But it wasn’t over yet.
The decapitated man picked up a piece of concrete from the ground and slammed it into the right side of Ning Zhuo’s head.
Debris flew everywhere!
Then he quickly twisted his neck, shedding his broken head like a lizard losing its tail, and quickly retreated.
…It was a bioroid. The core control center wasn’t in the head.
Thinking this through, Ning Zhuo calmly brushed the concrete debris from his hair.
The factory was spacious and open, with few places to hide.
Ning Zhuo’s casual shot at the second-floor platform, which was in his blind spot, was just a precautionary move.
He hadn’t expected to actually fish out an ambusher.
Without a word, Ning Zhuo disappeared into the thick smoke.
For a moment, only the crackling of the fire remained in the factory.
The bioroid was fire-resistant.
Ning Zhuo’s grab had damaged its infrared sensor.
Headless, it had to activate its backup audio-visual system, hiding behind a thick concrete pillar, one hand gripping the sniper rifle’s strap, the other holding a half-bucket of gasoline that hadn’t spilled out completely and was casually thrown nearby.
If Ning Zhuo dared to approach, this half-bucket of gasoline in such high temperatures would be enough to turn him into a human torch instantly.
Apart from the gasoline bucket, the bioroid’s half-body sat quietly in the burning fire, without any movement.
But it hadn’t heard any footsteps.
Nor any breathing.
It was as if Ning Zhuo had never been in this factory.
The bioroid was cautious, leaning against the concrete pillar, patiently waiting, not moving rashly.
Unexpectedly, in the next second, a fireproof industrial tarp came flying from behind, tightly covering the bioroid’s upper body.
Expressionless, Ning Zhuo leaned against the other side of the concrete pillar, pulling the tarp tightly with a winding motion.
The bioroid hadn’t anticipated this situation at all. Deprived of its vision, it immediately started kicking and struggling.
The gasoline bucket fell during the struggle, clattering into the fire.
With a roar, the flames flared up, reaching the first-floor ceiling.
Ning Zhuo sneered.
Waiting for me here.
The bioroid reacted quickly, throwing out a fireproof dagger and slashing it randomly.
The tarp tore with a piercing sound.
Freed from its restraints, the bioroid’s sense of direction was momentarily disrupted.
Relying on sound to locate, it aimed a sudden shot in the direction where the wind was coming from.
He distinctly felt that he had hit something, as metal fragments flew and grazed his skin.
The sniper rifle’s close-range lethality was immense, fortunately, its accuracy was generally poor.
Enduring the ringing in his ears, Ning Zhuo glanced at his mechanical right arm, now blown off up to the elbow. Seeing the gun in his hand, the old wound on his waist tingled slightly. The next moment, his eyes flashed with unconcealed rage.
He knew this gun too well.
The three wounds on his body were thanks to this gun and its owner!
That bastard Shan had modified it. In his hands, the reloading speed could reach 1.2 seconds.
The gun was one of the best on the market, and Shan Feibai was the best shooter Ning Zhuo had ever seen.
But in front of Ning Zhuo, Shan Feibai’s dominance was limited to long-range.
1.2 seconds, even Shan himself didn’t dare to reload so close to him.
People who had undergone prosthetic modifications often relied more on their artificial limbs, but Ning Zhuo never did.
He had trained his legs for many years, turning them into silent killing tools.
As the bioroid tried to pull back and reload, a beautiful and fierce right leg, carrying the sound of wind, struck the bioroid’s waist hard!
The bioroid’s just-lifted gun barrel was forced to shift, and a bullet hit the wall.
The sharp whine of the ricochet and the sound of metal shattering were equally piercing.
Now, the gun was out of bullets.
Ning Zhuo sidestepped again, delivering a horizontal kick with blazing heat, hitting the bioroid’s chest solidly.
If it were a human, the splinters of broken ribs would have pierced their vital organs.
But the bioroid felt no pain.
It fell backward into the fire, rolled over, and attempted to escape Ning Zhuo’s attack range using the terrain.
But with a stoic face, Ning Zhuo directly charged into the fire, punching the bioroid’s chest.
The bioroid’s backup vision was distorted by the punch, with sparks faintly leaking from the corners.
The terrifying part was, Ning Zhuo had no intention of stopping.
