Chapter 76: The People’s Fury

Olivia leveled her assault rifle and fired controlled bursts, pouring all her pent-up rage into every bullet. Radiant Path soldiers dropped as rounds punched through their heads, blood spraying as they crumpled to the ground.

The battle lasted only five minutes.

Even when faced with a killing machine like Finn, the Radiant Path soldiers refused to flee. They charged him one after another, throwing their lives away.

That saved Finn the trouble of chasing them down. The slaughter continued without interruption.

The last Radiant Path soldier rushed at Finn with despair written across his face, clutching a mortar shell in an attempt to take Finn down with him.

Finn did not even glance at him, treating him as if he were invisible. Closing in behind Finn, the soldier struck the mortar shell’s primer with the butt of his pistol.

The mortar shell detonated with a thunderous boom.

The soldier was swallowed by the blast and torn to pieces, shrapnel and chunks of flesh flying in every direction. Finn merely brushed a piece of bloody pulp off his shoulder and walked away as though nothing had happened.

After wiping out the forces outside Black Mountain, Finn and Olivia headed into the city. Before long, they encountered a group of Radiant Path soldiers rushing over as reinforcements.

Fighting broke out at once.

Grenades, bullets, and rockets rained down on them. Finn raised a Profound Energy shield and stopped the entire barrage, while Olivia picked up a light machine gun and mowed down every last soldier in a burst of automatic fire.

Finn was not a bloodthirsty man. He was even-tempered and rather lazy, preferring not to do anything he could avoid. Mopping up rank-and-file soldiers was repetitive busywork that created nothing of value, so he was perfectly happy to leave it to his maid.

They crossed streets choked with smoke and found the fighting ahead already in full swing. Black Mountain’s Refuge Security Force and local residents had begun battling the Holy Army of Deliverance forces stationed there by the Radiant Path. Gunfire thundered through the city, punctuated by one explosion after another.

Finn kicked apart the stone barricade blocking the street and plunged into the fighting, with Olivia close behind him...

Roughly half an hour later, the remaining Radiant Path soldiers had been wiped out.

The battered district was riddled with bullet holes. Severed limbs and mangled corpses lay scattered across the ground, while the stench of blood mingled with the acrid smoke of gunpowder.

Against all expectations, Black Mountain had managed to capture several prisoners.

Among them was High Priest Frank Griffin.

He was escorted to the city square, where Olivia asked the acting city lord to summon the residents. She had something important to announce.

High Priest Griffin held his head high and insisted on remaining on his feet, unlike the other prisoners, who knelt. He swept a contemptuous gaze across the surrounding crowd.

“So this is how Black Mountain treats its benefactors. We came here out of kindness to save you—”

“Shut up!” Olivia roared.

The people around her exchanged startled glances, unable to understand why she was so furious.

Acting City Lord Bell let out a long sigh.

“High Priest, if you and the Radiant Path agree to leave us in peace, we’ll release you and the others. We never wanted it to come to this.”

There was unmistakable guilt in Bell’s voice.

After the nuclear explosion, the Radiant Path had been the first faction to send a convoy to aid the stricken people of Black Mountain. Many residents remained grateful to them, and some had even been willing to join the Radiant Path.

High Priest Griffin sensed an opportunity to escape. Hearing the hesitation in Bell’s voice, he quickly changed his tone.

“If you allow my fellow believers and me to leave, I will do my best to report to the Holy Pontiff that this was an unnecessary conflict. From this day forward, as long as you willingly join the divine kingdom, the Radiant Path will leave you in peace.”

Many people in the crowd began murmuring among themselves. Some suggested releasing the high priest as a gesture of goodwill and avoiding any further conflict with the Radiant Path.

Others even started blaming Finn. They claimed that an outsider like him had caused the whole mess by slaughtering the Holy Army of Deliverance outside the city for no reason. That, in turn, had led to a misunderstanding between the Radiant Path soldiers inside the city and the Refuge Security Force, sparking the battle.

Olivia’s face darkened as she listened to the murmurs around her, especially when she heard people quietly slandering Finn.

She fired a shot into the air and shouted, “With Finn’s help, I caught a few of the animals responsible. Now you can see them for yourselves!”

The square fell silent.

Eleven-year-old Penny Peters drove an off-road vehicle into the square. Two indigenous tribespeople sat inside: Watcher Redhorn and Mother Redhorn.

In the open cargo bed were four bound prisoners—the last four surviving members of the Wilderness Rhino caravan.

Their captain had a wooden stick clenched between his teeth. He had not drunk a single drop of water in two days and two nights. His hair was tangled, and his eyes were unfocused.

Someone sharp-eyed quickly recognized him and cried out in delight, “They caught the culprit! Olivia brought back the Wilderness Rhino caravan!”

Olivia yanked the captain out of the vehicle and dragged him in front of High Priest Griffin.

“High Priest, do you recognize this man?”

High Priest Griffin let out a startled cry. His earlier arrogance vanished in an instant. Shocked disbelief flashed across his face, followed by despair and panic; even his brows drooped.

Without warning, he thrust a hand into his pocket, pulled out a tiny pistol, and aimed it at the caravan captain’s head.

The high priest moved fast, but Olivia was faster.

She caught his arm and twisted hard. His shot went wide, the bullet whistling past the captain’s ear without killing him.

The surrounding crowd broke into an uproar. Anyone paying attention could tell that something was wrong.

Several mutant warriors confiscated the high priest’s pistol, tied him up, and held him securely.

“How could you let yourself be captured?” High Priest Griffin snarled at the captain, venom filling his eyes. “You should’ve shot yourself before they took you alive!”

“Olivia, what exactly is going on?” Acting City Lord Bell asked, utterly confused.

