Free Web NovelChapter 7: The Shadows Outside the Vault
Lin Qing’s eyes instantly went cold. She snapped her head toward the main console table, where a grid of small monitors was hooked up to the cabin’s external perimeter cameras.
On the monitor, three men in heavy, mud-splattered raincoats stepped onto the wooden porch of the cabin.
"The tracks end right here," the leader growled, his voice coming through the external audio feed as he kicked the tire of the SUV parked flush against the cabin. "A premium ride like this? It’s gotta be some rich city folks hiding out. Check the shack!"
Lin Qing watched calmly as they kicked open the flimsy, warped wooden front door of the upper cabin.
Through the indoor camera, she saw them tearing the space apart, expecting to find an easy target—a lone woman and a child to rob. Instead, as they ripped up the dusty rug on the floor, they uncovered the hidden trapdoor.
"Hey, boss! Look at this!" one of them yelled, shining a flashlight down into the gap. "There’s a whole basement here... wait, no, it’s a freaking blast door! There’s a military bunker under this dump!"
The leader’s eyes lit up with pure, unadulterated greed. They had come up here looking to ambush a woman for her car, but they had just stumbled onto a literal goldmine. A bunker meant food, weapons, and a fortress.
"Open up!" the leader roared, slamming his crowbar against the cellar doors. "We know you’re down there! We saw the vehicle! Open the damn door and we’ll let you live!"
Inside the bunker, Han Ye’s eyes flooded with dark, murderous shadows. His tiny fingers twitched, his instincts screaming at him to tear these men apart for threatening them. But Lin Qing placed a calm, heavy hand on his shoulder, pinning him to the spot.
"Let them knock," Lin Qing said, her voice completely bored as she took another bite of her noodles. "That door is built to withstand a missile strike. They can hammer at it until their arms fall off. They’ll freeze in the storm and leave."
She wanted to lay low and save her ammo. It was the rational choice.
But greed makes stupid men even stupider.
Frustrated by the unyielding steel and desperate to get inside the jackpot vault, the gang leader lost his temper.
He pulled a heavy hunting shotgun from his coat, pressed the barrel right against the biometric lock mechanism, and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
The thunderous blast echoed through the metal doors, vibrating the concrete walls of the bunker. The lock sparked, but the deadbolts didn’t budge an inch. Enraged, the leader pumped the shotgun and blasted it again. BOOM!
Inside, Lin Qing’s expression instantly went from bored to dead cold. She set her noodle bowl down with a sharp, heavy click.
"Idiots," she muttered, her eyes narrowing into dangerous slits.
"The door can take it," Han Ye said, looking up at her, confused by her sudden shift in energy.
"The door can, but the mountain can’t," Lin Qing said,"Those shotgun blasts are echoing across the entire canyon like a dinner bell. That noise is going to drag every infected within a five-mile radius straight to our doorstep."
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At the entrance...
The heavy steel door didn’t budge an inch.
"Boss Qiang, it ain’t opening!" Ah Ming yelled over the deafening roar of the wind, his hands shaking as he aimed a flickering flashlight down into the dark gap of the floorboards.
"Keep hitting it!" Boss Qiang roared, as he racked another heavy shell into hunting shotgun, the sharp mechanical click swallowed instantly by a rolling crack of thunder that shook the mountain.
Pure, unadulterated greed had completely overtaken his senses. These men were local thugs who had spent years running illegal smuggling routes through these mountain passes, hiding from the law long before the world went to hell.
When the virus broke out in the city below, they had fled upward, planning to scavenge the isolated vacation homes. They had never expected to find a prize like this.
"We tracked those deep tire tracks through the mud for two miles. There’s probably enough supplies there to last for a long time! I am not leaving this mountain without the keys to that vault!"
He raised the shotgun again, aiming the barrel directly at the reinforced iron hinge, desperate to shatter the mechanism through sheer kinetic force.
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Inside the bunker, the environment was a stark contrast to the chaos raging above. But the tension inside the room was thick enough to suffocate.
Han Ye stood frozen by the edge of the medical cot. His five-year-old body was still weak from the supernatural awakening hangover, but his mind—the cold, calculating consciousness of a regressor—was firing at terrifying speed.
His tiny hands were clenched into tight, white-knuckled fists as he stared up at the security monitor.
The screen flickered, casting an amber glow over Lin Qing’s face as she prepared for termination.
In the timeline of his past life, Lin Qing was a gentle, soft-spoken civilian. She was a woman who wept when she saw dead animals on the road, a woman who had barely possessed the courage to speak up against his father’s distant, cold nature.
When the apocalypse had struck in his first life, she had been paralyzed by fear. She had been kind, yes—she had ultimately sacrificed her life to shield him from a roaming horde—but she had been ’weak’. She was a lamb waiting for the slaughter.
