Eldritch Horror Theatre

Everything happened too fast!

When Cynthia noticed the anomaly in the Testing Room and rushed over, she never expected to come face-to-face with such a monster.

Fu Qian's current appearance, combined with his deliberately provocative question, bore down on her with a suffocating pressure.

"Patches?"

Just as Cynthia froze, frantically searching for an escape, the monster leaned its head right up to her face and spat out a name in a bizarrely flat tone.

"Goya?"

Huh?

Cynthia hesitated. She barely had time to process what Fu Qian meant, let alone formulate an answer, before he asked another question.

Goya? For a moment, Cynthia was only more bewildered.

An extreme sense of danger surged as the monster's final word of thanks reached her ears, but it was already too late.

Its sharp appendages flashed past with inconceivable speed, tearing several deep gashes into Cynthia's body.

"I'm not—"

There was no time to wonder why it hadn't just slit her throat.

Cynthia instinctively backed away to flee for her life, subconsciously trying to explain herself.

To her despair, the monster followed her like a shadow. The distance between them hadn't changed in the slightest.

The next moment, something pierced her wounds, twisting into and tearing at her internal organs.

Accompanied by a heart-rending scream, the Nether Steed that Fu Qian had transformed into pulled back its hands and stood upright, dodging the resulting rain of blood.

Only then did Cynthia's mutilated corpse plummet to the floor.

This turn of events was simply too fast. Even on full alert, the guards had no time to support Cynthia. By the time they reacted, the slaughter was over.

The fact that Cynthia—a Mid Tier transcendent—had been instantly killed without the slightest resistance also significantly deterred their subsequent actions.

For a moment, a violent struggle erupted between the guards' professional ethics and their survival instincts.

Fortunately, with Fu Qian's help, their inner turmoil quickly came to an end.

Barely half a second after he killed Cynthia, over a hundred tentacles erupted from Fu Qian's arms. They split into two swarms, tearing through the crowd to strike two different locations.

Since she was clearly connected to Goya, killing Cynthia was certainly important. More importantly, however, the moment he unleashed Visceral Attack on her, Fu Qian had focused his absolute attention, allowing everyone's reactions to reflect clearly in his mind.

He hadn't put on that exaggerated act earlier to indulge some bizarre cosplay hobby, but to draw as many people as possible out into the open.

The situation before him was a trap designed to deal with entities from the Warehouse. Short of relying on higher Rank and pure brute force to crush it, there was no perfect solution.

Even now that he had found a way to identify targets using Visceral Attack, his next steps would basically be reduced to using Goya and Cynthia as focal points, repeatedly employing trial and error to eliminate suspects.

He would have to do this until he mapped out all possible targets, their positions, and their movement patterns. Only then could he design a perfect route, pick an excuse to strike without arousing suspicion, and begin his speedrun.

This was practically the only solution available to him.

Given the circumstances, Fu Qian decided to minimize his workload. His approach wasn't complicated: he would create an exaggerated scene to attract maximum attention, then carry out a public execution to conduct a large-scale appraisal first.

With any luck, he might just clear the board in one go.

In fact, he had already noticed that the moment he killed Cynthia, two targets exhibited obvious fluctuations.

One was, shockingly, the fake Goya. His reaction was incredibly apparent; his aura weakened almost instantly, as if he had suffered an injury himself.

He had to admit, this move carried the distinct flavor of Making the Real Look False—the idea that the substitute of a substitute was actually the true body.

Of course, in the face of Fu Qian's fully unleashed Biochemical Demonic Arm, the distinction between true and false no longer mattered.

The man couldn't even unleash the Aging Curse before he was violently torn apart.

Meanwhile, the target torn apart by Fu Qian's other hand was entirely unexpected—Ms. Kuraki Eiko.

That's right. This tester—who had put on a sequential performance of calm confidence, being fierce of face and faint of heart, and finally frantic collapse—had experienced the exact same uncontrolled fluctuation in her aura from the Visceral Attack on Cynthia as Goya's Substitute.

Hiding directly among the testers—truly worthy of a professional fraudster to keep a trick like this up their sleeve.

If Visceral Attack hadn't acted like a homing beacon, and he had simply slaughtered his way through, these bastards probably would have drained dozens of points of his SAN Value!

Witnessing this scene, Fu Qian sighed inwardly while mercilessly crushing skulls and breaking bones.

Since her displayed strength was clearly much weaker, she was sent straight to the afterlife before she could even let out a groan.

Yet whether it was her or the fake Goya, apart from that trace of synchronized fluctuation, neither had displayed a single anomaly right up until their deaths.

If this had been anyone else, it would have been hard for them to avoid doubting whether they were just overthinking things.

Unfortunately for them, after instantly killing the fake Goya and Kuraki Eiko, Fu Qian didn't even retract his tentacles.

A breath later, right in front of the crowd, his two Biochemical Demonic Arms exploded again. Countless black-and-red tentacles howled as they lashed out in all directions.

This time, his targets weren't people, but the sturdy metal walls and ceiling.

Naturally, anyone with bad luck or poor situational awareness was instantly turned into a necessary sacrifice.

Under this unhesitating, room-clearing onslaught, Fu Qian instantly transformed into a demolition expert. The metal walls dented and tore open beneath the frenzied assault, revealing the space behind them.

Found you!

The next moment, Fu Qian retracted his tentacles and jumped straight down through one of the blasted holes.

There was actually another space hidden beneath this supposed lowest level.

As expected of the project leader, the private sanctuary he had arranged for himself was quite impressive.

The room whose ceiling he had just blasted through was, shockingly, an office nearly the same size as the one above.

The instant Fu Qian landed lightly on his feet, Goya, who had been in the middle of getting up, went stiff. His movements slowed to a crawl as he gradually stood up straight.

"What are you?"

"Not bad. Asking what I am instead of who I am means you're at least a cut above those other fools."

Fu Qian replied while stepping forward, exuding overwhelming pressure.

These words weren't nonsense. The previous Goya had been merely a hair stronger than Cynthia, looking to be no higher than Tier 4 at most.

At this moment, however, the man's aura had undergone a qualitative change. A trace of divinity flashed past; even when facing Fu Qian's exaggerated appearance, he didn't seem outmatched.

He was at least in the Demigod Realm. This was truly—wonderful!

Fu Qian felt immensely satisfied.

As the saying went, when things are abnormal, there must be something sinister at work. Those previous few targets had shown zero reaction, and even when he had sent off this "true body" last time, the man hadn't changed at all.

But now, the target had suddenly jumped from Mid Tier to possessing the aura of the Demigod Realm. Fu Qian had every reason to suspect that he had triggered some sort of special mechanism.

For example, had he run out of clones?

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