Chapter 504

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Protagonist:

Lin En

Lena

At the dawn after the traps were set, while the sky was still chaos, the silhouettes of a band of human bandits slowly emerged on the horizon.

Ayla had not guessed wrong; that carefully disguised "tragedy" had worked, and sure enough, someone took the bait.

This band of bandits' equipment was not on the same level as the Scavenger Camp where Ayla was at all.

Leading the way were several modified off-road vehicles, their fronts welded with hideous spiked grilles, oversized hubs crushing the wasteland gravel, and even a heavy machine gun mounted on the roof of one.

A few wasteland motorcycles weaved on both sides of the convoy, side wings fitted with weapon platforms/

Almost everyone held thermal weapons — automatic rifles, double-barreled shotguns, flamethrowers, and so on......

Most exaggerated of all, several burly men wearing crude exoskeleton power armor were clustered in the center of the team, mechanical joints gleaming with cold light in the morning glow.

In terms of numbers, the bandits and the camp were roughly equal, but in terms of equipment, the two sides were completely not on the same level.

What made the people in the camp even more tense was that the other side was abnormally cautious.

The convoy stopped when it was still three hundred meters from the camp, advancing no further, and began observing from afar.

Someone raised a crude telescope to scrutinize this side; worse still, one actually put on a bio-nose, flaring his nostrils from far away, sniffing the smells drifting on the wind.

"Big Boss Gunshi, should be no problem." A short guy wearing protective goggles with a mohawk sidled up to the big guy in the simple power armor at the center of the team.

"Such thick blood smell, can't be fake. Look at their side, it's a good bit more damaged than when we came last time; looks like the Tusag Hunting Dogs did them quite a bit of harm."

The big guy called Gunshi had a face full of horizontal flesh, a mechanical prosthetic hanging at his side; one look and he was a ruthless character not to be trifled with.

But he was absolutely no brute; on the contrary, he was cunning to the extreme.

Although all signs at present indicated the hunting dogs had indeed inflicted heavy injury on the opposite camp, and his own side held every equipment advantage, he still refused to act rashly from start to finish.

"No rush, observe a bit more." Gunshi narrowed his eyes, voice low.

Inside the camp, people hid behind the sheds, staring dead at that band of bandits stopped in the distance through crude telescopes.

Seeing they delayed attacking, a few timid scavengers were already so tense their palms sweated: "Could it be... our traps were discovered?"

Yet Ayla had not a trace of panic.

Aside from a superhuman constitution, her strongest talent was actually perception.

She not only possessed vision and hearing far surpassing mortals, but could also, in a form almost like color, read the general emotions and thoughts in the hearts of surrounding humans.

This ability granted her superlative insight.

From three months old, she often heard strange whispers, or glimpsed unsettling illusions in dreams.

But the depths of her mind seemed to have a barrier guarding her; as long as she wanted to block out those auditory and visual hallucinations, she could isolate them at any time.

At this moment, she clearly perceived the reason that band of bandits stopped.

It was not wariness from discovering traps, but a pure caution and observation.

Gunshi was probing, weighing, judging whether it was worth making a move.

So what she needed to do was give the other side a little "temptation".

Ayla gave a soft instruction.

A few scavengers immediately understood, one after another disguising themselves as badly wounded, some binding bandages, some wearing casts, staggering as they dragged sacks filled with stones to the camp's outer areas.

Right before the eyes of that band of bandits in the distance, they dug pits shovel by shovel, burying "comrades' corpses," staging a post-battle corpse-collection tragedy.

Sure enough, less than two minutes after that miserable scene of three or five bandaged figures burying corpses fell into the bandits' eyes, the convoy roared to life and drove toward the camp.

A trace of cold smile rose on Ayla's lips.

When it comes down to it, caution is just a layer of disguise; in their bones they're just a gang of violent thugs scraping by on the wasteland, have some brains, but not many.

The moment they saw the prey show a miserable state, these people couldn't hide their greedy thoughts, wishing they could each rush to the most front to divide the most spoils.

The camp was sited on hills, all around were long gentle slopes.

The bandits' convoy crushed over gravel, halfway running into the first trap line.

Extremely exposed beartraps, sparsely buried on the slope, looked like nothing more than defense against beasts like Tusag Hunting Dogs.

Seeing this, the bandits burst into raucous laughter, mocking the camp's scavengers as foolish beyond measure, cursing and laughing as they drove on up the slope.

They didn't know in the slightest that this was merely another layer of illusion Ayla held out.

The real killing move was hidden in the second defensive line.

Beneath the loose sand, the scavengers' self-made poor-quality landmines were buried.

So-called poor-quality was only relative to military-standard mines' workmanship and stability.

And in the scavengers' simple philosophy, this kind of life-saving thing naturally was the more materials piled in the better.

So every single poor-quality landmine's TNT equivalent was over three times that of an ordinary military mine.

To further increase lethality against the human body, large quantities of iron fragments were also buried in the sand.

When the explosives blasted open, the loose sand together with iron fragments splashed in all directions, nothing short of a fragment storm.

The first to suffer was that domineering modified off-road vehicle.

Its wheel rolled onto two poor-quality land mines, the violent blast power directly flipping it into midair, disintegrating it on the spot; the roof's heavy machine gun didn't even get a chance to open fire.

Over a dozen poor-quality landmines detonated in succession, earth waves and iron fragments flying everywhere.

In just one round, that off-road vehicle was completely written off, motorcycle vehicles lost nearly half, over twenty bandits lost combat power on the spot.

The remaining thirty all cowered on the ground in terror, scrambling in panic.

Big Boss Gunshi had crawled and rolled on the wasteland for many years after all, reaction extremely fast.

He immediately halted his panicked subordinates and issued new orders.

No more advancing; hold the position right here and launch a long-range attack on the camp from the half-slope.

They brought quite a few heavy weapons; worst case, they'll just raze this camp to the ground!

Amidst the firelight and smoke, the bandits set up heavy machine guns and hauled out rocket launchers, preparing to pour firepower onto the camp.

But just as they were about to open fire, the camp gate burst open with a boom, and a lone figure charged out toward the bandits' direction.

It was a tall figure, yet beautiful to an excessive degree.

A head of jet-black long hair flew in the morning wind; a pair of bright purple eyes were sharp as blades. She was alone, carrying only a power spear, no heavy weapons.

Just like that, she strode forward in big strides toward the bandits hundreds of meters away, a group fully armed to the teeth.

The bandits were stunned for a moment, then erupted in raucous laughter.

"Is this woman crazy? Charging out alone to die? Shoot her dead!"

At Gunshi's command, gun muzzles swiveled in unison, locking onto that charging figure.

Yet Ayla, gazing at that expanse of muzzles and firelight, had not a shred of fear in her eyes; instead she narrowed them slightly, and within those amethyst-like eyes burned a fierce battle intent.

In the previous battle, she had already proven to everyone her command ability as a leader.

Now, at this moment, she would make these bandits, and the people in the camp behind her, witness with their own eyes what true ultimate individual martial prowess is.