No one expected the first person to make a move to be Wrench, who was lying on the ground.
He suddenly twisted around. With a stomp, he triggered the hidden mechanism in the sole of his shoe. A grappling claw shot out, tearing through the leather around his knee and flying straight toward the robot in front of him.
The sound of metal striking metal had barely faded when chaos erupted.
The survivors scattered in panic, nearly causing a stampede.
There were only a few survivors, yet apart from several people clutching guns and trying to squeeze their way forward, everyone else was desperately searching for somewhere to hide.
Raiders were one of the most dangerous groups in the entire wasteland, spoken of by every wastelander’s elders—and their elders before them.
They were even more dangerous than Night Demons and Swamp Crabs.
Night Demons did not come out during the day.
Swamp Crabs hibernated during winter.
Only Raiders killed and plundered regardless of season, day, or night. Killing and looting seemed to be the only themes of their lives.
As battle-hardened Raiders, their movements were nearly seamless. The moment Wrench launched the first attack, the others immediately brought out their own signature weapons and tricks.
And then there was no “after that.”
The man using a dagger watched helplessly as his blade slid off the armor.
The man with a firearm had not even managed to disengage the safety before the robot grabbed the weapon and crushed its barrel.
It was a massacre.
But this time, the victims were no longer unarmed civilians.
They were the Raiders themselves.
The survivors had not even finished panicking when Li Qingshan knocked several of the remaining fleeing Raiders on the head. Seeing stars, they collapsed to the ground and stopped moving.
Sentinel I looked at the people sprawled across the ground and began calculating.
After a long moment, it decided to contact its current highest-ranking officer.
…The signal was not very good.
It looked at the several Raiders on the ground who were visibly no longer breathing and decided to first follow its regulations, executing the most similar instruction it had received before.
That was—
Bury them first.
…
Amid the chaos, no one noticed a slave escaping from a corner.
His ankle chain had been loose for a long time, and he had always hidden the fact.
Today, shocked beyond belief, he took a step backward. When he felt the chain slip free from his ankle, he did not even have time to be surprised before instinctively making his first reaction—
Run.
As he sprinted wildly through the wilderness, the slave realized that this was almost like a nightmare.
A nightmare that, even many years later, would still make him wake up in the middle of the night.
He remembered those Raiders.
Every one of them was a skilled fighter. Any one of them could deal with three to five adult wastelanders.
His own settlement had been overrun by one of these people.
At the time, that Raider had two knives embedded in his body, yet it seemed to matter little to him. With bloodshot eyes, he had done nothing but bite at the throats of the people facing him, eventually tearing apart the shelter’s strongest vanguard and opening a breach.
The remaining defenders had lost their courage.
In the slave’s eyes, those Raiders were invincible—almost indestructible.
Pain made them laugh.
Battle wounds and disabilities were badges of honor to them.
But what had he seen just now?
He could hardly believe his own eyes.
—That monster. That silver-white machine. It had almost no reaction to any attack at all!
Raiders often used weapons that were not immediately fatal but were exceptionally vicious. The infections and complications afterward could slowly destroy even a healthy adult.
He remembered that Wrench possessed a powerful crossbow.
The projectiles it fired were not bolts, but grappling claws that embedded themselves into the human body before burrowing deep into the flesh.
Sometimes those grappling claws were attached to iron chains, allowing Wrench to grab the chain, mount his motorcycle, and drag his victims behind him.
But this time—
The flesh-ripping grappling claws launched from the crossbow had absolutely no effect against that smooth surface.
The hidden poison needles, the serrated military blades—every weapon bounced harmlessly off the silver-white shell.
Then that silver-white giant raised its hand.
In an instant, it snapped the arm of a Raider who was trying to choke a hostage.
A human arm was as easy to break between its fingers as a pair of chopsticks.
The slave touched his own throat.
He remembered being strangled by the neck back then. He had passed out, and when he woke up, there was nothing left.
His older sister was gone.
His father was gone.
His mother was gone.
Everything was gone.
His home and his family were gone.
Afterward, the Raiders killed all slaves who had no relatives. In order to survive, he had pointed at the neighbor’s child and said:
“This is my younger brother!”
The neighbor’s child did not deny it.
From that day onward, they depended on each other to survive.
The slave knew that he could leave now.
No one here knew him.
The child back at the Raider camp was not truly his family. He was only the neighbor’s child.
If he did not go back…
If he simply ran far, far away…
He could survive.
He could change his name.
He could start over.
As long as he never went back and became human again.
The slave had already run a great distance. By the time his lungs began to ache, he suddenly remembered…
What would happen to that child in the Raider camp?
If no one returned to report what had happened, the families of the other slaves would die as well…
The slave gritted his teeth.
Then he turned around and ran back in the direction he had come from.
…
Bear Hunter picked his teeth.
He had just eaten a piece of his own stored food, taken from some unlucky subordinate who had once failed to see what was good for him.
He narrowed his eyes.
[Several sentences appear to be missing or corrupted in the original text here.]
