CH 35

Chapter 35 – The Convoy Outside the City

Ten minutes ago, the defense line at the south gate of Gleaning City

Bing Siyun was standing on the city wall when a soldier saluted him, “Lieutenant Bing, the ammunition support has arrived.”

Bing Siyun: “Okay, I know.”

The soldiers were ready for battle, all the defensive turrets were raised, and the aircraft whizzed past overhead.

Bing Siyun had not rested for a long time, his eyes were red underneath, and the stubble that he didn’t have time to shave grew. Since the Level I warning, the monitors reported that the infection rate of the abyss had risen as a whole. It was obviously not the breeding season, but the monsters were extremely restless.

At the beginning of the peak period, there would be no significant change in the battle.

But like a blunt knife cutting through flesh, everything went downhill irreversibly.

What could they do about it? How long could the city last?

Could they wait until the low period returned as before?

This almost weak idea was suppressed by him as soon as it emerged.

Bing Siyun turned around, intending to instruct the adjutant to add two patrol teams, but just as he was about to speak, he found that he couldn’t see anything.

There was… nothing in front of his eyes.

There was only a thick blackness, so black that it looked like a void.

‘…what is this?’ he thought blankly.

Am I… dead?

The buzzer brought him back to reality: the infection detector on his waist was ringing, and Bing Siyun had never heard such a high-frequency warning sound. If he could see the pollution value, he would find that it had reached its peak, and it became a string of garbled codes because it could not be displayed.

He shuddered unconsciously.

Bing Siyun had been in the battlefield for a long time, had been to the most dangerous outposts and had done five or six years of wilderness rescue, and had been in the military for more than 20 years. He thought he had seen too many monsters, but he had never been so frightened for a moment.

The darkness was silent, but he heard a strange noise.

How to describe it?

Like the echoes of the deep sea, the noise of alien stars, the silent sighs of skeletons crawling out of their graves under the fresh dirt; like plunging into a black hole, like staring into an abyss for a long time, chaotic, cold and crawling up his spine, making people fall into madness forever.

This was probably the sound when everything was annihilated.

However, at the end of annihilation…

He seemed to see the light of a lighthouse.

After a few seconds, the darkness receded.

Drenched in sweat, Bing Siyun turned around abruptly.

A burst of black mist disappeared at the end of the wasteland, so fast it was almost an illusion. His hands were still shaking, and he reported to the command center. Five minutes later, the communication terminal received a notification: [It has been confirmed as the infection wavelength of Abyss No.0, please reply immediately.]

*

Today, the sky in the wasteland was rosy red.

The mutated flower group had bright colors and was as tall as three or four people, spewing out spores and poisonous gas. However, when a black mist approached them, they quickly curled up, the petals were dehydrated, the roots shrank, and they retracted into the ground, almost like fleeing.

Not only them, where the black mist passed, several mutated wolves also backed away whimpering with their tails between their legs, giant birds flew in fright, and the crooked-neck tree with its mouth full closed its mouth tightly, pretending to be an ordinary tree.

The black mist moved forward and stopped in front of a messy grove.

Then, it condensed together, slowly outlining a human figure—

The young man had devil horns on his forehead, black scales at the end of his eyes, which matched the creepiness of the road. He was like a messenger from hell, hiding the most dangerous things in the world under his harmless and beautiful appearance.

At this moment, the messenger from hell encountered a small problem:

Shi Yuan stood in front of the woods with a dazed expression.

He felt that he was lost.

The battle was fierce, and the voices of monsters were everywhere. He thought he could successfully find the main battlefield and secretly kill monsters, but he never thought he would come to a deserted place.

He looked far away.

There was a small upside-down iceberg hanging on the far horizon. It was obviously a weight of thousands of tons, but it was as light as a cloud, and it floated out for dozens of kilometers as soon as the wind blew.

A special infectious creature “floating river”.

Large groups of albatrosses spread their wings, each with ice hanging on its body, densely and storm-like surrounding the “floating river”. Although not as powerful as the “horn”, when the “floating river” made a strange clear sound, snowflakes fell one after another, melting the metal and rotting the flesh. It was the culprit of this Level II warning.

Afterward, the armed helicopters and aircraft took off like a swarm of bees, facing the blizzard, and headed straight into the sky.

—Shi Yuan knew intuitively that it was Lu Tinghan who was directing.

