The aurora cast down a pale green glow that shone upon the man's dark complexion, creating a strange deep green hue that made it seem reptilian.
At last, he spoke. "We aren't Judges, so we can't confirm that he's one hundred percent human."
"Although you say that," Hosen said in an exaggerated drawl, his arms crossed, "Flatland 2's pollution level is only two stars."
The dark-skinned man went silent for some time again. Then he said, "The average time taken for mutation to occur in Flatland 2 is four hours. I'll agree after four hours have passed."
"Fine," Hosen said. "If he still hasn't mutated by the time we finish gathering up the loot, we'll take him."
The dark-skinned man finally nodded. Then the three of them looked at each other, seeming to have reached an agreement.
"I'm Vance," the tall man in the middle said by way of self-introduction as he turned towards An Zhe.
"Hello," An Zhe said.
Hosen, who made him feel slightly repulsed, said, "Hosen."
The last man, the one who had been called "scum", was silent for a while before spitting out, "Anthony."
An Zhe greeted him as well, then added, "Thank you."
"No need for thanks," Vance said with a smile. "We're all fellow humans. Plus we just lost a teammate, so we're short-handed."
With those words, he walked onto the nearby monster head and directed the others. "We're leaving as soon as we finish harvesting the carcass. Move quickly."
As he spoke, Vance took out a pair of gloves and a long dagger from his backpack and tossed them to An Zhe. "You go remove the legs."
An Zhe caught the items, obediently responded, and walked ten or so paces forward before stopping next to the monster's halved body, where he put the gloves on and began to examine it.
The arthropod’s body was enormous, and its carapace was mostly smooth save for some places where long spines or protruding bulges stuck out. He looked down at the monster's legs. There were six altogether—slender and long, divided into three segments, and densely covered with shiny black fuzz.
On the other side, Vance and Anthony were taking care of the monster's head. They removed the carapace, allowing the brain and other fluids to flow out, then scraped the interior clean. Hosen was standing guard at the periphery.
So An Zhe also pulled out his dagger and attentively dug at the monster's joints. After approximately five minutes, he broke one of the joints, separating one leg from the monster's thorax. It fell to the ground, and viscous white brain-like fluid slowly leaked out from the opening and seeped into the yellow sand.
He heard Hosen say in a mocking voice, "Darling, don't vomit from disgust."
An Zhe didn't react, choosing instead to quietly continue digging at the next joint.
Not only did he feel nothing regarding this monster, he even felt that it was much cleaner than those animals that lived in the "Abyss".
But Hosen seemed to have no plans of letting him off the hook. Footsteps sounded behind him as Hosen walked over and pressed down on An Zhe's shoulder with his right hand, fingers sliding over it. "How old are you, sweetheart?"
An Zhe heard a sort of greed in his tone—the greed of animals in the face of food. But based on his limited understanding, humans wouldn't eat their own kind.
He calmly replied, "Nineteen."
An Ze was nineteen this year. He had consumed An Ze's genes, so he was probably nineteen or so as well.
"But you look to be only seventeen," Hosen said in a sharp voice with a raspy undertone, his snickers muffled in his chest.
An Zhe frowned, unsure how to answer.
"Hosen." Right at that moment, Vance's voice came from nearby. "Focus on standing guard."
Hosen made a contemptuous noise, then squeezed his shoulder a bit more before leaving.
An Zhe once again realized that among humans, each individual may have different characteristics. For example, An Ze was different from the humans who dug out his spore, and Vance was different from Hosen. He felt very grateful to Vance for stepping in when he did.
He lowered his head and continued to dig at the joints, dividing each leg into three segments. After he finished, he neatly stacked them up. The thing's carapace had a metallic sheen and was hard as stone, so they made crisp clacking sounds when they were stacked together.
By the time he removed all six legs, Vance and Anthony had also finished taking apart the head and came over to his half of the body. Vance took a look at the neatly stacked legs on the ground and smiled. "You're pretty diligent."
