Chapter 395: Video Recording

The surrounding hail had noticeably thinned; the sustained effect of 【Ice Crystal Falling Star Fist】 was about to run out.

"Photo's. me. found."

Over the walkie-talkie, Binary Tree's voice came in broken snatches. Fu Ding Hua Long hurriedly slapped the walkie-talkie hard. "Did you find it? Hello? Hello?!"

Crackle.

The walkie-talkie emitted a burst of static, and the network connection severed completely. The signal in the upper-right corner dropped to zero.

"Damn!"

Even with Fu Ding Hua Long's good temper, at this moment he couldn't help wanting to smash the walkie-talkie.

Of all the times for the network to drop — it was just like an ad window popping up mid team-fight and forcibly kicking you back to the desktop;

Like picking every lottery number right, thinking you'd won the jackpot, only to find it was last week's draw;

Like the Pinduoduo coupon progress bar forever stuck at 99.999%;

Infuriating, maddening, enough to make one tear out their hair.

"Everyone get ready."

Bai Ma Mu Bei's expression was solemn. Blue flame ignited on both fists, flowed over his whole body, and formed a ring of fire as a barrier.

Andre's whole body blazed with dazzling holy light,

While Ozaki Aozora ordered the ceramic puppet to open its back armor so she could climb inside — if Pajama Man really was, as guessed, unable to overlap with solid matter when teleporting, this method might buy her a little more time alive.

The back armor of the other two puppets also popped open, for Crimson Racer and Fu Ding Hua Long to crawl into.

As for Li Cheng, the Grey Rain standing beside him wrapped both hands around his head, the liquid metal melting and recasting into an iron sphere over 20 centimeters thick.

"Hello?"

Li Cheng knocked on the iron sphere, his voice muffled and booming: "Could you open me a little hole?"

"Oh, oh, forgot you need to breathe."

Grey Rain hurriedly reshaped the iron sphere, exposing two eyes — the look reminiscent of the Iron-Faced Man in Young Justice Bao.

Three, two, one.

The countdown ended; the hail no longer fell. Seeing that everyone had prepared their defenses, Pajama Man on the distant rooftop did not rashly blink forward,

but instead circled the group, teleporting dozens of times in succession, slowly searching for an opening.

Perhaps judging that the group no longer posed a threat to him, the legless Pajama Man suddenly blinked, plunging into the crowd, picked out the ceramic puppet where Ozaki Aozora was hiding, and slashed his blade toward the puppet's back.

Chance!

A fierce light flared in Bai Ma Mu Bei's eyes. Pajama Man had so far displayed two attack methods: one was direct teleportation, sending the blade into a person's body to cause a piercing wound.

The other was teleporting beside a player and slashing with the blade to cause a cutting wound.

The first kind was one thing — players almost had no chance to react in time and counterattack.

But the second kind, considering that Pajama Man needed time to swing his blade, that 0.2–0.5 second gap was the window for the players to counter.

Bai Ma Mu Bei twisted his body and threw a textbook uppercut, punching forward.

The fist generated wind; the wind fed the fire. The ghostly blue flame surged along the direction of her arm's swing, directly incinerating that ceramic puppet into charcoal, the remaining force still pouring toward Pajama Man.

This was not sacrificing a teammate — just a few seconds earlier, Ozaki Aozora had used a skill called 【Hundred-Li Voice Transmission】 to relay the intel to her across the air.

Namely, the inside of the ceramic puppet carried a teleportation function that could transfer the object inside into another puppet's body.

After all, the Puppeteer class, being a one-person army, like the Trainer, had relatively weak personal survivability and was vulnerable to decapitation strikes.

Ozaki Aozora had used this ability to ambush many an opponent to death.

The ghostly blue flame engulfed Pajama Man's left hand. He flashed urgently a hundred meters away, stared at his burning arm, paused a moment, then flashed again, teleporting his own left hand into the ground to overlap with the concrete.

But — when had a Transcendent's fire ever been so easy to extinguish?

The ghostly blue flames, like a bone-clinging pest, crawled out of the concrete and spread toward his shoulder.

"."

Pajama Man did not hesitate. Gripping his iron-slicing meat cleaver, he chopped off his entire left shoulder. The wound's cross-section, like his legs, did not ooze a single drop of blood.

"He's really ruthless to himself."

Li Cheng, wearing the iron-sphere headgear, spoke in a voice like a great bell, clicking his tongue in wonder: "Both legs and the left hand are gone — now he can only raise his right."

Crimson Racer and Fu Ding Hua Long, crouched inside one of the puppets, twitched at the corners of their eyes. Big bro, of all times you still want to make memes? You didn't secretly awaken some 【Super Meme System】 behind our backs, did you?

Every meme earns you a game coin, and the more people roast you the more your stats go up?

Setting aside their silent grumbling, Pajama Man — now missing both legs and an arm — had his threat level plummet. A crippled body meant he couldn't smoothly execute slashing moves,

and if he couldn't slash, then he was still limited by the 20-centimeter blade length. He couldn't pierce defenses thicker than twenty centimeters — like the iron sphere on Li Cheng's head.

Pajama Man himself seemed to realize this too. After a long pause, he vanished.

