He stood on Vajra’s roof with the Rhino Horn Javelin in hand, the autumn wind moving across him, still as a statue cast for a war god.

Li Aiping couldn’t find the words for what she was looking at. She’d spent the afternoon reading Shen Cong as someone with an almost pathological aversion to unnecessary risk — a man who’d built an entire survival architecture around never being caught exposed. And yet here he was, standing motionless on the roof of his truck while a burning near-Heavyweight evolved beast charged toward him through the ruins, and the word that surfaced in her mind, unbidden and accurate, was:

Powerful.

What she couldn’t see was the quiet instruction he’d already sent through the bond: Antgod — the moment I signal that I’m losing, come get me.

Win planning and loss planning, simultaneously. That was the actual shape of the decision.

The night wind carried the last of the summer heat away.

He did the inventory without looking down. Nine tusk javelins at 0.158H, two Giant Stag javelins at 0.169H, one Rhino Horn Javelin at 0.236H. Everything currently on his body and throwable.

At five hundred meters, he could punch any of them through steel plating without worrying about accuracy. Against a target three stories tall and on fire, accuracy wasn’t a constraint.

At five hundred meters out, the Violent Ape King still running hard, he started throwing.

His hands moved faster than the eye wanted to track. By the time the Ape King had covered roughly a hundred meters of the gap, all nine tusk javelins were gone.

“ROOAAAR—!”

Seven of the nine had connected. Buried in muscle and fat to the shaft. One had gone in through the face.

At three hundred and fifty meters, the two Giant Stag javelins followed.

Both hit.

Another scream — lower now, labored, the voice of something that was running out of things to give.

The Ape King’s gait was visibly wrong. The coordination that had carried it through the garrison’s fire for twenty minutes was dissolving. It was still coming, but it was coming on reserves it didn’t have.

From three hundred and fifty meters down to one hundred, Shen Cong held. One javelin left. He wanted the right distance, the right angle, the right everything.

At a hundred meters the Ape King was still charging, still screaming, and Shen Cong’s arm came back with the Rhino Horn Javelin.

Force. Angle. Both maximized.

Thunk.

The trajectory was precise in a way that couldn’t be described as anything other than perfect. A hundred meters, a moving target, a specific anatomical point — the center of the throat, the trachea — and the Rhino Horn Javelin found it.

The Ape King’s scream changed register immediately. Something that had been a roar became a hiss, an attempted roar that kept losing pressure, the sound of air going somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go.

That hit was fatal. The timeline was just unclear.

Against anything below near-Heavyweight, the question would have been settled. The Ape King kept its feet and kept coming.

“Antgod — stay ready.”

Shen Cong launched himself off Vajra’s roof, Warhammer already in hand, and ran toward it.

In the span of one blink from Li Aiping’s perspective, the man in dark silver armor and the burning three-story animal were in contact.

In armor, Shen Cong stood at 185cm. He came up to the Ape King’s shin.

The Warhammer swung at that shin with eight-bull force behind it, Activity driving through the strike.

Near-Heavyweight or not, there was a mechanical reality to bone and leverage that force overrode. The knee buckled. The Ape King went down on the impact leg, body dropping, a howl coming out of the ruined throat in a broken whistle.

The tail came around immediately — reflex, rage — and hit the ruins behind Shen Cong hard enough to convert standing masonry into powder.

Shen Cong was already in the air.

He came down on the Ape King’s back, launched again from there, and the Warhammer came down toward the skull.

The Ape King twisted its head and reached back with its remaining arm, trying to grab. The movement was slow. Everything was slow now — one arm gone, body burned, throat open, bone-gold weapons sticking out in every direction, fighting on whatever stubborn biology wouldn’t admit it was over. The grab found nothing. The Warhammer found the skull.

Crack.

“Weaker than I expected.”

Blood hit the armor. Shen Cong’s confidence, already high, went to a different place entirely. He put the Super-2 Ant Acid away in his mind and just kept swinging.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

He never pulled a strike in a kill situation. Ever. The doctrine was simple: when something was down, you made sure it stayed down, and you did it immediately and completely.

One. Two. Three. The skull gave way in progressive stages — fracture, breach, collapse — and then the brain was exposed to the open air and the Warhammer, and the Violent Ape King stopped.

A near-Heavyweight evolved beast.

Dead under a hammer, in a handful of exchanges, without drama.

Headlights swept across the road.

By the time the vehicles arrived, Shen Cong had already extracted the Ape King’s four tusks — each one as thick as an adult’s shin, as long as a leg — and loaded them into Vajra. The best material on the carcass, and it was his.

He suppressed the impulse to get back inside Vajra and stood his ground, legs slightly bent, ready to move at the first sign of incoming fire, watching the three vehicles roll to a stop.

An armored personnel carrier. A modified Great Wall Haval SUV. A modified dump truck.

Through the bond, through the constant low hum of the amalgamation sense, he read all three immediately: iron person vehicles. Kin to Vajra. Three iron people, minimum.

Doors opened. Several people in military uniforms.

Li Aiping stepped forward, putting herself between the two groups, and gave a salute to the lead figure. “Commander Zhu, sir. Li Aiping, White Cat Squad.”

“Little Li,” the Commander said. “We were just discussing your squad in the meeting — you hadn’t returned on schedule.” He looked down at the Ape King’s body, then up at Shen Cong. “Who is this?”

Commander Zhu Li. This was him in person — an evolved person, mutation visible at the collarbone, a bony protrusion there that made it look perpetually as though half his collar was turned up.

“Commander, I should have introduced him sooner — he’s an iron person, came from outside the district. This morning my squad was ambushed by Deathclaws and he pulled me out. We got delayed by…” Li Aiping paused for a fraction of a second, “…various things. I was bringing him to Mingfa Camp when the Ape King appeared. He killed it.”

She had, for reasons she probably couldn’t fully articulate even to herself, quietly edited out the part where he’d chained her to his truck for six hours.

“Iron person, good.” Commander Zhu’s tone shifted — something warmer in it, or something more calculated, or both. He turned to Shen Cong directly. “When the apocalypse came, the entire province — the entire country — suffered enormously. What we’ve built at Mingfa Camp is our foundation for rebuilding. Any survivor who arrives here has come home.”

A pause. He looked back at Li Aiping — he still didn’t have a name.

Li Aiping opened her mouth. She didn’t have one either. She turned toward Shen Cong.

Shen Cong answered for himself.

“Hu Ge,” he said. “My name is Hu Ge.”

(End of Chapter 141)