Chapter 105: Humans and Power
Translator: Letty Editor: DarkGem
“Fire!”
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Fifteen streams of lights sprang high up into the sky under Qing Shui’s command. Along with the deafening thuds, the bombs began to descend at the area that Chang had pinpointed on the map.
The bombs accelerated and descended one by one, their fire tails illuminating the fog before drowning in the horizon. Chang absently stared at the vanis.h.i.+ng fire tails from behind the special respirator that covered his face—they called it an anti-bacteria respirator now. He hunkered down, Jing wrapped in his arms.
The red fog disguised what was was happening that far away, so he could only imagine the aftermath on the banks of the Yellow River.
Without a doubt, the human soldiers would die in pain one by one. No one could stand against the hypermutable bacteria that was made under Qing Shui’s hands. He only wondered what was the last thing they would think of during their last breath.
Would they be overwhelmed with the fear of death? Would they miss their mothers? Or would they die in peace because they were finally free from the war against the nature?
Chang relaxed his sore legs, sitting down on the hill. At this moment, there was nothing left for him to do. He rested his head on his arm, but his eyes were locked on the figure that was directing the artillery. The bacteria bomb would cause over ten thousands deaths, yet Qing Shui retained a serene aura around him.
The apocalypse and evolution propelled the transformation of minds.
Before the apocalypse, that person who now stood at the peak, was merely a high school biology teacher. He might have been talented, but his occupation was limited to the field of education while surviving in the highly compet.i.tive society.
Now, Qing Shui as an EM, standing at the top of the social pyramid, had become an important personage that held the world in his hands.
In peacetime, power could rot pure minds. But Chang didn’t know about the days in the apocalypse, what kind of changes to a person’s spirit would absolute power and intelligence bring in a time like this. Nor did he know whether Qing Shui could control his growing desire for power with his great intelligence.
Perhaps one day, Jing, who he had been protecting and taking care of, would be taken away. Perhaps he would be living a precarious existence. Perhaps he would give up his moral principles because of fear and death threats to become the kind of person that he used to hate, behaving in a way that he used to be disgusted by.
“Humans sometimes have no choices but are compelled.”
It might sound less accurate in peacetime, but in the ears of humans who lived in the apocalypse, the sentence rang with cruel truthfulness to it…
The endless sh.e.l.lfire was being shot right in front of Chang’s eyes. The war zone experience affected him so profoundly that he had a feeling that he was brought to the center of the storm while watching sparks drifting and falling from the sky. Although it was only the first battle, the world was no longer recognisable.
The sh.e.l.lfire continued.
The roar of artillery gradually subsided as their bacteria bombs ran out.
When the thundering sound came to an end, Chang stood up from the ground—the first chapter was finished. It was time for him to face tribulation.
“Jing, let me know when there are moving objects in your perception,” Chang bade Jing again and put away his thoughts.
He moved to the elite squad. Receiving an altered machine gun from a squad member, he squinted his eyes as he relied more on his vision to seek out their targets.
“Close ranks, march!” Qing Shui ordered from hill’s peak. He was directing soldiers, but he also seemed to be attracting something.
The moment Qing Shui’s command was delivered, there was an intranquil sound which consisted of screaming and firing sent back from the vanguard legion. Jing immediately pointed her finger to the source. “Over there, about a hundred meters.”
“Mortars! Fire!” Qing Shui paid close attention to Jing’s guidance. His arm straightened, waving down to command those pre-arranged soldiers to initiate their attack.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Fire-tailed sh.e.l.ls rivaled each other in the air, all bombarding to the same spot. It resulted in a continuous din, and fire blooming on the land.
The first wave of attacks from the gene-altered soldiers commenced where Chang couldn’t see.
However, Qing Shui’s attack soon diminished as the fire didn’t catch a lot of flammable material. When the fire ceased, Chang didn’t see any of those fearless figures bolting toward Qing Shui’s fort—it was as peaceful as if nothing had happened.
“Jing, are those gene-altered soldiers dead?” Chang was agonized by this unusual situation.
“Nope, I can only sense a few that were injured. Most of them remained unhurt, but they disappeared from my perception range,” Jing said in a light voice.
“How many are coming toward us?” Qing Shui inquired.
“From what I can sense, there are about twenty to thirty. Their index is below 21, so I suspect that they are all infected,” Jing answered. “But I noticed that a few out of their indexes are fluctuating tremendously, and they are all above 45 now, meaning that they grew much stronger than before.”