Faced with Bear Hunter approaching him, the slave closed his eyes tightly, pressing his forehead against the ground and praying for death to come quickly—or, at worst, only a minor disability that would not affect him too badly.
The slave’s trembling pleased Bear Hunter greatly.
He merely kicked the person on the ground, sending him flying into the tree trunk at the end of the path. The impact shook loose a shower of leaves, and Bear Hunter burst into laughter.
“Hahaha!”
Once Bear Hunter began laughing, the others around him followed suit.
For a moment, laughter rose and fell all around.
“Enough! Stop making a fool out of me!”
When Bear Hunter narrowed his eyes, the corners wrinkled together so tightly that, compared to his name, he looked more like a blind mole.
“You’re telling me that a small town that has never cooperated with a shelter, and whose mayor has already left, possesses a pre-war killing machine?”
“Is that what you’re saying?!”
“Y-Yes…”
“Very good.”
Bear Hunter slowly nodded.
“If I later discover that you are lying to me, I will crush your younger brother’s fingers one by one.”
“And then I’ll have you crushed into meat paste.”
“Now, we change our target.”
He raised his head and pointed in another direction.
“No one gets to deceive me! Not even an Exile!”
“Now we’re going to find that damned Exile and get to the bottom of this!”
He stood up.
When he released the tree trunk he had been gripping, a clear ring-shaped indentation was visible in the wood.
“Then I’ll choose one of these two heads and smash it!”
“Move out!”
“To the industrial district!”
“Within three days, I want to see that damned Exile!”
“Crash…”
The sound of shattering glass alerted the people nearby.
This was the industrial district on the outskirts of Tianshui City. There were numerous factories and industrial buildings here, giving the area a completely different atmosphere from the city center, which was filled with skyscrapers.
Only from the enormous frameworks and skeletal remains could one occasionally glimpse the former glory of the industrial district.
There were tens of thousands of parking spaces, tower cranes taller than high-rise buildings, countless shipping containers, and one unmanned cargo aircraft landing pad after another…
But now, some of the collapsed factories resembled ghosts with their jaws wide open. Some were draped in vines, though their very frameworks had actually been corroded away by roots. Others looked as if they had suffered some terrible bombardment, leaving behind nothing but ruins.
The factories’ reservoirs and drainage outlets had long since stopped functioning. Over more than a century, some had been buried, while others had sunk into the ground. Under nature’s handiwork, the area was now filled with lakes of all sizes, providing an abundance of water sources.
As for whether the water was drinkable… that was another matter.
Abundant water had given rise to abundant life. There were countless irradiated creatures here, and one could spot some kind of mutant every few steps.
Ling Zhao tilted her head as she looked at the mutant in front of her, somewhat unsure whether this one counted as well.
“Stop! Outsiders!”
Zaika’s scales stood on end as she stood in the middle of the industrial district’s widest main road. Behind her, her clansmen were hidden in the shadows.
“We do not welcome outsiders! Please leave!”
By Ling Zhao’s standards of beauty, the… person? standing before her had quite beautiful red hair. She also had long, narrow golden eyes, with pale golden scales along both sides of her cheeks. The scales became denser around her throat, extending all the way down her arms and legs.
Rather than a person covered in scales, she looked more like some kind of lizard with a human face.
“I heard that you are the masters of this industrial district,” Ling Zhao said.
She had never actually heard such a thing, but that did not stop her from flattering them now.
“So I came here specifically to pay you a visit.”
M-Masters?
Zaika had never expected a human to acknowledge… to acknowledge that Exiles possessed ownership over a particular territory.
Usually, whenever humans wanted to drive them away, they simply drove them away.
Whether an Exile was beautiful but harmless, or beautiful and powerful, nothing good ever came from encountering humans. Some would be turned into works of art, while others would become exhibits in freak shows.
Zaika knew that she qualified for both categories.
There was even the possibility that she would be sent directly to an arena and made into a contestant in a bloody beast-fighting pit.
She was the most beautiful.
But she was also the most dangerous.
“I’m a merchant from a nearby shelter,” Ling Zhao said before the expressions of the people before her could turn tense. “A merchant from Shelter No. 999.”
“I brought some goods that can be used for trade.”
The everyday necessities she had brought along just in case could naturally serve as trade goods in a wasteland where barter was common.
Whispers came from the shadows.
“999? Never heard of it.”
“As long as it’s not 199. I hate 199.”
“Great Elder, should we make contact with them?”
Zaika watched as the Great Elder approached her, then crouched down and asked quietly.
“Let’s see what they brought first… You know that we lack everything. Many people are already close to not being able to hold on any longer.”
The Great Elder opened one wrinkled eye.
“And keep an eye on Nanuka.”
Nanuka was the Exile who longed for the outside world. He had always wanted to establish contact with the raiders.
In this troublesome time, when outsiders were beginning to arrive…
Hopefully, no more trouble would arise.
Author’s Note:
I suspect the author’s note I wrote at noon was the work of someone who hadn’t slept for two days and whose brain hadn’t fully woken up.
Thank you for the encouragement. I feel like I’m doing better again.