Then he said to Hosen, "Drive the car over here."
Without saying anything, Hosen turned and walked away.
An Zhe stood to one side and watched Vance and Anthony get started on the monster's thorax.
He asked, "Do you need my help?"
Vance, holding a black pincer-like tool the length of a human's lower leg in his gloved hands, asked, "You haven't come out here much, have you?"
"... Mm-hm," An Zhe replied.
"Then you can just wait over on the side." Vance pried away the piece of armor at the junction between the monster's thorax and abdomen with the pliers. The edges of the armor were irregular, forming a sharp black spine where it met the other pieces of armor, flashing with a chilly gray luster. Vance said, "This thing has a lot of spines. It’s easy to get pricked if you don’t have any experience handling them. Flatland 2's pollution level isn't high, but it is still possible to get infected that way.”
An Zhe obediently took a few steps back and watched them circle around the carcass and dismantle it at various points. They lifted away one piece of black carapace after another, and white viscera and organs spilled all over the ground.
As he watched, a dull roar started up. An Zhe looked to his right and saw a rectangular black armored car driving in their direction, looking like a huge crustacean-class monster—An Zhe was very familiar with the sight of it, for the team An Ze used to be a part of had five such armored cars.
The car drew near, and Hosen jumped down from it. Without even lifting his head, Vance said, "First help him carry the goods onto the car."
An Zhe made a sound of acknowledgment and picked up the armor pieces from the ground, then carefully tied them with rope and handed them to Hosen, who put them in the armored car's storage space.
The enormous monster shrank as they took it apart, and the number of armor pieces An Zhe picked up increased.
Just as he was tying up a stack of armor pieces with rope, he abruptly stopped moving.
On the spiny black armor piece beneath his hand, a few tiny droplets of liquid were congealing at the tip of a spine, dark and very difficult to discover if one did not look carefully.
He looked at the splashes of viscera on the ground and confirmed that all of the monster's internal fluids were white, yellow, or clear.
Then what were these dark droplets? He recalled the blood that flowed out of An Ze's body before he died.
An Zhe looked at Vance and Anthony. The two of them were thoroughly engrossed in dismantling the carcass, their expressions calm and everything seeming normal. As a result, An Zhe could only act as if nothing had happened. He bowed his head once more and tied up the armor pieces.
A long time later, they finally finished dismantling the carcass, and the three men seemed to also be convinced that An Zhe wouldn't suddenly turn into some deadly monster.
Vance said, "Get in the car, we're going back to the base. An Zhe, you come too."
A single armored car could hold seven or eight people, and there was also a space where people could rest. It was divided into three simple compartments, but each one was very cramped and had a low ceiling, so humans had to hunch over in order to walk around inside.
An Zhe was assigned the outermost space, the car door to his right, and he lay down with his head pillowed on his backpack. Anthony went up to the front to drive, Vance was next door to him, and Hosen occupied the innermost space.
The car door shut, and it went dark. There was only a faint light shining in from a small window on the side. After a jolt, the armored car slowly started up and drove forward, the ride mostly smooth but for the occasional small bump.
An Zhe looked into the darkness before him with eyes wide open, feeling like he was floating in a black tide. The tide was carrying him along as it flowed towards the Northern Base, a place he knew nothing of.
Enveloped by a slight sense of helplessness and confusion, he waited quietly in the darkness.
When the light coming through the small window gradually became stronger, the surroundings slightly brightened as well. The car stopped, and An Zhe heard Hosen get up, take a few steps inwards, open the door leading to the cabin, and walk in to take over from Anthony. Anthony returned to where Hosen used to be and lay down. His breathing was very heavy, and his movements were very large—even the floor of the rest area shook. Soon afterwards, Vance asked what the matter was, and Anthony replied that he was a bit tired.
Another long span of time passed, and it was Vance's turn to take over from Hosen.
