Chapter 364: Annihilate the Team

When the countdown reached zero, the entire air-raid shelter felt as if a sun had been stuffed inside.

White light.

Pure, retina‑burning white light burst through the iron door's crack, followed immediately by a shockwave—not just a shockwave.

A directional blast warhead tore a two‑meter‑diameter hole in the thirty‑millimeter‑thick alloy door plate, the rusted iron plates bent outward like petals and sprayed, their edges still glowing orange‑red.

The gun smoke had not yet cleared.

The first batch of black‑clad figures had already cut into the smoke.

Fully armed. Tactical helmets, bullet‑proof face plates, exoskeleton‑enhanced arm frames; each chest plate bore the insignia of the Federal Weird Investigation Bureau. Under each assault rifle's barrel hung a magazine of weird suppression rounds—devices meant for mutated entities, a single shot capable of necrotizing any C‑grade or lower mutated tissue on the spot.

Twelve people. Three diamond‑formation tactical squads.

The front two pushed forward with shields, the middle four split left and right to suppress in a fan shape, and the rear two carried heavy suppressors—half a person tall, whose firing made the whole street tremble.

Well‑trained. Their coordination was seamless.

Infrared lasers pierced the smoke, thick and dense, weaving a net; all the light points converged on the same spot.

The high platform.

Black robe.

Xiao Zhang.

Twelve red lines fell on his forehead, throat, heart, and abdominal cavity. The red dots on the black fabric twitched slightly, drifting up and down with the shooters' breathing, but never deviating more than two centimeters from a vital point.

"Target locked! Don't move! Hands on head—kneel!"

The assault team captain's voice came from behind his faceplate, amplified threefold by the loudspeaker, bouncing back and forth in the arc‑shaped tunnel, making ears ring.

The newly mutated believers below, like startled animals, began to stir. Some stepped back, some huddled in corners, some uttered garbled howls—their mutated vocal cords were no longer suited for human speech.

Every gun barrel remained steady, locked tightly onto that point on the high platform.

Then.

Xiao Zhang laughed.

It wasn't the forced calm after fright, nor the desperate resolve of a last stand. It was—how to put it—leisurely composure.

Like when you're reading in a library and someone nearby is cracking seeds; you glance over, find it a bit noisy but not worth fussing over—just that kind of smile.

He even placed his hands behind his back.

Twelve infrared markers marked six lethal spots all over his body, each bullet in the chambers capable of blasting a bowl‑sized hole through an ordinary person's chest. And Xiao Zhang—the very same person who, in Qin Zhixia's project team, would jump three feet high at the sight of a single hair stuck to a wall during an investigation, who on night shifts insisted on turning every office light on or else would pull a file bag over his own head—

—at this very moment, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

His body bore no trace of mutation—no scales, no keratin layer, no dark‑red markings. Clean and pristine, he stood in that black robe at the intersection of firelight and infrared beams, like a passerby who showed up for cosplay but grabbed the wrong prop.

But his eyes had changed.

Not the color, not the pupils—what lay inside had changed.

Those eyes, once always shadowed by dark circles, jumpy at the slightest scare, shrinking back at ghosts, were now unnervingly calm. That calm wasn't cultivated; it was a side effect of looking down from an extreme height to an extreme low, the natural sense of distance.

Like watching ants move house.

"Final warning! If you don't surrender within ten seconds, we will execute—"

"Eh."

Xiao Zhang cut him off.

His tone was as casual as greeting a coworker by the water cooler.

"You're late."

He didn't look at the gun barrels. He lowered his head and glanced at the kneeling, crouching, trembling believers below.

That gaze was light.

So light it held no aggression, so light that any lie detector would pick up no hostility.

But it was precisely that gaze.

Lao Zhao was the first to move.

He himself didn't know why. The lump of power remolded by the seed inside him suddenly expanded, spewing scorching current from the dark‑red vine‑like patterns, racing up his spine and burning through the last rational gate in his brain.

He lunged at the nearest shield‑bearer.

Not a charge, but a lunge. He smashed knee and elbow into the broken bricks on the ground, dropped to all fours like a hungry dog let out of a cage, and hurled straight at that tactical shield.

The bullets arrived 0.3 seconds after he launched.

The first round struck his right shoulder. The special warhead pierced the muscle, releasing blue‑white suppression energy that instantly necrotized the mutated tissue within five centimeters, turning it black.

Lao Zhao didn't stop.

He didn't even slow down.

The shattered right shoulder, even as he charged, began to grow new tissue outward—not flesh, but a dark‑red hard shell encasing still‑beating blood vessels, spreading from the bullet's edge and sealing the wound within two seconds.

The second round hit his abdomen.

He staggered, his knee scraping the ground and throwing up sparks. Then he got back up.

The third, fourth, and fifth rounds.

He did not dodge.

He didn't know how to dodge; the concept had vanished from his mind. The seed gave him power, and at the same time something more primal—not courage, but desire. A yearning to run in that direction that would please Xiao Zhang and gratify the Prophet.

More important than life.

When Lao Zhao slammed into the tactical shield, the Special Forces member behind it swore.

Because Lao Zhao's left hand had already embedded itself in the shield's composite layer; his fingers punched through the polycarbonate panel, the tips protruding from the other side, just two centimeters shy of jabbing into the trooper's goggles.

At the same time, Zheng Mei came around from the right flank.

