Chapter 53: The Mantis Stalks The Cicada, Unaware of The Oriole Behind
Three hours prior, Lin Han had driven out from Base No. 27 toward Chen Town, flanked by a handful of his most capable subordinates.
Upon entering the municipal grid, he purposefully navigated the most remote, low-visibility backroads, deploying only Ah Hu to keep tabs on the main thoroughfare.
When a thoroughly rattled Ah Hu rushed back to report that a massive horde of advanced zombies was blocking the lane ahead, Lin Han didn’t bat an eye. He had anticipated every bit of it.
He knew Xie Zetian and Xie Hao would be traveling in a vanguard alongside a man carrying a flock of mutant birds. He knew the horde had established a lethal ambush along the city borders, and he knew those monsters harbored the exact same strategic goal as him.
If anyone asked Lin Han whether he feared zombies that had evolved to possess human-tier cognitive intelligence, the honest answer was yes—yet he harbored an unyielding, almost delusional level of confidence. As a chosen warrior favored by the doomsday heavens, he believed no crisis could truly break him.
“Just hold your position and wait,” Lin Han ordered, a sinister grin breaking across his face.
Per Wan Youzhi’s flawless precognitive blueprint, Xie Zetian’s vanguard would eventually break free from the primary zombie encirclement and retreat straight into this exact narrow alleyway.
By the time they fractured the siege and crossed his path, their elemental reserves would be entirely depleted, rendering them completely defenseless. He could effortlessly sit back, relax, and reap the full corporate benefits of their hard labor.
Directly beneath the chassis of Lin Han’s idling tactical transport, a petite figure was currently dragging herself through the snow, tightly gripping a gleaming silver kitchen knife.
Right as Lin Han prepared to close his eyes and comfortably pass the minutes until Xie Zetian fell into his trap, all four of his reinforced tires violently exploded in rapid succession. The heavy transport vehicle plummeted hard against the asphalt. A horrified Lin Han scrambled to look out the window, only to find Song Yuqing standing right outside the frame, casually waving her kitchen knife at him with a thoroughly petty, mocking smirk.
“What the hell?! Drop her! Drag her down!” Lin Han bellowed, the veins across his neck bulging as his saliva splattered against the dashboard.
His mercenaries frantically threw their doors open, charging out to pin Song Yuqing down, but a colossal, towering giant panda suddenly stepped out from the shadows, completely blocking the alleyway.
Ah Hu, who had pushed his speed to the absolute limit to lead the charge, crashed face-first directly into the panda’s heavy calf muscle.
Hehe. Time to play.
Operating on a fully expanded, massive biological framework, Little Meat Bun gracefully extended his heavy paws, casually swatting the tiny mercenaries back and forth as if they were a tangled ball of yarn.
Ah Hu rolled over and over across the freezing pavement. Forcing down the intense wave of motion sickness churning in his stomach, he focused his reserves and launched a massive stream of fire straight at the beast.
The attack was entirely useless. Little Meat Bun happily opened his jaws, greedily swallowing Ah Hu’s fire dragon whole, before letting out a massive sneeze that completely blanketed the mercenary in thick saliva.
Ah Hu was left drenched from head to toe. Fortunately, the bear’s saliva didn’t carry a foul odor; otherwise, the guard would have suffocated on the spot.
The rest of Lin Han’s vanguard fared no better. Not a single mercenary could locate a tactical window to slip past the giant panda’s heavy grasp.
Witnessing his entire security detail collapse, Lin Han abandoned his cautious approach. A swirling black hole violently manifested in the palm of his hand. Aiming dead center at the giant panda, he launched the spatial distortion with immense force.
The black hole spun rapidly, expanding exponentially in mid-air until it completely blanketed the margins of the narrow alley. Lin Han’s spatial capabilities had clearly undergone a massive evolution over the past few days; it was painfully easy to deduce just how many high-tier crystal cores he had ruthlessly consumed to force that density of power.