Olivia took a deep breath and forced down her fury. She looked around at everyone gathered in the square and called out loudly.

“The people who sabotaged the reactor and destroyed Black Mountain were the Radiant Path! They disguised themselves as the Wilderness Rhino caravan and tricked us into buying that nuclear reactor. Then they deliberately forced it into a catastrophic overload, causing it to explode!”

The revelation struck like a boulder crashing into a still lake, sending waves of shock surging through the square.

The residents were stunned. Voices immediately rose from every direction.

“Olivia! Is that true?”

“It has to be! Why else would the high priest have tried to kill the captain just now?”

“Where’s the proof? Did the Wilderness Rhino caravan confess? Question them!”

Olivia forced down her rage and explained the entire sequence of events from beginning to end. Watcher and Mother stepped forward as witnesses as well.

The two of them had not needed to come, but Mother could no longer stand the Radiant Path’s atrocities. She had willingly accompanied Finn and Olivia to Black Mountain to expose the Radiant Path for what it truly was. Watcher had come along to protect the elderly woman.

In less than five minutes, everyone in the square had learned the truth.

The acting city lord immediately announced the news across Black Mountain through the city’s wired loudspeaker network.

Half of Black Mountain had been destroyed in the nuclear explosion.

Tens of thousands had died.

And it had all been a Radiant Path conspiracy.

More and more residents rushed to the square, packing it until the crowd became a sea of people. Their fury swelled like an active volcano rumbling on the brink of eruption.

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Dear readers,

I’m very sorry, but since the novel has not performed as well as I had hoped, I will be changing the update schedule to four chapters per week.

The truth is, I’m not a particularly fast writer. If I update every day, I will burn through my backlog very quickly. As you can see, I do not pad my chapters with filler. Every chapter moves the story forward.

To be honest, I started writing novels in 2019. It is now 2026, and the total amount of money I have earned from writing fiction is US$29.53, based on today’s exchange rate.

I am not saying this because I plan to start charging you. I simply wanted to share some of my personal thoughts.

Of course, I admit that I do not update as frequently as many other writers in this field. In particular, there was a period of nearly two years when my life went through an enormous upheaval. I was also severely stuck on the volume I was writing at the time, and I stopped writing altogether for almost two years.

My first novel took me three years to write and another year to revise. It earned me nothing. Of course, I was not writing full-time.

My second novel—the one I am currently writing—was removed from its original platform because of its erotic content. It was like a movie being pulled from theaters during its initial release. The damage to its prospects was enormous.

But I still like this novel very much, so I decided to keep writing it.

I am grateful for the development of AI, which has given me an opportunity to cross cultural and linguistic barriers and share my stories with readers from other countries.

I feel that today’s web fiction has gone down several misguided paths, and I do not agree with those trends. That is why I decided to turn toward English-speaking readers.

What kinds of misguided paths am I talking about? I’ll mention a few off the top of my head.

For example, the protagonist is never allowed to suffer a setback. Even if they do, they must take revenge within the next two or three chapters. This is especially true for an unknown author like me: readers have even less patience to wait ten or twenty chapters before the protagonist finally gets even.

And yet, in Harry Potter, Snape begins causing trouble for the protagonist almost immediately and does not die until the very end of the series.

Another example is extreme self-interest. The protagonist is expected to claim every possible benefit for themselves. If they share even a small portion of the rewards with a supporting character, some readers consider it a fatal flaw.

Then there is the obsessive demand for “purity” whenever a female character has romantic feelings for the protagonist. Even something as harmless as her shaking hands with another character may be treated as NTR.

This type of reader is especially common among fans of harem web novels. My God, you cannot impose impossibly strict standards while also complaining that fewer and fewer harem novels are being written.

The protagonist is also not allowed to make foolish decisions, hesitate, lack confidence, show weakness, or feel compassion. In other words, he must either be an alpha male or a sigma male.

You might ask, “Where is the character arc?”

Sorry—there isn’t one.

Apart from becoming more powerful, the protagonist must begin the story with his mind and spirit already at the maximum level.

Western stories are very fond of portraying middle-aged men going through existential crises. It may be a cliché, but it is still better than refusing to explore such struggles at all.

The protagonist is also not allowed to be suppressed, humiliated, or toyed with. As a counterexample, Kaito Kid, the famous character from Detective Conan, has outwitted and toyed with Conan many times.

There is also the belief that complicated plots should not be written. I remember someone once saying that if a web novel makes its readers think, then the author has already made a mistake.

I do not agree with that at all.

Another example is the relentless demand for constant updates, which forces authors to write large amounts of meaningless filler and recycle formulaic plotlines simply to keep up with the required schedule.

There is also the increasingly severe censorship, along with the ever-growing list of subjects that writers are no longer allowed to touch.

Web novels are also becoming more and more like short-form videos. But if that is the goal, why wouldn’t I simply watch short videos instead?

All of these things make it harder to create stories with depth—stories that can withstand the test of time.

Some people might say, “You take yourself far too seriously. Web novels are cheap entertainment. You are not some great literary author. Your only goal should be to satisfy your readers. You make fast food; you are not the chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant.”

But here is what I want to say:

If someone spends their entire youth making fast food, that does not mean they will automatically become the chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant when they reach their thirties or forties. By then, their way of thinking may already have become fixed.

What is even sadder is that, by that point, they may discover that they can no longer make good fast food either. They are no longer young. They cannot keep up with changing trends, and they cannot adapt to whatever flavor of fast food has become popular.

That would be a very tragic life.

I could continue talking about this for three days and three nights and still not finish.

In any case, I decided to turn toward English-speaking readers.

Unfortunately, the cultural and linguistic barriers do not seem as easy to overcome as I once imagined.

Forget it. I’ll stop here.

I don’t know what I should do in the future either.