Free Web NovelChapter 93: The Shadow of the enemy
By five o’clock in the afternoon, the sky over the mountain had completely surrendered to a heavy, suffocating darkness. In the bitter depths of the apocalypse’s brutal winter cycle, the sun was a rare luxury, barely scraping across the frosted horizon for a few fleeting hours before plunging the world back into a freezing, stygian gloom.
The temperature outside the sanctuary had plummeted well below zero, causing the ambient moisture in the air to crystallize into a fine, swirling ice mist. This freezing fog clung to the jagged rock faces like a dense, white shroud, drastically reducing visibility to less than five meters.
Inside the main security room, the ambient light of dozens of monitoring terminals cast a cool, clinical blue glow across Lin Qing’s calm, unyielding features. She sat forward in a chair, her fingers resting lightly on the edge of the master control board.
The facility was entirely silent, wrapped in a tense, vibrating anticipation. Every trap had carefully calibrated by them over the long afternoon. Now, they were simply waiting for the clock to run down, allowing the darkness to draw the enemy into their grasp.
Outside, resting his heavily gloved hand against the frozen concrete of the primary security wall, Han Zheng stood completely motionless in the shadows. He wore his heavy winter gear, his dark eyes fixed on the empty, swirling white void beyond the perimeter.
Suddenly, his eyes narrowed, and the muscles in his jaw tightened.
Thanks to his newly advanced evolutionary core, he felt it almost immediately —a rhythmic, faint disruption in the natural vibration of the mountain. It was the micro-rebound of metallic climbing spikes biting into frozen shale, hundreds of yards down the steep eastern slope. The frequency was precise, stealthy, and completely unnatural.
"They’re here," Han Zheng’s deep, gravelly voice vibrated through the localized radio channel, completely steady despite the gravity of the announcement.
Almost instantly, a sharp crackle echoed in everyone’s tactical earpieces. It was Ah Hua, who was currently pulling surveillance duty in the secondary security room, his eyes glued to the shifting digital displays. "Commander, Sister-in-law, I’ve got thermal signatures on the secondary long-range lens. They just crossed the lower perimeter marker. It’s Gao Feng’s vanguard. They’re moving fast under the cover of the mist, using the storm as a shield."
Inside the residential suite, the atmosphere was thick with an unvoiced anxiety. Sun Hao checked the battery seals on his sidearm one final time before looking over at the children. The absolute severity of the situation had trickled down through the base; looking at all the soldiers on standby, moving with tight, alert expressions and checking their weapons in grim silence, even the little ones had realized that a terrifying storm was brewing right outside their doors.
Gu An and Su Xiao sat huddled close together on the rug, their small shoulders tense as they held onto their markers without actually using them. Their wide, nervous eyes kept darting toward the heavy, reinforced door of the suite.
In stark contrast to the two trembling children, Han Ye sat perfectly still on a nearby chair. His small face was set in a mask of intense concentration, his eyes closed as he focused inward. He remained completely calm, deliberately preserving his energy and stabilizing his breathing, keeping his mind sharp in case the defensive lines fractured and he needed to deploy his own unique powers to protect the sanctuary.
Seeing the young boy’s stoic composure gave Sun Hao a brief sense of reassurance. He adjusted his earpiece, keeping his volume low so as not to disrupt the fragile peace in the room. "Residential suite is secure. Doors are triple-locked. I’m on standby with the kids."
"Copy that, Sun Hao. Stay put and keep them safe," Lin Qing replied smoothly into her headset from the command deck. She flicked her gaze across the array of camera monitors, her fingers typing a brief diagnostic command. A cold smile touched her lips as she observed the enemy’s approach path. "He really does have our old structural schematics. Look at that trajectory."
Down on the frozen rock face, Gao Feng’s elite mercenary climbers were moving with terrifying, surgical precision. They weren’t ascending blindly like a disorganized militia; they had perfectly mapped out the sanctuary’s external security cameras prior to the blackout, deliberately scaling the jagged cliffs along three specific vertical blind spots where the camera lenses couldn’t tilt far enough down to register upward movement. To any ordinary, untrained guard, the monitors would look completely empty, displaying nothing but swirling snow and empty stone.
At the crest of the snowy ridge, just beneath the shadow of the massive, looming security walls, the vanguard halted. The captain leading the assault squad was a seasoned professional who had survived dozens of high-risk operations.
Instead of greedily ordering all of his men over the wall at once to claim a quick victory, he held up a heavy, gloved hand, signaling a strict halt to the entire line. He pointed to two of his most agile, stealth-trained scouts, gesturing toward the parapet above.
He was being exceptionally clever. He was testing the water, verifying Dr. Chen Wei’s information before committing his entire force to the potentially lethal boundary of the fence.
