Tokyo: The Player Behind the Scenes

Huiming narrowly escaped the villagers' frenzied pursuit. He huddled in the cold darkness, covering his mouth tightly and suppressing his breathing to a minimum. Tears of fear and grievance silently streamed down his face.

Before he knew it, extreme exhaustion finally overwhelmed his emotions, and he couldn't help but close his eyes, falling into a deep sleep in the cold cave.

The screen went black. From Nobita's perspective, it was already night. The only light around them was the faint moonlight reflected from the snow, and everything was blurry.

Nobita misses games where he could adjust the brightness himself.

Huiming awoke to the biting cold.

It was pitch black outside the cave. He carefully poked through the snow and peered out.

Night blindness makes the darkness so thick that you can't see your hand in front of your face.

He fumbled for the hard jerky in his pocket and mechanically tore at it to replenish his meager strength.

With his excellent memory for routes, he stumbled and made his way towards the village.

His mother is still in the village. He must find a way to rescue her.

When he finally made it to the village entrance with great difficulty, the scene before him shattered his hopes in an instant.

Between the two houses, a thick wooden beam stretched across the room. Beneath the beam, a naked figure was suspended in mid-air by ropes.

The torches were planted below, illuminating the area and revealing the horrific state of the cold, wounded body to the dim pupils without any concealment.

【! ! ! 】

Huiming was frozen in place, his mind blank, filled only with pure, heart-wrenching horror.

"We can't go there, it's a deadly trap! Only by living can we take revenge! If we die, we have nothing! Only by living can we have hope!" Nobita didn't believe that the villagers had set up such a trap without any preparation.

There is no doubt that traps and ambushes must exist.

Huiming trembled violently, his teeth grinding together, his fists clenched into his mouth, drawing deep blood.

He stared intently at the figure drifting in the firelight, grief and hatred almost tearing him apart.

[It wasn't my fault! Revenge! Revenge! I want to live! I want them to pay for their crimes in blood!]

Finally, the trembling body miraculously calmed down over several minutes.

He gazed deeply at his mother's body, then knelt heavily on the cold snow in that direction, his forehead pressed against the frozen snow, and silently kowtowed three times.

He rose, his body radiating a deathly coldness, turned resolutely, and disappeared into the dark forests outside the village.

The village is gone forever.

[Our home is gone.]

Where can I go now?

Nobita, empathizing with Hikari's predicament, felt only a suffocating wasteland.

The only slim, or perhaps desperate, possibility is that of the scarred bandit leader.

From a game's logic perspective, it actually makes sense.

The man gave him the feeling that he was trying to recruit Huiming, or more accurately, that he was conducting a random and cruel experiment.

If one can survive this hellish predicament and reach him, one might be able to obtain a minor position; if one dies on the way, one will be nothing more than a piece of trash to be discarded.

Although the scarred man was also one of the culprits behind all this tragedy, compared to him, the villagers who wished they could tear him apart alive were even less likely to tolerate him.

He himself would never let any villager go.

"A trap. The bandits' stronghold should be near their trap today." Nobi pointed out the only possible "way out" for Kumei.

Huiming paused, and in Nobi's eyes, a progress bar that had never appeared before appeared beside Huiming.

It rose very slightly.

"Is this what they call the 'suspicion value'?" Nobi wondered why this thing hadn't appeared before, but had suddenly appeared now.

If there's any difference, it's probably that the character experienced the death of his mother.

Are you even surnamed Uchiha?! The tragic death of your loved ones can provide you with growth?!

However, this at least proves that his current approach is mostly correct, which is to let the characters experience this part of the story.

Once a point of suspicion is established, Nobita's instructions must be carefully considered to avoid arousing suspicion in the character.

By the faint moonlight, Mo Ming, like a lonely ghost, wandered alone through the desolate forest.

Each step crunched on the thick snow, sending a chill down my spine. The dark forest seemed to come alive, fraught with danger.

"Whoa! Whoa!"

The baby's mournful cries drifted from somewhere.

Huhu——

Then I saw a few clusters of eerie blue will-o'-the-wisps drifting in the distance.

The nights in the wilderness during this era were a paradise for demons and monsters, even more dangerous than the nights when Nobita controlled the Third Muramasa.

Huiming was terrified and repeatedly stumbled into dangerous places, paying the price of several lives, before finally avoiding the evil forces on the road and arriving at the animal trap where he first encountered the bandits.

However, the scene before them made him, and Nobita, feel extremely eerie.

The scarred man sat alone on a rock, a campfire crackling in front of him, the flickering flames reflecting off his dark red clothes.

He was looking down, intently fiddling with strings of dark-colored pieces of meat that were roasting over the fire.

"Something's wrong."

Nobita's vigilance instantly spiked. He had a god's-eye view; the campsite had appeared too abruptly. One second it was empty, and the next the scarred man and the campfire appeared out of nowhere.

Moreover, by the dim light of the campfire and the pale moonlight, Nobita scanned the edges of the firelight. Beneath the large, thick tree trunks in the shadows, countless long, swaying objects hung clearly, their outlines...

What they were were corpses hanging upside down!

Suddenly, my vision seemed to be brightened by an invisible force!

Centered on the campfire, within a radius of dozens of steps, countless corpses were hung upside down from the surrounding trees by ropes, like human flesh fruits growing in the forest of hell.

The corpses included both men and women. The men still wore the tattered clothes of bandits, while the women were the young women who had just been abducted from the village that day!