An Zhe instinctively curled up. He knew that with this, Hosen would be sleeping next door, and he felt ill at ease.
But no sounds of a human lying down came from next door.
An Zhe opened his eyes wide, waiting.
In the following moment, with the soft rustling of footsteps, a person directly threw himself upon An Zhe.
"Darling..." Hosen lowered his voice, sounding very hoarse. He forced his own legs between An Zhe's and wrapped an arm around An Zhe's shoulders. An Zhe struggled a little, almost on reflex, but he was pressed to the floor by a strength greater than his own. "That stupid Vance isn't here... I know what you do, I've been with more mercenary teams than he's laid eyes on."
The struggles just now took up no small amount of An Zhe's strength, and he panted for breath. "Please don't do this."
"Don't do what?" Hosen smiled. In the dark environment, his smile looked very malevolent.
An Zhe didn't reply. Hosen lifted the hand that he was pressing down on An Zhe's shoulder with and made to undo his belt. He could hold An Zhe down firmly with only one hand, which seemed to please him greatly. His smile grew, and his tone of voice was crude and mocking. "Darling, what can you do with such little strength? You don't know how to drive and can’t use heavy weapons. When you run into a monster, all you can do is wait to die. What did your teammates bring you out here for? Just to watch?"
As he spoke, he grabbed An Zhe's neck and leaned in close. His stubble-covered cheek pressed against the side of An Zhe's neck, and the acrid smell of smoke drifted from him. "I've seen plenty of little whores like you... But it is the first time I've seen one so beautiful. Which mercenary team were you a part of before?"
As An Zhe violently gasped for breath, Hosen pressed him down tightly and ran a hot, wet tongue over An Zhe's skin. An Zhe turned his head, coughing from the smell of smoke, and continued groping around in the darkness with his right hand until he finally touched the dagger Vance had tossed to him earlier.
Right at that moment, two compartments away, a huge noise came from where Anthony was. It sounded like something had been knocked over onto the floor.
"Don't be impatient, scum." Hosen laughed out loud. "It'll be your turn soon enough."
But his words seemed to have no effect, because footsteps approached.
With a soft curse, Hosen pulled An Zhe up and pressed him against the wall of the car, then yanked at his shirt collar.
An Zhe no longer resisted. Clutching the dagger in his hand, he looked at the dark aisle in silence while his white hyphae quietly spread out on the floor beside him, seemingly preparing for something.
But in the following second, all of his movements stopped.
A monster with a human torso and three pairs of slender legs protruding from its back slowly walked through the aisle, dragging furled soft wings behind itself, and the two blood-red compound eyes atop its head glowed faintly.
The thing's skin was black—the color of Anthony's skin. But the shape of his human face had already become distorted. The place where his eyes used to be was covered with densely-packed brown scales, the nose extended down at a slant to form a massive cleft, and the mouth area protruded outwards with a long and curled black tube extending from the middle.
Stolen novel; please report.
He stopped walking, and the edges of his wings scraped against the walls of the car, making ear-piercing noises.
"What are you doing, Anthony?" Hosen asked, his voice full of dissatisfaction. "I'm not fond of being watched."
After saying that, he lowered his head again and settled on top of An Zhe, who felt a set of teeth bite down at the junction between his neck and shoulder. The teeth worried at his skin, suffusing it with a slight pain. But he was in no position to care about it. Tensed up all over, he faced the monster Anthony had transformed into.
One second, two seconds, three seconds.
The wings behind Anthony vibrated slightly, and his proboscis curled and uncurled in the air.
"Scared?" Hosen, who was lying on top of him, seemed to have felt him stiffen up, and he muttered an inarticulate curse. "What are you acting for?" Then he grabbed An Zhe's waist with an unyielding grip and bit down hard on his skin.
Right at that moment—
With the buzz of vibrating wings, Anthony placed his six thin long limbs on the floor, leaned forward, and gathered energy as he sank down into a crouch. Then, just like a sleek spider, he rushed towards them!