The fire climbed up Ning Zhuo’s pant leg but was extinguished by his fierce and cunning punches and kicks.
For nearly a minute, he launched a relentless close-range attack, not avoiding the fire or considering his own life, making it seem as if Ning Zhuo was also a modified bioroid.
—A precise, vengeful killing machine.
The bioroid lacked the human instinct of fear but still had to protect its core from damage.
When Ning Zhuo grabbed its chest and flung it out, the bioroid finally raised its hand to protect its oil-leaking right chest to avoid further impact.
After throwing the bioroid, Ning Zhuo rolled to the side, and a necklace with a shell casing tied to it with fine thread swung out from his neck.
He wrapped the thread around his left thumb, hooked the sniper rifle strap on the ground with the metal edge of his severed arm, skillfully opened the magazine with one hand, bit through the necklace, and loaded the warm copper shell casing into the magazine, aiming at the bioroid’s right chest without hesitation, and pulled the trigger.
The entire sequence of actions flowed smoothly, taking no more than 3 seconds.
A shell casing wasn’t as lethal as a bullet.
But at such close range, it was enough.
The bioroid, which had just regained its footing, jerked backward from the impact, was flung against a concrete pillar, and fell to the ground with the crumbling concrete, its neck crooked, no longer moving.
Ning Zhuo raised the gun, muzzle up, propping his elbow on the scorching hot barrel, muttering to himself, “This shell casing was meant to kill him, you got lucky.”
Once he stopped, Ning Zhuo felt a burning pain in his chest, like it was on fire. Unable to cough, he forcibly swallowed the blood-tainted saliva.
He first thoroughly searched the bioroid, pocketing all the useful small items into his multifunctional waist pouch.
Including the deformed shell casing embedded in the bioroid’s right chest.
After ensuring nothing was left behind, Ning Zhuo kicked the bioroid’s chest, blown open by the sniper rifle, twice more and removed the small cooling tank used for temperature regulation.
He unscrewed the cap and sniffed it; it was water, not antifreeze.
Ning Zhuo carried the tank to Shan Feibai, lifted his helmet, and poured the water with a fuel smell directly on Shan Feibai’s face.
The fuel-scented water woke the unconscious man.
He opened his eyes and called out hoarsely, “…Ning-ge?”
Ning Zhuo, too lazy to explain why he was there, bent down to check his injuries: “Hmm.”
Shan Feibai’s fingers could barely move.
He raised his hand, touching Ning Zhuo’s shoes that were heated by the hot waves, and gently wiping away a drop of blood near the laces of Ning Zhuo’s right foot.
Ning Zhuo looked down and clicked his tongue lightly.
The bioroid wouldn’t bleed, so it must be his own blood.
When his arm was blown off, many parts of his face and body were also hit by shrapnel.
But his skin was burning, and with the adrenaline still pumping, he couldn’t feel any pain yet.
Ning Zhuo’s shoes were thin today; when touched, his toes itched slightly and shrank back.
Unhappy, he lifted his foot, lightly stepping on Shan Feibai’s hand as a warning.
Shan Feibai instinctively wanted to smile, but opening his mouth made him inhale smoke, triggering a series of coughs that turned his face white with pain.
Ning Zhuo finally found his injury.
His spine was broken.
After regaining sensation, Shan Feibai started to moan softly in pain.
His moans were low but filled with extreme pain.
A broken spine grinding against soft tissue and nerves was excruciating.
Ning Zhuo frowned, snapping the helmet shut to isolate Shan Feibai from the smoke.
…Troublesome.
He used the remaining water in the tank to douse himself, then turned to fetch two tarps. He made holes in the tarp corners with a knife, threaded a tarp rope through the holes, tied it roughly around his waist, creating a makeshift stretcher, and moved Shan Feibai onto it. He also tossed his blown-off arm onto the stretcher.
That last battle left Ning Zhuo with only one and a half arms, making delicate work a bit difficult.
Fortunately, there wasn’t much fuel in this factory, so the fires were burning rather lazily in scattered piles.
It was choking, but not fatal at the moment.
After finishing up, Ning Zhuo kicked the bioroid’s head, still burning in the fire, out of the flames.
Finding it too hot to handle, he nudged the head along with his foot, bringing it and Shan Feibai out of the fire.
