Global Evolution

by Steffen Schmidt

  The path they took was absolutely safe since Zhuo’s formation had already marched through this same route. The special force must have expelled the majority of the predators from this area, clearing out even their hideouts, and thus, Qing Shui’s regiment could only focus their energy on marching on the flat road.

  The journey was full of peace and tranquility, the regiment almost reaching their destination in three hours.

  “Stop,” Qing Shui ordered as he strode to the peak of a slope. “We’re less than ten kilometers from Zhuo’s formation, so there’s a chance we might expose ourselves to them early if we get too close.”

  “You’re right, although we are protected by the red fog, we don’t know if he secretly stationed some other EMs that we haven’t met in the surroundings. The distance is relatively safe here,” the fine man agreed, nodding at Qing Shui.

  “Thanks. Wang, can you roughly estimate their location and how they’re deployed for me?”

  Gesturing for the regiment to move up the slope, Qing Shui handed a small sketch book to the fine man. He then ordered the soldiers who toted the mortar and artillery components to assemble the weapons on the spot.

  Most of the soldiers busied themselves with the assembling. Because transportation tools were mostly limited by the energy supply and the difficulties of operating with limited vision, they could only transport things by manual labour.

  Tens of soldiers would carry all the components for a single artillery, and there were more than 15 of them brought. First, the soldiers who had the parts of the same artillery gathered together and took off their backpacks holding the parts. Then, five of the soldiers from each group would dominate the assembling process as they were trained in the craft.

  While the soldiers were busy, Qing Shui joined the crowd and arranged some positionings. He and some other officers then distributed the special respirators to every soldier on the field.

  The assembling process was long and complicated. It took almost two hours for the artilleries and mortars to be assembled even with the effort of a thousand soldiers.

  At the same time, Qing Shui walked to the center of the regiment, waving his hand to a squad that bore boxes of custom bombs.

  Qing Shui scanned the surroundings and made sure the preparations were done. He then rejoined Chang and the others, looking at Zhizhi.

  “They’re still there, aren’t they?”

  “They are. I can smell the odour of humans and the scent of the blood from over there.” Zhizhi raised her head, eyes closed. Her nose wings twitched as she said,.”But all I can be sure about is that they haven’t left yet. The scents are mixing altogether, I can’t distinguish individuals until we get closer.”

  “No worries.” Qing Shui gave her a knowing look that affirmed her output. Then he asked Chang, “What do you think? Can you go over there to check out what is happened there for me? Your vision and Jing’s perception make for the best combination, and we need to know more about where Zhuo is at this moment.”

  “Sure.” Chang stood up from the ground, dusting off the mud from his pants.

  “Be safe, I only want to know how far they are from us and their general location. It doesn’t need to be a detailed report of what they are doing exactly.” Seeing Chang obediently submitting to his request, Qing Shui hesitated. He reached to his pocket and took out a syringe with some kind of liquid inside, then said, “Take this. Inject it when you can no longer escape from danger.”

  “What is this?” Chang held up the syringe, but he still couldn’t see what exactly was inside.

  “This is the product of my recent research project. It’ll empower you.” Qing Shui’s expression changed. He seemed to be pained mentally. “But it hasn’t passed the human subject test yet. Even I don’t know what side effects it might have. Don’t use it until the very last minute. I’m afraid of the consequences, that you might become one of those soldiers who were injected with the red fog concentrate, gaining enhanced strength for a few days before death arrived.”

  “Got it.” Chang placed the syringe into his shirt’s pocket and patted it twice. He then lifted Jing up into his arms and ran down the slope. “I will keep myself away from them!”

  Chang bolted down before his voice dropped. The wind brushed his hair as he ran toward the direction Zhizhi had pointed to.

  It was only less than 10 kilometers, which wasn’t far to Chang at all. In fact, he could sprint over one kilometer in ninety seconds in the jungle. Thus, when Jing sensed the presence of Zhuo’s army, he had been traveling for only ten minutes.

  His arms tightened to ensure Jing wouldn’t fall off from his arms. He didn’t go any closer but patrolled around the vague shadows of Zhuo’s regiments. He veered back to Qing Shui after he confirmed their locations.

  The whole information collection was smooth.

  He noticed that Zhuo’s soldiers were celebrating—their thirteen-hour long battle with the Yessie had just ended, and it happened to match with Qing Shui’s arrival. The coincidence made Chang suspect that Qing Shui might have arranged this.

  This was the time when their enemies had suffered heavy casualties, and those still alive lied back and relaxed. It was the perfect timing to have the greatest impact on Zhuo’s force.

  However, Chang knew he’ll never find out how Qing Shui had calculated the length of the battle, nor how he could estimate Yessie’s endurance even without having seen it before.

  Not that any of these puzzles were his business

  Another ten minutes passed and Chang returned with the locations. He pinpointed them on Wang’s map, and that was the start of the first wave of Qing Shui’s long-awaited attack.

  “Calibrate to the direction of 11 o’clock! Load the bacteria bomb!”

  Chapter 105: Humans and Power

  “Fire!”

