Liu Zheng couldn’t react in time.

But the windshield’s shattering had introduced a variable. The glass fragments deflected the rhino horn arrow by a fraction — just enough. The shot meant for Liu Zheng’s forehead skewed, entered at the bridge of his nose, and exited behind his ear.

“Ahhh—”

A scream of pain, and he dropped below the dash by reflex. Grievously wounded. Not dead.

“Damn.”

It didn’t matter. The glass was gone, Liu Zheng was down and bleeding badly, and Shen Cong was already moving. He had detonators ready. He lit the fuse, counted to 2.5 seconds — the fuse burned at three — and launched it through the firing port with the slingshot.

The detonator entered the cab and detonated almost immediately.

BOOM.

Black smoke billowed from the fire truck’s interior.

He lit another. Counted. Fired.

BOOM.

The cab door blew off its hinges. Something came with it — a blackened shape tumbling out onto the road. Shen Cong confirmed it through the cameras: Liu Zheng, unconscious, badly burned.

“Commander Liu!” The mutant Zhu Ran’s voice came from somewhere in the wreckage.

The two support vehicles behind the fire truck tried to respond, accelerating forward to put themselves between Vajra and the fire truck. Neither was an iron person’s bonded vehicle. Shen Cong put a slingshot pellet through each set of tires — jeep and van, both swerving hard into the rubble on either side of the road.

Then he switched to soldier-mandible pellets and put seven or eight into Liu Zheng’s burned body, methodically and without particular feeling. No chance of survival left.

The provincial military district’s appointed fire brigade commander died in a debris field on an empty Juchao street, on the seventy-something day of the apocalypse.

The remaining fire brigade members watched their commander die and lost whatever fighting resolve they’d had. Several started to run.

Shen Cong opened the door and dropped from Vajra with the Dog-Croc Warhammer in one hand.

Ordinary survivors he could let go. Evolved people couldn’t be left behind.

Zhu Haifeng had told him there were twelve evolved people in the fire brigade total. This group had brought three: Liu Zheng now dead, Wei Falü dead in the opening burst. That left Zhu Ran.

Bang.

Zhu Ran came up from cover with a handgun, firing as Shen Cong came at him through the rubble.

Shen Cong was already turning. The bullet passed. He covered the distance at a pace that made cheetah comparisons feel appropriate — the Sharp Eagle tail feathers on his helmet cutting the air, the Super Baogai Armor catching the light — and reached Zhu Ran in a handful of steps.

“Don’t kill me—”

Four words. That was all there was time for.

The Dog-Croc Warhammer’s triangular head connected with Zhu Ran’s skull and kept going.

Three evolved people. Three kills.

He dropped the warhammer, pulled the slingshot, and put a steel ball into a fleeing fire brigade member at range. One down. Turned, fired again. Another direction, another running figure. Two down.

“Surrender and live. Run and die.”

Two bodies on the ground to back the words up. Every remaining fire brigade member stopped moving.

He swept the area, confirmed no one was still trying, and gave the order: “Everyone form up. Weapons on the ground. Hands behind your head, down on your knees in that open area. Non-compliance means immediate death.”

The weapons were few — several of the better-armed members had already been shot in the initial exchange. Everyone knelt.

Shen Cong bent to retrieve the Dog-Croc Warhammer.

In that moment, a fire brigade member on the ground pulled a handgun from his trouser leg and fired.

Bang.

Shen Cong’s reaction completed in under 0.04 seconds — he caught the muzzle flash and sound, arm coming up to cover his head before the bullet arrived.

Clang.

It hit the Dog-Croc plate on his back. Clean deflection, no mark.

The Super Baogai Armor had stopped QBZ-95 rounds at close range during testing. A handgun was not a QBZ-95.

He turned, drew his own handgun, and put three rounds into the man from close range before the man could process that the first shot had failed.

Dead.

The gap between evolved and ordinary was absolute. Activity Value at 1.062H and still climbing — Shen Cong was moving toward the thing he’d always wanted to be: someone who controlled his own fate. Not a fantasy anymore. A measurable, documented, continuously-verified fact.

Three vehicles. Assorted weapons. Some fuel. Some salvage.

