Free Web NovelChapter 39: The desperate viper
The distance between life and death in a collapsing world was measured in fractions of a second, and Commander Han Zheng’s reflexes operated entirely within those microscopic gaps.
As Li Mei—the cook’s daughter—threw her disheveled, sobbing frame forward in a desperate attempt to lock herself in his embrace, Han Zheng didn’t flinch. He didn’t offer a shred of comfort. With a simple sidestep, he shifted his weight, letting her stumble completely past him. She collapsed against the cold metal casing of the guard console, her tears smudging against the rust as she gasped for air.
Han Zheng didn’t look back at her. His dark eyes were already locked onto the black mouth of the western corridor, his kinetic force manipulation humming at a lethal frequency around his fists.
"We’ve got company," Lin Qing’s flat, icy voice cut through Li Mei’s hysterical sobbing. She hadn’t broken her stance for a single second. Her rifle was already settled into her shoulder, her cheek pressed against the stock as her fingers rested lightly against the trigger. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm
From the depths of the lower grid, a low, guttural chittering sound began to echo, accompanied by the frantic, scraping sound of heavy claws tearing against concrete. It wasn’t the clumsy, dragging footsteps of standard infected. These movements were lightning-fast, predatory, and perfectly synchronized.
"Defensive formation! Circle up!" Han Zheng’s command roared through the cavernous depot, instantly snapping the elite unit into a flawless tactical shape.
The squad moved with practiced precision. They didn’t waste a single breath on Li Mei, completely ignoring her pathetic state as she crawled backward. But Li Mei was clever. Even in her state of genuine terror, her survival instincts were hyper-calculating; she immediately scrambled toward the structural shadow of a heavy transport truck, tucking her body away from the immediate line of fire while keeping her eyes glued to the powerful men who represented her only ticket out of the mountains.
At the center of the squad’s defensive ring, Han Ye and Gu An were firmly positioned. Despite their lingering physiological depletion from the mountain bridge, their survival instincts were still sharp.
The soldiers intentionally formed a human wall around the two children. The evolutionary powered users—Lieutenant Chen, Xiao Li, and Han Zheng—held the absolute front line, their bodies acting as the primary shields against the oncoming threat. The non-powered veterans—Old Wang, Zhou Ming, Sun Hao, and Da Yong—stepped slightly back, their rifles raised over the shoulders of the frontline users, providing overlapping fields of heavy fire.
Suddenly, four massive silhouettes burst out from the black corridor, moving with terrifying speed.
They were mutated jungle cats—creatures that had fled the shifting eco-zones of the mountain forests during the initial two weeks of the cataclysm. They hadn’t reached the gargantuan, mutated proportions of apex monsters yet, but the virus had stripped away their natural caution, replacing it with lean, corded muscle, elongated fangs, and a ravenous, unnatural speed. They split instantly upon entering the light, using the concrete pillars to mask their approach as they leaped toward the squad from multiple angles.
"Light them up!" Lieutenant Chen roared. His hands instantly ignited with concentrated thermal energy, sending a blazing arc of high-heat fire snapping toward the lead beast. The cat shrieked as the flames singed its mutated fur, but its unnatural agility allowed it to twist mid-air, dodging the lethal core of the blast and crashing heavily against the concrete wall.
The battle instantly devolved into a chaotic, high-speed melee. These beasts were incredibly tricky to deal with, shifting their weight seamlessly and exploiting the dim, flickering emergency lights of the facility.
Xiao Li stepped forward, a rock-hard molecular layer of minerals instantly coating his skin and tactical shield into stone armor as a second cat slammed into his front line, its elongated claws scraping violently against the reinforced rock face with a deafening screech. From the rear, Old Wang and Da Yong fired disciplined, high-caliber bursts, the heavy crack of their rifles echoing off the ceiling as they systematically pinned the remaining beasts down, clipping their limbs to restrict their terrifying mobility.
Through sheer coordination and overwhelming force, the elite squad rapidly turned the tide. Within two minutes of brutal, high-intensity combat, three of the mutated cats lay motionless on the grit-strewn floor, their bodies riddled with thermal burns and heavy-caliber kinetic rounds.
The fourth and largest cat, however, was a feral survivor. Recognizing the impenetrable wall of the primary military circle, its predatory intelligence pivoted. It bypassed Han Zheng’s kill zone entirely, using a blind spot behind a fuel transport to launch a lightning-fast flanking maneuver. Its yellow, mutated eyes locked onto the solitary figure standing by the passenger side of the civilian SUV—Lin Qing.
Lin Qing didn’t retreat. Her expression remained entirely deadpan, her posture as rigid and unyielding as a statue. She raised her bunker rifle, her brain tracking the cat’s trajectory in real-time.