The wind whistled in the cramped space. An Zhe's eyes went unfocused in a split second, and his body instantly transformed into his soft and agile mushroom form. His hyphae fluttered about in the compartment, filling almost the entire space and momentarily blocking Anthony's line of sight.
Immediately afterwards, An Zhe felt the human on top of him first stiffen for a moment and cough a few times, then began to flail all of his limbs. "Fuck, what's th—?"
He looked down and saw that Hosen had snapped countless soft hyphae with a single bite, which had then choked his windpipe and esophagus. When he coughed, he looked panic-stricken and pained.
At the same time, countless more hyphae were cut apart by Anthony's forelimbs. They were soft and easy to break, lacking the slightest durability, so they could win no more than a five- or six-second-long window to make an escape.
An Zhe estimated the distance between himself and Anthony, then swiftly used his hyphae to roll up his clothes and flowed out from the chaotic space beneath Hosen, regaining his freedom.
His snow-white hyphae surged towards the door like a snow-white tide. Once there, he changed back into human shape and pressed the switch near it.
With a dull sound, the car door sprang open. An Zhe instantly retracted all of his hyphae, then reached out with one hand to forcefully drag Hosen's collar before rolling out. The two of them fell out of the car together and made a solid landing on the sand.
At least it was safer here than in the cramped space of the car.
However, mere moments later, Anthony stuck his head out from the doorway as well, and a harsh buzzing started up. He first flapped his wings to fly four or five meters up into the air, then abruptly dove towards them—
Right when he flew up, An Zhe had swiftly gotten to his feet and run away.
But he saw Hosen simply lie on the sand, his gaze unfocused, and Anthony's sharp forelimbs pierced his chest in an instant.
In the Abyss, An Zhe had seen the ways by which many monsters hunted and escaped, so he knew how he should escape and thought Hosen knew as well. But it wasn't until the moment when blood spurted out that Hosen seemed to come alive suddenly. Yelling, he grabbed Anthony's front legs with both hands and madly kicked at Anthony's body, which had become a long black pupa, with both feet in an attempt to retreat.
The ground rumbled. An Zhe spun around and saw the armored car, which had already driven quite far away, make a sharp turn and head back towards them—Vance had finally noticed something was wrong.
He took a few breaths, then began running towards the armored car.
Vance's worried expression was visible through the car window. Before the armored car reached An Zhe, its door had already sprung open. When the armored car passed him, a pair of strong arms wrenched him up from the ground, and he scrambled into the driver's cabin in tandem with Vance's movements. Vance swiftly tossed him to the other side of the cabin, then slammed the door shut.
An Zhe said, "They..."
"There's no saving them!" Vance once again yanked the steering wheel hard, and the armored car turned back to its original direction. With the accelerator pressed to the floor, it sped northwards.
An Zhe leaned back against the front passenger seat, panting. After catching his breath a little, he looked in the rearview mirror. The mutated Anthony and the mortally-wounded Hosen were tangled up together and rolling on the ground. Anthony lifted his forelimbs, then brought them plummeting down to pierce through Hosen's torso and nail his body to the ground. Then it lifted its head and looked in their direction. Approximately five seconds later, it seemed to have given up on chasing the armored car. It lowered its head, and its long and slim proboscis pierced Hosen's head. After another fit of convulsions, Hosen's body went utterly slack.
The car drove very quickly. Before long, their figures had disappeared in the yellow sand and shrubs, never to be seen again.
Vance asked, "Anthony mutated?"
An Zhe turned his head to look at Vance and saw that the rims of his eyes were slightly red.
He bowed his head. "I'm sorry."
He was still alive, but Vance had lost two teammates.
"What are you sorry for?" Vance forced a smile. "When we come out here for work, people often die. I'm used to it. Maybe the next one to die will be me."
