Chapter 99

Chapter 99: Big Bad Wolf

Little Red Riding Hood didn’t react at all to the giant wolf surging out of her shadow. It was like her mind had been nailed in place, her whole body locked in a blank, stunned state.

Yu Sheng reacted.

At the fastest speed he’d ever managed, he kicked off the ground so hard he left a crater in the marble floor. He shot forward like a cannonball and slammed into the red-cloaked girl.

He shoved her aside—

—and searing pain tore through his shoulder as fangs sank in.

Before the twisted wolf-man could clamp down for a killing bite, black silk threads snapped into place behind Yu Sheng, sealing off every gap. The threads pierced through shadow wolves and wrapped the monster layer after layer. A beat later, foxfire flared.

Foxy streaked past in deep blue flame, leaving afterimages and a boom. She smashed down onto the huge wolf-man with a furious headbutt.

The impact shook the entire exhibition hall. This wasn’t the half-hearted headbutt that had killed Yu Sheng back then. This was Foxy after eating her fill—an attack that felt like it could cave in a tank. The shockwave nearly knocked Yu Sheng off his feet, and the wolf-man exploded into a splatter of black shadow, like ink flung across the floor.

Two seconds later, the shadow gathered again.

Simple physical damage was useless. A blow that could punch through armor only scattered it for a moment. It rose upright once more, its blurred, twisted head parting as blood-red eyes opened and fixed on Yu Sheng.

His blood still smeared its fangs.

“What the hell is that?!” Irene sucked in a sharp breath. She threw up both hands and started weaving more black silk, trying to restrain the unkillable shadowspawn. Then she shouted at Foxy, “Silly Fox! Stop headbutting it! You might not be able to kill that thing!”

The instant the words left her mouth, the huge wolf-man froze in midair—locked rigid in the posture of pouncing on Yu Sheng.

Howls rose one after another.

The wolf pack, which had gone still along with Little Red Riding Hood, snapped back into motion. The shadowy wolves lunged at the suspended monster. Under the stunned eyes of Yu Sheng, Irene, and Foxy, those pups—tiny as dogs compared to the giant wolf—bit and tore, ripping the thing that could tank Foxy’s headbutt into shreds.

Black fragments drifted down. They pooled into thick, ink-like shadow that oozed back toward Little Red Riding Hood and sank behind her.

Yu Sheng watched the blood-red fade from her eyes. A thread of reason returned. A moment later, she blinked, and her focus snapped back into place.

“Are you okay?” “Are you okay?”

Yu Sheng and Little Red Riding Hood spoke at the same time.

Then they both fell silent. A heavy mood settled over the white exhibition hall.

“What just happened?” Yu Sheng asked at last, staring at her. “That half-man, half-wolf thing came out of your shadow.”

Irene edged closer to Yu Sheng, her doll face tense with caution.

Foxy looked much the same.

“…That was the wolf hunting me,” Little Red Riding Hood said quietly. She kept her head down, forcing her eyes away from the sacrifice at the center of the room. “It’s the curse Fairy Tale put on me.”

She swallowed, voice tightening. “The person on that platform carries strong mental contamination. I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see, and the Big Bad Wolf briefly entered the real world. Sorry… I even got you hurt.”

Yu Sheng glanced at his shoulder. Blood had soaked his shirt, but he could already feel the wound knitting closed.

“The injury’s not bad. But that loss of control was serious.” He frowned. “You said this is a curse from Fairy Tale, but Fairy Tale is your organization’s name, isn’t it?”

Little Red Riding Hood was silent for a moment. Then she said softly, “…Fairy Tale is an otherworld.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a needleless injector. A faintly glowing liquid filled the glass tube.

Yu Sheng could tell at a glance it was expensive—because she hesitated, her expression pained, before she pressed it to her skin and injected it.

“Don’t worry,” she said after she finished, letting out a small breath. “I won’t lose control again. Not during this operation.”

Then she looked at Yu Sheng. “This operation’s reward… if this mess even still has a reward, it all goes to you.”

Yu Sheng blinked. “Why?”

She sighed. “I held you back. Rules are rules.”

“No.” Yu Sheng waved it off. “We’ll split it the way we agreed. That was an accident. In a team operation, someone always runs into accidents. That doesn’t count as holding us back.”

A strange smile tugged at his mouth. “Besides, compared to reward splits, there’s something I care about more.”

Little Red Riding Hood paused. “What?”

“Curiosity.” Yu Sheng’s eyes even brightened a little. “I’m interested in the Fairy Tale otherworld you mentioned, and the curse on you—and if I’m guessing right, the curse on all of you. I want to know what’s really going on. Why were you cursed by an otherworld, and why did you take that otherworld’s name as your organization’s name?”

His gaze was open and sincere.

And for some reason, meeting it made Little Red Riding Hood feel fear—raw, instinctive trembling.

Not because she sensed malice, and not because she was afraid of Yu Sheng himself. She couldn’t explain it. It was like facing something fierce and pure, something without malice and far beyond what a human should understand.

Was it really just curiosity?

She hesitated. She normally wouldn’t speak about her organization’s secrets, but this pause carried something else, too.

In the end, under Yu Sheng’s unwavering stare, she gave in.

She nodded slowly. “If you really want to know, I can tell you—but it’s a very long story.”

“All right.” Yu Sheng nodded fast, clearly in a better mood. “Later, when we have time. This isn’t exactly the moment for story time… we still have a mess to clean up.”

He lifted his head and looked at the sacrificed body.

The brief chaos had left damage all over the hall—craters in the floor, scorch marks from foxfire on the walls. But they had acted quickly enough that the central platform itself hadn’t been hit.

Only two security guards had been knocked over by the shockwave from Foxy’s headbutt. Silver fox tails still covered their heads tightly. Those rule-bound entities lay motionless on the floor, both eerie and, in a grim way, ridiculous.

“…Was this done by the security guards?” Yu Sheng asked, looking from the corpse to Little Red Riding Hood.

“No.” She shook her head immediately. After the extra dose of sanity-blocking agent, she could finally study the scene—though every time she looked, a faint buzzing started in her mind. “The security guards kill rule-breakers in a simple way. They wouldn’t do something this complex and symbolic. This looks like something a person did.”

“So someone entered the museum before us,” Yu Sheng said, brows drawing tight, “stole the Weeper that was supposed to be here, and used a living person as a sacrifice on the platform… And that chain of actions activated the museum’s security guards, which is why we got attacked.”

“That’s a reasonable inference,” Little Red Riding Hood said, nodding slightly.

Then, watching Yu Sheng stand beside the altar like it was just another exhibit, she couldn’t hold back anymore. “You… looking at this, you don’t feel anything? And you didn’t take sanity-blocking agent beforehand?”

“No.” Yu Sheng spread his hands. “I don’t even know where you buy that stuff. I’m starting to think my rookie tutorial isn’t finished yet. You said you got contaminated just seeing him, but I don’t feel a thing.”

Little Red Riding Hood blinked. Then she looked at Irene.

“The doll isn’t scared of some measly mental contamination!” Irene declared, hands on her hips.

Little Red Riding Hood looked at Foxy instead.

“She tanked Hunger solo in Nightfall Valley for decades,” Yu Sheng reminded her. “She made ‘hunger’ so anxious it almost grew a brain.”

Little Red Riding Hood stared at him.

“…What kind of people are you?!”