Chapter 95: Transfer
“Didn’t you say these things wouldn’t attack us unprovoked?!” Yu Sheng shouted as he barely dodged a swipe from a “plastic” baton that grazed past his face. He twisted to glare at Little Red Riding Hood, who was commanding the Wolf Pack’s counterattack nearby.
The baton in the plastic guard’s hand smashed into the wall beside him, bursting into a cascade of sparks and ringing out with the clang of metal striking stone.
Yu Sheng spun and seized the plastic guard’s arm, slamming it hard into the ground and snapping it with a brutal twist. Yet, unlike before, he didn’t break it in half or twist off its head.
In the brief clash, he had realized a pattern: when these plastic mannequins were completely shattered into pieces or damaged past a certain threshold, it would trigger their “self-repair”—and within seconds, they’d be fully restored. But merely disabling their limbs without destroying them seemed to drastically reduce their threat and avoid triggering that repair.
“I don’t know what went wrong either!” Little Red Riding Hood called back breathlessly as she and the Wolf Pack fell back to a corner of the Exhibition Hall, fending off the constantly charging “Entity-Guards.” “I’m sure we followed all the Museum’s rules along the way—these guards shouldn’t be showing up at all!”
Yu Sheng opened his mouth to respond, but was cut off by a new sound—rapid footsteps echoing from the corridor at the far end of the Exhibition Hall.
One by one, swaying, grotesque figures burst from the corridor.
Irene had just restrained two lunging plastic mannequins with her black spider silk. She turned her head toward the sound and gasped in horror. “What the hell… more?! Are these Entities infinite?!”
“Infinite generation—until the night performance ends, or all the actors die,” Little Red Riding Hood answered quickly. “Or unless we manage to escape every guard’s sight. That stops the Museum from spawning more temporarily. They only actively search for Intruders right after spawning. If you get out of their sight, they go still—but if they can still see you, more and more will keep coming!”
Yu Sheng looked up toward the only exit besides that corridor: the massive Door leading out.
But that Door was already swarming with plastic mannequins. The Exhibition Hall had no blind spots and no clear route for escape.
They couldn’t afford to keep fighting here.
“Fall back! Get to somewhere without guards!” Yu Sheng shouted after a quick calculation. He dashed toward Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf Pack. “Rally on me—Foxy, make some space! Block that corridor for now!”
“On it!” Foxy replied.
With a buzz, her fox tails flared open. Wild, dangerous Fox Fire erupted around her, rings of flame spreading out and warping the plastic guards nearest her into melted heaps. Then the Demon Fox Maiden spun around—two silvery tails launched from her body, glowing with propulsion light, shrieking as they flew toward the corridor.
“Fox Radish Missile!” Foxy cried dramatically.
A deafening explosion followed. Even the sturdy Exhibition Hall in the Otherworld shook under the impact of the twin tail blasts. Part of the hall collapsed, and rubble sealed the corridor where the guards were flooding in.
But in the next second, the rubble began to pulse. Concrete and rebar writhed like living flesh trying to restore itself. Plastic limbs, clad in security uniforms, burst through the debris, and the guards clawed their way out, contorting grotesquely as they surged into the hall again.
Still, a few seconds was all Yu Sheng needed.
With Irene slung over his shoulder, he flung open a shimmering Phantom Door. “Through here!”
To him, encirclement, traps, ambushes—none of that mattered. He might not win a fight, but he could always run.
Trusting him completely, Little Red Riding Hood dove through the Door with the Wolf Pack. Foxy followed, but not before grabbing one of her tails and aiming it back at the hall.
Little balls of Fox Fire fired out like bullets from a machine gun. “Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat—”
“Fox Radish Gatling!” the Demon Fox Maiden declared, hugging her tail while laying down suppressive fire. She shot a quick glance at Yu Sheng and shouted, “Covering fire done!”
Yu Sheng groaned, “You and your ridiculous names—just get in!”
“Okay!” Foxy chirped. With a final sweep of flames, she leapt through the Phantom Door.
Yu Sheng followed, carrying Irene, as the Phantom Door shimmered behind them.
Just then, a plastic mannequin that had been lurking in Foxy’s blind spot—previously scorched and mangled by her Fox Fire—suddenly crawled back to life from the side. Its body had melted and twisted grotesquely under the flames, its eerie and rigid face now contorted in a furious grimace as though the heat had breathed rage into its inanimate shell. With limbs warped and dragging, it lunged forward and clamped tightly onto Yu Sheng’s ankle.
