Chapter 95: New Ability: Anomaly Sense

Zhou Shu stood there with his mouth hanging open, while Kate stared blankly at his row of tiny white teeth.

“Why are your teeth so perfect?”

“No choice. I was born this way.”

“Then I am very sorry. Please go stand over there for the moment.”

“...”

Because his teeth were too perfect and there were no fillings, Zhou Shu was temporarily assigned to the “suspicious” group.

There was nothing for it. His teeth had already been pretty good to begin with, and after his physique breakthrough to level one they had become even better. There were no cavities at all, and even the faintly yellowish tint of his teeth had faded into greater whiteness.

Healthy teeth are actually supposed to be a little yellow, but perhaps because of some evolutionary effect, his were now close to the color seen in toothpaste advertisements.

He could accept that, since he had the strength to back it up. Other people, however, found it much harder to accept.

Those who had just been saying they would cooperate with the examination had begun complaining again, some even refusing to comply.

“This is ridiculous!”

“You can tell whether someone is a monster just by looking at their teeth? Then wouldn’t dentists be the most powerful people of all?”

“Look, Kate has the authority here, but I remember Edward is the one in charge.”

Some truly felt aggrieved, while others were disguised monsters trying to muddy the waters.

After entering a human body, they would devour the original cells and replace them as a disguise. They would also gain the person’s memories and come to understand human fear and human baseness, so they could learn, adapt on the fly, cover for one another, and draw attention away from one point to strike at another.

Zhou Shu had been tricked by exactly this ability.

When he walked into the “suspicious” queue, someone pretended to be afraid. After all, Zhou Shu’s earlier performance had indeed been astonishing. The man feigned retreat, but the place he retreated toward was a wall, so after just one step he could not go back any farther.

Zhou Shu was distracted by his movement and prepared to guard against him, but before he could react, a sharp pain suddenly exploded through his back and chest. He looked down to see a spike piercing straight out through his chest.

His warning sense and slow-motion vision had activated at the same time, but it was already too late. When he turned his head back, all he could see was a bloodthirsty maw full of fangs.

And because time had slowed, he could clearly see exactly how the thing was slowly biting toward him.

That feeling... was terrifying.

But the terror did not end there, because the second round began almost immediately.

This time, it did not start with the frozen wasteland. Instead, the monster broke through the ice and fled, and they went after it.

Zhou Shu had thought the hunters had learned their lesson, so he followed the usual cannon-fodder at the start to search for the monster. Yet this time, the monster had actually moved somewhere else; it was no longer where it had been before.

The hunters had changed the script!

And they had changed it into roguelike mode, where each round was a completely new experience!

The old memorized strategy was useless now. What was needed was pure mechanical skill!

So when he heard screams from elsewhere and rushed over, only to find one person dead and the monster burned to death, the challenge had only just begun.

To him, everyone who arrived before him became a suspicious target.

The good news was that after being so thoroughly “frightened” in the previous round, his warning sense had finally advanced to skilled.

When everyone gathered again in the activity room, he checked his new attributes.

[Hunter System (Simulated State)]

[User: Zhou Shu (Recruit)]

[Spirit: 1.86 (+0.05)]

[Strength: 1.13 (+0.02)]

[Agility: 1.15 (+0.01)]

[Endurance: 1.10 (+0.01)]

[Physique: 1.11 (+0.01)]

[Special Ability: Slow-Motion Vision (Advanced 36%), Warning Sense (Skilled 3%)]

[Weapon Application: Firearms Use (Mastery 42%), Powered Exoskeleton Operation (Mastery 29%)]

[Auxiliary Equipment: One elite powered exoskeleton suit, in good condition]

[Source Essence: 1.42]

The shock from the previous round had been vicious indeed; his spirit had jumped by quite a bit all at once.

Sure enough, whenever new tricks were introduced at the start, mental strength would rise rapidly.

The other increases were fairly normal, but he had already run more than ten kilometers through the snow and died once, so why had his physique only gone up by 0.01?

Still, none of that mattered. As long as it was growing, that was enough. This time he was here to obtain the skill needed to distinguish monsters.