But An Zhe truly did feel guilty. Anthony had been infected. If An Zhe had told Vance about the drops of what he suspected to be human blood on the ant armor right after he discovered it, they may have been able to discover that Anthony had been infected in advance.
He lowered his head and told Vance about it.
Vance was silent for a while before he lowered his voice and said, "What Anthony changed into wasn't an ant. He may have been infected earlier. Before we ran into you, we encountered a swarm of mutated wild mosquitos."
"After that... was he also pricked by the armor?" An Zhe asked.
Vance looked out the car window and went silent for another long while before speaking again. "Flatland 2's pollution level is very low—two stars—so one might not be infected from getting pricked or slightly wounded. But if they speak up about it, they'll be abandoned by their team for sure, so many people won't do so until after they've been wounded."
His voice grew a bit softer. "... Because they want to go home."
"Then what about Hosen?" An Zhe asked.
If they had discovered that Anthony had been infected in advance, Hosen might not have died.
"Don't take it to heart. Hosen's death wasn't an unjust one." Vance lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. "He had done no small number of wicked things and had the blood of at least five people on his hands. This time, if it weren't for the fact that we were truly short of hands, Anthony and I wouldn't have worked with him. What was he doing at the time? Bullying you?"
An Zhe said nothing, and Vance turned his head to look at him.
In the twilight, the boy's contours seemed both quiet and peaceful, like a crystalline drop of water. For this sort of person to appear in the perilous wilds, perhaps he was dealing with unspeakable difficulties, but Vance didn't ask.
Likewise, An Zhe didn't know what to say to Vance. He was thinking of what happened prior to Hosen's death. At the very beginning, Hosen seemed to have briefly lost consciousness, only coming around once he had been stabbed.
What had Hosen done before that?
He had bitten a mouthful of hyphae.
An Zhe frowned. He actually didn’t know whether his mushroom self was poisonous or not.
Now he suspected that he was a poisonous mushroom.
As they continued forward, the vegetation became scarcer. In the boundless desert, there were no animals whatsoever, only their armored car traveling alone.
At night, when the aurora appeared in the sky again, Vance intended to stop the car and rest. He stubbed out his cigarette on the steering wheel, then opened the door connecting the driver's cabin and the rest area and jumped down. In the pitch-black rest area, his voice rang out. "Sleep first. We'll arrive at the base after driving for another day and a half."
An Zhe came to the door as well. To have a broader field of vision, the driver's cabin was very high up, whereas to save space for the storage compartment, the rest area was towards the bottom of the car and very low. The height difference between it and the driver's cabin was more than one meter, so he had to jump down.
He stood there, slightly hesitant. Merely three short seconds later, Vance seemed to have noticed his hesitation and said, "Sit there first."
An Zhe followed those instructions and sat down on the edge, his legs dangling. Then Vance reached out to hold his upper body and helped him down.
An Zhe landed steadily on the ground and said in a small voice, "Thank you."
"No problem." Vance smiled, and a slow affection came through in his voice. "My younger brother was afraid of heights, so he'd often be like this too. He was about your age."
An Zhe, doing his best to grasp the rules of human communication, asked tentatively, "Does he also come out into the wilds with you?"
"Mm-hm," Vance said. "We used to always be together."
"But not this time?"
"He's dead," Vance said. "It’s been two months since he was killed by a Judge at the entrance to the base."
Judge.
This was the third time An Zhe heard that word. The first time was from An Ze. He was trying to dissuade An Zhe from going to the human base, saying, "You can't escape the Judges’ eyes."
The second time was from Anthony. He hadn't wanted An Zhe to join their team, saying, "We aren't Judges, so we can't confirm that he's one hundred percent human."
And in the memories he obtained from An Ze, it seemed to be a word that appeared very frequently.
So he repeated, "... Judge?"
"You don't know?" Vance's voice pitched up in surprise. "Where exactly did you pop up from?"
An Zhe said in a small voice, "I haven't interacted with others before."
