Chapter 27: The Truce Agreement
Gaara?!
Wan and I looked at the man in front of us with surprise. We never expected to run into them here.
"Haha, it's so great to see you both are safe!"
Wan rushed over and gave Gaara's shoulder a hearty pat, laughing heartily, then suddenly froze for a moment: "By the way, where are your glasses friends? Why aren't they with you?"
"Don't worry, your brother is upstairs." Gaara rubbed his shoulder, which hurt from Wan's pat: "I just heard some noises up there a moment ago and was curious about the situation, so I came down with my wife to take a look."
The glasses friends are still upstairs? Why didn't they come down? Only you and Xiaobai came down to investigate? Could it be that something is keeping them upstairs, preventing them from coming down? Could it be those biochemical ghosts again?
"Don't worry, it's not ghosts. If it were ghosts, we would have run down together already. It's a group of defenders!"
"Defenders? No way, you mean the glasses friends are up there with a group of defenders?"
I widened my eyes and stared at Gaara, as if he were lying. Of course, Gaara wouldn't lie, so what are the glasses and the group of defenders doing upstairs?
"Gaara, what exactly happened after we left? Why did you leave the room? And how did you end up in this haunted place? Also, how come a group of defenders suddenly showed up?"
Right now, I had so many questions, and I burst them out in one go, feeling suffocated holding them in.
"Come to think of it, it was really dangerous back then!" Gaara sighed, seemingly recalling the situation, and shook his head: "Sit down first, I'll explain everything to you slowly." As he spoke, Gaara found a wooden box to sit on, and Xiaobai sat beside him.
"Ah, you should go upstairs first before explaining. The glasses friends are still up there with a group of defenders!"
Wan said, about to rush Gaara upwards. "Don't worry, how could I let them take risks upstairs? Although there's a group of defenders up there, we've already reached a truce agreement with them. Scorpio (the glasses) and his companions will be fine up there."
"Truce agreement?" What's this all about?“This all started when you and the Black Sniper went out to look for supplies. Oh, by the way!” Gaara turned his head to look at the Dead Yokai beside me. “This friend of yours should also be a Guardian, right? Since you're with them, you must be friends. Why not introduce him to me?”
“Hehe, no need to trouble Captain Yu Men. I'm called 'Erlang Zhenjun.' Thanks to you infiltrators for taking care of me on the way; I appreciate it here first! Since you all still have things to do, I won't bother you. I heard there are a few more Guardian companions upstairs, so I'll go take a look.” With that, the Dead Yokai climbed the ladder on the pathway.
Actually, the Dead Yokai realized that Gaara was being cautious, and as long as he was around, Gaara would never reveal the whole story honestly. So he smartly found an excuse to leave.
“Erlang Zhenjun?! The name sounds impressive, but why…”
Gaara muttered while watching the Dead Yokai's departing figure. “Haha, you can just call him Dead Yokai. We always call him that on the road,” Lao Wan laughed.
“Ah? Dead Yokai?!”
Hearing Lao Wan's revelation, a strange expression appeared on Gaara's face.
“What's wrong? Are you disappointed?” Xiao Bai secretly poked Gaara and rolled his eyes. 'Uh!' Gaara touched his waist. “Nothing, what are you talking about…?”
“All right, all right, the glasses guys are still upstairs! You'd better tell us, what exactly happened after we went out?”
It seemed that Gaara didn't want to go up to explain to us because there were Guardians upstairs. Although the ceasefire had been established, they were still technically enemies. He didn't want the Guardians to hear about our situation here, but he also knew we would ask, so he wanted to explain everything here first, and then let us go upstairs to reunite with the glasses team.
“This is what happened,” Gaara recalled and began to narrate that experience…
It turned out that after we left, the glasses team in the room first discovered that something was wrong with the two Guardian corpses. At the time, there was only one corpse at the scene; where had the other gone? (It was the corpse that pretended to play dead and ambushed us on the road.) Because of this discovery, the glasses team was very concerned about us and suggested going out to find us.Gaara was thinking of the bigger picture and originally wanted to stop Megane. He had just opened his mouth and barely said a few words when the entire building suddenly shook with a boom. Unexpectedly, even grenades were used. Megane panicked even more and, ignoring everything else, rushed out headlong. Gaara was also concerned about our safety, so everyone ran to the room to try to help us.