The force of its grip was as crushing as a hydraulic clamp.
Unfazed, Yu Sheng braced himself and dragged the twisted mannequin across the Door, severing the path behind him before it could follow.
The Door sliced through the mannequin’s arm in an instant.
Silence fell. The chaotic tide of berserk security guards, the violent blasts of Fox Radish Missiles, the crumbling and burning Exhibition Hall—it all now seemed like a faraway mirage.
But Yu Sheng had grown accustomed to this: each passage through a Door brought with it a surreal and drastic shift in the environment. This wasn’t his first time, after all.
He looked up.
On either side stretched a broad corridor, flanked by glass cabinets housing standard relics. Little Red Riding Hood stood alert, eyes scanning the area, while a cluster of seven or eight flickering Shadow Wolves prowled faintly in the surrounding air. Foxy cradled her own tail in both hands, adopting a two-handed stance reminiscent of wielding twin Barrett rifles, her gaze sharp toward the hallway’s far end.
No new Entities emerged. The berserk “security guards” had not given chase.
As Little Red Riding Hood had explained—if one could escape the sightlines of all pursuing guards simultaneously, the Museum’s “hunt” would temporarily cease.
“This is a hallway we passed earlier,” she broke the silence. “Honestly, I thought you’d just open a Door and leave the Museum altogether.”
“Wouldn’t that make this whole night a waste?” Yu Sheng sighed. “The Sanity Blocking Agent and all that induced stimulant stuff you prepped before coming would’ve been for nothing. Sounded expensive, too. And don’t you find it strange? Why did the guards suddenly become hostile? It doesn’t match the intel you had before. Something is definitely wrong with this Museum—it’d be reckless not to look into it…”
“In most cases, the safest move when unknown changes appear in the Otherworld is immediate retreat,” Little Red Riding Hood glanced at him, then added after a pause, “But you’re right. Otherwise… this would’ve all been for nothing. When risk is manageable, investigating fluctuations in the Otherworld can yield significant rewards.”
“Exactly. If things really go south, we just leave through here,” Yu Sheng nodded and turned his gaze toward Foxy.
The Demon Fox Maiden flashed him a triumphant grin, clearly pleased with her performance in that azure Exhibition Hall.
“…Impressive show of skill,” Yu Sheng admitted, then couldn’t help but quip, “But… when did your techniques start getting names? Who came up with them?”
“Irene!” Foxy beamed, selling her co-conspirator without a shred of hesitation. “I told her about all the stuff my tail can do, and she gave me a whole bunch of names! I’ve even got a new move in development—‘Fox Radish Charge’!”
Yu Sheng turned sharply to glance at his shoulder, where Irene perched: “I knew it could only be you—what are these awful names?!”
“I thought about them really hard!” Irene, previously worn out from repeated use of her abilities, suddenly sprang back to life with hands on her hips. “Look at her tail—don’t tell me it’s not accurate! Plus, I used puns—very clever ones!”
Then she mumbled to herself, “At first, we were thinking of calling the rapid-fire Fox Fire move ‘Fox Radish Biu’… but that didn’t sound formal enough…”
Yu Sheng could feel the veins on his forehead pulsing violently.
[At least it’s not called ‘Fox Tail Biu’…]
Little Red Riding Hood stood silently by, watching this utterly bizarre scene unfold—Yu Sheng, the Doll, and the Demon Fox in spirited banter.
It was absurd. Surreal. Outlandish.
Yet it all seemed to follow its own internal logic.
Nothing about them matched the environment they were in.
They didn’t behave like standard Spirit Realm Detectives conducting a mission in the Otherworld—nor were they clueless newbies bumbling through a dangerous realm. On the contrary… she could see they were dead serious.
Yu Sheng was serious. The Doll arguing over pun-based technique names was serious. Even the muddle-headed Demon Fox was serious. They approached the situation, and everything within it, with a seriousness wrapped in a mindset no sane Human would possess.
From the perspective of a “normal Human,” Little Red Riding Hood found it impossible to comprehend the trio’s atmosphere or actions. There was no way to judge whether their mental state was “proper” or not.
She merely sighed softly, then settled onto the back of one of her Wolves to regain strength.
[What a bizarre experience… Never thought I’d encounter such strange “people” before coming of age. Not bad, though.]