The horrific symphony of the oncoming pack rattled violently through the thick structural fra of the SUV.
The zombie dogs were closing the distance with a terrifying, unnatural agility that defied all known laws of canine anatomy, their heavily mutated muscles stretching and flexing to effortlessly match the vehicle’s high sweeping speed.
They were no longer wild animals driven by instinct; they were pure, unadulterated biological weapons fueled by a ravenous, unholy virus.
One massive, skinless Rottweiler—its throat a gaping wound of black, exposed tendons and oozing rot—lunged forward from the asphalt with an explosive, gravity-defying leap.
THUD!
The massive creature slamd heavily against the rear bumper, its thick, blackened claws scratching horribly against the reinforced armor plating as it desperately tried to gain purchase on the moving fra. Its rotting jaw snapped aggressively just inches from the rear window, stringy, foul saliva and necrotic blood saring heavily across the glass.
The reinforced ballistic glass didn’t crack—it had been ticulously designed to withstand heavy ballistics and blunt-force trauma—but the sheer, deafening weight of the impact and the sight of the abomination’s unhinged jaw sending a jolt of pure panic through the backseat.
More beasts were flanking them on both sides, their paws beating a relentless, heavy rhythm against the cracked asphalt, their bodies staying parallel to the doors as they prepared to leap. Gu An felt her breath hitch in her throat, a suffocating wave of survival instinct screaming at her to run as the claustrophobia of the cabin threatened to freeze her mind completely.
"Backseat! Focus!" Lin Qing’s icy, authoritative voice cut through the mounting chaos like a flash of lightning. Her hands remained rock-steady on the steering wheel, her eyes locked entirely on the cracked, dangerous highway ahead as she smoothly navigated around a shattered, abandoned sedan.
She absolutely refused to waste precious rifle ammunition on such erratic targets, nor would she risk slamming the brakes with a ravenous pack clawing at their heels. "Execute your roles. Guard the periter, or we bleed in this cabin. Use your training!"
The sharp command snapped them out of their instinctual dread, pulling them back into the harsh reality of the battlefield. Han Ye’s eyes turned cold, his small face hardening into an expression of absolute, lethal focus, though a slight bead of sweat was already forming near his temple.
Internally, he knew his current limitations all too well. He was physically only five years old; his current evolutionary core was still in its absolute infancy compared to the sovereign heights he had reached in his past life.
He could not summon twenty individual, precise shadow tendrils to chase down twenty erratic, fast-moving targets across the open road without completely draining his energy reserves and blacking out on the spot.
They needed a bottleneck. They needed to control the field and force the pack into a singular zone.
"Gu An! Now!" Han Ye shouted, his voice high-pitched but filled with a sharp, commanding urgency that brooked no delay.
Gu An gritted her teeth, forcing her trembling, sweaty hands forward. She slamd her palms flat against the interior of the rear window, directly facing the grotesque wave of snapping jaws, rotted fur, and milky eyes. She bypassed her rising fear, diving deep into the center of her chest to pull at the warm, tabolic spark of her evolutionary ability. She didn’t just want to survive; she wanted to prove she wasn’t dead weight.
BZZZZT!
With a fierce surge of pure willpower, Gu An didn’t just manifest the shield tightly around her own body—she projected it outwardly through the glass, snapping a wide, pale blue barrier into existence directly behind the SUV’s rear bumper.
The timing was absolutely flawless. The charging front line of the pack—six massive, deford hounds running at nearly sixty kiloters per hour—had already leaped into the air, their jaws extended to bite the tal. They slamd full-force into the invisible, humming wall of compressed kinetic energy.
A sickening, wet chorus of shattering bones, bursting tissue, and dull thuds echoed through the air. The deflection was utterly brutal; the invisible wall completely halted the animals’ massive forward montum in an instant, compressing their rotted bodies and staggering the entire center of the pack into a chaotic, tangled pile of thrashing limbs and mangled fur on the asphalt.
Gu An let out a sharp, agonized gasp, her face instantly turning as white as a sheet. Holding a stationary shield against a fixed point was one thing, but maintaining a projected barrier against the collective, high-velocity impact of a dozen charging monsters was an entirely different level of physical strain.
She felt the violent feedback ripple through her arms, into her shoulders, and straight down into her spine. Her muscles began to tremble uncontrollably, and her vision flickered darkly around the edges as her body rapidly converted her remaining fat and caloric reserves into raw defensive force.
"Hold it!" Han Ye growled, his own small body shifting into a low, braced stance across the backseat.
