Decision made, Shen Cong didn’t hesitate. He ran straight for the vineyard.

Crossbow up, fang arrow nocked, he scanned the mass of black bodies for the largest specimens. The priority targets were the big ones — the greatest threats first.

He channelled Activity into the fang tips. The arrows responded with an unstable, flickering radiation that told him everything he needed to know about their condition. Nine fang arrows total, salvaged from the Fangwolf and Teddy Tyrant cores, recycled through multiple engagements — the Activity cores embedded in them were near the point of collapse. The irregular radiation made it clear: these arrows were going out and not coming back.

They’d served him well. More than well.

One last brilliant moment, then.

Snap.

The arrow left the crossbow like a bolt of lightning and buried itself in the skull of a large Thieving Crow that had been happily gorging on Evolution Grapes.

Crack.

Blood across the grape vines. The crow dropped, dead before it hit the ground.

That got the flock’s attention.

The entire mass lifted simultaneously — a black cloud peeling off the vineyard and turning on Shen Cong in a single coordinated surge, the sheer momentum of it filling the air with sound and shadow. Zhu Haifeng and the others, running up from behind, stopped dead when they saw it coming.

For them, the only option to that wave was to hide. There was nothing else.

Shen Cong didn’t move.

He picked his moment, fired again. Another large crow detonated mid-dive. Then he stowed the crossbow and took the Dog-Croc Warhammer in both hands.

The warhammer ran one-point-eight metres from grip to head, but weighed only thirty kilograms — most of that in the steel tube handle, with the triangular drumstick head itself barely heavier than dense bone. What it lacked in mass it more than compensated for in hardness and impact transfer. Nothing ordinary metal could match it.

Sharpening the drumstick head required significant Activity investment and Shen Cong could only sustain it for a few strikes at a time. Against Thieving Crows, he didn’t need Sharpening.

He just needed to swing.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

He had no formal weapons training, no established technique or form. What he had instead was reaction speed under thirty milliseconds, spatial awareness extending through the Activity field around him, and seven-bull striking force behind every blow. Technique was optional when you could simply place the hit wherever you needed it, every time, without error.

He targeted the large specimens exclusively. Anything the drumstick head connected with died. The physics were not complicated.

The crows had three attacks between them — talon strike, beak stab, body slam — and against the Super Baogai Armor every one of them registered as approximately nothing. Only the oversized specimens carried enough momentum in a full dive to even shift his footing, and those were exactly the ones he’d already prioritised for elimination. Once the large crows were gone, the rest were manageable. Swatting flies.

Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

The bodies accumulated. Blood pooled across the vineyard floor and spread across his armour in dark streaks. Two of the Sharp Eagle tail feathers on his helmet got torn loose by a particularly determined crow — cosmetic damage, but irritating.

The smell hit after a few minutes. Iron and bird.

Then one crow screamed — distinct from the general noise — and broke west. Then another. Then a third.

They’d learned to be afraid.

That was different from the early post-apocalypse creatures he remembered, the ones with no self-preservation instinct, the ones that would throw themselves into a fight until there was nothing left to throw. These crows were calculating their losses in real time and updating their behaviour. Higher cognition. A meaningful development.

Knowing when to flee was, in its own way, a form of intelligence.

A few minutes more and the flock had lost a third of its number dead on the vineyard floor. Another third had already broken and headed west. The remaining third refused to leave the Evolution Grapes but wouldn’t come close to Shen Cong either — circling overhead in an agitated, noisy holding pattern, screaming continuously.

“Absolutely terrifying,” Fu Jianguo said from the sideline, swallowing.

Li Weijun didn’t say anything. He just watched.

“Boss Huang’s… output is genuinely very violent,” Zhu Haifeng said, choosing his words with some care.

“I knew he was strong,” Zhao Yalan said, sounding like she was working something out. “I didn’t think he was this strong.” She’d gone to test his limits herself a few days ago and gotten grabbed by the throat in under a second. She’d thought that was the ceiling. Looking at this, she was revising her estimate significantly upward.

“That armour,” Xu Wanxian said after a long pause. “None of us can break through it. I’d bet everything on it.”

Chen Song was shaking his head. “Iron people really do have it all. They can enhance their bodies like we mutants can, but they also get the vehicle bond and metal control on top of it. Never mind his armour — could any of you crack that truck? Boss Huang is not an ordinary person. He’s in a completely different class from Liu Zheng.”

“How does a person get this strong,” Zhao Yalan muttered, mostly to herself.

Li Weijun put a hand on her arm. “Either way — Boss Huang being this powerful isn’t bad for us. For the camp. Personally, I’d rather humanity have people like him. That’s the only way we have a fighting chance against evolved beasts.” A pause. “And whatever else he is, he’s not fundamentally rotten.”