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  Fifteen streams of lights sprang high up into the sky under Qing Shui’s command. Along with the deafening thuds, the bombs began to descend at the area that Chang had pinpointed on the map.

  The bombs accelerated and descended one by one, their fire tails illuminating the fog before drowning in the horizon. Chang absently stared at the vanishing fire tails from behind the special respirator that covered his face—they called it an anti-bacteria respirator now. He hunkered down, Jing wrapped in his arms.

  The red fog disguised what was was happening that far away, so he could only imagine the aftermath on the banks of the Yellow River.

  Without a doubt, the human soldiers would die in pain one by one. No one could stand against the hypermutable bacteria that was made under Qing Shui’s hands. He only wondered what was the last thing they would think of during their last breath.

  Would they be overwhelmed with the fear of death? Would they miss their mothers? Or would they die in peace because they were finally free from the war against the nature?

  Chang relaxed his sore legs, sitting down on the hill. At this moment, there was nothing left for him to do. He rested his head on his arm, but his eyes were locked on the figure that was directing the artillery. The bacteria bomb would cause over ten thousands deaths, yet Qing Shui retained a serene aura around him.

  The apocalypse and evolution propelled the transformation of minds.

  Before the apocalypse, that person who now stood at the peak, was merely a high school biology teacher. He might have been talented, but his occupation was limited to the field of education while surviving in the highly competitive society.

  Now, Qing Shui as an EM, standing at the top of the social pyramid, had become an important personage that held the world in his hands.

  In peacetime, power could rot pure minds. But Chang didn’t know about the days in the apocalypse, what kind of changes to a person’s spirit would absolute power and intelligence bring in a time like this. Nor did he know whether Qing Shui could control his growing desire for power with his great intelligence.

  Perhaps one day, Jing, who he had been protecting and taking car
e of, would be taken away. Perhaps he would be living a precarious existence. Perhaps he would give up his moral principles because of fear and death threats to become the kind of person that he used to hate, behaving in a way that he used to be disgusted by.

  “Humans sometimes have no choices but are compelled.”

  It might sound less accurate in peacetime, but in the ears of humans who lived in the apocalypse, the sentence rang with cruel truthfulness to it…

  The endless shellfire was being shot right in front of Chang’s eyes. The war zone experience affected him so profoundly that he had a feeling that he was brought to the center of the storm while watching sparks drifting and falling from the sky. Although it was only the first battle, the world was no longer recognisable.

  The shellfire continued.

  The roar of artillery gradually subsided as their bacteria bombs ran out.

  When the thundering sound came to an end, Chang stood up from the ground—the first

  Chapter was finished. It was time for him to face tribulation.

  “Jing, let me know when there are moving objects in your perception,” Chang bade Jing again and put away his thoughts.

  He moved to the elite squad. Receiving an altered machine gun from a squad member, he squinted his eyes as he relied more on his vision to seek out their targets.

  “Close ranks, march!” Qing Shui ordered from hill’s peak. He was directing soldiers, but he also seemed to be attracting something.

  The moment Qing Shui’s command was delivered, there was an intranquil sound which consisted of screaming and firing sent back from the vanguard legion. Jing immediately pointed her finger to the source. “Over there, about a hundred meters.”

  “Mortars! Fire!” Qing Shui paid close attention to Jing’s guidance. His arm straightened, waving down to command those pre-arranged soldiers to initiate their attack.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  Fire-tailed shells rivaled each other in the air, all bombarding to the same spot. It resulted in a continuous din, and fire blooming on the land.

  The first wave of attacks from the gene-altered soldiers commenced where Chang couldn’t see.

  However, Qing Shui’s attack soon diminished as the fire didn’t catch a lot of flammable material. When the fire ceased, Chang didn’t see any of those fearless figures bolting toward Qing Shui’s fort—it was as peaceful as if nothing had happened.

  “Jing, are those gene-altered soldiers dead?” Chang was agonized by this unusual situation.

  “Nope, I can only sense a few that were injured. Most of them remained unhurt, but they disappeared from my perception range,” Jing said in a light voice.

  “How many are coming toward us?” Qing Shui inquired.

  “From what I can sense, there are about twenty to thirty. Their index is below 21, so I suspect that they are all infected,” Jing answered. “But I noticed that a few out of their indexes are fluctuating tremendously, and they are all above 45 now, meaning that they grew much stronger than before.”

  Qing Shui wasn’t surprised at all. He simply nodded.”Before Zhuo departed, he brought seven red fog concentrate syringes for his special force. He planned to use them against the Yessie,but it seems like he didn’t use them all.”

  “The red fog concentrate?” Chang asked. “Didn’t it have a severe side-effect that caused sudden death?”

  “Indeed it’ll cause sudden death, but it can briefly boost the somatic functions.” Qing Shui had his brows tied. “He doesn’t care about his special force that much anyways.”

  While Qing Shui was still talking, Jing hurriedly shouted out, “They’re coming again! From all directions. They scattered!”

  “I see.” Qing Shui’s elite squad held up their guns in unison with his gesture. “You’ll shoot as well.”

  Chang nodded. He picked up that large caliber repeater and looked into the flowing red fog.

