Feint at the front gate while the real move happens around the wall.

Shen Cong had never read The Thirty-Six Stratagems, but he knew this one. While the group out front kept him occupied with noise and theatre, the ones slipping around the back were probably moving to plant the charges. Get one under Vajra’s chassis and detonate it — and Shen Cong would have a very bad night.

That was why having eyes everywhere mattered.

Modern warfare was information warfare. Control the information, and you play your cards at leisure.

He let the silence stretch — as if genuinely weighing the offer, genuinely softening. Then he answered, wearing the face of a man who’d decided to accept the surrender:

“Fine. I’ll let this go. But Wang Gen — Tao Daqian — you fill my tank. All the way. And food, water, supplies — enough to satisfy me.”

“Done!” Wang Gen called back, cheerful, relieved.

“I’m opening the rear door now. Send your people to bring the diesel over.” Shen Cong made a show of it — the rear door swinging open, him standing there with crossbow raised, visibly watchful, visibly cautious. The posture of a man accepting terms but not yet trusting them.

Wang Gen’s side played along perfectly, not a single gesture that might spook him.

What Wang Gen hadn’t anticipated was that Shen Cong had no intention of actually accepting anything.

He asked one question: “Is Dahaizi dead?”

It was enough. Wang Gen turned his head toward the trailer wreckage.

The bolt crossed twenty-plus meters in the time it took him to turn.

It took him in the unprotected eye.

“Ahhh—”

Wang Gen collapsed, voice tearing itself apart in agony.

One shot. One man down.

Shen Cong had barely lowered the crossbow before the pistol was in his hand, already firing at Tao Daqian. At this range, with no warning, no time to read it coming — Tao Daqian’s reflexes meant nothing. He went down under a burst of rounds before he could say a single word.

In the span of a breath: Wang Gen’s three evolved fighters, minus the unconscious Dahaizi, were one dead and one grievously wounded.

The moment their leaders fell, the rest froze.

Their weapons were on the ground. They’d put them there themselves.

“Nobody move. Anyone moves, they die.”

The killing weight behind Shen Cong’s voice hit them like a physical thing. Ordinary people, no Activity to cushion them from it — they went still.

Shen Cong dropped from Vajra and crossed to Wang Gen, crossbow up.

Wang Gen had both hands clutched around the shaft in his eye, screaming through his teeth: “Save me — please — don’t kill me — I don’t want to die — please, save me—”

The answer was the sound of a bowstring.

Then again.

Then again.

Six more bolts, one after another, into Wang Gen and Tao Daqian both.

The clean white moonlight fell across Shen Cong’s Baogai Armor and scattered into cold fragments. Around him, Wang Gen’s surviving men stood silent as tombstones.

Wang Gen and Tao Daqian’s plan hadn’t been a bad one, strictly speaking. The flaw was in running it while so exposed — gambling everything on a feint when they didn’t have enough protection to survive being wrong. Against an ordinary person, Wang Gen’s surrender act might actually have worked. Let them relax, slip the charges under the chassis, pull the trigger. There was a real chance it could have gone through.

The misfortune was that Shen Cong was not an ordinary person to run scripts on. Or rather — his script and everyone else’s were written in different languages entirely.

The moment Wang Gen had decided to move against him, Shen Cong had already written the verdict. Wang Gen. Tao Daqian. Dahaizi. No appeasement. No mercy. No conditions worth discussing.

He had the remaining men drag Dahaizi out of the trailer wreckage. The man was still unconscious. Shen Cong cut his throat with a fang knife himself.

Then he sent one of the survivors to round up the men who’d slipped away with the charges.

“Tell them to bring the packages back intact. If they don’t — I will find them personally, and I will feed them to evolved beasts. One by one.”

He pointed at two others: “You two. Sanhe Village. Find Captain Zhu Haifeng of the Shadows. Tell him to bring his people here.”

He’d pieced together Wang Gen’s full plan by then. Wang Gen had known he couldn’t plant a charge under Vajra’s chassis while under direct observation — he’d seen the slingshot work, seen what the crossbow could do, and had lost his nerve for a straight fight. So the scheme was layered: play surrendered, assess Shen Cong’s demands, and if the price was acceptable, let it go. If Shen Cong pushed too hard — give the signal, slip the charges in. He’d even had a second package back at the compound, a backup plan for getting it hidden inside a supply delivery if Shen Cong’s nighttime inspection was careless.

Every angle covered. Every contingency planned.

He just hadn’t anticipated that Shen Cong would give him no room to perform any of it.

Both packages ended up in Shen Cong’s hands. The two charges planted under Mudan Road Bridge came up as well. Each was wired with detonators and fitted with remote triggers — close-range ignition, point and fire. He had no idea where Wang Gen had sourced so many detonators.

As for the surviving crew: Shen Cong’s intention was to hand them to Zhu Haifeng for absorption into the rescue team. Cold as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to execute ordinary people who posed no threat to him. Better to give Zhu Haifeng the manpower and let the south district consolidation happen faster.

It was, he supposed, the one small concession he still made to being human.

“Mr. Huang, you’re something else — you swept up Wang Gen’s whole operation again.” Zhu Haifeng arrived in good spirits, trying for a familiar tone.

Shen Cong didn’t match it. “His men are yours. I’m taking everything useful from his stockpile — what’s left goes to the rescue team.”

The list was long: Activity cores, bone-gold weapons, firearms, diesel, cigarettes and liquor, automotive parts, the Hummer itself.

Wang Gen had been a mechanic by trade and an iron person by circumstance. His compound had accumulated years of tools and components — exactly the kind of material Shen Cong needed. He worked through the stores methodically.

The Hummer was already beginning to fade. With Wang Gen dead, its Activity was bleeding out slowly, like a fire with no one feeding it.

Shen Cong had a theory he wanted to test: whether Vajra could absorb the Hummer through Amalgamation — consume it, merge with it, and preserve what Activity remained. If it worked, it might tell him something about how iron people bonded, how the connection between person and vehicle actually functioned. The secret of that transformation was one he genuinely wanted to understand.

By midnight, he was done.

He turned down Zhu Haifeng’s invitation to drink — flatly, without ceremony — and drove Vajra out, fully loaded, taking the long way around to cross the Yuxi River at the Yuxi Grand Bridge on Provincial Road 208.

By the early hours of August 19th, Shen Cong left the southern district behind and entered the main urban area of Juchao.

(End of Chapter 78)