Qing Shui wasn’t surprised at all. He simply nodded.”Before Zhuo departed, he brought seven red fog concentrate syringes for his special force. He planned to use them against the Yessie,but it seems like he didn’t use them all.”
“The red fog concentrate?” Chang asked. “Didn’t it have a severe side-effect that caused sudden death?”
“Indeed it’ll cause sudden death, but it can briefly boost the somatic functions.” Qing Shui had his brows tied. “He doesn’t care about his special force that much anyways.”
While Qing Shui was still talking, Jing hurriedly shouted out, “They’re coming again! From all directions. They scattered!”
“I see.” Qing Shui’s elite squad held up their guns in unison with his gesture. “You’ll shoot as well.”
Chang nodded. He picked up that large caliber repeater and looked into the flowing red fog.
At the same time, a wave of bombardment tore through the air.
“Those were the mines that my company laid before. But they weren’t designed to kill anyone. Now, everyone, ready!”
Accompanied by the deafening explosions and Qing Shui’s loud orders, the gene-altered soldiers entered Chang’s vision one by one.
These gene-altered soldiers were slow compared to the ones he had dealt with before. They all looked unwell since the bacteria had infected their muscles and nerves. Some of them were even injured with shrapnel lodged in their muscles. Others had lost some of their scales, exposing their tight and pale muscles.
Seeing these remnants, Chang pulled the trigger without hesitation.
A rattle of gunfire tore apart the previously motionless atmosphere.
Chang’s vision was the best of them all, hence he was the first one to fire. Those injured and weakened gene-altered soldiers were slower than Chang moving his gun. Aided with his fine calculation ability, the first bullet array caused an explosion on the gene-altered soldier that he saw first. The highly explosive bullet almost broke the gene-altered soldier into two pieces, and the creature was thrown away by the momentum.
Upon his success in exterminating the first gene-altered soldier, he turned his body to locate his next target. For every gene-altered soldier he saw coming, he fired his repeater without any hesitation.
Soon, he killed off three gene-altered soldiers. Meanwhile, the remaining gene-altered soldiers kept climbing up to the slope while facing an unceasing explosive bullets.
Qing Shui’s elite squad responded quickly to the creatures that appeared from the red fog, and they were also equipped with bizarre looking goggles. According to Qing Shui, they were made out of a frequency-separating lens.
After a special treatment, the goggles allowed their wearers to see additional two meters. However, the compromisation of the improvement was that it dimmed the overall vision.
That was to say, the goggles weren’t helpful to Chang but it did a lot to human soldiers—after all, being able see two meters farther meant that they had almost doubled their current vision.
Therefore, given the fact that the elite squad had undergone special training and was equipped with the goggles, it was just as functional as Chang.
For a while, the gene-altered soldiers struggled to break through under the suppressive fire. It was so until Chang noticed that a few of them had plastic explosives secured to their backs, and the absolute balance was broken.
“Stop firing! They’re bringing explosives!”
A gene-altered was shot while struggling to dodge the bullets, and the plastic explosive detonated before Chang had even finished giving his warning to the squad. The creature shattered, his limbs blown away into pieces which then rained in front of the squad.
Boom!
A heated blast caused by the explosion swept across the field. Chang’s pupils contracted as he saw clouds of dust soaring skyward, then flooding toward them.
It all happened in a flash, so Chang was just able to cover Jing with his body. The heated wave gusted over his back, the sand borne by the wave sc.r.a.ping his skin. Uncontrollably, Chang and Jing were swept away for over two meters by the currents that blew them off the slope.
“What the h.e.l.l! Was it C4?”
Chang plunged to the ground, back first. He picked himself up, then spitted out the mud and sand that choked him. His whole back was taken hostage by a burning pain which spread to the back of his head.
“Ah!”
Although Jing landed less harshly in Chang’s arms, the shock caused blood to spurt out from her nose and mouth.
Chang didn’t have time to check his own condition, nor Jing’s. He immediately climbed up from the ground and placed Jing behind a tree that was just blown down by the blast. Then he ran off to pick up the repeater that he had dropped and went back to the position where he was designated to fight back from.
Zhuo must have used those C4 to fight against the Yessie, and then, distributed the remaining ones to the gene-altered soldiers to take vengeance on Qing Shui for his betrayal.
Chang could never think as fast as Zhuo under this chaos. Considering the suppressive fire that Zhuo was resisting, Chang had to admit that he was one of the most intrepid people that he’d seen his life, since he was able to act so swiftly against an unfavorable situation.