"I can see that." Vance twisted a knob on the car's wall, and a faint white light lit up at the top of the walls, barely illuminating the cramped space. He took out field rations from a cubbyhole in the wall, and An Zhe took out food and water from his own backpack as well before sitting across from Vance.
He heard Vance say, "The base has a system called the 'Arbiter's Code', after which came an organization under the jurisdiction of the military. It has a very high rank, and it's called the Trial Court. The members of the Trial Court are Judges. They usually take shifts at the base's gates, and every one of them is licensed to kill, so it won't count as breaking the law when they kill people."
After listening to this sentence, An Zhe dimly recalled that he had found something related in the memories he obtained from An Ze.
He said, "... They determine whether the people entering the base are human or Infected Ones?"
"Mm-hm," Vance replied. "In addition to the kind of Infected Ones that can be distinguished on sight, there are also some that can't. The mutation process hasn't yet started, or the mutation level is too high, so there are no differences from humans on the surface. The base calls those kinds of people xenogenics."
An Zhe opened his eyes wide.
If that was the case, then he was a xenogenic.
Vance undid his jacket and put it aside, then twisted open the water flask's cap and continued speaking. "The base is too densely populated. After xenogenics enter the base, they will go on a killing spree, and following that will be large-scale infection. The Trial Court's responsibility is to determine if every single person entering the city is human or xenogenic, and the determining process is called the 'Trial'."
"Then... what happens after they discover a xenogenic?" An Zhe asked.
"What else?" Vance raised his eyebrows. "They're shot on the spot."
Without saying anything, An Zhe bowed his head and took a bite of hardtack. He had just learned how to eat by human methods, but to him, human food was somewhat coarse. When he swallowed, his mouth and throat would get scratched. He ate very slowly, but his heart beat very quickly.
After a while, he asked, "Can they really identify all the xenogenics?"
Vance took a big gulp of water, leaned against the car wall, and closed his eyes. His voice carried a trace of despondency. "Who knows? The dead can't prove anything. Nobody knows whether the people killed were really xenogenics or not. That was the case with my younger brother."
An Zhe said nothing. Vance seemed to have answered a question he hadn’t asked, but he still listened quietly.
"That time... he came with me to Flatland 1, where the pollution level was lower than even Flatland 2’s. I kept an eye on him the entire time, and I could confirm that he hadn't been wounded." Vance smiled, but his voice was raspy. "When we returned to the entrance of the base, the one on duty that wasn't any ordinary Judge, but their boss. Everyone calls him 'the Arbiter'. Other Judges will give their justifications for killing someone, but he doesn't have to. He doesn't need justification to kill anyone, nor does he accept any pleas. Even if it's the base's top brass, if he killed them, then that's that. It was like that on that day. He so much as glanced at my brother before opening fire on him.
"I didn't believe it, but there was nothing I could do. This sort of thing happens often. He's killed many people, so there are many people in the base who despise him, myself included. For all I know, someday he’ll kill me too."
With those words, Vance looked at his own right hand in a daze for a while, then tossed the flask to one side. He lay down with his head pillowed upon his arm, but his eyes were still looking at the car ceiling. At last, he got back on track and answered the question An Zhe had asked at the very beginning. "They'd rather mistakenly kill someone than let them pass. If a xenogenic really made its way into the base, it would be discovered for sure. In the entirety of this year, there has been only one xenogenic attack."
An Zhe felt uneasy. To conceal this uneasiness, he closed his eyes and rubbed them with his left hand.
Vance said, "Go to sleep, kid."
An Zhe lay down next to him. No matter how tomorrow turned out, at least he was safe tonight. There were no monsters and there was no Hosen. There was only Vance, who treated him very well.
Before sleeping, he held the bullet shell in his hand and looked at the car door at the end of the aisle.
Supposing—supposing he secretly opened the car door right now, got out, and returned to the monster-infested wilds, he could still live. He would not face the Trial, and he would not be killed on the spot. He didn’t know how long he could live, but it would definitely be for longer than tomorrow.
