Commander Li Wenqiang did not sleep that night.
He didn’t make it obvious, and he didn’t announce it to his n like he expected sothing to happen.
He simply chose not to lie down, giving the massive bed in the room to Sun Ming and Lui Junjie.
Rouxi’s warning had been too quiet and too certain to ignore, and Li had long ago learned that the most dangerous information rarely ca with urgency.
It ca exactly like that—calm, almost casual, and delivered by soone who already knew how things would unfold.
"I wouldn’t sleep too deeply tonight," she warned him in barely a whisper. She wasn’t trying to prove a point or get him to pay attention to her words. She gave him information and then let him decide what to do with it.
He chose to listen.
"Single room," he had ordered instead, once ilan’s team began spreading through the upper floor as if they already owned it. "No splitting up."
No one questioned him. Sergeant Liu Zhenyu acknowledged the order with a nod and began moving the others without hesitation. Chen Minghao and Wang Junjie took opposite sides of the room to control angles, Tan Wei remained near Li, and the rest of the squad settled into positions that allowed them to rest without losing cohesion.
They didn’t treat it like downti.
They treated it like a hold and their weapons stayed within reach at all tis.
Boots stayed on, uniform stayed on, and eyes only lightly closed.
But no one fully relaxed.
For a while, long enough for Commander Li to think that he might have over reacted, nothing happened.
ilan’s people made more noise than they should have, moving from room to room, arguing in low voices about who would stay where, who would be closest to her, and who would take which space.
They were careless in a way Li found irritating, but he ignored it. They weren’t his responsibility, and they had already made it clear they weren’t interested in acting like a unit.
His attention stayed on the house.
On the quiet.
The first sound ca from below.
It wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t sharp enough to imdiately trigger a response, but it didn’t seem to belong.
Li’s eyes opened fully as he tried to figure out exactly what he was hearing.
Across the room on the bed, Liu had already straightened, his focus shifting toward the door. Sun Ming copied his movent as Chen and Wang adjusted without speaking, their posture tightening as their attention followed the sa direction.
No one moved yet.
They held their breath and just listened.
The sound ca again.
A slow drag.
Then sothing closer.
Not quite at the door, but just outside it.
Li pushed off the wall. "Up," he said quietly, the word barely audible to his n.
The room responded imdiately. Weapons ca up, and their positions tightened, the loose arrangent from earlier compressed into sothing far more deliberate. No one asked questions. No one hesitated.
The next impact ca against the door, a definitive thud that sounded like a drunk neighbor knocking.
It wasn’t strong enough to break it, but there was still enough force to confirm what Li had already feared.
"They’re inside," Tan breathed, adjusting his hold on his gun.
Li didn’t correct him.
The door shifted under the pressure, the fra giving just enough that sothing was able to forced its way through without actually breaking it.
The first body stumbled into the room, its movent uneven but direct, its attention already fixed on the nearest target.
"Take it," Li ordered, his voice commanding as he raised his own gun.
Chen fired first. One shot, clean and controlled, and the body dropped before it reached the center of the room. Another zombie followed imdiately after, then a third from the hallway behind them as more continued to co up the stairs like soone had rang an ’all you can eat’ bell.
"They’re inside the breathed," Liu said, his eyes already going to the window.
"No breach," Wang added. "They must have been already here."
Sun Ming shook his head. "Not possible. Even if Dumb and Dumr didn’t properly clear the house, we would have heard zombies in it long before night ca."
He was right, but that didn’t easy Li’s tension.
Everyone ca to the sa conclusion at once. If the zombies weren’t here before, that ant that soone had let them in.
Shen Rouxi’s words played in his mind again.
She. She planned it.
But the question was, did she want them to all die together?
He shook his head. This was not the ti to try to figure things out.
He stepped forward, his attention moving past the bodies and into the hallway. The movent there wasn’t random. It wasn’t scattered. It was consistent, building in a way that suggested flow rather than entry.
"They’re coming up from below," he warned everyone. Which ant he was right. The doors had been opened.
And he already knew who had done it.
"Hold position," Li said. "No pursuit."
His n adjusted imdiately, tightening their formation instead of expanding it.
They stopped trying to control the entire space and focused on the ground they could actually hold. That choice made the difference within seconds. When the next wave pushed in, they t it with controlled fire, dropping each target before it could build montum.
Li let out a scornful laugh. He didn’t know if he should kill Rouxi for letting the zombies in, or thank her for warning them.
Either way, as the pressure increased, it never overwheld them. They all breathed a sigh of relief when they understood that they would make it until morning.
They just had to hold the line.
Down the hall, on the other hand, was a completely different story.
ilan’s voice cut through the noise first, sharp and demanding, followed by the uneven rhythm of gunfire that told Li everything he needed to know about how her team was handling the situation.
Their shots overlapped instead of alternating, their positioning shifted too quickly, and their focus stayed on her instead of the environnt.
"They’re inside!"
"They’re coming from everywhere!"
"No—they were already—"
The rest was lost in another shot and the sound of sothing hitting the wall hard enough to rattle the fra.
Li stepped into the hallway just far enough to see.
The difference was imdiate.
His n held a line.
ilan’s did not.
One of her n fired too quickly and missed, forcing another to shift position in a way that opened space behind them. Another stepped in too close, breaking their spacing and forcing them to compensate instead of control.
Shen Kaiyang reached her side and stayed there, his attention locking onto her instead of the threat. The others followed the sa instinct, tightening their formation around her rather than spreading out to manage the flow of movent coming toward them.
They weren’t holding ground.
They were protecting a point.
Li turned away.
He had seen enough.
"Close the door," he said.
Tan moved imdiately, forcing the damaged door back into place while Chen reinforced the fra with a collapsible bar from his pack and Wang adjusted to cover the gap. Liu shifted slightly to maintain clean sightlines inside the room, keeping their formation intact as the next wave pressed forward.
The pressure continued, steady and controlled, but it never broke their position.
Behind them, the hallway filled with noise.
In front of them, everything stayed asured.
Li exhaled once as another body dropped.
Rouxi hadn’t sounded afraid when she spoke to him.
She hadn’t sounded urgent.
She had sounded certain.
Now he understood why.
Upstairs, the house was already lost.
But inside this one room, his n still held control.
For now.
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