The deep-seated thrumming vibrating through the linoleum floorboards didn’t stop. It accelerated, transforming from a distant tectonic murmur into a terrifying, bone-rattling crescendo of pounding hooves and tearing earth.
Outside in the village square, the violent roar of the elite squad’s battle was reaching its absolute peak. Han Zheng, tracking the advanced siphoning zombie, flicked his wrist one final ti. He generated a crushing, localized kinetic friction field that completely froze the predator’s deceleration mid-stride.
Slipped into a state of artificial molasses, the monster couldn’t dodge as Lieutenant Chen unleashed a blinding, white-hot torrent of thermal fla that incinerated its dark hide, followed instantly by Ah Hua’s heavy automatic rounds shattering its core nucleus into black ash.
The evolutionary predator was dead, but there was no ti to celebrate.
"Incoming! North-western transit lane!" Old Wang’s voice barked frantically from his sniper overwatch position atop the baggage truck. "We’ve got infected livestock! It’s a herd from the dairy pastures—they’ve been turned!"
Through the thick gray mist rolling over the paved grid-road, the zombified herd burst into the square. There were only five or six head of cattle, but these were no longer peaceful farm animals.
The volatile cataclysmic energy had violently fused with the necrotic virus, mutating their gentle mass into engines of raw destruction.
Their hides were mottled, sloughing off in patches to reveal raw, wire-dense muscle fibers beneath. Their jaws were unnaturally unhinged, dripping with a thick saliva, and their hooves had split into jagged, calcified claws that tore chunks out of the solid asphalt with every stride.
Driven mad by the sound of gunfire and the scent of living flesh, the zombified herd stampeded directly toward the stationary trucks.
"Form the line! Do not let them impact the cargo!" Han Zheng ordered, his deep voice cutting through the panic.
Da Yong and Sun Hao imdiately swung their assault rifles into position, establishing a tight, interlocking defensive firing line alongside the recovering Xiao Li, whose stone shield anchored the front bumper of the lead truck.
The square erupted into a fresh symphony of deafening gunfire as the non-powered and powered soldiers worked in perfect harmony to cut down the charging wall of undead flesh before it could breach the transport.
But inside the dim general store, five-year-old Han Ye’s eyes didn’t look toward the square. They remained locked entirely on the solid brick wall forming the northern flank of the building.
"It’s not out there," Han Ye muttered, his tiny voice cutting through the darkness with a chilling, cold certainty that made the hairs on Guo Jiong’s neck stand up. "It’s here."
Lin Qing didn’t hesitate. Trusting the tiny regressor’s instinct implicitly, she violently spun her body around, her rifle instantly tracking toward the northern wall. Her left shoulder flared with a sharp, burning agony as the movent strained her fresh stitches, but her expression didn’t flicker.
BOOM!
The solid brick wall violently exploded inward in a catastrophic shower of red mortar, shattered concrete, and pulverized wood.
Smashed through the structural fra was the nightmare alpha of the herd—a monstrous, zombified bull that had mutated into the size of a small elephant. Weighing well over two tons, its entire skull had undergone a terrifying, hyper-evolutionary calcification, forming a massive, jagged plate of solid, bone-white armor that covered its face like a prehistoric ramming shield. Its hollow, milky-white eyes burned with a mindless, necrotic hunger, and its spine had erupted into a ridge of jagged bony spikes.
The monster bull roared—a deep, unnatural, guttural sound that shook the dust from the ceiling—and its massive, rotting hooves dug into the linoleum floorboards. It was standing directly between the entrance and the open wooden trapdoor where the defenseless villagers were huddled below. The sheer weight of the beast caused the floorboards to groan perilously, threatening to collapse the entire basent ceiling.
"Get back!" Guo Jiong bellowed, his instincts overriding his fear as he instinctively threw his broad-shouldered fra in front of the stairwell.
He raised his hunting rifle, his calloused hands rock-steady despite the sheer scale of the monster. He pulled the trigger, aiming for the beast’s chest.
BANG!
The high-caliber hunting slug struck the beast’s shoulder, tearing through the rotting hide, but the zombified bull didn’t even flinch.
Lacking any neurological perception of pain, the impact only served to draw its mindless, aggressive focus entirely toward them. The massive, calcified skull swung downward, its bone horns lining up perfectly with Guo Jiong’s chest as it prepared to launch a fatal, trampling charge across the tight storefront.
"The skull plate is impenetrable to standard bullet," Lin Qing stated flatly as she stepped up beside the hunter. "Do not waste ammunition on the crown. Look at the lower mandible alignnt."
Guo Jiong, a master tracker who had spent years studying the anatomy of large ga in the northern foothills, instantly understood her analysis.
"The jaw!" he shouted over the din. "The calcified plate stops just above the nasal cavity! If we hit the soft tissue underneath the jawline at a steep upward angle, the bullet will bypass the armor and shatter the brain stem!"
