Chapter 143 The True Assassin

In truth, neither the middle-aged man nor the one who stepped forward was any good.

Their argument was entirely fabricated, a ploy to leverage the support of others to eliminate each other.

Yet the one who stepped forward proved too arrogant; he was simply no match for the middle-aged man.

Then again, in an environment like this, who could truly be called a good person?

The man who stepped forward died, but unsurprisingly, the game did not end.

This group of people continued to drag out their existence amidst endless terror, casting suspicious glances at everyone around them.

The unity they possessed at the very beginning was now utterly impossible to recapture.

Suspicion and distrust became their sole sentiments toward one another; they harbored the desire to kill everyone except themselves.

At that moment, the lights went out.

Not long after, the lights flickered back on.

This time, three more corpses lay upon the floor, and everyone had shifted from a seated position to standing, with some even bearing fresh bloodstains.

No one spoke. They all sat back down as if nothing had happened, maintaining their heavy silence.

No one cared about the three corpses, even though the injuries indicated that two of them had been beaten to death with bare hands, while the third had their throat slit, bleeding out.

They had all come to understand one simple truth: rather than waiting to be killed, it was far better to be the one who killed.

Consequently, no one bothered to discuss who the killer might be anymore; by now, everyone was a killer.

After a very long wait, the lights remained bright, showing no intention of going out, and they all began to grow impatient.

After all, darkness served as a convenient fig leaf to conceal their vile deeds; how could they manage without it?

Humanity was inherently this hypocritical.

The atmosphere had reached an absolute boiling point. Someone could no longer endure the pressure—the sensation was simply too agonizing.

A bespectacled man took a deep breath, then turned his gaze toward the person beside him.

"You're the killer, aren't you?"

The man looked at him in utter bewilderment. "What are you talking about? Making accusations with zero basis? Framing me?"

Before he could finish his sentence, the man in glasses grabbed him by the throat and slammed him down to the floor.

The man in glasses gripped his neck with all his might, his eyes bloodshot, the veins on his neck bulging, as he repeated the question over and over again in a loud voice.

"You're the killer, aren't you? Aren't you?!"

The choked man's face turned purplish-red, rendering him entirely unable to speak. He could only push desperately against the man in glasses.

Yet no matter how hard he pushed, he could not budge this madman. Within moments, his head slumped to the side, and his breathing ceased.

Everyone watched this unfold. No one stepped forward to stop it, nor did anyone flee; they merely watched with cold, indifferent eyes.

Having killed the man, the man in glasses stood up straight. Like the others, his face remained completely devoid of expression.

"Which of you is the killer, exactly?" His tone was exceedingly calm, as though he were asking some trivial question.

For a long, long time, no one answered him, yet everyone stared at him with unblinking hostility.

"I'm asking you all! Which of you is the killer! Tell me already!" He roared fiercely at the crowd, his voice cracking on the final two words.

"If no one speaks, I'll take your silence as admission. Every single one of you is a killer!" The man in glasses suddenly laughed. "I'm going to kill every last one of you."

His declaration seemed both correct and incorrect at the same time.

What everyone had been waiting for was precisely those words—this gave them yet another pretext to kill, another opportunity to increase their own odds of survival.

Like clockwork, they stood up, converged on the man in glasses, and began beating him mercilessly.

Facing such a crowd, the man in glasses offered no resistance, leaving his body entirely at the mercy of their flying fists and kicks.

Yet a smile remained plastered across his face, which soon escalated into full-blown laughter.

"Hahaha, my guess was right after all! You're all killers! Every last one of you is a killer!"

Eventually, the people drew away from his corpse, but this time they did not sit down. Instead, they began scanning their surroundings.

They were searching for suitable weapons.

The crowd scattered. Some picked up tables and chairs, while the luckier ones managed to secure sharp implements like knives and forks.

The moment they laid hands on these items, the very last shred of their humanity vanished completely.

From that point onward, mutual slaughter no longer required a fig leaf; it only required a catalyst.