Soon, he was breathing fresh air again.
In the distance, the red and blue lights of fire trucks and police cars could be seen faintly.
But the sound still seemed far away.
“White Shield” had a major incident tonight, turning the place into chaos. He wondered which enthusiastic little cop would come to such an insignificant place at a time like this.
Looking at the severely injured and now unconscious Shan Feibai, Ning Zhuo finally remembered to get angry.
He lifted Shan’s helmet and angrily grabbed his jaw, but worried he might kill him by shaking, he could only fume silently through gritted teeth.
If he died here in Chang’an District, or if someone saw him half-dead with Ning Zhuo, the whole “Haina” would be in big trouble!
But considering the severity of his injuries, moving him out of the burning factory on a makeshift tarp stretcher was already dangerous enough.
If he were to be carried back on a motorcycle, he would surely die on the way.
Ning Zhuo urgently needed a four-wheeled vehicle.
After some thought, he temporarily gave up on hijacking a police car.
Since this bioroid was lurking here, guarding the severely injured Shan Feibai, it must have had a purpose.
Once its goal was achieved, it wouldn’t just walk away, right?
Sure enough, after a bit of searching, Ning Zhuo found a white pickup truck in the overgrown weeds behind the factory.
The tricky part was that the door had a fingerprint lock.
Ning Zhuo was too lazy to go back into the factory to fetch the bioroid’s arm, so he simply smashed the glass with his elbow, ignoring the deafening alarm, and held the bioroid’s head to the vehicle’s facial recognition system.
Because he had squeezed the head somewhat out of shape, it took several tries before he successfully started the vehicle.
Loading the severed limb and Shan Feibai onto the truck bed, Ning Zhuo turned to his motorcycle and said, “There’s no room for you.”
The motorcycle’s headlight blinked blue three times and let out a short beep.
Ning Zhuo remained unmoved: “Be good. Abu. Go back by yourself.”
After another two short beeps, the motorcycle’s engine roared to life, automatically choosing a direction and speeding into the night with its cargo of snacks.
Ning Zhuo pulled off his belt, making a simple splint for Shan Feibai, then chose a different route from the police cars, stepped on the gas, and single-handedly drove towards the “Haina” base.
In his unconscious state, Shan Feibai turned to the side, reached out, and unknowingly clasped the fingers of the half-broken mechanical arm Ning Zhuo had casually thrown next to him.
Lacking strength, he could only grip the slender, broken fingers bit by bit.
Unable to grasp tightly, he just held on.
…
Five minutes later, a “White Shield” police car stopped in front of the factory.
A young police officer, just climbing out of the passenger seat, was hit by a wave of heat and started coughing loudly.
Catching his breath, he looked around and complained quietly:
“Lin-ge, I told you this area is already cordoned off; no one’s here. The fire won’t hurt anyone; at most, it’ll burn down the factory and the weeds behind it, making the developers happy by saving them money, right?”
“Lin-ge,” who got out of the driver’s seat, had his eyes covered by a one-way transparent white bandage.
The lower half of his face seemed to have been cut by something not very sharp.
Thirteen stitched scars crisscrossed his face, starting from a mole on the left cheek, with the left corner of his mouth torn, forcibly forming half a smile.
Holding a communicator, he spoke to the yawning fire brigade on the other end: “Please hurry.”
Compared to his hellish face, his voice was quite gentle.
The young officer beside him continued to chatter: “There’s been a big incident tonight; surely some thugs are out taking advantage of the chaos. Look, Lin-ge, my uncle just said that in ten minutes they’ll issue a curfew order, and we’ll catch any loitering punks. If we go after the troublemakers, we might find something valuable; isn’t that better than checking this broken factory? Even if someone set the fire on purpose, what’s the point of burning down a broken factory?”
“Exactly,” Lin Qin, the deputy captain of the third special unit in Chang’an District, replied, “what’s the point?”
The young officer was momentarily speechless: “Maybe… some kids playing around?”
Lin Qin looked at him: “On this specific night? At this exact time?”
Seeing the young officer couldn’t respond, he said no more, rolling up the sleeves of his dark police uniform to his elbows, and gave the order: “Get to work. Search the surrounding area.”
______
Author’s note:
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