Right at that exact millisecond, Gaha vaulted down from the roof line above, landing squarely on top of the ruined transport vehicle with a thunderous clang. Before Lin Han could even process the vibration, the zombie girl lunged forward, hoisted his entire body into the air by the collar, and violently threw him straight toward his own spinning black hole like a heavy bowling ball.
Lin Han flailed frantically, his arms and legs thrashing wildly through the air currents as he desperately fought to break free from the black hole’s absolute gravitational pull, looking thoroughly ridiculous.
Watching their supreme commander flying backward into his own spatial anomaly, the remaining mercenaries froze, completely forgetting about the physical beatdown they were receiving from the panda. The physical pain was nothing. Their prime corporate benefactor was about to be erased, their livelihoods were shattered, and their future was looking entirely bleak.
Song Yuqing stepped out from the shadow of Little Meat Bun’s flank, casually applauding the performance. While she had been navigating the sector to locate an intact electronics storefront, her radar had accidentally flagged Ah Hu’s suspicious, stealthy behavior, and she had quietly trailed his silhouette.
Ah Hu had been intensely stalking Xie Zetian’s vanguard, while Song Yuqing standardly stalked Ah Hu.
It was the textbook definition of a doomsday fable: the mantis confidently stalks the cicada, entirely oblivious to the apex oriole anchoring its rear flank.
“You really possess a remarkable talent for tracking detours, man. You map out a phenomenal volume of shortcuts,” Song Yuqing smiled, flashing a thumbs-up at Ah Hu, whose face was currently a heavily bruised mess. If she hadn’t shadow-tracked his movements, she would have remained entirely oblivious to the fact that Xie Hao, Nanjiao, and the others had been pinned down by a massive siege. Better yet, by leveraging Ah Hu’s pathing, she had discovered an entire network of hidden municipal shortcuts. It was a literal miracle that she had managed to intercept the vanguard so quickly given how long ago they had cleared Bell Street.
Ah Hu could only weep silent tears of pure defeat.
Right at the exact fraction of a second before the spatial void could completely consume Lin Han, a grotesque, half-human, half-zombie abomination violently burst from the shadows. Reaching out with a mutated, skeletal arm, the monster forcefully yanked Lin Han clean out of the black hole’s crushing gravity field.
Having barely cheated absolute death, Lin Han looked up at the terrifying, asymmetrical features of his savior, and his heart instantly plummeted right back into a deep, freezing sea of dread.
What on earth is happening to this city?!
Lin Han scrambled to scramble to his feet, but the creature callously pinned his torso against the freezing asphalt, trapping him flat against the pavement.
He simply couldn’t process the fact that such a hideously deformed, stomach-turning entity could actively exist on the planet, and his mind was completely blank as to its origin.
Seeing that the tactical outcome was entirely set in stone and Lin Han possessed zero avenues for a comeback, Little Meat Bun released the remaining mercenaries. Shrinking his biological framework back to his standard mascot dimensions, he trotted happily over to Song Yuqing’s side, playfully shaking his heavy head.
I came out to join the fun too!
Song Yuqing’s perimeter was already densely packed with people. The Xie brothers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their arms tightly crossed, staring down at the pinned dictator with their heads held exceptionally high. Nearby, Nanjiao was playfully tapping against Gaha’s open palm, boisterously praising her raw, mechanical lifting capacity. Chen She and his companions stood silently behind the store manager’s shoulders, completely paralyzed by the sheer absurdity of the sequence unfolding before their eyes.
A mythical panda capable of modifying its physical volume at will, a localized spatial black hole engineered to swallow human flesh, and a half-human, half-undead hybrid operating as a rogue combatant…
Every single element was completely unheard of in the outer bases.
Chen She couldn’t contain his internal excitement, his pupils flashing with intense fascination. In stark contrast, the low-tier adult psychics flanking him looked completely terrified, their knees shaking.
To fully map out the logistics, the timeline had to be rolled back by exactly thirty minutes.
Song Yuqing had been shadow-tracking Ah Hu when her line of sight cleared the corner, revealing the massive horde of hyper-velocity zombies completely encircling Nanjiao’s vanguard. Without a second of hesitation, she had authorized Little Meat Bun and Gaha to deploy and break the perimeter.