Her movement was off—too fast. An ordinary middle‑aged woman shouldn't move like that. Each step of her soles sent a heavy cracking sound through the ground, the concrete spider‑webbing with cracks, a dim red glow leaking from her eyes, heating the surrounding air.

The left‑wing shield bearer didn't have time to turn.

When Zheng Mei's shoulder slammed into his chest armor, the Exoskeleton's amplified arm frame emitted a sharp metallic overload alarm. The team member was knocked three meters away, his back slammed into the tunnel wall, and the bulletproof vest's chest area was indented with a fist‑sized pit.

He hadn't had time to get up when Chen Gang arrived.

The veteran's left leg was no longer shortened. The Seed repaired all his old injuries, even over‑repaired—his legs were sheathed in a flowing dark‑gray metallic sheen, each step sounding with a hydraulic‑machine‑like dull roar.

He planted a foot on the fallen team member's rifle.

The barrel snapped.

It didn't bend; it broke cleanly in two at the middle. The alloy barrel's break was perfectly straight.

"Fire! Everyone fire!"

The Captain's voice had changed pitch.

The rapid gunfire erupted inside the Air‑raid Shelter, spent casings clattering to the ground. Blue‑white suppressed‑fire tracers drew intersecting lines in the smoke, each shot landing with pinpoint accuracy—Special Forces are the Federation's most elite combat unit, ranking in the global top three for CQB, and no one would miss at this range.

Every shot hit.

But none were effective.

The believers surged from all directions. Not a charge, but a tide. Hundreds pressed together; those in front fell while those behind stepped on the corpses and kept moving forward. The pierced bodies self‑repaired as they advanced, dark‑red new tissue growing from the bullet holes, tougher, denser, and harder to penetrate than the old flesh.

Special Forces' tactical line collapsed.

It wasn't shattered; it was drowned.

A diamond formation of twelve men, against hundreds of Mutated Entities that feel no pain, fear no death, and regenerate faster than a bullet can destroy, was no different than a sandcastle on a beach facing the tide.

A team member tried to activate the heavy suppressor.

The device was only half‑preheated when two dark‑red, vein‑like tentacles erupted from the ground, coiling around the launch tube and twisting it into a knot.

A team member triggered a shock bomb.

White light and sound waves ricocheted seven or eight times within the sealed space, and several believers at the front were shaken so violently that their seven orifices bled, collapsing to the ground convulsing.

Three seconds later, they rose again.

Blood streamed from their ears, the capillaries in their eyeballs exploded, turning red like a rabbit.

After standing, they kept moving forward.

The Captain was the last to fall. He emptied every magazine, stabbed two believers' throats with a tactical knife, and was tackled from behind by a third believer. His faceplate was ripped off, revealing a face drenched in sweat and blood.

He saw flames on the ceiling.

Then his view was blocked by a hand sheathed in dark‑red scale armor.

The whole process lasted less than ninety seconds.

From the iron door being blown open to the last Special Forces member hitting the ground—one and a half minutes.

The Air‑raid Shelter fell silent.

The air was thick with gunpowder smoke, the scent of blood, and the charred odor of cooling casings. The ground was littered with broken equipment fragments, and the Exoskeleton's hydraulic fluid, spewed after its pipes ruptured, mixed with human blood, the colors indistinguishable.

Xiao Zhang stepped down from the platform.

His stride was unchanged—neither hurried nor sluggish, each step perfectly timed. The hem of his black robe brushed the spent casings on the ground, producing a faint metallic clink.

He stepped over a severed rifle barrel.

He skirted a tactical shield that had been smashed to fragments.

He paused beside a tactical glove that had fallen off a corpse, tilted his head to glance, then continued forward expressionlessly.

Then he stopped.

Next to a Special Forces member lying in the corner.

The person was still breathing. His chest armor was half‑shattered, his face covered in blood, yet his torso remained upright. His right hand clenched a black square device—a combat recorder. Its red recording light still flashed.

Xiao Zhang crouched.

He pulled the law enforcement recorder from the now‑weak hand, flipped it over, and wiped the blood from its lens with his cuff.

The movement was light.

As light as when he once wiped coffee stains off Qin Zhixia's desk.

Then he aimed the lens at his own face.

Flames from the side illuminated his features: a crew cut, dark circles under his eyes, a wax‑yellow complexion like instant coffee and archive paper. The corners of his mouth lifted slightly, a modest curve but precise.

"Hi."

He waved at the lens and turned to leave.

The hem of his robe swept the floor, stirring up a spray of still‑wet blood droplets.

The believers yielded a passage like a tide; all the transformed bodies bent together, foreheads pressed to the blood‑stained concrete, as if seeing off a departing king.

Xiao Zhang did not look back.

He entered the deepest part of the tunnel, behind a rusted iron door; his silhouette stretched in the firelight, folded, then vanished into the unlit passage.

The law enforcement recorder slipped from the Captain's loosened fingers, struck the ground, and its screen cracked with a spider‑web fissure.

But the red light kept flashing.

The recording signal traveled through encrypted frequencies, passing the Air‑raid Shelter's concrete, the city's fiber‑optic network, and half of the Federation's satellite relay nodes.

It finally landed on the Investigation Bureau headquarters' top‑level database main screen.

In the shattered screen, Xiao Zhang's smiling face was frozen there.