Gamers Are Fierce-Chapter 75 Suspicion

"Notice something? Ao Yong said he was the first one to arrive at the mall."

Li Ang raised two fingers and spoke languidly, "In the Murder Game, all players have two crucial rules to abide by: one is to ensure their own safety, and the other is to conceal their real-world identities.

"A player can’t tell whether another is friend or foe. A player can’t tell whether another’s intentions towards them are good or evil. A player can’t tell whether another thinks they have good or evil intentions. A player can’t discern what another player thinks of their intentions—whether they are perceived as good or evil. A player can’t determine if another will plot against them after a mission is over.

"Summing up this verbose and cumbersome wording, it boils down to one concept: the chain of suspicion.

"Players can’t be sure that the ’teammates’ they encounter are friendly and won’t scheme against them after completing the mission, so they must never reveal their real-world identity.

"There’s fundamentally no trust between players who meet for the first time. They have to interact and understand each other to build trust and dispel suspicion.

"Suppose in this mission, all players have to visit the mall during the daytime to trigger the mission. That would mean that by checking surveillance footage and identifying customers with unusual behavior, one could likely identify the real-world identities of the players involved in this mission.

"Players wary of teammates scheming against them—like me, Plague Doctor, Lost Airship, Wu Dai, and Ao Yong—would act as if nothing happened after triggering the mission during the day. They would continue playing the role of a normal customer and leave the mall casually.

"Only after leaving the mall and reaching a safe location would they use the time from daylight until the mission started at midnight to prepare—for instance, by buying intelligence or investigating the background of the mall, and so on."

"But," Li Ang continued, "what if upon triggering the mission and hearing the System’s prompt, a Player A exhibits noticeable signs of distress, expressions, or behavior? What then?

"Even if Player A had merely accidentally spilled a cup of coffee in excitement after triggering the mission, or nearly tripped, or dropped a coin while paying...

"Player A, aware they’ve shown anomalies under surveillance, would quickly realize—driven by the chain of suspicion—the possibility of encountering an evil Player B during the cooperative mission.

"The malicious, evil Player B could behave normally while carrying out the mission and, after its completion, check the surveillance footage. They would identify all unusually behaving customers throughout the day and sift through them to narrow down the suspects.

"Compared to the potential value of an exposed player’s identity, the time and effort spent screening ordinary customers are negligible.

"Once evil Player B figures out Player A’s real identity, they can use the System’s friend chat to threaten Player A with their real identity. They could force Player A to hand over all their Game Coins and equipment to Player B. Otherwise, Player B would harm Player A’s family, and so on.

"Player A can’t be sure if the evil Player B they’ve conjured up in their mind exists, nor can they be sure that the teammates they’ll meet next will be so nefarious. But they absolutely dare not gamble on it, nor can they afford to.

"Therefore, Player A only has two paths to choose from.

"One, defect to the Special Affairs Bureau.

"Two, before the mission starts, preemptively erase the day’s surveillance video from Longheng Mall to eliminate any chance of revealing their identity. novelbuddy-cσ๓

"If the player doesn’t want to defect to the Special Affairs Bureau and thus completely sever ties with their friends and society, then they only have the second option.

"So, they must act faster than the other players."

Li Ang pulled out his phone and swiped across the screen. "It’s very likely they wouldn’t have enough time to find a Broker, buy hacking software, and remotely delete the surveillance footage.

"The quickest way is to get to the control room ahead of other players who might try to intrude into the mall’s surveillance system and delete the footage first."

Li Ang opened a segment of surveillance footage from the mall at 5:40 PM on his phone screen. It showed a narrow corridor on Floor C, with the men’s and women’s restrooms at one end and a utility room at the other.

Ordinary people were moving in and out of the restrooms as usual when suddenly, the camera feed went black.

Li Ang swiped the phone screen and switched to the view from another camera outside the corridor. The timestamp read 5:42 PM.

Customers were still going in and out of the restrooms normally, but a uniformed, masked security guard, who hadn’t appeared in the previous footage, emerged from the utility room deep in the corridor.

"Did you notice this security guard?" Li Ang asked. "The first camera didn’t capture him before it malfunctioned, and the second only recorded him coming out of the corridor.

"This is clearly a customer masquerading as a guard—in the split second they pretended to exit the restroom, they covertly destroyed the first camera and then doubled back to the utility room to put on a security uniform before passing the second camera."

Li Ang continued to swipe the screen, switching between camera feeds, watching the masked guard make his way downward until he reached the main control room at B1 level at 5:47 PM.

"There are no cameras inside the main control room, just in the corridor outside. It wasn’t until 8:18 PM that the man disguised as a security guard left the control room and walked out of the mall’s main entrance."

Li Ang said with a sly smile, "If he was a player, why wouldn’t he immediately delete all the surveillance footage to prevent his real identity from being exposed? Why was the surveillance system still operational even then?

"Unless something unexpected happened to him inside the control room..."

Li Ang had sought out the Information Broker ’Mule’ sometime after 8 PM and obtained software for hacking into the surveillance system from him. It took two hours to review all the surveillance footage from the morning until just after 8 PM, during which he noticed this anomaly.

But at the time, due to a lack of information, Li Ang did not immediately connect this man with the Fierce Ghost, and even when he first entered the lobby, he tried to initiate Spirit Search Teammates.

It was only after exchanging messages with Liu Wu Dai on WeChat, when he realized the number of Ghosts didn’t add up, that he abruptly linked the man’s anomalies with the Ghosts involved in this mission.

Li Ang continued, "The man emerging from the control room, disguised as a security guard, might have already encountered the Ghost by the afternoon and been murdered, his body taken over."

Li Ang sighed leisurely. "A Ghost that possesses a body no longer needs to care about destroying surveillance footage to protect the original owner’s real identity.

"In the Murder Game, killing a player immediately grants you their player identity.

"It was only after I shared information with Wu Dai and deduced that the number of Ghosts wasn’t right that I started to suspect our team harbored a Ghost that had taken over a player’s body."

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