RotA – Chapter 33

The sound of the wind outside the window grew louder.

It howled across the silent plain, causing the black vines to sway, their faintly glowing leaves, flowers, and branches dancing in the wind.

Within the night fog, cold raindrops began to fall from the sky.

Plink, plonk. They shattered against the window or disappeared into the sand.

Chai Yuening closed the side window she had opened for ventilation.

The sudden sound of the falling rain made those who were already sleeping fitfully toss and turn in the oppressive night.

Chai Yuening glanced down at her pocket watch. The second hand ticked on, as tireless as the raindrops outside.

But it moved too slowly, so slowly it was starting to feel irritating.

This night was so long, it felt as if it would never reach its end.

On a quiet, rainy night, one’s mind was always prone to wandering.

Just like now, Chai Yuening couldn’t help but feel consumed by worry.

The Base had chosen to believe in hope, but that hope was far more tenuous than imagined.

Could the Floating City reacquire a new location from the tracking system?

And after acquiring the location, would they be willing to commit their full support without knowing the current situation there?

If the Floating City chose to do the same as last time, sending only an advance team to investigate, would that team be able to arrive successfully? After arriving, could they send a message back smoothly? How many lives would be sacrificed to pay for the time lost in this back-and-forth?

Could the outer city, which had fallen days ago, hold on? Could the newly fallen Ninth District hold on? Could the Base’s main city, which had already committed all its military strength to support the Ninth District, hold on?

This was all a gamble, and no one knew who would win or lose in the end.

The sound of the rain grew louder, occasionally punctuated by a suppressed, muffled clap of thunder.

In the rest cabin, Lao Xiang’s snores were in no way inferior to the sound of that thunder.

Ren Dong simply couldn’t sleep anymore. She maneuvered her wheelchair toward the light, arriving at the cockpit door.

Hearing the movement, Chai Yuening turned to look. “Can’t sleep?”

Ren Dong nodded and said in a low voice, “Captain, why don’t you get some rest? I can keep watch.”

“I just took over for Lu Qi less than an hour and a half ago. I’m not tired.” Chai Yuening rejected the suggestion. She couldn’t sleep now anyway. Going to the rest cabin would just lead to more anxious thoughts. She might as well sit here where it was a bit brighter.

Seeing that Chai Yuening wasn’t sleepy, Ren Dong turned her head to look at Chu Ci. “You’re not resting either?”

Chu Ci replied, “Can’t sleep.”

Ren Dong thought for a moment, then wheeled herself inside and sat behind the two of them. “I can’t sleep either. Can I stay here?”

Chai Yuening answered, “Of course.”

There was suddenly one more person in the cockpit. It was still quiet, but the atmosphere seemed to have undergone a subtle change.

Time continued to march forward at its own unhurried pace.

All of a sudden, Chu Ci stood up from the front passenger seat.

She frowned, placing one hand on the window and peering through the curtain of rain toward a distant, fog-shrouded point behind the vehicle.

Chai Yuening reached out and turned on the wipers for all three front windows.

“What is it?” she asked softly, instinctively leaning forward to look.

The dense fog and heavy rain outside seemed to obscure everything. She couldn’t see a thing, only that Chu Ci’s expression had grown increasingly grave in just a few short seconds.

Just as Chai Yuening was about to get up and take a closer look, she saw Chu Ci clench her fists, her eyes fixed on the area behind the armored vehicle. She muttered a single word, but no one heard it clearly.

Ren Dong: “What?”

She subconsciously maneuvered her wheelchair closer to Chu Ci.

Chu Ci: “Go!”

This time, it was practically a shout.

The snoring from the rest cabin seemed to be cut off mid-snort, and the dim lights instantly brightened.

“Wha—?” Lao Xiang shot up from his bedding as if electrocuted.

Beside him, Lu Qi sat up dazedly, clutching his blanket, his hair a messy chicken’s nest and his eyes completely bewildered.

The vehicle started up at almost the same instant.

Yellow fog lights illuminated the path ahead, the wipers moving at their fastest frequency, yet the road ahead remained a blur to Chai Yuening.

Fortunately, this was a plain with almost no buildings or trees. She immediately slammed her foot on the accelerator, and the armored vehicle shot forward like an arrow.

The powerful jolt sent the old man and the young man in the rest cabin tumbling into each other.

Chu Ci, meanwhile, grabbed Ren Dong, who had lost her balance.

With a few cries of alarm, the half-asleep men were instantly wide awake.

“What the hell is going on?” Lao Xiang rubbed his lower back as he climbed up from the floor.

He walked into the cockpit, glanced around outside the window, and asked in confusion, “There’s nothing out there?”

Ren Dong and Lu Qi also instinctively looked out the windows.

The dense fog and torrential rain outside concealed almost everything, but besides them, the world seemed dead, with no sign of any living thing in motion.

Chai Yuening subconsciously slowed the vehicle.

But beside her, Chu Ci’s voice rang out again. “Don’t stop. It’s behind us.”

“Behind us?” Lao Xiang frowned, took two steps forward, stretched out his arm, and pushed open the rear hatch door.

A blast of cold wind and rain instantly poured in.

Lao Xiang grabbed a high-beam flashlight, threw on his coat, and steadied himself against the vehicle wall as he walked toward the open hatch. Bracing himself against the wind and rain, he squinted and shone the light outside.

“The fog’s too thick, and the rain’s too heavy! I can’t see a thing!”

He yelled back over his shoulder, his voice mostly swallowed by the wind and rain.