But from her hiding spot beneath the transport truck, Li Mei saw her opportunity. Her mind, warped by a sudden, intense jealousy and a desperate need to undermine the woman who held the Commander’s attention, snapped. As the beast launched itself into the air toward Lin Qing, Li Mei suddenly opened her mouth and screamed at the top of her lungs:
"Han Ye! Watch out!"
The scream was a blatant, calculated trap. Han Ye was safely tucked away at the absolute center of the military circle, completely removed from the line of fire. Li Mei’s sole, malicious motive was to create a sudden panic—a psychological distraction designed to break Lin Qing’s focus, cause her to look away to check on the child, and let the mutated beast tear her apart.
The distraction failed instantly against Lin Qing’s iron psyche. She didn’t even twitch an eyelid toward the sound.
However, the piercing, high-pitched human shriek had an unintended, volatile effect on the attacking beast. Sound-sensitive and already maddened by the scent of blood, the mutated jungle cat went completely frantic mid-air. Its velocity spiked, its muscles contracting as it altered its trajectory with terrifying, unnatural speed, its jaws snapping open as it lunged straight for Lin Qing’s throat.
The sudden spike in the beast’s speed caught the frontline soldiers off guard. From the center of the ring, a cold terror gripped the two children.
"Noo" Gu An cried out. Despite her severe energy depletion, the young girl violently forced her awakening to its absolute limit. A translucent, shimmering kinetic barrier flickered into existence right in front of Lin Qing, the effort causing Gu An’s face to drain of all color as she tried to intercept the strike.
Simultaneously, Han Ye’s dark eyes turned pitch-black. Ignoring the massive strain on his frame, the little regressor summoned every remaining shred of his shadow manipulation power. Dark, corded tendrils of pure shadow erupted from the floorboards beneath the SUV, whipping upward like razor-sharp blades to impale the beast before it could touch his stepmother.
Both children had thrown their entire lives into the balance to save her, their breath catching as they prepared for the impact.
But Lin Qing didn’t need them.
As the frantic cat surged forward, the sheer force of its erratic, hyperspeed leap caused its rear claws to slip on a patch of slick grease on the concrete floor. That microscopic loss of traction altered its arc by an inch—just enough that when it lunged, its heavy flank clipped the rusted structural support wire hanging from a decaying column directly above.
The cat didn’t hit the barrier, and the shadow tendrils never reached its flesh. Instead, the sudden, violent tug on the structural wire triggered a collapse of the compromised concrete ceiling.
With a deafening, thunderous boom, an entire massive chunk of concrete came crashing down from the darkness above. The timing was terrifyingly flawless. The heavy slab fell precisely on top of the mid-air jungle cat, obliterating its momentum and crushing it completely into the floorboards beneath its weight. A cloud of thick, gray dust erupted outward, blanketing the area in a ghostly mist. freewebnøvel.com
When the dust slowly cleared, a heavy silence dropped over the transit depot once more.
Han Ye and Gu An stood completely speechless, their activated powers slowly dissolving back into the air. They stared at the massive, shattered block of concrete pinning the destroyed beast to the floor, and then at Lin Qing, who was calmly stepping backward, entirely untouched by a single shard of debris.
For Han Ye and Lin Qing, the sudden, bizarrely perfect timing of the ceiling collapse wasn’t a mystery. They had already witnessed her passive, completely absurd "incredible luck" before.
It wasn’t an evolutionary power anyone could sense, nor was it an active skill she wielded; things in her vicinity simply fell into place with terrifyingly fortunate timing whenever she was in danger. Though they were briefly surprised by how dramatically it had manifested this time, both the regressor and the transmigrated survivor had already accepted this bizarre reality as a baseline fact of her existence. Lin Qing casually reached up, brushing a layer of gray plaster dust off the sleeve of her coat without a single change in her deadpan expression.
The surrounding soldiers, however, were completely dumbfounded. Lieutenant Chen’s thermal energy sputtered out into a faint wisp of smoke, his eyes bulging as he stared at the structural debris that had magically dropped like a hammer from heaven to save the commander’s wife. Xiao Li’s stone armor faded away, his jaw slightly open as he looked at the shattered ceiling chunk, wondering what kind of divine fortune governed this woman’s steps.
Near the guard console, Han Zheng quietly let the glowing, invisible ripples of his force manipulation dissolve back into his palms. His dark eyes remained fixed on the concrete block, a turbulent storm of questions raging behind his stoic mask. He had been fully prepared to obliterate the beast with his own power, but the environment itself had literally rewritten itself to protect her.
The only person in the entire subterranean facility who wasn’t staring in awe was Li Mei.
Huddled beneath the transport truck, her face twisted into a mask of pure, bitter fury. Her perfect, malicious distraction had not only failed to scratch Lin Qing, but the universe itself had seemingly bent over backward to keep the woman alive, leaving her looking completely unshakeable in front of the entire elite squad. As she looked at Lin Qing’s cold, indifferent profile, a toxic, dangerous hatred began to fester deep within her chest.