Gaha had unleashed the full force of her advanced telepathic aura to challenge the cognitive authority of the dominant Kings, successfully siphoning the low- and mid-tier walkers away from the human line. Little Meat Bun had utilized the spatial distraction to launch a brutal, crushing flank assault, leaving the two Golden-Eyed Zombie Kings completely exhausted and outmatched. Realizing their tactical disadvantage, the dominant variants had promptly ordered a full evacuation, melting back into the shadows.
While Song Yuqing had been deeply anxious for her clients’ safety, Ah Hu’s highly suspicious behavior had triggered an even greater level of executive concern. She had briefly harbored a dark theory that the zombie ambush had been covertly engineered through a secret collusion between Lin Han and the two Golden-Eyed variants.
Consequently, she had chosen to continuously shadow the guard’s pathing until he led them straight to this narrow alleyway, exposing Lin Han’s armored transport.
An absolute conspiracy! Song Yuqing’s sharp instincts had screamed that the spatial user was orchestrating a predatory ambush.
She had covertly crept up to the cabin door, dropping into a low squat to mask her visual silhouette, and intensely pricked her ears to audit the internal conversation.
Song Yuqing hadn’t expected to harvest a high fidelity of data, but the armored modification on the transport proved to be incredibly low-grade, providing remarkably poor acoustic insulation. She had effortlessly intercepted the explicit command: “Just hold your position and wait.”
Confirmed. A total ambush.
For the absolute first time since the night of the meteorites, Song Yuqing resolved to abandon her defensive posture and launch a proactive strike.
Naturally, she hadn’t chosen to engage on a blind whim. Out of the corner of her eye, she had caught sight of Xie Hao and the rest of the vanguard stealthily repositioning themselves directly outside the mouth of the alleyway, completely ready to anchor her perimeter.
“Chen Ke, pick up your cargo and clear the sector immediately,” Song Yuqing called out, directing the statement toward the half-zombie.
Hearing the name Chen Ke, Lin Han’s pupils violently dilated. He stared up at the grotesque abomination pinning his chest, his mind utterly refusing to process the data.
When the creature had first broken cover, he had merely felt a faint, eerie sense of familiarity radiating from its asymmetrical profile, but he had never in his wildest dreams imagined that this hideously deformed monster was none other than his long-lost, elite lieutenant.
“Chen Ke?! Let me up! Stand down!” Lin Han gasped, assuming that since it was his old subordinate holding the line, he still possessed a viable avenue to negotiate his survival.
Unfortunately for his ego, his math was catastrophically wrong.
Chen Ke fixed her bloodshot, milky eye dead onto his face.
“I have dragged myself through absolute, literal hell for weeks,” she rasped, her voice dripping with venom. “The single thing that preserved my sanity was the burning desire to catch you in a corner and slowly dismantle your flesh.”
Her rotting hand wrapped tightly around Lin Han’s throat, cutting off his oxygen.
“Hiss… I have zero intentions of granting you a quick, merciful execution. I am going to systematically force your system to experience every single tier of agonizing torture you callously inflicted on my life…” she whispered slowly, enunciating every syllable with chilling precision.
Chen Ke aggressively hoisted Lin Han upward by his winter collar with a single hand, marching his dangling frame straight toward Song Yuqing.
“You have my gratitude for honoring the corporate terms of our contract,” the half-zombie noted.
“Think nothing of it,” Song Yuqing replied smoothly, though she privately recognized she was receiving credit for absolute coincidence. She had completely forgotten about the loose agreement they had mapped out back at the concrete butcher’s stalls; today’s intersection of timelines was pure, unadulterated luck.
Chen Ke tightly secured her grip on Lin Han, turning on her heel to vanish down the end of the dark alleyway within a matter of moments.
Nanjiao whirled around to face the store manager, his mind completely scrambled by the logistics. “How on earth did you calculate Lin Han’s exact ambush coordinates? And when exactly did you establish a communication line to route Chen Ke to our location?”
