Volume 6 - CH 101.1

A Communiqué to All Humans

AD

Translated by boilpoil

Edited by boilpoil

When the Nightmare restarts, Fei kneels down and starts shaking uncontrollably, curling herself up.

Through the window of the library, they all saw what happened.

Something fell out of the sky, crashed, and then, an inferno stretched throughout the city. A shockwave, a loud rumbling, then dust clouded over the skies… They saw it all.

But they didn’t die.

Fei’s habits had her instinctively analyse it all.

The Missiontakers inside the library didn’t perish.

The shockwave shook the library, breaking all the glass windows, sending them tumbling to the ground.

They were bleeding from scratches and received some blunt trauma from the glass and rubble, but none of them suffered anything fatal.

If they didn’t stay near the windows, they wouldn’t have had serious injuries either.

The Nightmare still restarted very promptly, though.

Someone must have died.

Was it one of the mad people around, or… the two Missiontakers that didn’t make it back to the library?

AD

The moment Fei thought of that, she looked up to check on Ding Yi and He Shujün.

Then, she realises that everyone is looking at He Shujün, including Ding Yi.

They realise, that the lively, talkative young woman, has basically gone insane.

She looks all depressed, moody and grey. She keeps murmuring about ‘Apocalypse,’ ‘we’re going to die,’ etc., like she has suddenly contracted terminal stage cult membership.

What happened to her?

Ding Yi explains, “just now… She, was struck and killed by rubble flying through the air.

And ended up like this.

Fei says somewhat vaguely, “but, how…”

Buzzcut, examining He Shujün’s state, says, “she looks no different from those succumbed to Collapsed Nightmares.”

The rest of the Missiontakers are surprised to hear that.

Ding Yi asks, “you’ve seen one before?”

“Just once,” Buzzcut looks somewhat fearful but also mocking as he continues, “they end up prisoners of the Nightmare, losing all sense of reason. They’d claim to belong to the Nightmare, repeating everything they experienced in the Nightmare──not just verbally, but even physically.”

Their gaze falls back on He Shujün while he explained.

Wu Jian still seems to be in disbelief, and he says, “so, in this Nightmare… being killed is equal to succumbing forever? That’s nonsense!”

“More accurately, it is to be killed by the ‘Raining Hellfire,’” Mu Jiashi suddenly interjects. The other Missiontakers look at him oddly, and he adds, “I learned this before coming to the Nightmare, directly from the Tower resident, who uttered… Raining Hellfire.’”

Fei knows that this information is actually from Mu Jiashi’s previous experience in the Nightmare instead, but the rest of the Missiontakers will probably take this to mean that he overheard the Tower resident who is the Nightmare owner before coming in or something similar.

At least Buzzcut chimes in, “eh… I didn’t get squat when I tried to question the Tower resident beforehand.”

Some more meaningless banter later, they quickly focus back on the Nightmare itself.

“So, that disaster was the ‘Raining Hellfire’?” Fei wonders, “and dying to it, causes one to become a husk belonging to the Nightmare itself.”

She almost instinctively wants to look around to check on the lunatics in this Nightmare. It’s hard not to think about how, among those mad people, could there be some who are actually Missiontakers who ended up succumbing to the Nightmare in the same manner as He Shujün did?

That said… nobody knew what a truly Collapsed Nightmare looks like.

Some people guess that those disappeared Missiontakers are gone for good, but some suspect they are merely trapped somewhere – in Nightmares, or possibly somewhere in the Tower.

They still have no idea what the full layout of the Tower is, and it is practically impossible to know anyway. Who could even claim to know the many nooks and crannies, for a start?

Regardless, He Shujün’s abrupt changes have made the Missiontakers much more wary of the Nightmare.

While the young woman herself is still uttering ‘Apocalypse,’ fire’ and ‘no escape,’ the Missiontakers only had a moment of pity for her before getting down to serious analysis.

The Missiontakers report on their findings; Ding Yi does so as well, and besides the information on the bus and the Museum, the others took particular note of where the two were when the Raining Hellfire began.

“That means… you were outside?” Buzzcut falls into thought, wondering, “so would staying indoors have helped avoid the disaster?”

“A shelter? Or safe zone?” Wu Jian murmurs, glancing at the library not far from where they are.

Fei says, “even if such shelters exist, they are probably not just any building either. They have to at least be prominent places in the Nightmare, for example… Cangcheng Library?”

“The library is definitely one of them,” Buzzcut nods in agreement, “then there’s… the Museum? The Space Agency? Then, uh… the popular hotpot store?”

Fei sounds hesitant to agree on that last one, “the hotpot store… I don’t really think so?”

Buzzcut also seems to have realised after the fact how dumb a suggestion it was. Embarrassed, he says, “regardless, the library is safe for certain now. We can’t take too many risks here…”

Fei agrees, and says, “now we can try to summarise our information.”

She sweeps her gaze across the Missiontakers, when she notices Mr Suicide with his long hair.

She suddenly realises that something has been off with him.

Why is he not reacting much?

Not merely how down and quiet he was around the lead-up to the disaster the last run, but more notably, when Raining Hellfire happened, he did nothing too. Didn’t he say he desired death?

When the Nightmare started, he even proclaimed that he would seize any opportunity to die when circumstances conspire correctly, and told other Missiontakers not to stop him.

He didn’t do a thing when Raining Hellfire happened, though.

Well, it could be that he was too injured to move outside, or he was too in awe at the amazingly grand and destructive scene, but his current silence and non-responsiveness is still odd.

His expression is too… He’s looking up worriedly, deep in thought.

Chasing after death… A spark flew across Fei’s mind.

Though she then shakes her head and abandons the thought.

She has way too much on her hands already.

The other Missiontakers have already started talking without her.

“Clearly, the Nightmare owner’s fear must come down to fearing the Raining Hellfire,” declares Buzzcut, “but it would be difficult to deal with…”

“Does that mean we would need to find and keep the Nightmare owner safe from the Raining Hellfire?” Wu Jian makes a guess, “and the last run might have ended and restarted anyway when the Nightmare owner ended up dying without us?”

Buzzcut nods, but then he becomes troubled, “alright… so the elephant in the room, who is the Nightmare owner? To this point, we haven’t seen the Tower resident directly.”

“We still have two areas not yet explored, for that matter,” says Fei.

The last run of the Nightmare, they headed north and south.

The avenue went straight through the city without any turns, with one way leading to the Space Agency, and the other going all the way to the parking lot for the busses, with the Museum, and even the Art Gallery along the way.

And at this intersection where they spawned, there is also a major roadway running east to west. They don’t know what clues this might have or where the roads lead to.

So Buzzcut makes a final decision, “this time, let’s walk along the east and west, and mainly focus on finding the Nightmare’s owner.”