Up on the ramparts, hidden deep inside the recessed defensive alcoves of the wall, Lieutenant Chen, Xiao Li, and Old Wang were completely static, their breath pluming into the freezing air like small, white clouds. Old Wang’s calloused hand was hovering directly over the secondary manual breaker box—the manual kill switch that would route a massive, lethal surge of high-voltage electricity directly from the newly integrated solar grid into the perimeter wires.
"Sister-in-law, the first two scouts are approaching the lip of the wall," Old Wang whispered into his radio, his voice a low, raspy thread. His finger twitched with a veteran sniper’s anticipation, the desire to neutralize the threat overriding the freezing cold in his bones. "They’re stepping onto the unpowered wire right now. Should I flip the breaker? I can fry them to a crisp in three seconds flat."
"No. Hold your fire," Lin Qing’s voice cut through the earpiece, cool, authoritative, and completely unhurried.
"But—" Old Wang began, his eyes tracking the dark silhouettes clearing the top edge.
"Do not flip the switch yet, Old Wang," Lin Qing reiterated, her eyes tracking the faint thermal outlines creeping over the parapet on her specialized console screen. "And to everyone stationed outside, suppress your auras completely. Do not let your auras flare. Blend into the darkness and the cold. Do not let them catch a single trace of your presence or realize that we are awake."
Lin Qing knew exactly what Gao Feng’s captain was doing down there. If they fried the first two scouts immediately, the captain at the base of the wall would realize it was a trap, immediately pull his men back into the blizzard, and regroup with a heavier, more destructive artillery siege strategy.
To completely destroy the vanguard and break Gao Feng’s momentum, they had to let the enemy believe their carefully constructed lie was working flawlessly. They needed the entire snake to crawl into the basket before they closed the lid.
The two mercenary scouts hauled themselves over the top of the concrete barrier, their heavy combat boots landing silently on the snowy walkway. They moved in perfect tandem, their suppressed rifles raised to their shoulders as they cleared the immediate platform, scanning the shadows for sentries.
They checked the dead power conduits on the fence, ran a handheld diagnostic scanner over the locking mechanism, and found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. The base seemed entirely dark, unsuspecting, and vulnerable to their infiltration.
One of the scouts reached for his short-wave radio, tapping his throat mic twice to open the encrypted channel to the captain down below. "Captain, this is Scout One. The unpowered wire is verified dead. The info from the insider is correct. The immediate rampart area is completely clear. No sentries, no active defensive measures. The area is secure for main ascent. I repeat, the area is secure."
Down below, the mercenary captain smirked through his heavy mask, a cruel satisfaction washing over him. "Excellent. Main climbing teams, begin your ascent immediately. Cover all three lanes and move fast before the wind picks up."
The moment the scouts cut their transmission, believing they had successfully opened the gates to the castle, a towering shadow materialized directly behind them from the swirling white mist.
Before the first scout could even turn his head or register the sudden shift in atmospheric pressure, Han Zheng closed the distance with terrifying, augmented velocity, his reflexes making him look like a phantom in the winter storm. He clamped a heavy, gloved hand over the scout’s mouth, his immense physical strength effortlessly crushing the man’s capability to scream or sound an alarm, while his other hand pinned the scout’s rifle down against his vest.
Simultaneously, Xiao Li stepped out of the darkness like an unyielding stone monument. His hardened, molecular-dense arm, coated in a rock-hard layer of minerals, wrapped around the second scout’s neck in a brutal, vice-like chokehold, cutting off his oxygen instantly.
Lieutenant Chen and Old Wang closed in within half a second, stripping the weapons from the mercenaries’ hands with practiced ease and slamming heavy, military-grade zip-ties around their wrists. The entire capture was executed in total, eerie silence—lasting less than five seconds from start to finish. The two bewildered scouts were dragged into the darkened security alcove, gagged, bound, and entirely neutralized without a single shot being fired or a single drop of blood hitting the snow.
Inside the security room, Lin Qing watched the main thermal feed with unblinking intensity. On the screen, dozens of new heat signatures suddenly appeared along the lower vertical rock faces, glowing like angry red embers against the cold blue geometry of the mountain. With the two scouts confirming the perimeter was "safe," Gao Feng’s main vanguard had completely committed their strength. Their climbers were now scaling the blind spots in a dense, tightly packed formation, moving upward like a line of ants drawn to bait.
She leaned forward, her hand hovering directly over the primary command console, her eyes cold as she watched the trap fill to the absolute brim. The soldiers outside held their breath, their eyes fixed on the empty wire, waiting for the word.
"They’re all on the wire," Lin Qing murmured into the radio, her voice laced with patience. "Keep waiting... let them get a little higher."
