The Mingfa Camp’s air raid alarm ran for a full ten minutes. By the time it cut off, the entire installation had cycled into Level-Two Combat Readiness. The civilian population was being moved — all of them, converging on the central platforms: Number Two, Three, and Four.

The camp’s eleven elevated platforms had defined functions. Number One housed the Research Institute. Number Two was the field hospital. Number Three was the Independent Motor Battalion’s station. Number Four was the logistics and supply reserve. These four were the garrison’s core protected assets.

The remaining seven platforms each housed a military unit, with the civilian population distributed across them in normal operations. Thirty-thousand-plus people spread across eleven platforms — each platform the population of a high school.

Shen Cong had already moved. The moment the alarm sounded he’d pulled Li Aiping away from Silihe Road and back to Vajra at a fast walk. He hadn’t seen what was incoming — but proximity to whatever triggered a Heavyweight alert wasn’t a position he intended to hold.

From a safer distance, he watched through binoculars.

His vision enhancement at this range — roughly five kilometers, aided by the optics — produced a workable picture even in the dark. About fifteen minutes after the alarm, the garrison opened up with rocket fire. The detonation light solved the visibility problem instantly.

In the light of the explosions, he saw what was attacking the Mingfa Camp.

Violent Great Apes.

They looked more like macaques than true apes — lean, long-bodied, the name somewhat misleading. The individual size range was enormous. Small specimens were Featherweight tier, roughly Bull Demon King scale. Mid-size individuals sat in the Lightweight range, comparable to Dog-Crocs. But the pack leader — the one the Classification Chart would have flagged — pushed into the near-Heavyweight bracket.

As a colony unit, the Violent Great Ape group was one of the six Heavyweight-tier entries in the Chart. Individually, the leader alone was a different category.

“What do you know about Violent Great Apes?” he asked.

Li Aiping had pressed herself against Vajra’s side and was watching the distant explosions with an expression he recognized as controlled fear. “They’re one of the threats we know best — they live in the Huoshan Oasis. When the garrison’s first expedition went in, they injured the pack leader, the Violent Ape King. That was it — we’ve had a grudge with it ever since. Every few days it organizes a raid on the camp.”

“Holds grudges. High intelligence.”

“Very high intelligence. But incredibly volatile — if you hit their olfactory system with irritant dust, they go berserk immediately, start attacking each other as well as us.” She watched another explosion bloom in the distance, quieter now. “Every raid, people die. A lot of people. I don’t know how many tonight.”

Human beings were social animals by construction; the death of community members triggered the full cascade of negative emotional responses by default. Empathy, grief, the particular anxiety of it could have been me — all of it was natural, and in its way admirable.

Shen Cong didn’t feel most of it. Not because something was missing in him, but because he had a framework that had already processed loss at a scale most people hadn’t. The grief that had followed his parents’ deaths had receded with time, as grief did. Strangers dying in a garrison he hadn’t yet visited didn’t register on the same circuit.

He kept watching.

Five minutes in, Li Aiping sighed. “Shouldn’t it be over by now?”

“It’s escalating.” He had his eye on something through the binoculars. “There’s a very large one. It’s taking artillery fire and not going down. That’s the Violent Ape King.”

In the optics: a shape several stories tall moving like something with intentions. The face was baboon-adjacent — elongated jaw, four prominent tusks catching the firelight with a metallic silver gleam. Every so often it would dip its head. When it came back up, its jaw was working.

Eating.

“It came into the camp personally? The Ape King is inside the camp?” Li Aiping’s voice went up half a register. “It never does that. It always stays in the back. What is it doing—”

Whatever had changed, the Violent Ape King had decided tonight was different. It was inside the perimeter, and it was making that decision count.

The next five minutes produced a firelight show visible without optics.

The Mingfa Camp was burning in sections. Whatever had gotten in was doing structural damage that showed as sky-glow from five kilometers out.

Then something changed in the shape moving through the firelight.

One of the Ape King’s arms was gone. Not wounded — gone, removed at somewhere near the shoulder by something explosive. The body was studded with what had to be bone-gold weapons, the long shafts of javelins and spear-type armaments bristling from its torso and limbs.

A detonation, close-contact.

The Ape King’s howl reached them clearly across five kilometers.

Fire. Not explosion-fire this time — the particular, sustained, adhesive burning of an incendiary weapon. Whatever had detonated against it was clinging, white-bright, spreading across the Ape King’s body the way white phosphorus spread. The creature’s fur caught. The creature itself caught.

Half the camp caught with it.

The Violent Ape King rolled. Beat at the flames. Couldn’t extinguish them. After a minute of this it gave up on the camp entirely and dropped to all fours, running.

North of Mingfa were the Dafangyong and Dongpu reservoirs — both large water bodies, both close. The Ape King, burning and running in blind panic, went neither direction. It went southeast. Into the urban ruins of Hefei.

Toward Suixi Road.

Toward where Vajra was parked.

“That thing is coming straight at us! Why are you standing there — drive, drive—!”

Li Aiping’s head had appeared from the rear cargo door. She’d seen the burning shape moving through the ruins toward their position and arrived at the obvious conclusion.

Shen Cong didn’t move.

He stood on Vajra’s roof in the dark silver armor, watching the oncoming shape, and didn’t move.

Inside him, two things pulled against each other with equal force.

Run. Principle. Instinct. Heavyweight tier — Golden Python category — the rule was absolute. You ran from Heavyweight tier. You didn’t wait to see what happened.

Kill it. The blood said: it’s wounded, it’s burning, it’s exhausted, it lost an arm — what’s standing in front of you is no longer what it was when the garrison made it a Heavyweight threat.

He ran the numbers.

“Violent Great Ape colony is Heavyweight. The Ape King as an individual sits somewhere between Heavyweight and Lightweight — call it near-Heavyweight. I’m confident against Lightweight — Dog-Croc tier. A near-Heavyweight individual that’s already lost an arm, still burning, bones full of bone-gold weapons, has been in continuous combat for at least twenty minutes…”

“Four vials of Super-2 Ant Acid. Full deployment. Plus the Rhino Horn Javelin from range — I don’t have to close with it at all.”

“The garrison is pursuing. They haven’t broken off — they want the kill. If I take this kill before they close the distance…”

A credential. A demonstration. The kind of entrance statement that couldn’t be argued with or qualified. Killing a near-Heavyweight evolved beast solo — wounded or not — would put him in a category that no evolved person in the garrison currently occupied. That changed every negotiation going forward.

“But if they turn hostile, if there’s a plan in place that I haven’t anticipated—”

“I need the garrison. I need their research data, their facilities, their manufacturing capacity. Vajra needs the overhaul. Without it, reaching Lv1 together isn’t achievable on any timeline I can project. And I need to understand what Activity is — what’s actually happening to me — and the Research Institute is the only entity likely to have meaningful data.”

“Li Aiping’s intelligence checks out. The discrepancy risk is lower than it was this morning.”

“The contact timing is the only problem. This is too soon, this is uncontrolled, this isn’t how I planned the introduction—”

He looked at the burning shape getting closer. Looked at the Rhino Horn Javelin in its carry position.

“—but why am I treating this as something to be afraid of. They should be afraid of me. I am the strongest evolved person in this area. Anyone who moves against me dies. That isn’t arrogance. That’s the accurate force assessment.”

The always-a-suspect-in-my-empire mentality — except the emperor in this case had the numbers to back it up.

Shing.

The Rhino Horn Javelin came out of its carry position slowly, deliberately.

Shen Cong had made his decision.

(End of Chapter 140)