Han Zheng kept his eyes strictly trained on the green, glowing hue of the dashboard’s thermal night-vision display, entirely unaware of the shock that the na ’Su Xiao’ had just triggered in the passenger seat beside him.
His mind was purely locked into operational mode, calculating the fuel efficiency of the heavy transport trucks as they navigated the rough, unpaved grid-road. To him, the na was just a na—another identifier for a little girl swallowed by the chaos of the plains.
He glanced briefly at the central rearview mirror, checking on the three children in the back seat before shifting his gaze back to the dark, uneven terrain stretching ahead into the night. He opened his mouth, about to gently ask the silent girl another question to figure out how she had ended up entirely alone on these desolated back roads, when the radio suddenly crackled to life with a burst of static.
"Commander," Lieutenant Chen’s voice ca through the link, low, muted, and tightly controlled to avoid throwing any unnecessary noise into the dark interior of the cabins. "The gravel road is splitting up ahead. We’ve just hit an unmarked, unmapped fork. One path cuts a hard angle to the right toward the old concrete irrigation canals, and the other stays left along the high drainage ridge. Which one are we taking?"
Han Zheng lifted his right hand from the leather steering wheel, opening the map. He stared intently at the lines, his brow furrowing as he tried to analyze the terrain advantages of both routes. The right path offered significantly better tree cover against aerial observation or long-range scopes, but the left path kept the heavy vehicles on higher, more stable ground where they were less likely to bog down.
Before he could make a definitive decision, a tiny, raspy voice cut through the quiet, heated cabin from the rear seat.
"Don’t go to the right," Su Xiao whispered.
Han Zheng’s hand paused mid-air over the touch screen. He glanced back up at the rearview mirror, montarily stunned by the sudden, unsolicited intervention from the traumatized five-year-old child. Beside him, Lin Qing turned her head slightly, her eyes locking onto the child’s small fra with a calculating focus that went entirely unnoticed by her husband.
"Why shouldn’t we go right, Su Xiao?" Han Zheng asked, his deep voice deliberately calm, level, and devoid of any patronizing tone. He treated her words with a serious, unhurried gravity, understanding that children in the cataclysm often saw things adults missed. "Did you notice sothing over there?"
The little girl clutched the chemical hand warr tighter against her chest, her small, thin shoulders tensing visibly under her tattered clothing. She nodded slowly, her wide, unblinking eyes staring out into the pitch-black void of the side window as if she could still see the images burned into her mory. "I saw weird monsters there. Lots and lots of them."
"Can you elaborate on that for ?" Han Zheng pressed gently, his foot micro-adjusting the accelerator to slow the SUV’s pace down to a re crawl as they approached the looming fork in the dirt road. "What exactly were they doing?"
"They weren’t running or screaming," Su Xiao said, her voice trembling slightly with a lingering, deep-seated terror that she was fighting hard to suppress. "I passed through the road before I found the big highway. The monsters... they were just standing there. Lots of them. In the dark, they not making any noise at all. They were just still, like they were waiting for sothing to happen."
A cold, heavy chill seed to settle instantly over the interior of the armored vehicle, completely independent of the heater’s steady drone.
"They were probably lower-level infected under active, synchronized control," Lin Qing spoke up imdiately, her smooth voice cutting through the growing tension with absolute clinical precision.
Her dark eyes t Han Zheng’s across the dark center console, sharing a look of grim agreent. "A Ruler-type mutation doesn’t just gather a horde to march them in a clumsy, straight line. It positions them structurally. If they are standing completely still in a dormant state without actively hunting or wandering, they are likely acting as a stationary blockade, waiting for a central psychic command to trigger a synchronized ambush on anyone trying to bypass the area."
In the back seat, Han Ye’s small fists tightened further inside the pockets of his winter trousers. His dark, cold eyes stared intently at the side of Su Xiao’s dirty face. ’She’s right,’ he thought grimly, his mature mind instantly mapping out the exact formations he had seen Ruler-types deploy hundreds of tis during the brutal apex of the evolutionary wars in his past life.
