The crane truck roared toward the battlefield, black smoke rolling across everything.

The Golden Jiao was covered in wounds. Its blood ran out black. The devastation had slowed the great body, made it less fluid than it had been — but the head was still up, fangs bared, saliva dripping from the jaw in thick strands. The two horn-like protrusions above its skull caught the light, silver-bright even through the smoke.

Even half-dead, the Golden Jiao carried the absolute authority of a Heavyweight evolved beast.

Shen Cong floored the accelerator and jammed it down — wedged it so it wouldn’t pull back. Then, when the distance to the Golden Jiao was right, he pulled a detonator from his kit, lit it, and left it in the cab.

He timed the roll perfectly. Door open, body out, letting the crane truck continue forward on its own.

The truck’s appearance pulled the Golden Jiao’s attention immediately. The great head swiveled. The forked tongue moved in and out — tasting danger, broadcasting it. While the serpent tracked the vehicle, Shen Cong rose slowly from where he’d landed, in a way that drew no notice, and drew the Ape King Javelin from his back.

He raised his arm.

In the command post, the closed-circuit monitors showed nothing but Shen Cong and the Golden Jiao. Zhao Weiliang, Zhu Li, and the rest of the leadership watched in silence.

This was Plan A.

If Shen Cong failed, Plan B activated immediately — the Independent Evolved Detachment, over a hundred mutants, throwing themselves at it in numbers. Or Plan C: full dispersal and retreat.

The Detachment was massed on a platform at the camp’s edge, watching. For them, closing to that range against a beast of that tier was functionally suicide. The decisive factor was speed — without Shen Cong’s bullet-dodging reflexes, none of them could reliably survive even one sweep from the Golden Jiao’s tail.

Along the interior platforms, the camp’s ordinary survivors pressed against the railings and stared into the distance. Their eyes weren’t sharp enough to make out much — Shen Cong was a small dark shape against the smoke and dust. But they watched anyway.

Every heart was in every throat.

It looked like those scenes in films — bystanders watching a lone figure try to save the world. They’d never seen his face. They knew only that he was called Hu Ge, that he was the Edge of Evolution, the strongest evolved person in camp.

Nanjing’s nuclear fire. The Golden Jiao at the gates.

In the face of forces that large, people reach for something human-shaped to believe in. Someone whose existence means the disaster has an answer.

“Mama, will that big snake die?”

“Yes.”

“Will Uncle Hu Ge kill it?”

“Yes.”

“Uncle Hu Ge is amazing.”

The mother didn’t correct her daughter’s simple faith, because it was exactly what she was hoping for too. Her palms were soaked. The camp had over four hundred evolved people, and not one of them had dared to approach the Violent Ape King. What Shen Cong was facing now was worse than the Ape King by every measure.

The Golden Jiao, wounded by seventeen bomb vehicles, was still moving like something very much alive.

Far too strong. Their hearts hammered.

“Can Hu Ge actually kill the Golden Jiao?” The command post staff were no less anxious — they understood the situation better than most. The seventeen bomb vehicles had been the camp’s last ammunition reserve. Spent now, completely and finally. There was nothing left to deploy.

This was a last stand.

Win, and the camp had a chance to breathe. Lose, and there was only collapse.

Shen Cong didn’t know how much weight was riding on him at that moment. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have cared.

From the moment the bomb vehicles had begun their run, he’d entered a state of cold and total focus. One problem: how to kill a wounded Golden Jiao.

Killing the Violent Ape King had given him a deep well of confidence. However powerful an evolved beast, it could fall. He’d proven that.

He’d been wanting the Golden Jiao for a long time.

Zhang Tianshen had once ranted about wanting to slay a dragon. Shen Cong was here to do it for him.

The arm holding the Ape King Javelin didn’t move. In his head, he counted down.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One—

BOOM.

Almost to the second, the detonator went off in the crane truck’s cab. The Golden Jiao’s entire attention snapped to the explosion.

Shen Cong threw.

The Ape King Javelin, saturated with Activity, crossed the distance like a lightning bolt and traced a clean arc straight into the Golden Jiao’s eye — buried itself to the hilt and disappeared inside.

The Golden Jiao could dodge artillery shells. It couldn’t dodge this. It could deflect shrapnel. It couldn’t deflect an Activity-charged bone-gold weapon.

One throw. One hit.

The eye socket connected directly to the brain cavity. The pain hit the Golden Jiao like a detonation of its own. The massive body began to thrash — each sweep of its length flattening the ground the way a bulldozer would, leaving it scraped clean and level.

Yellow dust swallowed the black smoke completely.

The crane truck took a tail sweep and came apart. Whatever remained of Wang Yu’s body inside was no longer the kind of thing that bore thinking about. The cheering from the camp’s direction reached Shen Cong faintly. He didn’t pay attention to either. He was already moving — bounding away from the radius of the thrashing body, repositioning.

He had the power to kill the Golden Jiao. He was also aware that a single tail strike from it would put him down hard, possibly permanently. Humans carried a disadvantage against evolved beasts in raw physical resilience. Intelligence was the equalizer.

He cleared the immediate danger zone and came back in through the hanging yellow dust. His glass visor handled the particulate — he could see clearly while the dust blinded the Golden Jiao’s sensory input, masking his position even as the serpent’s enormous body remained completely exposed.

Second Ape King Javelin in hand.

The moment came and went in an instant. Shen Cong caught it. Close range now; his accuracy had been drilled to the point where it didn’t require thought. The javelin crossed the air and drove into the Golden Jiao’s other eye.

Serpents don’t depend on eyesight the way mammals do. But these weren’t just eye wounds. Both javelins had penetrated deep enough to reach the brain.

The evidence was visible: in the midst of its thrashing, the Golden Jiao’s body began to seize in rhythmic, involuntary spasms. Neural disruption. The signals were misfiring.

The Golden Jiao had taken everything it intended to take. It turned to retreat.

Shen Cong’s operating principle had always been: when your enemy is wounded, finish the job. He was already sprinting, already airborne, landing on the serpent’s body and pulling himself toward the head.

He was almost there when the Golden Jiao rolled.

Shen Cong drove both hands into the scales and pressed flat against the body as the world inverted. The full weight of the Golden Jiao came down on him for a fraction of a second — enough to feel the Half-Activated Armor buckle under the pressure, enough to hear the Ape King Javelins on his back snap clean through.

The roll was the last effort the Golden Jiao had. It didn’t have the strength for another.

Shen Cong came off the body the moment the pressure released, drew the Ape King Long Blade from his hip — still intact — and drove it in at the three-inch point.

Snakes have two lethal targets. The seven-inch point, which corresponds to the heart, and the three-inch point, the junction of the spine just below the skull. A strike to either kills immediately. The seven-inch location requires experience to find — Shen Cong had never located it precisely on the Golden Jiao. The three-inch point needed no expertise: the narrowing of the neck where it met the head, the thinnest part of the connection, right there. Sever the spine here and all neural function below the strike drops away at once.

He’d estimated the Golden Jiao’s three-inch point long before tonight.

The Activity-charged Ape King Long Blade opened the scales without resistance and found the vertebra. Shen Cong put everything into it.

Crack.

The blade levered the spine apart.

The Golden Jiao’s entire body convulsed once, completely, and then went still. It lay on the ground as though every process inside it had simply stopped.

Blood from the spinal wound soaked through Shen Cong’s armor.

The yellow dust began to settle.

From their platforms, from the railings where they’d been watching with hearts in their throats — the camp’s survivors saw him.

Standing on the serpent’s head.

Harvesting its horns.

(End of Chapter 158)