“Come back!” Chai Yuening shouted. Just as she was about to reach out and close the hatch, a bolt of lightning tore across the sky.

In that instant, the electric light pierced the dense fog, briefly illuminating the night shrouded in mist and rain.

For a moment, the vast world was as bright as day.

Everyone looking toward the rear of the vehicle caught sight of an enormous figure, at least six or seven stories tall, thanks to that flash of light.

Chai Yuening saw it in the rearview mirror as well.

It stood in the dense fog not far away, as silent as a small mountain.

But there were no mountains in this place, only skilled predators lying in wait.

As the daylight-like brightness faded, a delayed, deafening roar exploded in their ears, like a thunderous drum beating against their hearts. Everyone finally snapped back to their senses from the shock of that moment.

Lao Xiang: “Holy… shit…”

Lu Qi: “Good lord, that thing’s fucking huge! It wouldn’t even be able to stand up straight inside the Base!”

Chai Yuening instinctively moved to close the hatch, but she heard Lao Xiang shouting as he ran toward the rest cabin, “Don’t, don’t close it! It’s so big, closing it won’t stop it! One good stomp and we’ll all be meat paste between two sheets of iron! Leave it, leave it open… If I can’t see where it is in a minute, my heart’s gonna give out right here!”

Chai Yuening shouted back, “If your heart’s not doing well, you come drive. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

As she finished speaking, Lao Xiang, half-soaked, had already run up to her and said seriously, “I did want the steering wheel, but it’s not because my heart’s bad, it’s because my driving skills are better than yours, understand?”

“Understood.” Chai Yuening got up to give him the seat. Before she could steady herself, the vehicle swerved sharply to the right.

She grabbed the back of the seat to keep from falling.

Lu Qi, bracing himself against the vehicle wall, cursed, “What the hell! Is this what you call skill?”

The words had barely left his mouth when a six-legged mutated beast scraped past the left rear of the vehicle, rolled, scrambled back to its feet, and shrieked as it gave chase.

“Damn it!” Lu Qi pulled out the gun at his waist and fired a burst of bullets at the beast’s head.

The armored vehicle swerved violently to the left again. Lu Qi slammed into the wall once more, crying out in pain, “God of driving! Keep it steady!”

“What are you yelling so loud for?” Lao Xiang yelled back even louder. “Look at all these precious darlings around us! This wind is so damn exhilarating!”

In the misty rain, the black vine flowers, shimmering with a faint reddish-purple light, swayed in the downpour.

In the path illuminated by the fog lights, on both sides of the armored vehicle, countless pairs of eyes were staring intently at them.

Some had already charged the vehicle, only to be dodged by Lao Xiang and end up chasing from behind. Others remained in the darkness, shrouded by the mist and rain.

Under the dim light source, their silhouettes were varied, yet they all seemed to be moving under some kind of summons, twisting their grotesque bodies in the rain.

It was as if a host of demons from hell were dancing a dance of the apocalypse.

“How enchanting, this charming little bunch,” Lao Xiang laughed. “Hold on tight! We’re gonna punch through and leave all this crap behind us, then the ride will be smooth!”

Hearing this, Chai Yuening quickly took two large steps to get to Ren Dong and Chu Ci, extending her right arm to shield them.

The speeding armored vehicle began to rock violently from side to side.

The sounds of wind, rain, thunder, scraping, and impacts, accompanied by the piercing shrieks of the mutated beasts in the horde and the incessant gunfire from the rear of the vehicle.

Wave after wave of noise threatened to rupture their eardrums.

The glass on the left side of the cockpit was slashed open by something sharp, and wind and rain instantly poured in.

Chai Yuening didn’t even have time to react before a worm-like creature lunged from the side, its body suddenly expanding horizontally in a bizarre fashion, instantly transforming into a tentacled sucker the size of a washbasin that latched firmly onto the broken side window.

Chu Ci steadied herself against the window with one hand, pulled out the dagger from her waist with the other, and stabbed furiously at the sucker outside the crack.

Blood splattered. The worm shrieked and flew backward, but the cracks in the window had bloomed into a “flower tree,” looking as if it might shatter completely at any moment.

With several loud thuds of impact and crushing, the armored vehicle broke through the encirclement of the beast horde.

But the horrifying sounds continued from the roof, the sides, and the rear of the vehicle.

The vehicle had stabilized, but the mutated beasts were still on it, or behind it, in relentless pursuit.

Mutated beasts would normally prey on each other, but when faced with humans, they had eyes for nothing else.

They seemed to have an almost frenzied craving for human genes.

“Help!” a shout came from the rear cabin.

Chai Yuening rushed to Lu Qi’s side, grabbed a rifle from nearby, and shot a mutated beast that was leaping onto the vehicle, sending it flying.

Chu Ci pushed Ren Dong toward the mounted heavy sniper rifle.

She unconsciously stopped, lifting her eyes to the distant fog.

“It’s coming,” she said in a low voice.

As if to confirm her words, another flash of lightning illuminated the night sky.

The terrifyingly massive creature was much closer than before.

It was moving, moving in their direction.

Its enormous body seemed to be floating in mid-air, yet it wasn’t truly floating.

It had soft legs, like those of an octopus or perhaps a snake’s tail. Though it was hard to see clearly, it was easy to tell there were at least a dozen of them.

Those soft legs slithered across the ground at an indescribable speed.

Gradually, they no longer needed the light to see its silhouette.

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Author’s Notes:

Chatting: Oh my god, so scary!

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