Volume 2: Road of Fury Chapter 139: Level-Two Combat Air Raid Alert
Under the terms of their transaction, Li Aiping chose to guide him. Her expression made clear she wasn’t happy about it.
Shen Cong didn’t particularly care. His threat assessment of the route was already favorable: the garrison had evidently done multiple sweeps of the urban core over the months since the apocalypse, clearing the stronger evolved beasts from the immediate area. The city ruins had no vegetation to speak of — the Activity-rich zones were all in the outskirts and countryside, which was where the evolved beasts with territorial ambitions had staked their claims. The probability of encountering anything Super-heavyweight, Heavyweight, or even Lightweight on a route through the urban wasteland was low.
He’d built a rough mental framework for the seven tiers and how he stood against each.
Super-heavyweight: run. Run immediately, run at maximum speed, don’t look back. If running wasn’t an option, accept the outcome.
Heavyweight — Golden Python tier: also run. If escape was impossible, take to the air with the Antgod and hope aerial maneuvering bought survival odds that ground engagement didn’t. Vajra couldn’t fly and their bond was permanent; that was the one scenario where the connection became a liability.
Lightweight — Dog-Croc tier: confident solo engagement.
Featherweight — Bull Demon King, Venom Duke, Sharp Eagle tier: straightforward to eliminate, though protecting a third party at the same time wasn’t guaranteed. A Venom Duke striking from concealment at Li Aiping was a reaction-time problem, not a capability problem.
Bantamweight, Flyweight, Grassweight: effectively negligible.
“The plan is this,” he told her. “I drive to the intersection of West First Ring Road and Silihe Road — about three kilometers from the Mingfa Commercial Plaza, outside radar detection range, and dark enough that the three-hundred-meter sentry towers won’t pick us up. We leave the truck there and walk to Silihe Road, observe from the perimeter.”
The genuinely risky segment was the walk from Suixi Road to Silihe Road through the urban ruins — and even that was low-grade risk by current standards. No vegetation meant no cover for evolved beasts, which meant the strong ones had left for better territory.
Shen Cong had never been in the habit of placing himself in genuinely dangerous situations when avoidable.
The drive from Feidong County to Dayang Town took an hour at the speed he ran — not because the distance required it, but because he’d shut down two of the three engines to reduce the sound signature. Noise attracted attention, and he didn’t know what kind of attention might be listening on the road between here and the garrison. The reduced noise discipline cost time and he accepted the trade.
At Suixi Road, he stopped.
Any further and he’d be entering the garrison’s detection envelope. That wasn’t the plan.
“Antgod — stay with the truck. Guard it. Take Blackhead with you.”
He said it from the roof, looking up at where the Antgod had settled into its preferred position. Blackhead had already been exposed as a factor in the Li Aiping encounter — the Antgod was still unknown to the garrison, and he intended to keep it that way. It was potentially his only aerial asset, which made it a card you kept hidden until you needed it.
Armor on. Perimeter sweep. He opened the rear cargo door.
“Suixi Road. You’re leading from here. Don’t worry about the threats — I’ll handle them.”
The road was silent.
A sliver of moon cast pale light across the broken skyline. In every direction, black shapes of collapsed buildings against a slightly less black sky, the urban ruin of Hefei rendered in shadow and negative space.
For Li Aiping, it was a grim evening. On a normal night she’d be back inside the Mingfa camp by now — in the elevated compound built on the commercial plaza ruins, under oil lamp light, eating roasted meat.
Instead she was being escorted through the dark ruins of her city by a paranoid external iron person who wanted to surveil the garrison she worked for.
She’d told him everything about the garrison already. She’d answered hours of questions. And still he felt the need to come look for himself. The diagnosis — someone who doesn’t trust anything they haven’t personally verified — was complete.
Her mind drifted, half-walking, half-somewhere else.
She’d had the hero-rescue fantasy before. Most people did. Someone dangerous is pursuing you, someone stronger saves you at the last second, and the story goes the way stories go. The setup today had matched the fantasy exactly — Deathclaws, certain death, rescue at the final moment.
Then he’d chained her to his truck.
The middle and end of the story had departed from the template so comprehensively that she was still processing the gap.
A Deathclaw that had been sheltering behind a collapsed wall launched itself at her while she was drifting.
Its tongue could punch holes through evolved people’s bodies.
Thud.
The Dog-Croc Warhammer’s triangular head came down from behind her and converted the Deathclaw’s skull into a problem it wouldn’t be having anymore. Blood spattered across the road surface.
“Ah—!” Li Aiping startled into a full scream.
“Quiet.” Shen Cong was already returning the Warhammer to its carry position. “Keep moving.”
One dead evolved beast at her feet and she was screaming. He found this disproportionate.
Li Aiping took a breath. Said nothing. Kept walking.
The pattern repeated several more times on the approach — evolved beasts in the shadows, attempting ambush, each attempt ending the same way. Shen Cong’s eyes picked them up before they could complete a single step of the approach, and none of them reached her. The idea of something reaching Shen Cong was clearly not a serious concern for anyone, including the evolved beasts.
By the third or fourth incident, Li Aiping had stopped flinching. Somewhere between the first one and the last one, the threat register had simply dropped out of her active awareness. She was alive because the thing next to her handled it, and that fact had become so consistent that it stopped requiring attention. She walked, she navigated, she focused on the directions.
They reached the intersection of Suixi Road and Silihe Road at a reasonable pace.
Silihe Road, followed to its end, terminated at the Mingfa Commercial Plaza — the Mingfa Camp, headquarters of the Hefei Garrison.
At one kilometer from the perimeter, Shen Cong stopped.
The radar coverage threshold was close. He wasn’t ready to be detected — not yet. Observation from concealment produced honest information; entering the garrison’s awareness before he’d chosen to do so handed away initiative he wasn’t prepared to spend.
He climbed the nearest intact section of rubble to a useful height and brought out the binoculars.
The camp was visible. Not brilliantly lit, but not dark — the garrison had evidently absorbed the flooding lessons of the early months, or had prioritized defensive architecture against evolved beast incursions, because the entire camp had been raised. The ground level of every structure sat on platforms of compacted rubble, each platform standing at least three meters above the surrounding road surface.
Eleven of them, from what he could count — spreading out from the original Mingfa Commercial Plaza ruins as the central point. Over thirty thousand survivors in a self-contained elevated complex, a small town built on top of a city’s wreckage.
He cross-referenced the visible layout against Li Aiping’s descriptions. Question by question, detail by detail, the picture assembled.
Everything checked out.
Li Aiping had told him the truth.
He could, provisionally, lower his assessment of the deception risk.
Then the air split open.
A sustained, penetrating waaaaaaaaaa — the garrison’s air raid siren, loud enough to reach every corner of what remained of Hefei.
Shen Cong’s first thought was immediate and sharp: they found me.
Li Aiping’s voice cut through the thought before it could develop.
“Level-Two Combat Air Raid Alert!” She’d gone rigid, scanning the sky. “That’s the Heavyweight evolved beast alarm — something Heavyweight is attacking!”
(End of Chapter 139)