Lu Tinghan must be surrounded by military officers and leaders. Unexpectedly, his little devil had sneaked out of the city and walked with the monsters.

Humans belong to humans, monsters belong to monsters, the two sides have returned to the beginning, and each has its own place.

Shi Yuan withdrew his gaze, and looked at the forest in front of him again.

There were a lot of monsters in this forest, but Shi Yuan didn’t want to kill them. Out of selfishness, he only wanted to find those who were attacking humans.

He was hesitating about where to go when he suddenly saw a few deep car marks on the wet soil in the forest, bypassing the rocks and rolling to the depths.

Under the influence of Lu Tinghan for several months, although Shi Yuan did not have much military knowledge, he also judged with his poor common sense that the car marks were very fresh, and the human convoy should have just passed by.

It’s a pity that knowledge couldn’t be transmitted by touching the head.

Even if he and Lu Tinghan slept head-to-head together, knowledge has no osmotic pressure, and it will not flow from places with high concentration to places with low concentration. Otherwise, Shi Yuan would realize that this was the Alliance’s third vanguard team, responsible for the work outside the city.

The movement of the convoy was loud, driving slowly in this terrain, it was likely to be attacked by restless monsters.

—In fact, Shi Yuan had already heard the whispers of the monsters.

In the sky, the first wave of the “floating river” offense was losing at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The world in the distance was temporarily quiet.

Shi Yuan hesitated for a few seconds and followed the car tracks.

His judgment was right, the convoy was just two hundred meters away and was in trouble.

The convoy was headed to support the south post, heavily armed and carrying a large amount of military supplies. Theoretically, they should have been traveling in the open wilderness, but this part of the forest was so long and narrow that the convoy would have taken a lot of wrong turns if they had to go around. After weighing the pros and cons, the command center ordered them to quickly pass through the woods – if it went well, they could pass in eight minutes.

However, it was during those eight minutes that something happened.

One of the military vehicles had a flat tire.

Military tires were different from ordinary tires. They used composite materials, add skeletons and internal supports, and were extremely strong and durable. The glue in the inner layer also provided self-sealing capabilities. If hit by several bullets, it could still drive normally, enough to handle more than 95% of monster attacks.

There was an exception to everything, a spike protruding from the ground pierced it.

It pierced through the body from bottom to top, and with it, the soldier on the passenger side.

There was no time for panic or mourning, the people in the same car quickly moved to other vehicles. And the spike retracted silently, as if waiting for the next attack.

When Shi Yuan found them, a military vehicle was parked next to the wrecked vehicle, facing its door, so that the soldiers in that vehicle could get on the other vehicles.

“Bang, bang, bang—!”

There was a burst of shooting, and Shi Yuan’s tail curled up in fright.

It was a machine gun on a military vehicle. The woods seemed empty, but the bullets hit the surroundings…all kinds of weird things. Several bushes were shot, and green sap sprayed out, as if humans that had been hit in a major artery. They twisted their bodies in pain, branches reached forward only to be ignited by the flamethrower; rocks were also hit, they shattered into several pieces and then slowly rolled again, gathered together, and reconstructed a larger stone.

The shooting never stopped for a second, and absolute firepower suppression was the only way to ensure that monsters could not approach.

Shi Yuan hid far away, crouching down to ensure that stray bullets would not hit him. In front of him were tree roots covered with moss and two mutated mushrooms.

The mushrooms had eyes and fish scales, and their eyes stared widely at him.

Amidst the gunshots, Shi Yuan whispered, “How are you guys?”

Mushroom: “……”

Shi Yuan said, “Don’t be afraid, they can’t hit you here.”

Mushroom: “……”

Like other monsters, they refused to communicate with Shi Yuan, but they couldn’t run away since they didn’t have legs. They could only close their eyes and pretended not to see Shi Yuan.

Shi Yuan still whispered: “You guys are really rude.”

He named them “stinky fish“ and ”rotten shrimp”, and thought they were far less cute than Broken Copper and Broken Iron.

A minute later, the last soldier climbed to the door of the car, holding a pistol tightly in his right hand, ready to step across to the opposite vehicle. At the moment he stretched out his foot, something moved in his peripheral vision.

Before he could even think, he instinctively raised his gun to the ground and pulled the trigger!

The power of the heavy gun was huge, and the bullet splashed the dirt and hit the monster!

