One sparrow was nothing.
A hundred sparrows hitting simultaneously was a different calculation entirely. Even at eight-bull strength, Shen Cong found himself staggered, catching himself on the Dog-Croc Battle Standard’s frame and holding on while the flock surged around him. He worked his way to the rear of the roof through sheer persistence.
He activated the fire truck’s pump, switched the feed from water to diesel, screwed on the flamethrower nozzle he’d fabricated earlier, and opened the valve.
A wide arc of atomised diesel sprayed into the flock.
He got the lighter to the nozzle.
The mist ignited.
Fwoom.
The rolling flames went up with a sound like heavy breathing, carrying a column of black smoke, and the temperature in the surrounding air spiked immediately.
“All of you — die.“
He swept the flamethrower through the densest concentrations. Sparrows caught in the stream went up immediately, shrieking. The ones that had taken a diesel coating from the initial spray were worse — they became secondary ignition points, carrying fire to their neighbours on impact, wing beats spreading the burning faster than the flamethrower alone could have managed.
What had been a dense grey mass became something else.
A fire cloud.
The dark flock transformed over the span of seconds into a burning constellation, hundreds of individual fires moving through the air. The ones not yet burning were being struck by the ones that were. Panicked wing beats spread the fire faster still. The flamethrower was almost unnecessary — the flock was doing the work itself.
Shen Cong stood in the middle of it and felt the oxygen going.
The combustion was pulling air from the immediate area. Combined with incomplete-burn carbon monoxide from the diesel, the effect was cumulative — his thinking slowed slightly, his breathing became laboured, a faint vertigo began at the edges.
“I need to get back in.”
He dropped through the roof hatch, sealed it, and found the oxygen cylinders in the back cabinet. Several deep pulls from the mask and the vertigo began to clear.
The flamethrower was burning himself as much as the birds.
He checked the camera feeds.
The exterior of the flock — beyond the burning core — was still enormous. New sparrows pressing in from the surrounding area, apparently drawn by the Bee Treasure scent, apparently not deterred by the fact that the entire area was on fire. The total population he was dealing with was not going down meaningfully.
This approach won’t work.
He sat with the problem for thirty seconds.
The mathematics were clear. At the current rate, the sparrows would slowly drain Vajra’s Activity Value through their beak Sharpening — a constant low-level drain that accumulated over time. Every combat scenario he entered from this point forward would be against a depleted baseline rather than a full one. That was unacceptable.
And the fire truck was the source of the problem and also the solution.
He’d been carrying the fire truck as a storage extension and Activity source. What he’d actually gotten was reduced speed, reduced manoeuvrability, blocked rear firing angles, and an inability to traverse uneven ground. The Activity gain from the fire truck’s amalgamated exterior was good but not irreplaceable. He’d always known the truck was temporary.
The Bee Treasure scent coating Vajra’s hull could be dealt with. The scent on the fire truck’s exterior was also Bee Treasure, concentrated there from the carry bag loading. If he transferred the scent concentration to the fire truck and detonated the fuel tank—
Sacrifice the truck. Clear the birds. Move on.
He made the decision and started working immediately.
Two honeycomb sections from the carry bag, wrapped up. Through the roof hatch, flock be damned — into the sparrows, across to the fire truck roof. The birds were primarily hitting Vajra, not the fire truck, because the dominant scent source was on Vajra. That gave him a window.
He threw everything on the fire truck that wasn’t worth keeping over the side first — metal scrap, miscellaneous materials. The Activity cores went last, directly into his pockets. When the truck held nothing he cared about, he pressed a remote detonator to the blasting cap he’d taken from Wang Gen’s stockpile and left it inside the cab.
Then he unwrapped the honeycomb, opened the cargo bay door, and smeared Bee Treasure honey on every interior surface he could reach.
The sparrow flock registered the concentrated scent source immediately. The shift was near-instant — the attack pressure on Vajra dropped sharply as several thousand birds redirected toward the fire truck.
He washed himself down with diesel to strip the remaining honey scent from his armour, sprinted back to Vajra, and pulled himself through the hatch.
He cut the coupling to the fire truck.
Engine, accelerator. Vajra rolled forward fifty metres — maximum safe range for the remote detonator.
He stood in the rear door frame, watching through the window. The sparrow flock had packed itself around the fire truck in concentric rings — a dense, layered ball of grey feathers, every bird in the vicinity engaged with the vehicle, packed so tightly that the truck itself had disappeared inside the mass.
“You came to rob me. You all die for it.”
He pressed the detonator.
The first explosion was sharp — the blasting cap, inside the cab. A fraction of a second later the diesel fuel in the main tank caught the shockwave.
The fire truck’s cargo body disintegrated.
The pressure wave, shrapnel, and superheated gas expanded outward at a speed that left no meaningful reaction window for anything within ten metres. Beyond ten metres, the secondary debris — shredded metal, vaporised fuel, fragments of sparrow — peppered the surrounding area. Several pieces hit Vajra’s exterior armour hard enough to rock the truck on its suspension for a full second.
The sound rolled away.
Shen Cong opened the window and looked at what remained.
Where the flock-covered fire truck had been, a black-red mushroom cloud was climbing into the sky. More than ninety-five percent of the birds had been vapourised in the initial detonation. The rest were scattered shreds. A small outer population that had been beyond the direct blast radius circled the rising smoke, producing a sound he found difficult to categorise between chirping and screaming.
Over twenty thousand mutant sparrows. Gone.
He opened the cab door and peeled a cooked sparrow from the panel where the pressure wave had plastered it. The body was done through — the heat had cooked it in place. He stripped the beak away and measured: Lv0.433, Activity Value 0.055H, Talent 0.127H.
Extremely weak.
He looked at the column of smoke for a moment.
A fire truck with primary activation metal still in its engine block. Original activation metal that he’d been wanting to consume for months and still hadn’t found a method for. Gone, or buried under the burning wreckage, or scattered across the highway.
That one stings.
He allowed himself a brief, humourless smile. “In the apocalypse, even your life isn’t guaranteed tomorrow. A piece of metal is not worth losing sleep over.”
He looked at the smoke column again.
“I suppose that counts as the Heavenly Demon Dissolution Technique. And apparently the only ones who play with explosives here are Angry Birds. I’ll call them Furious Sparrows.” He glanced at the still-burning wreckage. “Need to check the fire for original activation metal once it cools. Assuming anything survived.”
The fire truck burned in the middle of the highway, and the flames reflected off Shen Cong’s helmet in shifting orange.
(End of Chapter 124)