The night was quiet in the way that cities got quiet after midnight — not silent, but still, the ambient sounds reduced to wind and the occasional distant crash of something structural that had been waiting to fall.

Zhu Haifeng’s team of about fifteen moved through the ruins with the practiced caution of people who’d been navigating hostile terrain for months. Shen Cong followed at the back of the column, where he had clear sight lines to everyone ahead of him and could monitor the approach without being visible from the front.

The infrared imager at his helmet’s left eye showed heat signatures in the familiar blue-to-orange spectrum. Fourteen warm shapes moving in column, plus two larger ones standing in the road section ahead where the Dragon Slayer operation was in progress.

Wang Dong was a specific shape — the shoulder spines showed clearly as elevated temperature profiles distinct from the surrounding body heat.

Shen Cong ran a quiet inventory as he walked.

Hand crossbow with fang-tipped bolt loaded. Second fang bolt on the quick-release clip at his left shoulder. Eight standard fang bolts in the quiver at his right. Eight fang javelins in the carry rack across his back — the four remaining from his original set plus four more ground from the Bull Demon King horn remnants after the activity-core research. Slingshot and 141 Activity-infused pellets. Both fang knives. Military spike and entrenching tool on the thigh mounts. Type 64 handgun in the belly pocket, safety off. The small glass vial of Super Ant Acid tucked in a padded interior pocket where impact couldn’t break it.

The acid was the backup to the backup. A volume sufficient to dissolve approximately Level 0.3 of Active protection from whatever it contacted, useful if he encountered someone whose defenses were genuinely more substantial than expected. Against people operating at pseudo-Level 0.28 or below, it was excessive.

He was running at a hundred meters in five seconds with full kit on. Without kit, closer to four.

He’d done the speed calculation earlier in the evening as part of the threat modeling — confirming that his movement capability exceeded anything Wang Dong or Zhang Tianshen could match. The mathematical certainty of it had settled something in how he was holding his body. Not confidence exactly. More like competence registered accurately.

Some of Zhu Haifeng’s people kept glancing back at him. He understood why. The Baogai Armor in moonlight had a particular quality — the queen ant chest plate catching silver off the cut edges, the fang inclusions at the helmet’s temples, the full coverage that communicated prepared for something more clearly than any statement could.

He ignored the attention.

Zhu Haifeng stopped at a broken wall and dropped to a crouch. He gestured Shen Cong forward.

“Wang Dong’s crew is about two hundred meters up the road. I’ll take my people in and go for Wang Dong directly. Stay back and watch for Zhang Tianshen coming from the south — when he shows up, I need you to occupy him long enough for me to finish Wang Dong.”

“Understood.”

Five minutes later the engagement opened.

The dynamics were approximately what Shen Cong had expected and not particularly illuminating about evolved-human combat. The moonlight was adequate for people who’d been living outside for months but not adequate for accurate shooting at unfamiliar targets in the middle of a fast-moving melee. Both sides had guns and both sides declined to use them freely for the obvious reason that firing in low-visibility conditions at mixed targets was as likely to hit a friend as an enemy.

What resulted was something closer to a large brawl with occasional gunfire on the margins — each combatant finding a roughly matched opponent, the matching done by volume and proximity rather than any tactical scheme.

The interesting portion was Zhu Haifeng chasing Wang Dong.

Wang Dong knew he was outmatched in a direct exchange and had apparently made peace with that assessment. He ran. Zhu Haifeng pursued. Wang Dong fired a shot backward over his shoulder at irregular intervals — the deterrence value of a gun deployed by someone who had no intention of standing still to aim it. Zhu Haifeng dodged or ignored each shot and kept closing.

The speed difference wasn’t quite enough. Wang Dong was staying fractionally ahead of the pursuit, buying distance through the advantage of not caring where he was going.

Shen Cong watched, assessed, and noticed the motorcycle headlight emerging from the Mudan Road direction. Zhang Tianshen, the sound of the engine audible now, moving fast.

Zhu Haifeng registered the sound without looking. “Hold him! I’m almost there!”

He wasn’t almost there. Wang Dong had another two minutes in him at minimum, and Zhang Tianshen was less than ninety seconds out.

The operation fails if Wang Dong survives long enough to be reinforced.

Shen Cong raised the crossbow.

Wang Dong was running toward him at an oblique angle, now inside forty meters. A moving target at that range, at night, under stress conditions — the kind of shot he’d have considered difficult eighteen months ago and now considered with the detached assessment of someone who had been putting crossbow bolts through evolved-beast eye sockets at fifty meters for the last two months.

He activated the Activity sharpening on the bolt tip.

Deep breath. One smooth release of the exhale. Eyes open, wrist adjusted for lead angle, finger pressure applied.

Click.

The bolt left at 500 feet per second.

Wang Dong’s instinct was to raise his arm. The arm was there when the bolt arrived, and the bolt was through the arm and through the skull before Wang Dong’s nervous system had processed that anything had happened. The fang tip’s Activity enhancement meant that the specific hardness that had made Burrower mandibles impervious to his earlier attacks worked in the other direction when applied to an offensive edge.

Wang Dong went backward. Hard. The bolt’s remaining energy drove him into the broken road surface before the arm that had tried to block it completed its useless gesture.

The arrow’s tail end protruded from his forehead.

The fighting in the road section stopped.

Zhu Haifeng stopped running, breathing hard, staring at the thing that had been Wang Dong.

He looked at Shen Cong.

He had the expression of someone who had just received new information about the nature of the situation he was in.

(End of Chapter 67)