the spot, covering his face and wailing. It seemed that the force of the impact was not light.

“You’re out,” the porcelain doll said to Eddie.

The salted fish that had fallen on the ground flopped and jumped back to the other side of the field, its dead fish eyes staring at the players as if mocking them.

“Isn’t this cheating? Only getting hit by a ball counts as being out. When your teammate, that salted fish, flew over, what was that about?” Xue Li scolded.

Although the porcelain doll was small, it was quite unreasonable, “In our game, what I say goes. The dolls can fly over and hit the players, but you can’t come over. If you come over, you’re out.”

How could they play like this? The dolls were all coming over to hit the players, and once they were hit, they were eliminated, while the dolls could still return to their field. They had never heard of such unfair rules.

But now they were in an instance, this was the dolls’ home turf, and what they said went.

Eddie angrily stood up, the red mark on his face from being hit by the salted fish very obvious. “Fine! We’ll play with them.”

Then he pulled Zhou Zhou aside and took out a piece of paper from somewhere, “Zhou Zhou, here!”

“What’s this?” Zhou Zhou asked curiously as he took the paper.

“It’s a flying talisman, a prop I bought at a high price. I only have two pieces. Stick this one on your fat duck, and then hit them hard. Didn’t they say the dolls could cross over? We’re not without a doll either.”

Eddie was clearly holding a grudge. At a time like this, there was actually no need to use props, since they were just playing a game and losing wouldn’t get them eliminated from the instance. But being hit squarely by a salted fish had caused Eddie a lot of harm.

You can hit me with a ball, but you can’t insult me with a salted fish! This grievance must be avenged!

Zhou Zhou turned the paper over and over, although he had long known that he could buy props with points, he had never thought to buy them before. It seemed quite interesting, and he would check it out next time.

He obediently stuck the paper on the little yellow duck, and the white paper seemed to merge into the duck’s body, leaving no trace at all.

Since Eddie was “injured” and out, the fat duck would take his place on the field.

He waved his hands from outside the field, “Go for it, hit them, hit them hard!”

Zhou Zhou nodded as he held his little yellow duck.

This time, it was Heya’s turn to serve. His serve was very powerful and fast, and after serving, he immediately rushed toward the salted fish lying on the other side, seeming to want to avenge Eddie.

The salted fish remained motionless until the ball was about to reach it, then suddenly leaped up, narrowly dodging the ball.

But as it was falling back down, a yellow ball suddenly appeared in the field and hit the falling salted fish.

The salted fish was immediately knocked out of the field.

Then this yellow balloon with two small wings actually curved before landing and flew back to the players’ side of the field.

Salted fish: “……”

Porcelain doll: “……”

The fat duck had completed its mission, successfully eliminating one doll. It puffed out its chest and quacked at Zhou Zhou, looking very proud of itself.

Eddie applauded vigorously from outside the field, “Great! One more time!”

Zhou Zhou was a little dazed too, not expecting the little yellow duck to be so formidable. He picked up the duck again and looked toward the other side.

“You cheated just now, that was against the rules,” the porcelain doll shouted in its childlike voice.

Eddie immediately refuted it. Clearly, it was the dolls who made the rule that they could cross over, and now they were denying it.

“Sore losers, sore losers!”

If the porcelain doll was a real person, it would probably be red-faced with anger by now. It glared at Eddie, who had been fanning the flames all along on the sidelines, but in the end, it could only accept it, or else it would mean they had cheated first.

Zhou Zhou threw the duck out, and although his force wasn’t great, because the duck had the flying talisman, it could even fly to the opponents’ side of the field, hit one, then fly to the other side and hit another, scoring a double knockout before flying back.

After a few rounds like this, the players always served first.

Before long, all the dolls were eliminated, while the players still had many remaining.

They originally thought it would end like this, but the porcelain doll actually demanded another round, with the same words: if they didn’t play, they would die.

And in the next round, the porcelain doll even swapped out some dolls, replacing several with flying ones, so that the fat duck was no longer unique.

During the game of dodgeball, this was the scene that emerged: not only balls but also various dolls were flying back and forth in the field.

The players not only had to dodge balls but also the dolls flying over from the other side.

The players won the second and third rounds because the little yellow duck was faster than all the dolls on the other side.

The flying talisman lost its effect in the fourth round, and the players lost.

The fifth round…

The sixth round…

Finally, the players were exhausted and panting for breath, and the dolls had also become dirty, with several dolls even missing arms and legs.

It was only then that the dolls ended the game and lined up again to return to the house.

The players also went back to the house and sat down to rest.

“When, when are we going to start looking for clues?” Eddie panted.

Zhou Zhou wasn’t actually tired at all, but since Xue Li and the others were panting heavily, he immediately remembered that he was an NPC and couldn’t behave abnormally, so he also panted as he replied, “No, no need to look.”

“Why not? Did you find, any clues?” Eddie asked.

“Because, because it’s almost, night time.” Zhou Zhou pointed at the clock and said breathlessly.

The others also looked at the clock and realized it was indeed almost night time. It was only then that they realized the dolls’ ploy, they had been stalling for time and draining the players’ energy.

Now they were in trouble. Not only had they not found any clues, but they also had almost no energy left, and a large group of large ghosts was about to approach…