Chapter 68: Counterattack

Chapter 68: Chapter 68: Counterattack

Once he was somewhere safe, Xiang Yi finally disengaged the thought acceleration.

Pain slammed into his skull like a wave.

"Agh..."

He couldn’t help pressing his hands against his head, a low, guttural groan escaping through gritted teeth.

He had pushed his thought speed to several hundred times its normal rate again, and the Spiritual Power burned through in that short window had left his brain screaming — an overloaded, white-hot agony that radiated from the inside out.

At the same time, the ironclad grip he’d held over his own musculature was fading fast. Every muscle that had been forcibly commandeered by his Spiritual Power was now crying out in protest, the pain sending wave after wave of uncontrollable trembling through his body.

The toll on his mind and body alike was absolutely brutal — a pain that came close to what he’d felt when he first made contact with the Black Stone.

But it beat dying.

The pain came hard and fast, and it left the same way.

The two days of rest Xiang Yi had gotten beforehand were doing their job.

The anguish in his head and muscles gradually subsided, leaving only the persistent throb where the bullet had caught him square in the back of the chest — enough to make every breath a little shallower than it should’ve been.

Through his Spiritual Power, he sent a silent, remote command to Shi Tie: stop moving the equipment and slip through the underground passage to the stairwell on the opposite side of the hospital.

He then picked up a small, scavenged strip of reflective metal and angled it to peek past the edge of his cover.

The man in the camouflage jacket was still crouched at the hospital entrance, gun leveled at the room where Xiang Yi was holed up.

More figures had gathered behind him, and even more were still closing in from a distance.

"Hey! Scavenger! Quit hiding — you’re already boxed in. Either you walk out nice and easy and we let you live, or you die in there. Your call."

Xiang Yi took slow, measured breaths to ease the pain radiating from his back, then shouted back, "What did I ever do to you people?"

"You’re standing here. That’s enough."

The one who’d spoken first answered flatly, then rose and advanced toward Xiang Yi’s position with his weapon trained forward.

Xiang Yi could make out an insignia on the sleeve of the man’s camouflage jacket — a shoulder patch that looked a lot like the local military’s markings.

"You’re military?"

"You figured it out. So why the hell aren’t you coming out?"

Xiang Yi had always held the military in high regard — but he never expected the first person on this world who might actually be a soldier to be someone like this...

One person doesn’t represent an entire institution, sure, but still...

He said nothing. He didn’t move.

He couldn’t go out. There was absolutely no way he was going out.

There was only one explanation for why these people had suddenly shown up here: they were the ones who had found the two pieces of equipment underground and sealed off the exits before he ever arrived.

Those three shots earlier hadn’t been warning shots. They were meant to kill him, plain and simple.

The guy in the camo had clearly seen him come up from below and figured there was a good chance he’d already spotted the equipment — so the cleanest solution was to put him in the ground and keep him quiet.

Abnormality Equipment was just as valuable as a Spiritual Device — both were synonymous with serious money. And unlike Spiritual Devices, Abnormality Equipment wasn’t something you could just buy, no matter how much you had.

The cost of killing someone out here in an abandoned district in the middle of nowhere was practically nothing.

Especially for someone with military connections.

That said, Xiang Yi noticed the rest of the group weren’t in uniform — just ordinary clothes, no different from any other Scavenger he’d run into before.

He couldn’t tell whether someone was impersonating military personnel, or whether an actual soldier had simply brought a crew of civilians along with him.

Either way, he needed to find a way out of this — or take every last one of them down.

Xiang Yi had just as much interest in the equipment downstairs as they did.

Those two pieces of equipment could cut the time he needed to earn enough money down dramatically — and one of them might even turn out to be the most critical piece of hardware he’d need to get off this planet.

If they weren’t interested in talking, then he had no problem playing dirty either.

If they thought silencing him would come without a price, he was perfectly happy to think the same way about them.

He pulled the Mind Pulse Generator from his pack. Ready to use at a moment’s notice.

The problem was that the Mind Pulse Generator’s Psychic Pulse range still didn’t reach far enough to cover the group gathered near the hospital entrance.

The people outside were being cautious too — none of them were rushing the stairwell side. They were spreading out, each one hunting for cover.

He needed to draw them closer.

Or at least buy some time.

Xiang Yi shrugged off the jacket he’d been wearing and hurled it out through the doorway.

A storm of gunfire erupted instantly. The jacket hadn’t even hit the floor before it was shredded to pieces.

The wall behind him shook violently under the relentless impact of the bullets, and the strip of reflective metal he’d been using to observe the outside was blasted clean out of his hand. Stray rounds could clip him at any second.

He dropped low immediately, making himself as small a target as possible and shielding his head with his arms.

There was no question about it — more than one person was shooting.

All that talk about letting him walk out alive, and they’d been lined up with their fingers on the triggers the whole damn time.

Out here, you couldn’t trust anyone. Ever.

When the gunfire finally died down outside—

Xiang Yi shouted toward the entrance, "What unit are you with? Who the hell taught you to open fire on civilians?"

"None of your goddamn business! You really think anyone out here is a civilian?"

Seeing that talking him out hadn’t worked, the group outside conferred briefly among themselves, then began to spread out and use the stone pillars in the hospital lobby as cover, steadily advancing toward the room where Xiang Yi was pinned down.

It looked like their full team had arrived by now. Fifteen people in total.

Two of them wore camouflage and had the look of actual military. The rest were indistinguishable from the Scavengers Xiang Yi had encountered before.

Every single one of them was armed. Any hope of breaking through the front or matching them gun for gun was dead in the water.

Show your face, and you’d get torn apart.

The ground floor of the hospital was fully enclosed, and the windows in Xiang Yi’s room had iron bars over them.

Given enough time he could force them open — but time was the one thing he didn’t have.

He was completely trapped.

Shi Tie, however, was already in position — having made his way through the hospital’s underground and come up on the stairwell on the far side, waiting on Xiang Yi’s next order.

"Open fire on those people! Kill every last one of them!"

The command went out through Xiang Yi’s Spiritual Power.

Shi Tie emerged halfway from the underground passage on the opposite side of the hospital.

He raised his rifle, took aim at the group whose full attention was locked on Xiang Yi, and pulled the trigger.

When Shi Tie pulled that trigger, he pulled it all the way — sweeping the muzzle across the crowd in a continuous spray.

He had no thoughts of his own. Only Xiang Yi’s orders.

Xiang Yi said open fire on the crowd, so he opened fire on the crowd. His immense physical strength gave him complete control over the weapon’s recoil, keeping it perfectly steady.

Every round found its mark.

Chaos erupted instantly.

"What the fuck! The Biological Sensor said there was only one person in there!"

Someone screamed it out from somewhere in the chaos, but no one answered.

The ones with fast enough reflexes didn’t have time to say anything — they’d already hit the deck or thrown themselves behind cover.

The ones who were too slow, who only just noticed Shi Tie and tried to return fire, were already dead before they could pull the trigger.

No drawn-out screaming. Just bodies on the floor.

Of the original fifteen, only nine were still moving — and of those nine, only seven were actually able to get back on their feet and make it behind cover.

There was no arguing with what firearms could do.