  At the same time, a wave of bombardment tore through the air.

  “Those were the mines that my company laid before. But they weren’t designed to kill anyone. Now, everyone, ready!”

  Accompanied by the deafening explosions and Qing Shui’s loud orders, the gene-altered soldiers entered Chang’s vision one by one.

  These gene-altered soldiers were slow compared to the ones he had dealt with before. They all looked unwell since the bacteria had infected their muscles and nerves. Some of them were even injured with shrapnel lodged in their muscles. Others had lost some of their scales, exposing their tight and pale muscles.

  Seeing these remnants, Chang pulled the trigger without hesitation.

  A rattle of gunfire tore apart the previously motionless atmosphere.

  Chang’s vision was the best of them all, hence he was the first one to fire. Those injured and weakened gene-altered soldiers were slower than Chang moving his gun. Aided with his fine calculation ability, the first bullet array caused an explosion on the gene-altered soldier that he saw first. The highly explosive bullet almost broke the gene-altered soldier into two pieces, and the creature was thrown away by the momentum.

  Upon his success in exterminating the first gene-altered soldier, he turned his body to locate his next target. For every gene-altered soldier he saw coming, he fired his repeater without any hesitation.

  Soon, he killed off three gene-altered soldiers. Meanwhile, the remaining gene-altered soldiers kept climbing up to the slope while facing an unceasing explosive bullets.

  Qing Shui’s elite squad responded quickly to the creatures that appeared from the red fog, and they were also equipped with bizarre looking goggles. According to Qing Shui, they were made out of a frequency-separating lens.

  After a special treatment, the goggles allowed their wearers to see additional two meters. However, the compromisation of the improvement was that it dimmed the overall vision.

  That was to say, the goggles weren’t helpful to Chang but it did a lot to human soldiers—after all, being able see two meters farther meant that they had almost doubled their current vision.

  Therefore, given the fact that the elite squad had undergone special training and was equipped with the goggles, it was just as functional as Chang.

  For a while, the gene-altered soldiers struggled to break through under the suppressive fire. It was so until Chang noticed that a few of them had plastic explosives secured to their backs, and the absolute balance was broken.

  “Stop firing! They’re bringing explosives!”

  A gene-altered was shot while struggling to dodge the bullets, and the plastic explosive detonated before Chang had even finished giving his warning to the squad. The creature shattered, his limbs blown away into pieces which then rained in front of the squad.

  Boom!

  A heated blast caused by the explosion swept across the field. Chang’s pupils contracted as he saw clouds of dust soaring skyward, then flooding toward them.

  It all happened in a flash, so Chang was just able to cover Jing with his body. The heated wave gusted over his back, the sand borne by the wave scraping his skin. Uncontrollably, Chang and Jing were swept away for over two meters by the currents that blew them off the slope.

  “What the hell! Was it C4?”

  Chang plunged to the ground, back first. He picked himself up, then spitted out the mud and sand that choked him. His whole back was taken hostage by a burning pain which spread to the back of his head.

  “Ah!”

  Although Jing landed less harshly in Chang’s arms, the shock caused blood to spurt out from her nose and mouth.

  Chang didn’t have time to check his own condition, nor Jing’s. He immediately climbed up from the ground and placed Jing behind a tree that was just blown down by the blast. Then he ran off to pick up the repeater that he had dropped and went back to the position where he was designated to fight back from.

  Zhuo must have used those C4 to fight against the Yessie, and then, distributed the remaining ones to the gene-altered soldiers to take vengeance on Qing Shui for hi
s betrayal.

  Chang could never think as fast as Zhuo under this chaos. Considering the suppressive fire that Zhuo was resisting, Chang had to admit that he was one of the most intrepid people that he’d seen his life, since he was able to act so swiftly against an unfavorable situation.

  Chapter 106: Captured

  Even though Chang applauded for Zhuo, he still knew that he shouldn’t be losing guard against him.

  Chang intensified his vigilance while holding his repeater. He was also looking around for that familiar figure -- Qing Shui, who he lost sight when he was blown away by the blast. And because his head absorbed quite amount of the shock wave, not only he felt the world was spinning, but also the bandage that wrapped around his head ripped and loosened.

  All the sensation he was enduring came as the consequence of being impacted by the explosion. However, Chang was relatively far from the spot where the C4 was detonated and his condition was this bad already. He believed that those gene-altered soldiers, who were much closer to the source, must be suffering worse injuries.

  Thinking of this, Chang bent his back forward while turning around his body, cautiously looking for and distinguishing his comrades and enemies.

  The first person he found was a soldier from the elite squad. Perhaps they stationed close to each other prior to the explosion, the direction of where they were thrown was similar and hence they landed close to each other as well. Although that soldier seemed much more broken than Chang with one arm missing. His face was also coated with blood and his repeater was nowhere to be found.

  “Hey bro, are you okay?” Chang crawled forward to the front of the soldier, and lightly patted his face.

  “Yep...” That soldier shook his head as if that could rescue him from dizziness. His pupils were yet to focus on Chang’s face, obviously, his brain was messed up from the shock wave.