Down below the buildings, the water quickly turned into a boiling pot of red blood and thrashing limbs.
The fat guy did not even have the time to scream a second time before half a dozen mutated aquatic creatures dragged him under the surface.
They tore him apart in a matter of seconds, leaving nothing but torn pieces of fabric floating on the crashing waves.
Up on the fourth building, the guy with the glasses watched his friend get devoured and stumbled backwards in panic.
He pushed his glasses up his nose with shaking fingers as he looked around the empty rooftops.
"What the hell is going on?" he shouted, his voice cracking with fear.
"Why are they attacking us?"
He turned around to flee back the way they had come from, since he was not willing to stay and fight a crazy person who just threw his friend off a roof like a stone in a slingshot.
Before Gene could even focus on the fleeing leader, a slapping sound echoed near the edge of their own roof.
The guy in the torn coat pulled his upper body over the ledge. He was panting heavily with a metal shuriken still embedded deeply in his left eye.
He managed to drag his torso onto the flat surface, clearly expecting to find a moment to recover from the ambush, but he only met Gene's cold stare looking down at him.
"Why—" the guy started to ask, coughing up a mouthful of spit and dark blood.
Gene did not let him finish the question.
He simply brought his heavy leg down hard right on the man's face.
The stomp crushed his nose and sent him tumbling backwards off the ledge without a single ounce of resistance.
[Player Gene Riven has received +10 points]
Aiden stood a few feet away with his mouth wide open, looking completely horrified by the execution he had just witnessed.
"Why are you killing them?" Aiden shouted, stepping back as if Gene was the actual monster here.
"They were just jumping over here to help Maria out!"
Gene totally ignored the blonde guy's useless moral panic.
He did not have the time to sit down and explain the reality of this game to someone who still thought they were living in a civilised society on Earth.
If Aiden could not figure out that those men were predators looking for an easy target, he was not going to last another hour in the Submersion Zone.
Gene turned his head toward the second building they had crossed earlier to put the rest of his plan into motion.
"Kiara, now!" Gene yelled across the open gap.
Kiara was hiding behind a concrete chimney on the adjacent building, exactly as Gene had planned.
She peeked around the corner and immediately threw her black sphere straight at the guy with the glasses.
Her system-upgraded strength carried the smoke bomb perfectly across the open air, and it slammed hard against the roof right at the fleeing guy's feet.
Bam.
Black smoke exploded outward in a wide radius, swallowing the rooftop and blinding the guy with the glasses.
He froze in place instantly.
He was too terrified to take a single step forward or backwards because he knew one wrong move in that blinding fog would send him falling straight into the hungry river, but he still stayed alert.
But as the dark smoke finally started to drift aside, Gene was already standing right in front of him.
Gene had cleared the roof gap silently under the cover of the smoke and immediately drove his fist hard into the man's stomach.
The guy gasped for air, bending forward from the impact, so Gene followed up with a brutal kick right to his jaw.
The force snapped his head back, and a shiny brass object slipped right out of his uniform pocket and clattered onto the concrete.
'Ah, so you actually had one too,' Gene thought, watching the item hit the ground.
He reached down and picked the brass compass up from the roof, wiping the dust off the glass face.
This was exactly what he needed to cut their travel time in half and find the weapon cache before Dane could lock the whole place down.
"Why?" the guy with the glasses asked, his voice shaking badly as he spat blood onto the roof and backed away toward the edge.
"We didn't even do anything to you."
"Die without knowing the cause, you bastard," Gene said coldly.
He remembered exactly how this guy had held him down in his past life while Dane laughed and crushed his throat.
Gene stepped forward and shoved the man hard in the chest.
The guy lost his footing on the slippery edge and plummeted straight down into the water to join his dead friends.
➢ [Player Gene Riven has received +10 points]
Gene stood at the edge of the roof and watched the water bubble for a moment before turning back to his new group.
Maria was still standing near the edge of her roof, where she had acted as bait, looking just as shocked as Aiden.
Kiara was peering out from behind her chimney, holding another smoke bomb that had just respawned in her hand like magic.
"Listen to me very carefully," Gene said, raising his voice so they could all hear him over the wind.
"Those guys were not coming over to help anyone but to kill you and take your starting points. This is not a game where we all hold hands and sing songs. If you hesitate for a single second when someone comes at you, you will end up at the bottom of that lake."
Aiden swallowed hard and looked down at his own trembling hands.
He was starting to realise that his throwing stars were not just cool toys given out by a generous system.
"So what do we do now?" Maria asked, her voice shaking just a little bit as she walked over to join them on the main roof.
Gene held up the glowing brass compass so they could all see it clearly.
The tiny needle inside was spinning rapidly before locking onto a specific direction, pointing straight toward the towering black skyscraper in the distance.
"We follow this," Gene said, putting the compass safely into his pocket.
"And we kill anyone else who tries to stop us from getting a weapon."