VRMMORPG: The Other World Online

"East," San Zhe said to them.

Yaksha and Cheng Xiu nodded.

The three walked towards the direction that he pointed.

Just after they took three steps, there was a flash of light in front of them and a woman appeared out of it.

San Zhe and Cheng Xiu had their weapons at the ready immediately to wait for an attack.

She wore deep green robes and a soft smile. "Hello. I am Fiona, nice to meet you!"

Cheng Xiu blinked. She looked at the woman in front of her closely. This woman looked nothing like the NPC Torch who turned into a mage. Sure, they might have the same ancestry but that was the only common thing about this woman in front of her and the real Fiona.

"You don't believe me, do you?" she asked in a disappointed voice. "I used a spell to hide my face before!"

"Why would you need to do that?" Cheng Xiu asked.

"Were you someone who did bad things too them?" San Zhe followed up. "Did you steal from them? Kill a loved one? What did you do that you had to change your entire face?"

The woman smiled gently at him, like he was a foolish child who said the stupidest thing that she had ever heard but she indulged in his words and ideas because she found his foolishness cute.

San Zhe gritted his teeth. He felt that he was reading too much into this simple action of the NPC.

Cheng Xiu frowned. She did not think there would be any side quests at this stage. They had too many sub-plots to help them already and no game would be so darn helpful, Newbies or not!

"Are you one of the Queens?" Cheng Xiu asked.

The woman smiled at her. "What makes you say that?"

Cheng Xiu shook her head. "That is the most clichéd answer that you could have given. We only have the Queens to meet at this point. Anyway, why are you not with your sibling? Aren't twins supposed to attack us together?"

The woman sighed. "I came here before my brother would."

Cheng Xiu waited.

The Queen smiled at her.

Cheng Xiu sighed. "Why?"

"Because I wanted to warn you. To give you a chance to save yourself."

Cheng Xiu smiled. "Thank you for your concern. May I ask why you would say that?"

"Isn't that obvious?" the Queen asked. "You are not going to be able to stop my brother. He is stronger than the people you have met so far, and I am giving Lord Yaksha by saying this."

Cheng Xiu looked at Yaksha in surprise. The two knew each other?

"Actually," the woman said, "He is the reason that those Rat Puppets attacked you at the stairwell. He wanted to see your fighting potential and asked me to attack you with it. Who knew that both you and the boy would manage to attack so well. I had to see how far I could go after that. Sorry about that."

Cheng Xiu felt her eyebrows twitch. Did this woman mean that they lost a lot of fighting time because of Yaksha?

She looked back at the man with a glare.

He looked at her with a pair of calm eyes.

"Are you not going to defend yourself?"

"I did it."

Cheng Xiu gritted her teeth. "Why would you do that?"

"I told you, I wanted to see how well you fought, what your potential was."

Cheng Xiu glared. "Really? Are you telling me that making us fight with those creatures was the best way to see how strong we are?"

"You told me not to help you in the missions."

"So you decided to conspire against us?"

"There are only two ways that I could understand my enemy," he explained. "One, as your comrade, and two, as your enemy."

"Or three, a by stander," Cheng Xiu said with gritted teeth.

"I am a bystander," Yaksha said to her. "I am not participating myself. I just instigated you to participate and gleaned some results. Would you like to know my evaluation of you?"

"No!" Cheng Xiu spit out. The absolute moron! Did she seem like she was in the mood to listen to his evaluation?

The Queen looked between the Human Cultivator and the Lord of the Ghost Realm. They were a really interesting pair.

San Zhe, who stood at the side, seemed to want to escape from the place so that he did not have to witness this. Though he did empathise with Cheng Xiu's words and also had a few things that he wanted to say, he did not have the courage to actually say those things.

"I will tell it to you anyways," Yaksha said. "You seem like an intelligent person-"

"Seem?"

Behind the black mask, Yaksha smiled. "Yes. Seemed and there are times that I believe that is the truth but…"

His deep-set eyes looked at Cheng Xiu's Phoenix eyes, watching the myriad of emotions dashing through them.

"You are too emotional at times," he said to her.

Cheng Xiu scoffed. She turned to the Queen. "I am not willing to listen to this non-sense. Let us just fight, Fake Fiona."

The Queen glared at her for the name-calling. "But I want to listen to the rest of his evaluation too."

"The NPCs of this game are too sentient," Cheng Xiu said. She turned to the NPC fully. "Are you going to attack yet?"

"That is her second problem," Yaksha said to San Zhe. The man looked absolutely confused. Cheng Xiu heard his words and turned to glare at him. "She is too reckless when her emotions are running high and then there is her mood swings."

San Zhe blinked. Mood swings?

"Have you not noticed that she easily changes her mind according to the situation?" Yaksha asked him, "Especially that time when she was fighting with that pair of brother and Sister."

San Zhe nodded. He had also noticed that she was contradictory in most cases.

Cheng Xiu looked at him in disbelief. Even he was against her now?

"Do you think it is schizophrenia?" San Zhe asked him.

Yaksha looked at Cheng Xiu's agitated form. "No. I think it is arrogance at her own intelligence and that she is too…pragmatic or easily swayed."

Cheng Xiu took a deep breath and calmed herself down. She knew that Yaksha was just trying to get a reaction out of her, and she should be the better person. The intelligent thing to do at the moment was to not give the two idiotic companion of hers anymore chance to diss her and concentrate on the matter at hand.

"Thank you for informing me," Cheng Xiu said to the Rat Queen. "But right now, the only thing I care about is getting out of this dungeon in this round. There is no way that I want to keep fighting in this dungeon forever. Thank you very much."

The woman realised that Cheng Xiu had entered a different mindset than she was in before.

"I can see what they mean by mood swings," the NPC said with an awed expression. "But in the end, a changing mood is not going to help you with anything."

Cheng Xiu smiled behind the pristine white mask. "Perhaps. But I think the mindset that you have when you are entering a fight has a big impact on the way that the fight would turn up too."

"Mindset," the NPC muttered. She sent Cheng Xiu a sweet smile. "Yes. The mindset does have an impact, doesn't it. In that case…isn't it good to see what you would do when you are facing an old enemy with a different thought process yourself?"

Cheng Xiu had a bad premonition.

Sure enough, the woman took out a Spell Book. It looked no different from the leather bound spell books of the other NPCs, but Cheng Xiu guessed that this NPC might be able to use the book freely without the presence of her brother.

There was a flash of light and suddenly something jumped out of the rock floor.

San Zhe stepped back in reflex as fear gripped his heart.

Cheng Xiu gritted her teeth.

Yaksha walked to the side and leaned against the wall, looking at the proceedings with curiousity in his eyes.

A humanoid rat that was about a head taller than Yaksha stood before them on its hind legs. It held a pickaxe twice its height against its shoulder. The rat was burly and rugged. It had single piece of red loincloth to cover its private part. The creature's eyes glowed with inner light and drool seeped past its mouth as it revealed jagged teeth towards them.

"An Old aquintance," the Queen said to them, "But stronger than before. Let us see how you fair, shall we?"

San Zhe stared at the creature in shock, unmoving.

Cheng Xiu took a deep breath and rat towards the creature with her sword unsheathed.

***

This work is being serialized in Webnovel. If you are not reading it there, then please know that you are reading stolen work.. Please don't support theft.