Chapter 276: Dense Forest Borderland

The tent's fabric curtain door made the thin sound of being ruffled open.

Spades tightened his hand over Bai Liu's lips and whispered in his ear, "Here it comes."

Bai Liu's gaze moved past the several obstacles blocking his view and landed on the upper of the shoe of the person who had just stepped into the tent - a pair of well-made prop shoes.

Spades wasn't wrong in his prediction, and it was indeed his teammates who came in.

Someone's muttered voice came through, "Spades this guy actually left the body he robbed, what the hell?"

"Adversary, what do you think?"

The Reverse God looked around, and opened his mouth, "He should be preparing to use this place as a stronghold."

Bai Liu, who was hiding under the bed, squinted his eyes - the Inverse God's voice was an AI-synthesized mechanical sound that was very close to a human voice, and could not be detected unless one listened carefully.

But Bai Liu had done some technical interfacing on this in the game he was working on, and one of the voices was almost exactly the same as Inverted God's, and Bai Liu heard it instantly--

-This guy uses a synthesized voice in front of his teammates, not his original human voice.

He looked upwards to divert his eyes in an attempt to see the face of this Adversary, but the vice-like grip of Spades behind him grew tighter and tighter, but eventually, Bai Liu caught sight of the Adversary's face as he walked over to the bed.

It was a very unrecognizable face, even a professional player like Bai Liu, who was good at memorizing people's facial features, would need to stare at it for two or three seconds before he could barely memorize it.

--But the next time he saw him, Bai Liu wasn't sure he'd be able to immediately recognize the Reverse God from the crowd.

The man's features were ordinary looking to the point of being a blur.

Like his voice, it has an artificially tweaked, overly balanced quality that defies normalcy.

The Adversary didn't stay by the bedside for long before turning away with the rest of the team, "Spades may have found a better stronghold and abandoned this original one ......"

"But he didn't even take his body with him ......"

"...... probably saw a better body on the road with higher judgment points and Spades just dumped it, it's not the first time he's done this, the last time he did it was against the Ka Bala guild ...... "

The group walked out of the tent with a murmuring ground.

But Spades remains motionless, stuck on Bai Liu's shoulder, as if waiting for something to happen, and doesn't come out from under the bed.

"There's another wave coming." Spades said.

As his words fell, the tent curtain, which had not long been closed, was once again lifted, and Bai Liu, peering through the gaps in the assorted items under the bed, saw several pairs of panicked army-green rubber shoes dragging a humanoid figure lying on a stretcher in a blood clot, or what could only be described as a blood clot, into the tent.

This [blood clot] had no limbs left, the semi-viscous blood gushing out of his mouth muddied his entire face to the point where his features were invisible, and the severed mouths of his limbs kept spewing blood out, and the tent was already covered in the blood he had spewed out.

One of the soldiers tries to stop the bleeding by tying bandages around the severed parts of the limbs, but it's just labor - the flow of blood just changes from a "fountain" to a "stream", but there's no sign of it stopping! There was no sign of stopping.

This soldier sounded miserable and panicked: "...... He's still alive! Why didn't the medics carry him away for treatment when they cleared the battlefield! Just let him stay where he was blown up like this by the enemy's sweeping shells!"

"He could have lived!" As he said this, the soldier was still straining to tighten the bandage in his arms that had caught the break, attempting to stop the bleeding by such human means - his voice was shaking a little from the exertion.

The other soldier's voice was much more calm, but it was still hard to hide the heaviness, "...... Haven't you noticed that we've been encountering more and more living people when we've been cleaning up the battlefield lately?"

"...... There are more and more wounded soldiers on the battlefield, but the medical supplies are clearly not keeping up, we don't have that many supplies to aid the wounded and leaving them unattended damages morale, so the rear troops are preparing ...... "

The soldier who was tightening his bandages to save his life had a hard voice, "-so this group just doesn't save them and lets us collect them as corpses so that there are no wounded soldiers, only martyrs, right?"

The other soldier was silent.

The soldier sneered ruefully, "It's just a reissued metal medal of martyr's merit, something this group of sergeants wholesaled for less than five cents, and they think it's worth a life?"

He snapped, but there was a sob in his voice: "Guy, this corpse lying on the ground, who ate and slept with us yesterday to collect the bodies and wrote letters to his mother and fiancée, do you think a martyr's plaque is worth his life?"

"...... I don't think it's worth it." Guy replies sadly, "But Alex, this is war, and the value of our lives isn't rated by us, not even our dead bodies."

Alex finally loosened his strangled to shaking hands, he sat paralyzed on the ground muttering, "...... Yeah, this is war, and isn't it true that those high and mighty sergeants want nothing more than a body to attack? --no emotion, no value, not even life."

There was no more blood coming from the severed limbs of the body on the stretcher - he was long dead.

