Simulation Game: Crisis Management

Chapter 475 - 222: Strategic Deployment (Part 2)

"If I could get another Optical Camouflage Invisibility Cloak for the Poison Needle Trap mine, wouldn’t I turn into a ’ghost’?"

Gu Ji smacked his lips repeatedly, instinctively imagining himself slipping behind enemies like a character in a game and executing them with a single stab.

He first embedded the infiltration mark into the slot.

In an instant, the familiar knowledge resurfaced in his mind, and memories that were previously blurry now became as agile as instincts.

After opening the box, Gu Ji was left with 12.6 crisis points.

After contemplating, he spent 2.1 crisis points to accelerate the enhancement of his skeletal muscles, ensuring that his strength, resilience, and other key attributes could handle the upcoming challenges.

As for the Central Nervous System, the time difference was too great, and the remaining points were simply insufficient.

Forcing acceleration was too cost-ineffective.

A flash of blue light, and Gu Ji suddenly felt his muscles and joints twitching uncontrollably, as if they were pieces of dough left to rise, veins bulging like twisted dragons, and a tingling itch radiated from the roots of his biceps, prompting him to scratch instinctively.

He raised his hand unconsciously, uncertain if it was a mental suggestion or genuinely effective.

He felt his movements were noticeably smoother than before.

Yet before he could feel any joy, a wave of intense hunger and weakness surged up, and in an instant, his vision blackened, as though someone had suddenly drained 1000cc of blood from his body, causing Gu Ji to almost stagger and collapse onto the bed.

"I spent money to accelerate, and there’s a DeBuff, why the hell didn’t you mention this earlier?"

Gu Ji had never used attribute enhancement acceleration before and didn’t expect the game to trap players without blinking an eye.

No wonder it’s banned within the game’s levels; suddenly casting a "weakness" on yourself at a critical moment is nothing short of suicidal!

It seems he was right to specifically choose to enhance during leisure time!

"Grumble, grumble..."

Listening to the growling coming from his stomach, he dragged his weakened body to the hotel restaurant and ordered a beef rice bowl, three plates of sushi, two fried pork chops, and over twenty skewers of Japanese grilled chicken in one go.

After a few bites of sushi, feeling the carbohydrates, protein, and quality fats melt away between his lips and teeth, Gu Ji finally breathed a sigh of relief, satisfied.

After eating, he had the strength.

He then began to consider the few items he had obtained.

The item setting in the honor level is the same as reality; once you extract an item, it cannot be used within the game level again.

Currently, the ERC Information Interference Device initially comes with one, and the VX Nerve Agent Bomb and high-frequency microwave jamming device are all weapons and equipment from the Sinaloa drug dealers in the plane crash level.

After careful consideration, Gu Ji decided to extract the first two.

On one hand, in Japan, lacking effective lethal weapons, the VX Nerve Agent Bomb could be used as a means of counterattack at a critical moment or a negotiation card for mutual destruction, and there were relatively more of them; on the other hand, he also wanted to see how the game mapped reality and delivered the equipment to him.

In the game’s item bar, it showed he could extract items to himself or any character.

Gu Ji chose himself.

[Deploying...]

He shoved the last piece of fried pork chop into his mouth, staring at the countdown at the lower left corner while also surveying the personnel environment in the restaurant.

It was now half-past eight in the evening in Japan, considered the tail end of dinnertime.

But due to the recent tourist season in Tokyo, the area near the embassy is relatively quiet and safe, so there were still a dozen foreign tourists sitting in the restaurant, along with five or six uniformed waiters and sushi chefs standing by to serve guests.

While Gu Ji was surveying the surroundings, observing suspicious individuals.

Suddenly, a shadow passed by his side, and with a thud, a black backpack dropped at his feet. Just as he was about to remind the person of their fallen item, the system issued a prompt.

[Deployment successful!]

What!?

Gu Ji immediately picked up the black shoulder bag on the ground, unzipped it, and inside was the ERC Information Interference Device and a VX Nerve Agent Bomb from the plane crash level.

He quickly looked up and saw a man wearing a black hoodie, a black baseball cap, with a medium build.

Gu Ji quickly scanned the hotel restaurant’s surveillance cameras.

Fortunately, the hotel restaurant was not an important place, so he didn’t need to waste the ERC Information Interference Device and decisively grabbed the backpack to avoid the surveillance coverage and tailed after him.

At the moment the shadow was about to enter the lobby, he grabbed the man’s shoulder.

"Ah!"

The man in the black hat seemed startled, yelling in surprise, and turned his head alertly, speaking in rapid Japanese that Gu Ji couldn’t understand.

He had a very ordinary Japanese man’s face, with flat features and light eyebrows, nothing distinctive, the kind that would be lost in a crowd in the blink of an eye.

Gu Ji squinted subtly, pretending to apologize, and asked in English:

"Sorry, were you dining in the restaurant just now? I noticed there was a backpack dropped in the passageway. Is it yours?"

"No!"

The man glanced at the backpack first and then shook his head.

Gu Ji scrutinized his micro-expressions carefully, finding no flaw, as if he genuinely didn’t recall dropping the backpack just now.

Helpless, he apologized again and let the man leave.

As the man in the black hat turned and entered the lobby, Gu Ji suddenly noticed a shadow on his swinging right wrist, like a tattoo.

"The pattern is a... barcode?"

Recalling the details of the fleeting moment, Gu Ji looked again at the man in the black hat, only to find that the target had suddenly started moving quickly and vanished at the hotel entrance.

He hurried out, looked around the streets, and didn’t see a single figure.

If it truly was a passerby, how could they run so fast?

Damn!

Got fooled by this guy!

He initially thought the system used the game’s reality-mapping mechanism, temporarily possessing someone to command them to deliver the items to him, but with the person suddenly disappearing, it was clearly done intentionally!

There truly are operators running the game in the real world!

But as Gu Ji recalled the details of the earlier encounter, he found no flaw in the man’s startled reaction and response; it was perfect as if there wasn’t even a trace of falsehood, though he wasn’t an intelligence agent, he did possess SERE interrogation skills, and combining with the reconnaissance mark he just acquired, even a trained agent might not be able to deceive his observation.

Unless he underwent very strong special training.

How could someone so capable willingly work for a game?

However, those aren’t the main points.

The biggest doubt, which sent a chill down Gu Ji’s spine, was that the person was lurking around him and had preemptively carried the game items.

The latter might be explained through the game’s internal mechanics, like drawing the ERC Information Interference Device not being purely Gu Ji’s good luck, but rather a pre-set by the game.

But how to explain the former?

From game extraction to the appearance of real items, the entire process took only one or two minutes.

Such a powerful deployment ability.

Even a superpower would find it difficult, unless they had people perpetually tracking him!

If that’s truly the case, then it becomes even more terrifying.

Given Gu Ji’s current strength, not saying he’s a special forces king, at least an elite in a top police squad, for someone to track him so long unnoticed, could it be that the other party is a god?

Or did they possess even higher-level game black tech equipment?

Since the operators are so formidable, how does the game system ensure they adhere 100% to its control, without attacking or favoring game players?

What do they do when not delivering?

Countless questions flashed through Gu Ji’s mind.

A cold light swept through his eyes.

This extreme mystery induced a strong sense of insecurity in him.

He dearly wanted to extract the game items once more, to see if it was still this person "deploying the delivery," but after considering calmly several times, he decided to temporarily shelve it.

Gu Ji was afraid of causing a conflict that might raise suspicions from those with ulterior motives.

Especially now that he confirmed there are other players in the game.