". He left?"

Andre's brows knit tightly, his voice carrying a hint of relief.

"Hard to say."

Before Bai Ma Mu Bei finished speaking, he suddenly looked up at the high sky.

Amid the black, cotton-like snowflakes, a pickup truck plummeted thunderously toward the group.

It happened too suddenly. Andre flashed backward, at the same time kicking a puppet to send Crimson Racer hiding inside retreating along with it.

Boom!

That Ford pickup slammed into the ground, its front end shattering, shards of iron and glass spraying everywhere.

Before the group could react, a second, then a third vehicle — a steady stream of assorted cars — kept falling from the high sky. Through the blizzard of black snow, one could faintly see Pajama Man's high-frequency blinking figure.

A third attack method?!

Andre's breath hitched. It seemed Pajama Man could take along any object he was in contact with and blink-teleport it together.

At the same time, this teleportation ability had a limitation: he could not bring a contacted object into contact with other solid matter.

Otherwise, Pajama Man could simply touch the player, then take the player and brick them directly into the wall or floor.

However, knowing this did nothing to help resolve the predicament at hand.

One car after another plummeted down at two hundred kilometers per hour. Within the secret realm's building complex, there had to be a parking lot, providing Pajama Man with an endless supply of "ammunition."

"Strike it rich!"

Li Cheng shouted as he dodged the heavy-luck truck falling from the sky.

No one knew what the secret realm's generation mechanism was, but the cargo beds of some heavy trucks were even fully loaded with sand and gravel, steel pipes, and steel coils.

A one-meter-wide steel coil weighs fourteen tons, a 1.2-meter-wide one weighs eighteen tons, and those industrial-grade steel coils reach an absurd thirty tons.

Hui Yu couldn't dodge in time and was smashed by a hundred-ton heavy truck loaded with steel coils, crushed flat on the spot, and snarled viciously: "Damn it, being looked down on like this is really something."

As the players' formation was broken apart, Pajama Man's finishing move had also arrived—in the high sky, an enormous South Asian statue materialized out of thin air.

The statue was unveiled in October 2018 in Gujarat, India, commemorating the Indian independence hero Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Standing one hundred eighty-two meters tall, weighing twelve thousand tons.

Such a colossal object no longer needed gravitational acceleration to boost its power; Pajama Man simply placed the giant Indian statue at a height of five meters above the ground and let it free-fall.

At the moment of life and death, each player employed their own means. White Horse Gravestone threw a punch, melting out a crater at the base of the statue so she could stand inside it and avoid being crushed,

Father Andre used Bible teleportation to evade, Li Cheng relied on his familiar to swap positions, exchanging places with the paper crane he had released earlier,

The ceramic puppet carrying Ozaki Sora and two others revved its engine until it smoked, narrowly bursting out of the statue's base range.

Only Hui Yu once again took on her two-dimensional form.

If one strike didn't do it, there was always a second.

Pajama Man was in no rush; his remaining right hand gripped the nostril of the ten-thousand-ton Indian statue, and he flashed back into the air

Sizzle!

Just as the Crimson Racer and the others were filled with despair, preparing to force-quit, the advertising screens on the exterior walls of the high-rises on both sides of the street lit up, playing a video.

In the footage, a fully-limbed Pajama Man beamed with a bright smile, holding a camera, filming a Christmas video at home—decorated for Christmas—for his wife, their two children, and his parents and siblings who had come from afar for the family gathering.

"Wow! A PS5?! Thank you, Aunt Betty!"

"Hahaha, I'm good to you guys, right? Your stingy old dad would never buy you this. So, how about it—want to come home with me~"

The video's audio, amplified by the giant advertising screen's speakers, echoed throughout the entire street.

Pajama Man's expression went blank; he loosened his grip, flashed to the advertising screen, and reached out to touch the display.

One of the symptoms of PMO face-blindness is the inability to recognize three-dimensional faces, but being able to recognize faces in two-dimensional images.

The video kept playing—a family gathered around the dining table, eating turkey and salmon, drinking red wine, chatting about the trivialities of the past year.

In the corner of the frame, one could faintly see the meat cleaver bearing the Zwilling logo, placed by the washbasin.

"Hello? Has the signal recovered?"

The walkie-talkie carried Binary Tree's voice: "I've found the person in the picture. He's a thirty-four-year-old American man, no prior history of PMO. Judging from the police report, on Christmas night he"

"We already know."

White Horse Gravestone cut off Binary Tree's words, took a deep breath, and raised her fist.

Pajama Man was already completely captivated by the video; without his teleportation skill, he was no harder to deal with than an ordinary lv10 monster.

"Let me do it."

Li Cheng raised his hand, stopping White Horse Gravestone, and said calmly: "Your punch has a wind-up; it'll alert him."

A dignified lv29 being held back by an lv21 was a bit strange, but White Horse Gravestone chose to trust her teammate and stepped back half a pace.

Li Cheng turned around, his left hand gripping 【Hover Engine】, his right hand assuming an elbow-strike stance, aiming at Pajama Man.

Then, at the speed of light, he launched himself into a flying elbow strike.

(End of this chapter)