With the pack temporarily clustered, slowed, and trapped into a tight choke point by Gu An’s kinetic wall, the perfect tactical window had opened. Han Ye capitalized on the cluster instantly, refusing to let her sacrifice go to waste. He unleashed the liquid shadow energy from beneath his boots, forcing the dark mass through the floorboards and expanding it outward like a massive, rolling wave of black ink across the cracked highway behind the shield.
The darkness blanketed the asphalt beneath the staggered, struggling hounds, cutting off their escape.
"Harvest," Han Ye whispered, his small fingers clenching into a tight, white-knuckled fist.
SHRST! SHRST! SHRST!
Dozens of jagged, thick shadow spikes erupted violently from the dark undergrowth of the asphalt simultaneously. The black harpoons pierced cleanly through the bellies, limbs, and skulls of the trapped zombie dogs, pinning the writhing, snarling monsters brutally to the ground. The sheer force of the shadow harvest tore the pack apart, black blood spraying across the gray, misty road like a macabre fountain.
But there were still three stragglers—smaller, incredibly agile hunting hounds that had managed to bypass the outer flanks of the kinetic shield. They lunged toward the SUV’s rear tires, their jaws clicking wildly as they sought to immobilize the vehicle.
Gu An’s cells were screaming in agony. Her face was completely devoid of color, her teeth grinding together so hard her jaw ached as she held the flickering blue barrier against the remaining pressure. "I can’t... hold it!" she cried out, her energy hitting a critical threshold as the light of her shield began to fracture.
Right as the blue light of her shield shattered into harmless microscopic sparks, Han Ye pushed past his own limits. A harsh, burning fatigue flared within his chest, his veins throbbing under the sudden strain of the massive energy output.
With a raw, determined growl that sounded far too old for his small fra, he forced the liquid shadows to lunge sideways, forming two last, razor-sharp whips that snapped through the air, cleanly decapitating the remaining three hounds before they could ever touch the tires.
The shadows instantly snapped back, retreating across the asphalt and dissolving entirely into Han Ye’s boots.
Suddenly, the highway behind them fell into a dead, grueso silence. The massive pack had been completely decimated, reduced to a horrific, unmoving graveyard of skewered, mangled flesh that rapidly faded into the dense morning fog as the SUV maintained its steady, unyielding pace southward.
Inside the backseat, the silence was deafening, broken only by the sound of ragged, heavy breathing from the two children.
Gu An collapsed back onto the leather seat, her limbs completely heavy, limp, and unresponsive, her uniform soaked completely through with cold sweat.
Beside her, Han Ye slumped heavily against the door panel, his breath coming in short, uneven gasps, his small hands trembling violently from absolute exhaustion. His face was entirely devoid of color, his eyelids fluttering. The massive, wide-area attack had pushed his current five-year-old physical container to its absolute absolute limit.
He slowly turned his head, his dark eyes eting Gu An’s wide, exhausted gaze. He didn’t speak a single word, but he gave her a single, firm, and lingering nod of true battle comradeship. They had both reached their absolute limits, but they had stood their ground, trusted each other’s roles, and survived a nightmare.
In the front seat, Lin Qing adjusted her rearview mirror, her icy gaze sweeping over the silent, grueso highway behind them before checking on the two pale, sweating children in the back.
Her expression remained an unreadable, stoic mask, but internally, her evaluation was highly favorable. Their reaction tis under a threat were exceptional, and their tactical cohesion was solidifying faster than she anticipated. They were no longer just a mother and two children escaping a wasteland; they were a functioning fireteam.
However, her calculating mind also noted the heavy, dangerous physical toll of the encounter. Their powers were lethal, but the biological cost was far too high for sustained combat.
"Good response tis," Lin Qing evaluated, her voice calm, steady, and grounding as it echoed in the quiet cabin. "You neutralized a high-speed flanking threat without compromising our mobility. But you are both burning through your reserves far too fast. The evolutionary cores require heavy, imdiate sustenance to repair the cellular damage from that level of energy output."
She glanced down at the dashboard console, checking the gauges, the fuel levels, and the digital map coordinates.
"There is a small, rural gas station five kiloters ahead, just off the secondary bypass," Lin Qing commanded, her tone shifting seamlessly back into a cold directive.
"We will execute a temporary stop. We need to siphon extra fuel for the long haul, lock down the periter, and get high-calorie nutrients into your systems to let you recover before we attempt to cross the provincial border. Rest your eyes for the next five minutes. The road ahead only gets heavier."
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