Following the sounds, when they arrived at the battle scene, they found that there was no one left. Just as they didn't know where to chase, machine-gun fire suddenly came from upstairs, and they saw a person jump down the stairs, followed by a large group of red ghosts!
This person was the Black Sniper who helped us lure away the bio-ghosts. Seeing the ghosts following him, Gaara and the others originally intended to open fire. After a few shots, they realized that the ghosts were not just a couple—there were even more than a dozen monsters behind them.
The situation was so unexpected at the time that they couldn't fight them. Fortunately, they managed to relieve the Black Sniper from encirclement. They originally intended to retreat back to the original room to reconsider their plan, but somehow someone led the way downstairs. People are like that; in a panic, once they see someone taking the lead to run, they also blankly follow.
That was exactly the situation: everyone ran downstairs. From the third floor all the way to the ground, they hadn't shaken off the trouble behind them yet, and unexpectedly, a large group of bio-ghosts appeared out of nowhere. In a state of panic, they retreated to a small basement room. There, they found a drainage pipe and followed it until they escaped to here. (Really pitiful, apparently just like us ==!)
But it wasn't over yet. After barely escaping death, when everyone joyfully walked into the upper room, they discovered that there were already ‘owners' there, the group of defenders from upstairs.
It was really unexpected to encounter the defenders here—truly a narrow path for enemies. The defenders were quite numerous, 10 people, whereas we, along with the rescued Black Sniper, were only about 6. Naturally, we didn't stand a chance if a fight broke out.
Fortunately, both sides were so battered by the external ghosts that everyone looked neither fully human nor fully ghostly, as miserable as could be, and had no mind to continue fighting. So, under Gaara's leadership, both sides simply agreed to a ceasefire.Although no one is fighting anymore, it doesn't mean we've become friends; the infiltrators and the defenders are still wary of each other. We were about to discuss our next step when we appeared at that moment.
“Oh, so that's how it is! By the way, what's with the torn clothes in the room?”
“Oh, you mean the strip of cloth I tore off!”
Gaara shook his head: “At that time, we heard gunfire outside, but it quickly stopped. Who knows what happened to the shooters outside? By then, the ones with glasses had already rushed out of the room. I was worried that after going out, we wouldn't be able to find you, and coincidentally, you managed to escape just as we were leaving. So I came up with an idea: I tore a strip of cloth and left it on the ground. If you came back and saw it, you'd probably guess that we would return here eventually. After all, we already planned on coming back here sooner or later when we left.”
Wow, so that strip of cloth was meant to tell us to wait here, that we'd come back! None of us thought of that. But we can't really blame ourselves. Looking back, we were all tense rushing to the meeting point and, finding no one there, it's inevitable to feel anxious and overthink things.
After many twists and turns, fortunately, we met again. Everyone was overjoyed. Oh, the ones with glasses are still waiting upstairs for us; now that we understand all this, let's go up together.
When we reached the ladder and pushed open the door, those with glasses were curiously looking in our direction. Seeing us, their eyes instantly lit up, and they ran over laughing: “Damn, damn, damn! Are you guys still alive in this world?!”
“Haha! We almost didn't get to see you.”
It felt like decades had passed since we last met; everyone hugged each other, tears of joy streaming down our faces. This is what it's like to reunite after escaping death—a feeling that's just wonderful.
“Alright, alright, stop hugging! I really wonder if you guys are really ‘comrades!'”
“You're the real comrade!” I turned around to scold them, only to find that the person in front of me was… Black Sniper God!
“Heh, didn't expect it, huh? Facing so many ghosts and still surviving—I guess I'm the first one to do it.”
Black Sniper God laughed proudly.We saw the elite and the werewolves again. This time, after life and death separated us, everyone happily gathered around to chat, seemingly with endless topics to talk about.
'Noisy, noisy, what are you all making a racket about!'
Just as we were happily chatting, a few annoying voices suddenly came from nearby. When we turned our heads, we saw a group of guards staring at us.
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(The end of this chapter)