“You want to be witnessed?”
“Fine. I’ll put an arrow through you.”
Shen Cong’s expression had gone flat. He felt the damage to Great Vajra as a physical ache — the photovoltaic panels were nearly irreplaceable at this point. Every one lost was a meaningful blow to the vehicle’s power generation. He had almost no spares left.
He’d raised the crossbow when the death-eater who’d fired the improvised cannon retreated behind the group. The bolt went wide of him and punched through someone else’s abdomen instead. That man went down screaming.
Sixty-six left.
Before he could adjust, a second death-eater had already produced another wooden tube. This one didn’t bother with any ceremony — just twisted the end in silence, and the tube coughed out a projectile that hit the opposite side of Great Vajra. More glass. More panels shattering and sliding off the hull.
Another wave of visceral pain.
“This won’t work. A few more of those and the vehicle takes serious damage. Activity reinforcement isn’t stopping this weapon.” He thought through it quickly. “But the reload time is slow.”
“Dismount and engage.”
Nineteen-bull strength and bouncing stilts against death-eaters operating at seven, eight, maybe nine-bull — he could completely suppress them. And they couldn’t reload those tube weapons fast enough to track him at speed.
He was already moving toward the exit when a new convoy appeared from the Pukou District direction.
Motorcycles — three in the lead, crude sidecar configurations, rifles up in the sidecar positions. Behind them: simple bicycles, riders with bows slung across their backs and core weapons at their sides.
The death-eaters reacted before Shen Cong could process what he was seeing.
“Those are — Zhao the [slur]!”
“Sidecar trikes — Home of the Fearless sidecar trikes!”
The motorcycle convoy didn’t slow down. Without any preamble, they engaged — the sidecar gunners opening up on the death-eater mass with aimed fire.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Sustained gunshots. The death-eaters, who’d been comfortable throwing numbers at Great Vajra, couldn’t absorb fire from two directions simultaneously. They scattered and began returning fire, pulling attention off the vehicle.
Two groups now, Great Vajra as the pivot point, exchanging fire across the ruins. Arrows, gunshots, crossbow bolts, sling pellets, throwing darts — all of it crossing in the air between them. The death-eaters still occasionally targeted Great Vajra in the chaos.
Shen Cong, who had been preparing to dismount, stopped and frowned.
He’d heard what the death-eaters shouted. His hearing was good enough to parse it. The motorcycle group was Zhao Zilong’s people, combined with a contingent from Home of the Fearless — the only faction that maintained functional firearms, because their iron people kept the mechanical equipment running in exchange for C1 from the other organizations.
“Let them fight. I’ll move when the moment’s right.” He wasn’t going to assume the new arrivals were here for his benefit. This was a city full of people who did insane things for insane reasons. He didn’t know what connection existed between any of these factions below the surface.
He pressed the accelerator and began working Great Vajra toward the edge of the engagement.
One of the sidecar trikes pulled alongside — the rider a tall, thin figure in a silver mask and a sharkskin cloak. The rider called out over the engine noise: “Hey! Eastern Theater Command? Help us finish these ones off first!”
A woman’s voice. Direct, efficient. Almost certainly Zhao Zilong — the Holy Mother of New Hope Laboratory, as described.
Shen Cong ignored her completely and kept driving.
The trike fell behind as Great Vajra cleared the engagement zone.
“They’re not turning around. Still moving away,” the gunner in the sidecar called to the rider.
Zhao Zilong glanced back at the departing vehicle, then turned to the fight. “Deal with these people first. We’ll contact them after.”
He ran the vehicle five kilometers to Zhujiang Town without stopping and got onto the Hening Expressway. Open road again — he could move properly. He pulled over and assessed the damage.
Both sides had taken hits from the wooden tube weapons. Seven photovoltaic panels lost. The structural dents in the hull plating were manageable — the Half-Activated Armor’s extension properties could reshape those. The bumper system had sections blown off and needed realloy and reshaping.
Beyond physical damage: Great Vajra’s Activity Value had dropped from 2.995H to 2.814H. Roughly five hours of ambient absorption to recover.
He swapped the drone battery and sent it up briefly to observe the aftermath.
The motorcycle convoy and the death-eater group had exchanged several more passes through the ruins — casualties on both sides, nothing decisive — and then both pulled back. The death-eaters retreated toward their territory. The motorcycle convoy regrouped and began following Great Vajra’s tire tracks north.
They appeared on the cameras within minutes.
He left the engine running but didn’t move yet. Going further north meant entering ratman territory. Rushing in while managing a possible threat from behind was a problem he didn’t want.
And if he got into a serious engagement with the ratmen and the death-eaters appeared behind him — that was a worse problem.
His preference: deal with the organized, scheming, intelligent death-eaters first. Then the ratmen were a simpler tactical problem — if he needed to push through Chuzhou to go north, that fight was unavoidable, but he’d rather face it without a knife in his back.
The convoy stopped a hundred meters out. Only the silver-masked rider came forward — alone in the sidecar trike now, with a different passenger in the car.
Shen Cong went to full alert, running scenarios.
The trike stopped alongside Great Vajra. The tall figure climbed out, raised both hands open, palms forward.
“Are you Eastern Theater Command?”
“Who are you?” Shen Cong answered from inside the vehicle.
“My name is Zhao Zilong. This is Lu Hang — he was a company commander in a motorized infantry brigade. We’ve been working against the human-consumption practices here, trying to hold some things together that should be held together. We’ve been trying to reach the Command for months.”
“Death-eaters trying to reach the Command?”
“I know how that sounds. There’s a lot of complicated history. But we’re not the same as the ones who just attacked you. We oppose the killings. We believe humanity should be uniting, not fracturing into factions killing each other.” Her voice was direct, unhesitating.
Shen Cong didn’t believe a word of it. She was wearing a mask. A mask was deception and concealment. Someone who wouldn’t even take off their mask was lying by definition.
She had a scheme.
His wariness increased rather than decreased. “How do you prove you’re not working with the death-eaters?”
Lu Hang answered: “We just took casualties fighting the Black Blood Group, Lost Paradise, and New Hope Laboratory’s people. Doesn’t that demonstrate something?”
“What do you want from the Command?”
“Help bringing order back to this area,” Zhao Zilong said. “The moral and social structure here has completely broken down. People have gone insane over C1 Mutagen. Some of the death-eater leadership has been accelerating the worst of it deliberately for their own benefit. I want the Command to reintegrate everyone here — give ordinary people a second chance, especially the ones who were manipulated into wanting C1 injections. The environment corrupted them.”
“The Command doesn’t produce C1. It can’t supply death-eaters. You should factor that into your thinking.”
Zhao Zilong answered without hesitation. “When we put ourselves on the opposite side of the death-eaters, we already accepted we’d stop using C1. Ending as a human being — just a human — is a reasonable ending.”
(End of Chapter 231)