Chapter Ninety-One: The So-Called Decisiveness

Chapter Ninety-One: What Is Called Decisiveness

Running up the stairs all the way to the third floor, Liu Chang found that there were not many people on the upper level. It seemed to be the territory where the leaders of this black organization lived.

By the time he reached the top, he saw several people who had been sleeping on the sofas in the hall sit up just then, each with a weapon in hand, while another was trying to switch on a flashlight.

There were eight people in the hall altogether: two with guns and one with a flashlight. The flashlight was an ordinary large torch; the guns were pistols. Seeing this, Liu Chang did not hesitate for even a moment. He slipped straight into a corner of the hall, set his crossbow, and shot an arrow through the chest of the man holding the flashlight.

With a cry of agony, the newly lit flashlight rolled to the floor, casting a faint glow as it turned.

At the sight of this, several of the group’s leaders instinctively clustered together, standing back to back and looking all around them.

“Which organization are you from?” one of them shouted into the darkness.

But before he could finish, Liu Chang’s second bolt, unwilling to waste time, pierced his throat. The pistol in his hand fell to the ground at the same moment.

The first strike had caught them unprepared, with darkness all around and no clear view of the attacker. But the soft twang of the second bolt gave them a point of reference. The only remaining man with a gun fired four or five shots in the direction of the sound. In the spray of muzzle flash, the darkness only answered with the metallic ping-pang of bullets striking objects.

“Missed!” The shooter’s heart tightened, and his eyes darted around in fear.

At that very moment, a flash of cold light swept toward his throat.

The blade crossed his neck without the slightest obstruction. After killing him, it went on toward the person beside him.

It took Liu Chang only two cuts to finish off the remaining six men. Before the corpses had even hit the floor, he was already moving toward the one and only bedroom on the third floor of the villa.

Perhaps because killing these men had been too easy, too casual, Liu Chang also grew a little careless. He kicked the bedroom door open and prepared to go straight for the bandit leader. The kick was simple and direct, with no feint or hesitation; the door flew open at once. But what met his recklessness was a furious volley from a semi-automatic rifle.

Rat-tat-tat!

The boss of the black gang, who had been lying in wait by the door, was cunning enough not to come out. He had waited there all along for his prey to come to him, and the moment the door was kicked open he squeezed the trigger.

Although he could not see how many people were outside or how much firepower they had, he still sprayed bullets in blind, reckless bursts.

At the same time, after kicking open the door, Liu Chang saw the muzzle flash from the rifle at once. In that instant, his brain calculated with terrifying precision.

Though he could not see the bullets’ trajectories, in his mind there appeared, in an instant, a clear image of the paths those bullets would take seconds later. He calculated that before he could even begin to retreat from the doorway, the rifle would spit out a total of seventeen rounds. Based on the frequency of the shooter’s muscle tremors, six of those seventeen rounds would strike him. In that instant, he even calculated exactly where those six bullets would hit.

So, having worked all this out, he evaded in advance according to the bullets’ expected flight paths.

Lowering his head, bending his waist, driving off with his legs, he successfully dodged five of the six bullets before he had even left the doorway. Only the very first round, the hardest to avoid, skimmed along his side, grazing the ballistic vest and blazing by with astonishing heat.

With a thump, just as the seventeenth bullet finished firing and the eighteenth had barely left the barrel, Liu Chang leaped out of the zone covered by the barrage and returned to the corner of the corridor. He then touched his injured abdomen, where a searing pain spread through him.

“I was careless!”

After escaping the field of death, Liu Chang broke out in a cold sweat and profoundly understood a truth: in the age of firearms, even someone ten times weaker than you could still kill you with ease.

At that moment, he thought of the centipede-like creature that had been blown away by a soldier’s cannon blast. So long as your luck is good enough and your calculations are sharp enough, you can use a life of one to kill a creature ten times stronger. If not for the bulletproof vest he was wearing today, he would have been severely wounded for certain.

Having understood this, Liu Chang no longer dared to be careless. In an instant, he put himself on full alert.

After this brief storm, the people on the first floor also managed to rush up to the third. Seeing this, Liu Chang sprang upward and caught a protruding part of the ceiling with one hand, hanging there like a gecko.

“Where is he? Who attacked us? Boss, are you all right?” The people below came pouring in one after another, but they no longer had firearms. Each of them held flashlights and clubs, sweeping the darkness with their beams.

Liu Chang watched the probing paths of more than a dozen small flashlights and slowly moved along the ceiling to avoid the light. Under his precise calculations, not a single beam succeeded in landing on him.

After shifting into a dark corner, he braced himself between two walls with his feet, freeing both hands to string his crossbow again.

“Don’t be careless. The intruder isn’t dead. There shouldn’t be many of them, but their level of evolution is very—” The boss’s voice came again from the bedroom, but he would never finish that sentence.

Because the moment he uttered the first word, Liu Chang had already leaped down from the ceiling, slipped like a bolt through the crowd, and within the calculated path of movement closed in on the bedroom door again in just two seconds. Then, the instant he took the first step through the doorway, the already loaded bolt flew from the crossbow and, before the boss could react, pinned through his shoulder blade, sending his automatic rifle crashing to the floor.

