18. Ye Rin’s Squad Advances

Ye Rin’s Squad Advances

“Wait for Chen Jin to come back from scouting.”

Zhou Xiaorui repeated the sentence for the third time, even reaching out to tug my wrist when I started to move around the corner.

He was a tall man of thirty-five or thirty-six, with a serious face and an air of tightly controlled violence. Every movement carried a firm sense of duty.

He was also rapidly becoming a headache.

A black shadow flickered past, only half-glimpsed, and slipped around the corner quickly and soundlessly.

To ordinary eyes, it would have blended almost completely into the fog. Even with my enhanced perception, its outline was somewhat blurred.

Around the corner stood a group of monsters—walking corpses, a head taller than ordinary humans, wearing heavy armor made from overlapping layers of iron plates.

Their weapons were peculiar iron spears. Each spearhead was a broad, slightly curved blade, as if someone had fastened a scimitar to the end of a pole.

The shadow approached the last undead creature in the line without a sound, then drove a knife from behind into the hollow of its throat.

The undead soldier swayed. The shadow twisted the knife, pulled hard, then stabbed deeper.

The neck became a ruin of torn flesh. The spine was severed. The walking corpse fell, and its killer lowered it gently to the ground so its armor would not clang against the street.

Then, with movements so clean they could only have come from thousands of hours of training or a supernatural skill, the shadow slipped toward the next undead in the formation.

He repeated the silent killing almost casually, moving down the line, stabbing each monster through the only gap in its heavy armor where a fatal wound could be delivered.

One after another, he put them down.

Then he returned to us.

“Clear, squad leader,” said the man in black casual clothes.

The fabric around his body flickered and writhed as if alive. It seemed less like true clothing and more like a power similar to my Super Suit, able to create wearable material while providing excellent camouflage.

“Only four monsters.”

“Any irregularities?” Zhou Xiaorui asked.

“They’re stronger. A normal person couldn’t kill them with a knife anymore, even knowing where to aim.”

We did not want to be spotted by anything more dangerous than a patrol of sentries, so we circled around the monster remains and hurried across the open street.

The corpses were already decomposing rapidly. Even as we watched, their armor began to rust and peel.

The armor was thick, so it broke down slowly, but a cloud of dust and rotten stink was rising around them, and none of us wanted to breathe that in.

“Do you think their armor is thicker than before?” Zhou Xiaorui asked as we walked.

“Thicker and heavier, but it doesn’t slow them down. It fits better too,” said Chen Jin, the shadowy man, with a sigh. “They have to be strong to move in armor like that. It must weigh a ton.”

The two men exchanged a look, then several hand signals I did not understand, and we continued forward.

We encountered two more groups of monsters.

The first was a pack of especially tall, mutated flayers. Corrosive slime seeped from their bodies, and every drop that hit the ground ate into asphalt and concrete.

That was the first time I saw Zhou Xiaorui act.

He charged forward with his gun raised.

His rifle looked as if it had been made from a drainpipe. He lifted it and aimed at the undead creatures. When he pulled the trigger, the weapon made no sound, spat no fire, and did not even recoil in his hands.

Small invisible spears of force fired from the gun at roughly twelve shots per second, tearing through undead flesh like real bullets.

Zhou Xiaorui calmly shifted fire from one enemy to the next, knocking them down one by one when it was almost impossible to tell where the attack came from.

By the time we eliminated the fifth group of monsters on our way through the city, I finally realized what they were doing, and why.

A silent advance.

No wonder I had run into so many monsters after leaving the school.

I had been causing half the trouble myself.

To avoid conflict, I could only stand there and watch.

By the seventeenth time we encountered a monster patrol, I had finally come up with a plan. That also meant I had more time to test a few ideas before putting anything into real action.

Force Field Creation lv1:
Apply the force effects you can personally exert to a volume of space no larger than one cubic yard, at reduced effectiveness. You may apply it to only one simple geometric shape at a time.

The moment we entered the city center, the number and variety of monsters began to increase. They approached from multiple directions, which proved we had attracted the attention of the enemy commander.

A group of eight bloated zombies, each as large as a bull and probably stronger, split into smaller groups and tried to surround us.

When our group came under threat, the two soldiers immediately moved into defensive positions.

But once the fight truly began, something very strange happened.

Every time one of the bloated undead was about to be struck by the shadow’s knife or hit by an invisible bullet, its head simply fell off, its thick neck cut clean through.

After those eight zombies were sent back to their “graves,” the same phenomenon befell the swarm of little devils that tried to rush us. A perfectly even, pencil-thin hole appeared through each of their torsos.

Then came four spear-wielding, armored ghost riders.

Their skulls were crushed by blunt force…

while their helmets remained perfectly intact.

“Damn it, this is annoying,” shadowy Chen Jin complained as yet another enemy died in front of him. “How many does that make now? We’re about to win, and the enemy suddenly dies? At least they clean themselves up afterward.”

He added the last part with disgust as the zombies slowly crumbled into dust.

“This is not funny,” Zhou Xiaorui scolded.

I worked very hard not to giggle like a little girl.

“What if this is an enemy plot to stop us from growing stronger?” He looked suspiciously at the rapidly rotting corpses, carefully checking every detail to see whether he had missed anything.

He found nothing.

Name: Ye Rin
Profile: Female human, 17 years, 3 months, and 10 days old

Abilities [2 points available, 35 total]
Strength Modulation lv3
Force Sense lv2
Force Field Creation lv1
Forced Acceleration lv2
Constant Strength lv2
Persistent Force lv1
Progressive Regeneration lv3
Near-Object Manipulation lv3
Super Suit lv1

Attributes [2 points available, 35 total]
Strength 18, Agility 10, Intelligence 3, Perception 7, Spirit 10, Luck 2