The monster hidden in the soil was in pain, twisting its body wildly, and the earth turned upside down. Taking advantage of this gap, the soldier closed the car door, and countless bullets poured down here. In the chaos, the monster appeared in its true body. It was a silver fish with no eyes. The whole body was shiny like a diamond carved out of it, but the dorsal fin was a deadly thorn. Just now, it was its dorsal fin that suddenly stretched and pierced the vehicle.

The silverfish twisted left and right and scurried back into the soil. There was an idiom ‘like a fish in water’, but it was incredibly flexible in the soil, as if melting into it. However, the artillery fire of the convoy was extremely powerful, and once it had bitten the prey to death, it would not stop. The bullets were like a rainstorm, shaving the ground five meters below. Underneath, he saw the silverfish lying motionless, the scales of the fish were beaten to pieces, and transparent blood flowed out.

It was dead.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

The convoy did not dare to stop, they drove to the end of the woods, and disappeared after a while.

Shi Yuan cautiously walked out of the dark.

The pierced military vehicle was parked in place, fully loaded with supplies, and the engine was still hot. But in a few days, or a few hours, it will be covered with infected vines and moss, and then used as a nest by a few small infected creatures, and the body of the co-pilot will mutate or become a good meal for which monster.

Shi Yuan approached, wanting to take a look at the silverfish.

“Cough! Cough! Cough!” There was a violent cough in the car.

……that person was not dead!!

Shi Yuan ran over and struggled to open the half-broken car door. He saw blood spitting out from the corners of the soldier’s mouth. His hands and feet were convulsing, but he stretched out his hand forward, as if to grab something.

“Can you hear me?” Shi Yuan asked anxiously.

The soldier didn’t answer, he couldn’t help shaking his head, twisting his body slightly, struggling, as if he was extremely unwilling to stay in the car. Shi Yuan took one of his arms and brought him out with difficulty, letting him sit against the car.

There was a layer of fluff on the warrior’s right neck, like that of a spider or a moth. If you look carefully, in his half-opened eyes, the pupil is a compound eye structure composed of countless small eyes.

This was a mutant warrior who had been infected by insects.

The mutation brought him a vitality that surpassed that of human beings, otherwise, he would have died on the spot.

But his blood was gushing out.

Shi Yuan got into the car again, rummaged through boxes and cabinets in the car, threw away a few guns, removed a few pieces of solid military rations, and finally found the suppressors and medical kit under the seat.

Inside the box was a bunch of things he had never seen before, Shi Yuan didn’t know how to use them, so he could only carry them back to the soldier, picked out a bandage, and tried to wrap the wound.

—He didn’t know that it was absolutely impossible to recover from this injury. Even if this person was discovered by his comrades, he would be executed under the euthanasia law.

Shi Yuan buried his head in pressing on the wound, but the blood was still flowing and couldn’t stop.

He struggled for a while until something cold pressed against his head.

Shi Yuan looked up and saw the black muzzle of the gun.

The soldier’s eyes were sightless, he could no longer see anything, but he regained a little consciousness when the light came back, and he pointed the gun at Shi Yuan.

The gun was very powerful, one bullet was enough to pierce the entire head.

Shi Yuan didn’t know if he would die if he was shot in the head, but he didn’t care too much: “Ah, you are awake!” He was a little surprised, and then said, “Don’t worry, I’m not an enemy, can you tell me how to use the medical kit?”

The soldier raised his gun, and his strength increased a bit: Shi Yuan understood what he meant, he didn’t want him to make any more moves.

Shi Yuan said again: “I’m here to help you.”

It took quite a while for the warrior to speak slowly, his voice seemed to have been ground by sandpaper: “…you are not human.”

Shi Yuan was taken aback.

All human research had proved that monsters couldn’t have a higher mind, let alone become human beings. He came from outside the city, some people doubted his origin, some people doubted his past, but no one had ever suspected that he was a monster.

Maybe because this person was on the verge of death, his mind was confused.

The blood was still flowing, and Shi Yuan was splashed with scarlet all over his hands. He didn’t dare to hesitate, and decided to lie again: “How is it possible? Look, I’m still talking to you. You tell me how to use these, I can save you.”

“No, no, you are definitely not human.” The soldier tilted his head slightly, and his sightless eyes seemed to be staring at him, trying to make a hole in his face. What he said next made Shi Yuan fall into an ice cave. He said softly, “…Does General Lu know about this?”

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**TN

Like a fish in water – like a duck to water, easily adapting to a new environment