He felt no guilt about taking it. He didn’t go after people’s resources unprovoked. But anyone who’d tried to kill him forfeited any claim to consideration. This was simple and had been simple since the beginning.

What gave him more pause: the surviving fire brigade members.

He questioned them methodically. The picture that emerged differed somewhat from Zhu Haifeng’s intelligence — nine evolved people in the brigade currently, not twelve. Total survivor population under fire brigade protection: over nine hundred, encamped in Fenghuang Mountain.

The reason for Fenghuang Mountain: an evolved fruit tree grove. A vineyard, probably a former commercial operation before the apocalypse, now producing Activity-rich grapes. One grape provided enough nutrition for an ordinary person for two days.

The vineyard was the fire brigade’s private property.

The mountain had good defensive terrain against evolved beasts, reasonable proximity to Chaohu Lake, and an irrigation channel that could feed water from the lake to the old cement factory without requiring anyone to go near the lake shore — where the Dog-Crocs ran. The location made genuine sense.

“Liu Zheng had flaws, but his authority in camp was real. Most of the survivors trusted him. At a minimum, the fire brigade was protecting the camp and handling evolved beast threats.” One of the fire brigade members offered this without being asked, apparently feeling some obligation to be fair.

It was an accurate assessment, Shen Cong thought.

Liu Zheng was not, strictly speaking, a villain in the mold of Wang Gen.

He was something more like the Governor from The Walking Dead — the first major antagonist, the one who built something real and functional and then gradually bent it around his own interests until the two became inseparable.

Before the apocalypse, Liu Zheng had been the political instructor for Juchao’s fire brigade. On the day the meteor storm hit, he’d been leading a response call. The storm’s shockwave had knocked him unconscious; he’d come to buried in rubble, the fire truck damaged but partially intact, and made his way to a nearby air raid shelter.

When the storm cleared, he’d organized survivors, established order, and built the largest organized survivor group in Juchao. Wang Gen had started the same way — local hero, community anchor. Both men had been, in those first weeks, people others depended on.

Then the provincial military district had come through, taken the evolved people and their families, and left.

Liu Zheng stayed — for reasons no one had clearly explained to the survivors. With the military district’s nominal backing, he’d formally organized the fire brigade and assumed authority over Juchao’s reconstruction.

And then he’d started to change.

Not to Wang Gen’s extremity — he’d never crossed into blood food or active predation. But he’d looked away from Zhang Tianshen’s group when they’d been terrorizing the district. It had taken his deputy Li Weijun, logistics officer Zhao Yalan, and eventually Zhu Haifeng — all pressing hard — before he’d expelled Zhang Tianshen from the main district. Zhu Haifeng had left the brigade entirely over it and gone after Zhang Tianshen himself.

The vineyard had been the final point of fracture. Li Weijun and Zhao Yalan had wanted equitable distribution — every survivor got access. Liu Zheng had decided that only evolved people were entitled: evolved people needed the Activity to grow stronger; ordinary people eating the grapes were just consuming fuel they didn’t need. The decision had driven three mutants out of the brigade in disgust. Their whereabouts were unknown.

The brigade’s evolved roster had dropped from the original fifteen to nine.

The power structure that remained: Liu Zheng, Wei Falü, Zhu Ran, and a mutant named Ran Tai as one faction. Deputy commander Li Weijun and logistics officer Zhao Yalan as a second, more moderate bloc. Three others — Chen Song, Xu Wanxian, Fu Jianguo — holding a neutral position.

Liu Zheng’s grip on authority came partly from being an iron person who knew vehicles — the camp’s mechanical capability ran through him. He’d used that leverage to maintain control of the vineyard as brigade property, distributing grapes selectively to reward loyalty among the ordinary survivors.

Life in the Fenghuang Mountain camp was, by most accounts, stable. Threats from evolved beasts were handled. Food was adequate if not generous. The grapes were available to sufficiently loyal people. The ones who’d complained too loudly about the inequity had been educated on the subject by Wei Falü and similar individuals.

Strong-man rule, protective and self-serving in roughly equal measure. Difficult to call simply good or simply bad.

(End of Chapter 99)