Guy wrapped his arms around the trance-induced Alex and rested his head on his shoulder, "-but there are no such corpses in this world, so we're corpses like humans who are at war, and we're not supposed to be human anymore."

"-- Alex, stop harboring feelings for other bodies, it's too painful."

Alex wrapped his arms tightly around the back of Guy's shoulders, and he buried his face in them, sobbing stoically, "I can't do it, Guy, I can't do it - I'm not a corpse."

"I can't stop myself from sympathizing with suspicion and pain and love."

Alex's face was streaked with tears as he looked through Guy's bloodstained shoulder at the bloodstained, disfigured corpse on the ground, and asked in a trance, "-- Guy, do you think that if corpses could move, and keep fighting the war as those people want, then wouldn't there be no anyone injured or dead, there would just be soldiers like us who recover corpses?"

Guy stroked Alex's hair and sighed as if he thought he was being silly, "You're not turning twenty for another month, this isn't something you should be thinking about."

"Trying hard to survive the battlefield is what you should be thinking about."

Alex lowered his head against Guy's chest and suddenly looked up and kissed him, also circling his neck with his arms.

Guy, however, is not shocked by Alex's behavior, but instead leans back on the bed, still letting Alex vent his emotions by kissing him passionately and wildly - not the first time this has happened, by the looks of it.

The two men stripped each other of their blood-stained clothes and stared at each other with ragged breaths for a long moment, Alex, as if containing and restraining emotions and desires he shouldn't have, braced himself against Guy's body tensing up and shivering at the waist.

He knew it was wrong.

But he no longer knew what was right to do.

Seemingly sensing Alex's rejection on this occasion, Guy, who was lying on the bed, raised his hand over his eyes as he tried his best to sound relaxed and slightly flirtatious, "Hey lad, relax, there's a reasonable amount of condom use out there for anyone, Tom from the tent next door goes through ten boxes of Battlestar Galactica condoms in a month at the brothel in town. "

"We do this just ......" Guy paused, "just, it's like going to a brothel you know? But of course it's not quite the same as that either, it's just that you and I don't want to go to a whorehouse, so we catharticize in this way ......"

Alex, still with his head down, didn't say anything.

"God!" Guy interrupted himself abruptly, dropping his hand to stare bleary-eyed at the blood-splattered tent roof, muttering to himself in a trance, "What am I talking to you about ...... Alex, you're still a kid."

"You shouldn't be doing this with me in a place like this, at a time like this ...... I've brought you down, and God will punish me."

Guy tries to push Alex, who is on top, up.

"Then God should punish me too." Alex lifted her eyes bright red from crying, "Because I just wanted to do it with you, I couldn't help it, I couldn't think of anything that could happen to anyone but could be other than you. "

"You're the only person in this place that makes me feel like I'm not a corpse myself. "

"I love you, Guy."

Alex pushed a stunned Guy back onto the bed, and they rocked fiercely on the spartan steel-framed cot as if they were going to be corpses under the bed the next moment.

Concentrating on listening to the main plot line, he suddenly switched to the adult channel halfway through the episode and couldn't understand it, so Spades with a confused look on his face: "......?"

Bai Liu who listened intently to the main thread and realized what was going to happen halfway through : "......"

This Guy and Alex are actually a couple.

Although Bai Liu had read a lot of weird studies, he did know that in some tough, special circumstances where there was a lack of women, the percentage of gay men would skyrocket.

Not because these males are naturally attracted to men, but in such cramped, high-risk environments, it's hard for them not to feel some kind of special attachment to the comrades they spend their time with and entrust their backs to, above and beyond friendship.

The most direct manifestation of this is that in this environment, many men will tend to have intimate relationships, such as sexual relationships, with the men around them.

So Bai Liu anticipated the possibility that he might see this in this copy, but not in this condition.

The steel frame at the foot of the bed shook violently, occasionally knocking the back of Bai Liu's head with its calm gaze, and there was a passionate entanglement going on only a bedpan away, with gasps and various erotic phrases mingling and reverberating in the small tent.

If Bai Liu is the only one, he is perfectly capable of shamelessly walking straight out from under the bed.

But ...... when there is someone in this situation, everything becomes ......

After confirming that some small movements could not disturb the two people above, Spades approached Bai Liu and inquired in a low voice with a proper attitude, "This thing they are doing, is it related to the main plot?"

Bai Liu turned to face Spades squarely and said calmly, "Not quite relevant, except to say that this thing shows the character relationship between these two NPCs."

"What are you asking for?"

"Oh." Spades nodded understandingly, "Is that so? Just now you felt a little nervous ducking out of the way when you heard Alex about to insert Guy."

"I thought it was something closely related to the main plot that you wanted to hear seriously."

Bai Liu: "......"

Spades looked at Bai Liu confusedly, "? Why are you red?"