Zhu Haifeng looked at the circling crows. “They’re not attacking anymore. Should we go help?”

“Carefully. Keep your guards up. All together.”

By the time Zhu Haifeng’s group moved in, Shen Cong had already slung the warhammer across his back and switched to the slingshot. Twenty bands of elastic, steel ball bearings — at 1.184H Activity Value and seven-bull force behind the draw, the projectile velocity was approaching small arms territory. The difference between his slingshot and a handgun was narrowing.

Between Shen Cong’s slingshot and the group’s combined fire, they picked off fifty-odd more of the reluctant holdouts. The last of the Thieving Crows gave up, screamed their displeasure at the sky, and headed west.

The vineyard fell quiet.

Black feathers. Red blood. The smell of it thick in the air.

Li Weijun wiped a spatter of blood from his forehead and turned to Shen Cong. “Thank you, Boss Huang.”

Shen Cong was already moving through the bodies, retrieving both spent fang arrows. The heads had shattered on impact — finished, unusable. He pocketed the shafts anyway, then sorted through the corpses for the largest specimens, stringing several of the big ones together with a cord along with one standard-sized crow and dragging them behind him.

He turned to Li Weijun. “Eighty percent of the Activity cores from the bodies on the ground. Clean them up and bring them to me.” He’d done the overwhelming majority of the killing. The greater share was his by any reasonable accounting.

The meat he’d leave. Too much to eat before it spoiled.

“Agreed,” Li Weijun said immediately. He’d already done the calculation — almost every kill in the vineyard had been Shen Cong’s. That he was leaving the meat at all and offering twenty percent of the cores to the Provisional Government was generous by any fair measure. Pushing for more would damage a working relationship for nothing.

Quietly, he’d noticed: he was acting more like the District Chief than Zhu Haifeng was. The observation wasn’t comfortable, but it was accurate.

“And tonight — take me to the meteorite fragments.” Shen Cong added it without looking back.

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

Li Weijun considered. Shen Cong was capable enough that time of day didn’t change the risk calculus much. “Alright. Tonight.”

The reason Shen Cong wanted to wait until night wasn’t arbitrary. The fight with the Thieving Crows had cost him physically — not seriously, but enough. He needed time to recover and reset to full capacity before walking into unknown terrain for an unknown payoff. Whatever was on that mountain, he wanted to meet it at his best.

Darkness also worked in his favour in a specific way: his own senses — Activity perception, enhanced vision, reaction speed — weren’t significantly degraded by low light. Other people’s were. Evolved beasts’ were, mostly. Night was when the balance of advantage tilted furthest in his direction.

He dragged the crow corpses back to Vajra without ceremony.

Being outside the truck — even for a short engagement — had carried a low-level tension he hadn’t fully registered until it released when he climbed back in. The cab closed around him and he breathed out properly for the first time since leaving.

He ran water from the defensive trench through the armour, washing the blood off in sections, then cleaned himself up properly.

Then he got to work on the corpses.

The data from the Thieving Crows was interesting. Activity levels varied significantly within the flock — the largest specimen he’d brought back measured Lv0.516, Activity Value 0.176H, Talent 0.341H. An ordinary rooster-sized individual from the same flock measured Lv0.5, Activity Value 0.154H, Talent 0.308H. Meaningful difference within a single species cohort.

Activity core locations were distributed across multiple sites, but the pattern for the large specimens was consistent: the left talon, which had grown roughly twice the size of the right. The three forward and one rear claws at the talon tips were dense, curved, and sharply pointed — Shen Cong turned one over in his hands and assessed the geometry. With some grinding work: arrowheads. Four of them, cut from the largest specimen’s claws. Slightly stronger than the fang arrows had been.

He designated them Thieving Claw Arrows.

The ordinary-sized crow’s talons were too small to work with for arrowheads. Noted and set aside for other purposes.

Updated ranged ammunition inventory:

• 1 × Rhino Horn Arrow — Activity Value 0.236H
• 4 × Thieving Claw Arrows — Activity Value 0.176H (new)
• 7 × Fang Arrows — Activity Value 0.158H (heavily worn, near end of service life)
• 10 × Soldier-Ant Mandible Arrows — Activity Value ~0.074H
• 40 × Worker-Ant Mandible Arrows — Activity Value ~0.06H
• Various standard amalgam arrows

He filed the inventory, set the crafting work aside for later, and looked out at the darkening sky.

Dinner.

“Fried Thieving Crow leg,” he decided.

(End of Chapter 108)