’The right fork is an absolute at grinder. If we had driven the heavy transport trucks down that narrow canal road, the horde would have boxed us in from both sides within minutes, stripping away our ability to maneuver.’
It frustrated him deeply, causing a bitter taste to rise in his throat, to admit that this girl’s absurd, infuriating streak of good luck was already operating at maximum capacity in this tiline.
In his past life, she had always been like this—constantly stumbling into the impossible, catching every single unbelievable break, and surviving scenarios that should have torn any normal human to shreds. She wasn’t calculating; she was just frustratingly, unbelievably lucky.
And now, that ridiculous luck was rewriting his own family’s survival trajectory. He kept his mouth firmly shut, however, refusing to emit a single sound that might expose his internal knowledge to his father.
Han Zheng didn’t hesitate any longer. He keyed his radio, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp, quiet command that brooked no delay. "Lieutenant Chen, alter deploynt vector imdiately. Take the left fork along the drainage ridge. Do not use your brake lights under any circumstances. All units, stay hyper-vigilant and cut your speed by half. We are sitting right on top of the monster’s periter boundary."
"Copy that, changing vector to the left now," Lieutenant Chen radioed back, his tone instantly turning dead serious as the lead truck swung its massive bulk onto the higher ridge path.
After that final directive, Han Zheng clamped his jaw shut and focused entirely on navigating the rough, uneven dirt path ahead through the green lens of his night-vision display. He didn’t speak another word. No one inside the SUV made a single sound.
The entire three-vehicle convoy beca a line of ghosts, moving through the freezing, pitch-black terrain like a row of silent shadows cutting through the frost. The heavy, muffled rumble of their modified engines felt dangerously loud in the dead night, but they kept moving, inching further and further away from the silent, dormant trap waiting in the trees to their right.
The suffocating tension stretched out for miles, wrapping around the occupants of the SUV like a heavy shroud. For hours, the silence remained absolute. The only movent within the front cabin was the scanning motion of Lin Qing’s eyes across the frozen fields and Han Zheng’s steady, precise micro-adjustnts of the steering wheel over the cracked earth.
After several hours of uninterrupted, agonizingly slow driving, the sheer psychological and physical exhaustion of the night finally began to take its toll on the passengers. Lin Qing unlatched her gaze from the passenger window, turning her head slightly to cast a quiet, monitoring look at the back seat to evaluate their human cargo.
The children had all completely given in to the crushing weight of the journey. Gu An was fast asleep, her head leaning heavily against the leather seat, her mouth slightly open as she breathed evenly.
Even Han Ye, despite the intense internal crisis torturing his mind and the burning hostility he harbored toward the new variable sitting next to him, had ultimately lost his battle against his five-year-old body’s strict biological limits.
His head was tilted back against the seat cushion, his small fra rising and falling in a deep, heavy slumber, his tightly clenched fists finally relaxing in his lap as exhaustion claid him. Beside Gu An, Su Xiao was curled into a tight, quiet ball around the fading warmth of the chemical hand warr, her eyes fast asleep, her breathing synchronized with the others.
Lin Qing turned back to the front, her face an unreadable mask in the dim, green dashboard light. They had successfully navigated the worst of the dark hours without a single active disturbance, completely bypassing the silent, waiting army standing in the frozen timber line.
Slowly, the heavy, deep black of the winter night began to fracture. The low sky gradually shifted into a pale, bruised shade of gray-blue as the rotation of the earth brought them toward dawn. It was already almost sunrise, the very first hints of a cold, weak morning light bleeding over the flat, empty horizon and illuminating the vast, dead plains.
As the pale light began to burn away the edges of the darkness and highlight the thick layer of frost coating the fields, Lin Qing’s eyes suddenly locked onto a strange silhouette rising in the distance. She froze instantly, her posture snapping from relaxed fatigue into a rigid, lethal stance. Her fingers tightened like iron bands around the fra of her rifle as she spotted sothing completely solid and unexpected breaking through the gray morning mist right ahead of their path.
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