But was the spore something more important than his own life?
It was.
To the creatures in the Abyss, death was the most trivial thing. And in this short day outside of the Abyss, he had witnessed Anthony's mutation and Hosen's death. Human lives were by no means precious either.
An Zhe closed his eyes. He knew he had to go to the Northern Base.
----------------------------------------
Early the next morning, they continued driving towards the base. Because only Vance was driving and he lacked energy, their rest times became irregular. They stopped to rest that afternoon and continued driving north at midnight on the third day. When the aurora began to dim and the sky was suffused with white, Vance said, "We're almost there."
An Zhe looked forward. In the morning's gray fog, a round city gradually appeared from the horizon.
City—he knew this word. Humans clustered in cities the same way mushrooms clustered in the rainy season.
The armored car continued moving forward, and bit by bit as the early morning fog gradually dissipated, more of the city's details appeared. The round city was enclosed by gray steel walls, their height like that of the tallest mushrooms. Even if twenty people stood atop one another, with each person's feet on someone else's shoulders, it still may not have been enough to climb over the wall. Steel tusks and spines protruded from the walls as well, their hues sharp and icy cold like rocks and soil in winter.
The city boundary was filled with surveillance equipment and laser devices, so anyone who sneaked in would be immediately discovered. The two city gates were the only ways of getting in and out of the city, and one was entry only while the other was exit only. The one they were at right now was the one that only allowed entry.
Then An Zhe saw many small teams similar to Vance's drive back from all directions. Some of them were traveling light, while others were wearing heavy gear and carrying weapons. There were four or five people per team, and they drove similar armored cars to designated areas before getting out of them and walking through the city gate. The cars and people were inspected separately.
Vance got out first, and An Zhe jumped down from the car while grabbing onto his arm. Feeling that Vance's arm was somewhat tense, he thought that perhaps this city gate evoked Vance's bad memories of his younger brother.
They walked towards the city gate, where a long line had formed. There was a slight disturbance at the head of the line, but they couldn't clearly see the situation. People were still entering in order.
An Zhe trailed after Vance, walking towards the line and looking around as he walked.
Soldiers clothed in black uniforms stood at both sides of the city gate, two guns at their waists. One was a thermal weapon, while the other was a laser gun. Behind them were colossal heavy weapons that directly faced the city gates. One could imagine that as soon as a monster tried to break in, it would be blown to pieces by these heavy weapons.
After looking around, his gaze was drawn to a black figure. At an open space beneath the distant city walls, that person, also clad in a black uniform, appeared to be a sloppy and undisciplined soldier who had abandoned his post. He wasn't standing guard in an orderly fashion like his colleagues, but rather leaning against the city wall and slowly wiping a black gun with his head lowered.
However, the silver-trimmed black uniform he wore seemed more beautiful and imposing than the others, perhaps because his physique was tall, slim, and well-proportioned.
Vance cast a glance in that direction and began walking much faster for some reason while pulling him straight forward. Just as they were about to join the end of the line—
An Zhe saw the man in the distance slowly raise his head.
A pair of ice-cold green eyes showed beneath the brim of the black uniform cap.
In an instant, An Zhe stopped dead in his tracks, feeling that the surroundings had turned as chilly as if they had frozen over.
Vance turned back and said, "What's the—"
His voice suddenly stopped.
A gunshot ran out.
Vance's tall body swayed on the spot, then toppled over with a thud. His eyes were wide open, his throat made gurgling noises, and blood gushed from his temple. After his body jerked a few times, there were no further movements.
But An Zhe could not even reach out to grab at the hem of his clothes, nor did he have any room whatsoever to think about what exactly had happened just then. He could only lift his head and meet the gaze of the uniformed soldier because, at that moment, the soldier was slowly turning the jet-black muzzle of the gun…
… towards him.