"Coordinate the line," Lin Qing replied. "You take the left optic nerve to force a tilt. I will deliver the payload."
From the deep shadows near the rear counter, five-year-old Han Ye stood perfectly still, his cold eyes calculating the exact trajectory of the beast’s weight distribution. "It’s loading its hind legs," the boy whispered, his voice an eerie, silent guide. "It will lean right before the strike. Now."
The monster bull let out a terrifying, wet snort, its massive rear hooves splintering the floorboards as it violently launched fra forward in a blind, crushing charge.
BANG!
Guo Jiong pulled his trigger with flawless, professional speed. His hunting slug struck the creature’s left eye socket with pinpoint accuracy.
The eye exploded in a spray of black, coagulated blood, and the sudden, blinding force caused the massive bull’s head to violently jerk upward and to the right, exposing the soft, pale, unarmored underside of its throat and jawline for a split second.
Lin Qing’s dark eyes contracted into two points of absolute precision. Ignoring the sharp, tearing pain in her stitched left shoulder, she locked her bunker rifle into her right armpit, her steady hands tracking the moving target with the focus of a machine.
BOOM!
The high-caliber, military-grade bullet erupted from her barrel, the concussive force shattering the remaining glass display cases in the store.
The heavy slug tore cleanly through the soft, flesh beneath the bull’s jaw, bypassing the calcified bone shield entirely. Traveling at supersonic speed, the bullet ripped upward through the nasal cavity, completely pulverizing the creature’s mutated energy core and shattering its brain stem into fluid.
The montum of the beast didn’t stop instantly. The dead, muscular mountain of flesh slithered across the splintering linoleum, its massive head crashing into the base of the rear counter before grinding to a heavy, static halt.
The massive skull of the zombified breeding bull stopped a re three inches from the edge of the open wooden trapdoor. Black, foul-slling blood began to slowly pool across the splintered linoleum floorboards, dripping harmlessly away from the darkness of the cellar below.
Guo Jiong dropped to one knee, his chest heaving heavily as he frantically racked a fresh shell into his rifle, his tough face pale as he stared at the massive mountain of dead at. He slowly looked up at Lin Qing, his respect for the woman reaching a level of near-religious awe.
She hadn’t shifted her footing by a single inch. Her face remained completely expressionless as she reached into her pouch, using her uninjured right hand to cleanly slide a fresh magazine into the chamber of her bunker rifle with a sharp ’clack’.
Before the heavy silence in the ruined storefront could settle, a shadow tore through the shattered northern brick wall.
"Lin Qing! Han Ye!"
Han Zheng erupted into the room, his chest heaving violently, his dark eyes wide with panic. Having recognized the thundering vibrations outside, the Commander had pushed his physical limits, rushing toward the general store the absolute millisecond the small cluster of infected cattle in the square was neutralized.
He knew the building’s structural integrity was compromised, and he had braced himself for a struggle to protect his family.
Instead, he skidded to a dead halt, his heavy boots crunching on the red brick debris.
Han Zheng stared.
In the center of the ruined shop lay a two-ton, hyper-mutated apex breeding bull, its impenetrable calcified skull armor completely bypassed by a single, terrifyingly precise upward shot through the throat. Standing right beside the carcass was his five-year-old son, Han Ye, who simply looked up at him with an unbothered stare, his tiny hands tucked neatly back into his pockets.
And standing right in front of the cellar door was Lin Qing. Her left shoulder was visibly leaking a tiny bit of fresh blood where her stitches had strained, but her posture was straight, her eyes eting his gaze with the calm indifference of soone who had just swatted a common housefly.
Han Zheng swallowed hard, his towering, powerful fra suddenly feeling remarkably small in the quiet room.
He now knew that his wife and child weren’t entirely helpless, but seeing a mutated beast ’that’ massive dropped so cleanly—without a single scratch on either of them—left him utterly floored. A profound sense of pride and intense admiration swelled in his chest. His wife was a genius, a peerless marksman, and an absolute badass.
...But as Han Zheng looked at the perfectly hollowed-out exit wound in the bull’s skull, and then back at Lin Qing’s completely unblinking, stoic face, a tiny, involuntary shiver ran down the spine of the baseline-powerful Commander.
’Note to self,’ Han Zheng thought, a faint, slightly strained smile tugging at the corner of his lips as he raised his hands in a passive gesture of peace. ’Never, under any circumstances, get on her bad side.’
"Are you two... alright?" the Commander asked, his voice carrying a rare, highly amused touch of caution.
Lin Qing didn’t blink. "The threat is neutralized," she replied flatly, slinging the heavy rifle back over her uninjured shoulder. "We’re good as long as the blood doesn’t ruin the floorboards."
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