Without exception, their faces were contorted with horror, their chests cruelly ripped open, their internal organs empty!

【vomit!】

Huiming felt a churning in his stomach. At that moment, he saw the gruesome sight of the hanging corpses, their bellies ripped open, especially the faces of several familiar bandits and the frozen expressions of the women. His legs went weak, and he collapsed onto the cold snow, all his strength drained by the horrific scene before him.

Even though Nobita kept giving the order to escape, Hikari was finally unable to move an inch.

The scarred man stopped what he was doing and slowly raised his head.

The firelight illuminated his blood-red, inhuman eyes.

He stared intently at the limp Huiming, a grin spreading across his face.

"It's finally here."

He casually put down the sizzling, charred skewer, which upon closer inspection turned out to be a string of human hearts strung together, and slowly stood up.

"My delicious main course."

Only then did Huiming notice that a knife was stuck in the scarred man's chest, with most of the blade embedded in his chest, leaving only the hilt and the back half sticking out, yet he seemed completely unaware of it.

As he stood up, his body made a crackling sound as his bones rubbed together, and then it began to swell and twist unnaturally.

Especially around the neck, it stretched and thickened wildly like a balloon, with strange muscles writhing beneath the skin. Its head was held high, looking down at Huiming on the ground like an ant.

He is a monster.

Huiming's mind went blank.

"Is this the Mikoshi Nyudo?" Nobita quickly recognized the legendary demon that grows larger when it encounters people.

Since he called Huiming the main dish, it means that something about Huiming is strongly attracting it. But what is its reason for killing all its subordinates and abducting women?

The monster stretched out its huge claws, covered with rough, scale-like skin, and grasped the hilt of the wakizashi sword stuck in its chest.

As it was slowly pulled out, the blade emitted an eerie red light, just like its eyes, as if it were breathing with the life of a creature.

Just when Nobita thought this trip was going to end with Hikari becoming food for monsters again, and was preparing for the end of the game...

A sudden change occurred!

A violent, icy wind swept across the flat ground, sharp as a knife, instantly extinguishing the flames of the campfire, causing it to flicker wildly and erratically.

The monster's enormous shadow twisted in the firelight, and it instinctively reached out to shield itself from the wind and snow.

In the heart of the blizzard, a figure, like an ice crystal formed from the void, suddenly burst into the midst of darkness and the monster!

【Mother!】

Huiming was completely stunned, unable to comprehend what was happening before his eyes.

Not to mention him, even Nobita's brain overloaded for a few seconds.

She was completely naked, her skin appearing translucent and inhumanly pale in the moonlight and firelight.

Her disheveled black hair danced in the gale, rapidly turning snow-white.

The wind and snow seemed to be an extension of her will; she simply raised her hand coldly and pointed at the monster, which was becoming increasingly enraged by the strange occurrence.

“Crack!”

A bone-chilling cold wave erupted instantly, and the air almost froze.

The monster's furious roar abruptly ceased, and its enormous claws, along with the rock it was standing on, were instantly covered by a layer of ice several feet thick!

The ice layer spread rapidly upwards like a living thing, reaching the calves, knees, waist, and abdomen. No matter how much it struggled and roared, it could not stop the erosion of the frost.

In the blink of an eye, the enormous demon that had just been baring its fangs and claws, along with the wakizashi in its hand, transformed into a ferocious yet silent ice sculpture, frozen in its final struggle.

She took two steps forward, stretched out her pale hand, and grasped the hilt of the wakizashi sword that was frozen in the ice.

Zheng!

With a clear, resonant sound, the wakizashi was easily pulled out.

As the blade was severed from the body—bang! Whoosh!

The two- or three-meter-tall ice sculpture, along with the terrifying demon frozen inside, exploded instantly.

It transformed into countless crystalline ice shards and fragments, scattering and disappearing without a trace in the howling wind and snow.

Only the wakizashi, still emitting a faint red glow, remained, quietly held in her palm.

She turned around, and the swirling snow quickly subsided. Her hair returned to its jet-black color, and her almost transparent white skin returned to a normal human complexion, albeit with a pale tinge.

"Cough cough."

She coughed a few times, covering her mouth, revealing a hint of weakness.

"Mother?" Huiming called out softly, his face full of shock and uncertainty.

She nodded gently and planted the wakizashi in front of him: "Huiming, use this knife to kill everyone in the village."

Huiming opened his mouth, his mind filled with all sorts of questions.

"I'll be waiting for you here. Go quickly and come back soon, child."

She gently stroked Huiming's face, and he felt a surge of power emerge from nowhere, quickly replenishing the energy he had expended that day, and the darkness in the distance became clearly visible.

He pursed his lips, stood up, and drew his halberd: "I will listen to you, Mother."

Nobita dared not give any instructions.

He had a premonition that if he gave instructions at this moment, even if the purpose was the same, but the thought process was different, it would cause the suspicion level to skyrocket.

Nobi became an observer, witnessing Kumei pick up the wakizashi, quickly return to the village, and then silently break into each house, cutting off heads as if he had no prior knowledge.

In the end, Huiming used sticks to stick up the heads of everyone in the village and placed them in the very center.

This knife

Huiming seemed to sense that something was wrong with the knife, and his eyes began to bloodshot.

But the matter was quickly quelled.

By the time he returned to his original spot, it was already daylight.

His "mother" changed into someone else's clothes, and the hanging corpses disappeared.

"You have great talent; you truly are my child."