He sorted through his skills again and let the system raise the percentages. Slow-motion vision had improved a little more, and most importantly, warning sense had finally entered the skilled stage.

According to Little Hunt’s prompt, once warning sense reached the skilled stage, it could be actively activated. It could scan the surroundings, and if someone in the crowd harbored killing intent toward him, or if danger existed nearby, it could detect it directly.

The number of scans and their range were both tied to spirit.

One scan consumed 0.1 units of spirit.

At present, the maximum was nineteen scans, but the system recommended using only ten, leaving roughly half the spirit to recover, because excessive spirit depletion would cause a severe drop in physical condition.

The scan range was still ten times the spirit attribute, measured in meters.

This seemed somewhat similar to the system’s “mini-map” function, but the mini-map only recorded the pheromones of monsters within its sensing range; disguised monsters were not displayed.

Even now, it still could not directly identify disguised monsters, but at least it had made progress. It could now actively search for hostility.

With hostility, he could proceed to analyze and investigate, and then determine whether it was truly a monster or simply someone jealous of how handsome Zhou Shu was.

However, the active detection of killing intent was not very useful at first. Part of that was a matter of proficiency, and part of it was because the mimetic monsters here did not simply harbor killing intent toward humans.

Or rather, not merely toward the humans in this small space.

The monsters had larger ambitions. They wanted to leave this place and enter the bustling human world, so their first goal was to get out. Only those who blocked their escape would become their targets for elimination.

Zhou Shu had not understood this at first, and the killing intent had even led him astray, causing him to mark human beings as his primary suspects.

As expected, under extreme circumstances, humans are often cruelest to other humans.

And someone too capable really did look out of place, making them an easy target.

By the time he figured out the truth, it was usually already the moment he was tricked to death by the monster.

Because the place was too small, and there were too many people, and nobody moved around alone, everyone was packed shoulder to shoulder almost every time. Once the monsters began targeting him for performing too well, even slow-motion vision could not always dodge in time.

They were simply too close.

So close, in fact, that a scenario meant to cultivate “abnormal perception” had unexpectedly brought up the proficiency of “slow-motion vision” as well.

There was no helping it. These mimetic monsters played dirty, and sudden incidents were far too frequent, forcing Zhou Shu to activate slow-motion vision again and again.

Moreover, hostile-sense detection consumed spirit energy, and slow-motion vision consumed energy as well, causing his spirit reserves to drop at an abnormal rate. He could only use them sparingly each time.

He had to judge for himself when to use them and when not to. A single misjudgment...

[Sorry, you have died yet again!]

But because he was so terrible, each round ended very quickly...

Ahem, so quickly that the time spent in one round was even shorter than a single loop in Edge of Tomorrow.

Over there, at least you could live through a day and a night. Here, he died within a few hours.

If it were not for the fact that he had to receive the people from headquarters in the morning and still carry out the Demon Extermination Plan, he would absolutely have drained his spirit power down to the safest minimum and spent more than a hundred rounds through the night.

Even so, he had retained quite a bit of spirit power and still managed dozens of rounds that night.

But the experience was far too unfriendly, leaving him mentally tense. That was why when Shi Ren Guang suddenly touched him, he jumped in shock.

Of course, having paid such a price, the gains were pleasing as well.

By the end of the night, his warning sense had advanced once more, and even its name had changed.

[Abnormal Sensing (Beginner 1%)]

The skilled-stage warning sense had been overwritten, but the ability to actively detect danger and killing intent had not disappeared. Instead, when actively probing, it could not only sense whether there was killing intent, but with a small chance it could also determine whether the target was human or monster.

However, the odds were very low, since it had only just fallen back to beginner stage, so the main function was still sensing danger.

Fortunately, the current mission involved a large number of super-beasts, and since they were directly attacking the enemy lair, killing intent would certainly not be in short supply.

“I found the target. There’s a concentration of Bai Huayue’s pheromones in the villa district ahead!”

A report snapped Zhou Shu back to attention, and his gaze turned razor-sharp.