The woman standing before him right now was checking the slide of a handgun with the precision of a professional executioner.
There was no fear in her eyes. No panic. When the shotgun blasts had vibrated through the concrete walls, her only reaction had been a faint, irritated twitch of her eyebrow, as if someone had merely interrupted her lunch.
"Stay here and finish your soup, kid," Lin Qing said, her voice smooth and entirely devoid of fear. She slid a heavy machete into the sheath at her waist, the dark, blackened steel absorbing the ambient light. "Let me show you how to handle a noise complaint."
Before Han Ye could even formulate a question, she turned toward the back of the bunker. She didn’t look back at him.
She didn’t offer a motherly word of comfort or tell him to hide under the bed. She treated him like a soldier would treat a stationary outpost—expecting him to hold his position while she went out to eliminate the threat. freewebnøvel.com
Han Ye watched the screen as she approached the back wall. He knew this bunker layout from his past life; he had used it as a temporary base years later.
But he hadn’t known about the hidden emergency ventilation shaft that exited through a hollowed-out faux boulder thirty yards away in the dense pine tree line.
Lin Qing, however, moved directly toward it, unlatching the hidden panel with practiced ease and slipping into the dark shaft like an apparition.
’This makes no sense,’ Han Ye thought, his young face contorted in deep, turbulent calculation.
’Did she regress too? No... even if she regressed, Where did she learn to handle weapons? Where did this terrifying aura come from?’
His thoughts were cut short as the external audio feed on the console crackled, transmitting the sounds of the stormy porch directly into the bunker.
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Outside, the rain was blinding. Ah Ming wiped his face, turning away from the blast door. "Boss, maybe we should use the axe on the wooden frame instead? If we can rip the floorboards up, we might find a weaker spot in the concrete."
"Shut up and hold the light steady!" Boss Qiang snapped, his temper flaring.
A few feet away, guarding the flank near the corner of the porch, stood Da Wei. He was a massive, bearded man carrying a heavy splitting axe, his eyes scanning the dark woods nervously.
The wind was playing tricks on him, making the pine branches look like reaching arms. He shivered, pulling his wet raincoat tighter around his shoulders.
He didn’t see the shadow detach itself from the pitch-black mountain night.
Move for move, Lin Qing was perfectly synchronized with the storm. The roaring thunder masked the sound of her rapid approach; the torrential downpour washed away her scent and blurred her silhouette.
She closed the distance from the tree line in three explosive, low-profile strides, her combat boots finding flawless traction in the shifting mud.
Before Da Wei could even register a shift in the air pressure, a wet hand clamped violently over his mouth, driving his head back at a brutal, snapping angle.
Slice.
The edge of Lin Qing’s machete parted his throat with terrifying precision. Da Wei’s eyes widened in brief, silent horror.
The light in them extinguished instantly as his weapon slipped from his numb fingers, tumbling into the wet mud below.
Lin Qing didn’t hesitate; she caught his collapsing, heavy body before it could crash against the wooden deck, lowering him soundlessly into the overgrown weeds beneath the porch structure.
One down. Two to go.
On the porch, Boss Qiang slammed the iron butt of his shotgun against the steel door again, completely oblivious. "Hey, Ah Ming! Tell Da Wei to bring that axe over here! We’re going to try pryin’ the hinges!"
Ah Ming turned around, frowning heavily into the dark rain. "Da Wei? Stop messing around, man. Get over here."
Receiving no response, Ah Ming stepped off the porch, his heavy work boots squelching loudly in the mud as he walked toward the corner where his companion had been standing. His flashlight beam flickered wildly across the grass, eventually illuminating a pair of clean, dark combat boots.
Ah Ming blinked, tracking the light upward. The beam climbed past a pair of cargo pants, a wet black tank top, and settled directly onto Lin Qing’s cold, unblinking stare. She was standing perfectly still in the downpour, the machete in her right hand trailing dark, diluting blood into the pooling rainwater.
"Bo—"
The warning choked violently in his throat. Lin Qing lunged, using the momentum of his sudden shock against him. Before he could raise his weapon or scream, she drove her knee with crushing force into his groin.
As the man doubled over with a breathless, agonized gasp, she spun on her heel, utilizing the force of her turn to slash the spine of the machete directly across his temple.
The blunt impact cracked loudly against his skull. Ah Ming dropped like a felled log, his consciousness completely severed before his body even registered the impact with the dirt.
Down in the bunker, Han Ye stared at the monitor, his breath completely caught in his throat.
Through the static-heavy video feed, he had just watched his stepmother neutralize two armed, grown men in a span of less than fifteen seconds. Her movements weren’t just efficient; they were predatory. There was no hesitation, no moral conflict, and no fear.
’Who is she?’ the future villain thought, a sudden, unfamiliar prickle of dread creeping up his spine.
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