Chapter 30: The Hunt

The force of the head-on collision was not to be underestimated; it brought the vehicle to an abrupt, jarring halt. John was thrown forward during the emergency braking, his chest-mounted ballistic plate making intimate contact with the steering wheel. Scarlett’s orders were always reckless, but John had grown accustomed to her aggressive style, which was the only reason he could serve as her partner. He looked up to find the hood of the car deeply buckled and the right headlight shattered.

"I hit something."

"That just means I heard right. That freak was running right here, and you definitely sent it flying!"

Scarlett pivoted the spotlight on the truck bed, aiming it at the upper section of the stairs that had been smashed by the impact. The light illuminated a figure clutching its face.

"Hey, you mud-caked freak up there! This is our target, not yours. Get down here immediately!"

The figure on the stairs was, of course, Shi Rang. He had just scavenged a gun from the still-warm corpse on the ground and was clutching it, debating whether to keep it as evidence, when everything happened in a flash. The vehicle that had smashed into the structure felt as if it had struck him directly in the head, plunging him into instant confusion. He stood dazed, staring at the base of the stairs that had been there only moments before, failing to notice that he was standing near the edge of the collapse and that the steps beneath his feet were spider-webbed with cracks.

If the thing running through the factory earlier was an avenger or a criminal caught in a turf war, then who were these new arrivals? What was happening to the world?

Before he could process his thoughts, the spotlight hit him square in the face, blinding him. The roar of the impact left his ears ringing, and he couldn't make out a single word of Scarlett’s shouting. As the ringing in his ears subsided slightly, the sound of mechanical rotation accelerated, followed by a gruff shout.

"Jump! Kid, jump down!"

Immediately, a torrent of bullets, streaked with tracers, erupted from the light source. If there was one thing Shi Rang needed right then, it was a clear order. Amidst the dense barrage, he tilted his body forward in a panic, falling directly into a pair of arms with astonishing strength. The man was easily two meters tall, clad in body armor. After setting Shi Rang on the ground, he flipped down what appeared to be night-vision goggles from his helmet to track the bullet impacts.

Shi Rang gripped the heavily scraped exterior of the vehicle, for a moment suspecting he was hallucinating. No matter how he looked at it, the woman on the truck bed, mounted behind a heavy machine gun and using tracers and a spotlight to calibrate her fire, was strafing the dark second floor of the factory.

The factory wall was shredded by the storm of bullets, opening a direct view to the night sky. As the hail of lead swept across, it carved a jagged, horizontal gash through the masonry. The already precarious factory began to tremble; suspended walkways and rooms collapsed one after another, raining down bricks and dust. The large man, ignoring Shi Rang who was cowering with his hands over his ears, stepped into the driver’s seat and, gripping the frame, reversed the vehicle away.

Shi Rang scrambled after the headlights, head tucked low, running for his life.

Almost instantly, the factory groaned and collapsed under the brutal destruction. The falling debris kicked up a shockwave; Scarlett and John ducked behind the vehicle for cover, but Shi Rang was blown flat onto the ground. Scarlett stopped firing, letting the red-hot barrel spin freely before turning off the spotlight and flipping up her visor to peer into the smoke and dust.

The area was too open; limited light would only restrict her vision now. The object she was hunting had transformed from a high-speed somnambulist into a monster with doubled speed and durability. She was certain her target had died—it still radiated heat, but it was dead—yet its anomalous properties had mutated. That was usually how it went. Anomalous traits were not changed or transferred by consciousness, but while the living could be prevented from harming others, the dead were beyond control.

She had predicted the movement during her barrage, but the thing had absorbed the majority of the bullets, persistently circling the factory to reach the second floor via a different staircase just to catch the "rookie." Its movement pattern matched what she had observed earlier.

She glanced at the rookie, who had climbed back up and was retreating alongside the vehicle. Although he was bleeding from his nose and mouth, he didn't seem seriously injured. He wasn't running aimlessly, he remained relatively calm, and he hadn't dropped his weapon. For a civilian hunter, his composure was decent. Given the dirt on him and his scent, he had likely been lurking in the vicinity for a while.

He was quite brave, really. No combat equipment, no logistics support, coming to handle a threat entity of this level with nothing but a small "water pistol." If he hadn't run into her, he wouldn't even know how he’d died.

"It’s still active," John said, stopping the car. "That wasn't enough."

"Keep observing."

Scarlett glanced at the rookie again, expertly changing the ammunition belt while quickly analyzing the situation. In its sleepwalking phase, the target tracked those it had recently encountered, one by one, until they were dead. Groups of targets would lure it into skipping the sequence to kill the cluster first, but that condition wasn't met here.

What a pity. The dead don't come back. What was even more unfortunate was that the target hadn't been killed completely. With the factory collapsed, the only remaining target was the rookie by the car. Scarlett didn't connect the man by the car to the new reporter she’d met at the diner a few days ago; their appearances and demeanors were too different. The "rookie" was now essentially a mud-caked statue—his face was unrecognizable—and she prioritized jurisdiction over personal identity anyway.

"It’s about to crawl out. Ten seconds," John reported.

Scarlett acknowledged him. At its previous speed, it would catch the rookie within a single breath of emerging from the ruins. Once the rookie was dead, she could have John try to kite it with the car, but the vehicle had taken damage from the wall and the entity, and she couldn't guarantee it would outrun a creature that might accelerate beyond two hundred miles per hour. Support was out of the question; by the time an assessment team arrived, they would only be collecting their corpses.

Their black suits were excellent tactical gear, but they were designed to stop bullets, not to grapple with monsters. How do you make a high-speed target stand still and take a beating? Scarlett’s eyes darted toward the road they had come from. The path John had taken was riddled with deep pits and craters, which had already trapped their wheels once.

"John!" Scarlett slammed her fist against the machine gun mount. "Throw him in!"

Shi Rang, still standing by the car, felt his head ringing. He hadn't broken down—not because he was calm, but because the night’s events had far exceeded his capacity to process them; he was nearly catatonic. It wasn't until John hoisted him up like a chicken under his arm that he realized the woman was talking about him.

"Let go! Put me down, let—"

Shi Rang, who had only recently crawled out of a pit himself, was carried and forcibly tossed into another. He landed on his backside, hitting the mud at the bottom of the crater, barely able to rise. The fear of being buried alive surged back, the shadow of death looming before him. He scraped at the pit walls with his remaining strength, struggling to stand, and began to shout.

But the roar of the heavy machine gun drowned out his cries. He watched the tracer rounds streak over the top of the pit, swaying left and right for some reason, moving back and forth like someone whipping a donkey walking in a circle, or perhaps suppressing an entire open field. The gunfire was so dense it sounded omnipresent; heaven only knew how many people were shooting.

Occasionally, scorching shell casings would fall from above, forcing him to curl into a ball and cover his head. He suspected he had encountered lunatics. Lunatics with heavy firepower!