The gas station was on the south end of Yinping Township. He’d passed it once already — late evening on the day of arrival, when stopping hadn’t made sense. Then the scavengers had happened, and other priorities had taken the day.

It had been built in open farmland, no topographic protection, fully exposed to the apocalypse storm for a month. The probability of finding usable diesel was low. He went anyway, because low probability wasn’t zero, and fuel was the constraint he had the least ability to work around.

He drove Vajra to the site rather than walking — the station was outside the town proper, open ground, no reason to leave the vehicle parked somewhere else. The dozer blade cleared the rubble in two passes.

He stepped out into quiet surroundings and started looking.

The answer came quickly and wasn’t the one he wanted. Char marks on the foundation stones. The unmistakable pattern of intense heat that had burned long enough to work its way into the structural material. Two car frames in the debris, both blackened to the chassis. Whatever had ignited here — a lightning strike in the storm, a vehicle fire propagating to the storage tanks, anything with enough energy to reach ignition temperature — had done the job completely.

Nothing left.

He drove back to the lake.

“I need fuel. The only option I haven’t fully explored is going back to the scavengers.”

He set the fishing lines in the Yuxi River channel — the small tributary arm he’d identified on the map — and then walked back into the township. The lines would sit; the current problem required human intelligence rather than patience.

The streets were quiet in the morning heat. No sign of Old Li’s group or anyone else working the area. The township was far enough from city south that scavengers only came when the closer options were exhausted. Zhang Youhai’s team had been one of the outranging groups; most of the daily scavenging traffic probably worked within a kilometer or two of the urban edge.

He walked the main street twice, checked the side routes, found nothing.

He stood at the edge of the ruins and took an honest inventory of the morning.

Police station armory: cleared before his arrival. Diesel: burned. Scavengers: absent.

Three objectives, zero results. He’d eaten from his Activity reserves, worn down his armor charge, accomplished nothing tangible. In the pre-apocalypse world, he would have called this a wasted day and moved on. In this one, the emotional weight of an unproductive day was smaller than it might have been — because the baseline expectation was that most things wouldn’t work out, and the ones that did were worth more for the contrast.

He looked at the township ruins for a moment.

The persecution complex had given him a particular habit of mind: assuming that the environment was adversarial, that any gap in his preparation was a gap something would eventually find. Six years of treating this as a real possibility rather than a theoretical one had turned out to be the difference between surviving and not. The same framework that his teachers had called a disorder, that his neighbors had found unsettling, that had cost him seven years of isolation — it was precisely calibrated for a world where threats were real and unpredictable and arrived without warning.

I used to be the one person in the room who thought the worst was coming. Now the worst has come, and I’m still here.

He walked back to Vajra.

He saw it through the telescope before he registered what he was seeing.

Something large enough to be a water buffalo was crouching over something smaller near where he’d left the Spine-cat chained. The posture was wrong for an animal at rest. It was eating.

He adjusted the focus.

The Spine-cat — or what remained of it — was under the water-buffalo-shaped creature. The size was wrong for a normal water buffalo. This one was approaching elephant scale, the body mass distributed across a frame that moved with the particular weight of something that had added thirty percent to its body size since birth. The horns were enormous, disproportionate to even the enlarged body, curving up and outward in a configuration that would have looked theatrical if it weren’t clearly functional.

Water buffaloes didn’t eat meat. This one was.

Evolved bovine. Good size. Probably significant Activity content in the core structures.

He also had no more fresh meat after the Spine-cat. Both problems pointed in the same direction.

He moved to seventy meters, crouching behind a low rock formation, and spent a minute and a half in observation.

The creature was occupied with feeding. Its attention was down and forward. The wind was moving across him rather than toward it. The ground between them was rocky but manageable.

He picked up the first fang-javelin, channeled Activity into the tip until the charge stabilized, set his feet, and threw.

Three weeks ago, the first javelin he’d thrown had missed by ten meters. He’d been working on the technique since then — the specific mechanics of transferring throwing power from the hip rotation through the shoulder to the release point, calibrated for the weight distribution of a fang-tipped steel rod rather than a conventional spear. Three bulls of strength meant nothing if the release was wrong. Practice meant the release was now usually right.

The javelin crossed seventy meters with the particular sound it made when the Activity charge was full — a sharp sustained note that ended in impact.

The javelin hit.

Not a kill shot. The tip entered at the upper back and came out through the lower abdomen — a through-and-through that would have been immediately fatal to something without the Activity-enhanced physiology that mutated creatures apparently shared. The buffalo lurched, got its feet under it, and turned toward the sound of the impact.

Then it saw him and charged.

He was already moving.

The hand crossbow was up before the buffalo had covered ten meters of the gap. Fang-tipped bolt, full draw. He released at sixty meters.

The bolt hit the center of the forehead. The buffalo stumbled, recovered, kept coming.

He loaded the second bolt while running a wide arc to the animal’s left side.

Second shot at forty meters: left eye. The buffalo staggered, lost its rhythm, but didn’t go down.

He ran the arc tighter.

Third shot from thirty meters: neck, left side, deep.

The animal’s legs stopped coordinating properly. The momentum carried it forward another several steps before it came down.

He stepped back, watched it settle, waited for any recovery movement.

Nothing.

He walked up, loaded two standard bolts — no point spending Activity-core bolts on a prone target — and put both through the eyes at close range.

The sounds stopped.

He pulled the javelin free, collected the crossbow bolts, grabbed the buffalo by one rear leg, and started dragging it toward Vajra.

It was significantly heavier than a Fangwolf.

He didn’t care.

(End of Chapter 43)