The rifle, however, did not complete its own fall. Liu Chang, swift as the wind, caught it in midair. The rifle’s second magazine had already been loaded by the boss, and Liu Chang strode out carrying the semi-automatic rifle, unleashing a hail of gunfire into the hall.

Rat-tat-tat!

The power of firearms was fully revealed at this moment. Fierce bullets, laden with brutal force, surged into the crowd and instantly tore up a bloody storm.

Before the magazine had even emptied, the people who had just rushed up were thrown into complete disorder, scattering in all directions. One after another they clutched their heads and fled back down the stairs. No one dared to poke their head out and joke with their own life anymore.

Seeing this, Liu Chang also discarded the now-hot rifle, then reentered the only bedroom on the third floor.

Aside from the wounded, broad-shouldered man, there was no one else in the room.

The boss Liu Chang had shot with the crossbow was now pinned motionless to the wardrobe behind him by the bolt. The reason Liu Chang had not killed him was that he was worried he would not be able to find his own pistol.

“Where is my gun?” After searching the muscular man’s body, Liu Chang still could not find his pistol.

“You are...” The broad-shouldered man studied Liu Chang’s features carefully, a look of confusion appearing in his eyes. “Could you be the one from today...”

“Cut the nonsense. Where is my gun?” Liu Chang asked.

“If I tell you, will I still have a life?” The big man’s tone was filled with desperate will to survive.

“Tell me or not, you’re still going to die. You only get to choose whether it will be quick or not.” Liu Chang extinguished his hope in a single breath. As he spoke, he searched the room. What he feared most was that during the time just now, this man had already traded away his pistol.

Fortunately, it was already dusk, and he knew the odds of that were tiny. Sure enough, after searching for a moment, he found his pistol successfully in the man’s bedside table, along with several grenades.

“The gun and ammunition are all here. You didn’t damage them, did you? In that case, I won’t torture you.” Having found his gun, Liu Chang was in an excellent mood. After loading a round into the chamber, he aimed the giant pistol at the big man’s face. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to test this gun’s power. Thank you for giving me the chance!”

Bang!

The big man, seeing the muzzle of that massive pistol, had not even finished pleading for mercy before a huge bullet pierced straight through his skull.

A one-shot headshot.

Not a mere headshot in the ordinary sense, but a true, literal blow that blasted the head apart. In an instant, the man’s massive skull shattered into pieces, and with brain matter spraying everywhere, only fragments remained.

This was the first time Liu Chang had seen the giant pistol’s power head-on. One shot, and the burly man’s head was completely blown apart; even the wardrobe behind him was blasted through with a huge hole. That enormous wound, impossible to even identify as a wound anymore, made one wonder whether this was not the mark left by a firearm at all, but by a hand cannon rather than a pistol.

After taking a look at the pistol’s savage destructive force, Liu Chang put away this killing weapon again. Then he stood up, gathered his crossbow and bolts as well, and left two grenades in the room and the outer hall to wipe the place clean. After that, he jumped out the window, broke the bars apart, and returned to the outside world.

Boom! Boom!

The moment Liu Chang’s feet touched the ground, two explosions roared behind him. Without looking back at the flames, he left the area.

He ran all the way back to the residential complex where he lived. After burning the scarf that covered his head and the outer layer of clothing he had wrapped himself in, Liu Chang found an empty apartment, changed his clothes, and returned to Xiao Jing’s side.

The little girl had stayed in the room without sleeping. When she saw Liu Chang return, she immediately gave him the most comfortable carpeted spot in the corner.

“Big brother, was it dangerous? Were you scared?” After helping Liu Chang lie down, Xiao Jing wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“Not really,” Liu Chang said, shaking his head.

“But I feel like every time Big Brother kills someone, you always end up in a bad mood,” the little girl said, trying to hug Liu Chang’s head like an adult, but her short arms made it rather difficult.

“This time I don’t feel anything special. Maybe it’s because I killed bad people,” Liu Chang said, leaning against the little girl and staring blankly at the ceiling.

“But when Big Brother saved Xiao Jing, you also killed bad people, and I still remember how intense your emotions were,” the little girl said. Recalling the past, her face suddenly broke into a smile for some reason. “Still, if it hadn’t happened then, I never would have met you.”

“That’s true.” Liu Chang continued to stare blankly at the ceiling, silently feeling the steadiness of his heartbeat. “But why do I really feel nothing special this time?”

“Maybe Big Brother has already gotten used to it,” the little girl said, half understanding, half not.

“It’s not getting used to it. It’s more like... numbness,” Liu Chang said, closing his eyes.

The night passed without a word.

Early the next morning, the one who opened her eyes together with Liu Chang was a woman with an aquiline nose.

“Sir, the captain already said yesterday that we should set out as soon as possible!” Seeing her eyes open, the soldier who had been waiting beside her, afraid to wake her, finally spoke in anxious haste.