And that catalyst appeared almost immediately.

One person crept slowly toward another and drove a fork straight into the other's eye.

"Ahhhh!!!" The victim emitted a piercing, agonizing shriek.

With that scream, the massacre officially began.

They frantically wielded their weapons in indiscriminate attacks against one another. At this stage, they could no longer be described as human beings; they were nothing more than a pack of ravenous beasts stripped of all reason.

Amidst wave after wave of roars and shrieks, only three people remained standing in the arena.

Two of them were covered from head to toe in wounds, while the third watched the pair of them with an indifferent expression, holding a gun in his hand.

Of these three, the one holding the gun was none other than the middle-aged man from earlier.

Having preserved a tiny fraction of his wits, he had hidden in the room previously occupied by Kolo and the others, accidentally discovering the firearms they had left behind, and had silently watched the entire battle unfold from the shadows.

He only emerged at the very tail end of the carnage.

This man truly exemplified the art of cowering to the bitter end.

"Bang!" A gunshot echoed.

Yet the person who fired was not the middle-aged man, but Kolo, who was hanging from above.

Gazing down at the middle-aged man collapsing into a pool of blood, a faint smile touched Kolo's lips before his hands lost all strength, letting the weapon slip from his grasp onto the floor.

His final breath of life faded away at that exact instant, extinguishing him beyond any hope of return.

Only then did the surrounding dark red hue gradually recede, and the light emitted by the lamps grew noticeably brighter.

The two survivors collapsed to the ground as though liberated from a nightmare, seemingly bathing in that radiance—the genuine light of day.

And at last, they beheld everything around them.

Most of the people who had perished earlier had transformed into bizarre entities. These grotesque creatures stared blankly at the two survivors, making no move whatsoever.

"Splendid. I never imagined this game could turn out quite so magnificent," a deep, resonant male voice echoed from the second-floor stairwell, belonging none other than Westful.

As they watched Westful slowly approach them, one of them managed to ask in a weak voice:

"Who on earth was the killer?"

"Does it matter?" Westful appeared slightly puzzled.

"It matters a great deal," the two replied in unison.

Their voices sounded feeble, yet their eyes burned with an unnatural luminescence.

Westful rubbed his chin, pondered for a moment, and then offered a gentle smile.

He strolled over to one of them and lightly tapped him on the head. "Actually, there never was any such thing as a killer."

Then he walked over to the other and tapped his head as well. "If you insist on naming one, I suppose that killer might just be your own stupidity."

Upon hearing this answer, both men froze into stunned silence, the full weight of everything they had done rushing back into their minds.

"Stupidity? It would seem so... Was all of this truly their own fault?"

They repeatedly posed the question to themselves in their hearts, yet found no answer.

They knew full well that this had merely been a game, but they had lost from the very start.

The true beginning of the game had been the moment they chose to flatter Westful and enter this remote estate.

"Very well. You've survived this game; you may leave now."

Westful's words shattered their reverie, yanking them violently back to reality.

Neither of them said another word. They merely cast one final look at Westful before rising to their feet and walking away.

As they stepped out of the estate and onto the hillside, they realized their entire bodies were drenched in cold sweat, their limbs so limp they could scarcely take another step forward.

Seconds later, total darkness overtook their vision, and they tumbled headlong down the slope, rolling all the way to the foot of the mountain.

A long time later, another contingent of police officers arrived at the base of the mountain—the very same team that had handled the deliveryman incident.

Seeing two blood-splattered individuals sprawled at the foot of Westful Manor's hill, they all shook their heads.

Clearly, these were just two more blind fools who had managed to offend Westful.

Drawing upon their previous experience, their handling of the situation was exceptionally swift.

"Identify them first, then log it as an accidental fall from the mountain, and wrap up the operation!" the captain ordered absentmindedly.

At that moment, the two officers who had gone to inspect the "corpses" cried out in astonishment: "These two appear to be exceptionally prominent local tycoons!"