The night was as dark as ink, and a damp, chilling mist hung over the jungle along the border.
The military camp was unusually quiet tonight. Even the insects that normally filled the night with their chirping seemed to have fallen silent.
But the silence didn’t last long.
A faint singing suddenly drifted over from the direction of the family quarters.
“Brother is heading to the great mountain, while little sister waits by the riverbank…”
It was a love song sung in the Miao language. The melody was gentle and sorrowful, but in the dead of night, it sounded inexplicably eerie and sinister.
Especially with the singing came a series of faint rustling sounds, like countless tiny feet crawling across the ground.
Sentry Xiao Wang felt his scalp go numb. His palms were sweating around his rifle.
“Squad Leader… did you hear that? Sister-in-law’s singing… why does it sound like she’s summoning spirits?”
The squad leader was pale too, though he forced himself to remain calm.
“Stop talking nonsense! It’s just ethnic culture! Or… or you’d better put your earplugs in.”
The song seemed to possess some kind of magic. It made everyone feel uneasy, leaving them completely unable to sleep.
Huo Feng was lying in bed as well, staring at the ceiling with his eyes open.
The singing was coming from right next door and had incredible penetrating power.
But he couldn’t sleep not because he was afraid.
It was because… what the hell was that woman next door doing, singing in the middle of the night instead of sleeping?
Suddenly.
The singing stopped abruptly.
Immediately afterward came an extremely faint sound—one that only someone with special training could hear.
The sound of a lock being picked.
Huo Feng shot upright in bed.
Something was wrong!
The sound had come from the back window!
He grabbed his clothes and rushed into Su Man’s room, kicking the door open.
“Su Man! You—”
Before he could finish, he froze.
The room was empty.
Su Man was gone. The two children were gone. Even the several-hundred-pound wild boar was nowhere to be seen!
Only the window stood wide open, cold wind rushing inside.
The large spiders that normally served as “guards” were all curled up on the windowsill, seemingly trembling in fear, as if they were terrified of something even more frightening.
“Damn it!”
Huo Feng rushed to the window and looked outside in the moonlight.
The grass on the ground had been crushed by something heavy. Those were Dahua’s hoofprints.
And the trail of hoofprints led directly toward—
the restricted zone behind the mountain!
“Woooo—Woooo—Woooo!”
Just then, the heart-stopping first-level combat alarm once again tore through the night sky.
This time, it wasn’t a drill.
And it wasn’t because of poison gas.
Someone had entered a genuine death zone.
“Report, Wolf Head! The radar has detected an unidentified creature entering the minefield behind the mountain! It’s enormous and moving extremely fast!”
The duty operator’s terrified voice came through the radio.
“And… and there seem to be two heat signatures on the creature’s back! They appear to be… human children!”
Huo Feng’s mind went “buzz,” instantly going completely blank.
The area behind the mountain was a minefield left over from the counterattack years ago. Thousands upon thousands of various land mines were buried there.
There were pressure mines, tripwire mines, and even old, rusted bounding mines that had become even more unstable with age!
Even the most highly trained sappers wouldn’t dare venture in recklessly.
It was a true gateway to hell!
Those two children… had gone in?
“All personnel, assemble! Bring the mine-clearing equipment! Follow me!”
When Huo Feng roared those words, his voice was trembling.
He rushed out of the barracks like a madman, forgetting to put on his bulletproof vest.
Five minutes later.
Huo Feng led a squad of special forces soldiers to the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the minefield, all of them gasping for breath.
A huge hole had been forced open in the fence.
Clearly, Dahua’s doing.
Under the powerful searchlights, everyone saw a sight that nearly stopped their hearts.
More than two hundred meters inside the minefield, a gigantic wild boar was leisurely rooting around in the grass.
On the boar’s back, Huo Xiaoman was waving a tree branch around like a little commander.
Huo Xiaoxie, meanwhile, had jumped down and was crouching on the ground with a small shovel, digging for something.
Less than ten centimeters from his feet, half of a rusty metal object was exposed.
It was an American M14 anti-personnel mine!
One slight touch was enough to blow that tiny body to pieces!
“Don’t move! Nobody move!”
Huo Feng roared, cold sweat instantly soaking his back.
He didn’t dare let the soldiers rush in. The minefield was far too complicated. The more people entered, the greater the chance of triggering a chain reaction.
“Xiaoxie! Stay right there! Daddy’s coming to get you!”
As he shouted, Huo Feng pulled the military knife strapped to his leg, preparing to enter the minefield alone and clear the path.
However, upon hearing his voice, Huo Xiaoxie looked up and calmly adjusted the nonexistent glasses on his nose.
“Shh! Don’t make noise!”
The little boy raised a finger to his lips.
“There are good things buried here. Don’t scare them away.”
Huo Feng was so anxious that his eyes turned red.
“What could possibly be more important than your life? That’s a land mine! It can kill you!”
Huo Xiaoxie glanced disdainfully at the mine beside his foot and lightly nudged the potentially explosive device with his toe.
Every soldier watching nearly stopped breathing.
“You call this piece of scrap metal a land mine?”
“I’m looking for this.”
Huo Xiaoxie drove his shovel into the ground, then suddenly yanked it upward.
A bizarre snake as thick as a wrist, completely black with a fleshy growth on top of its head, was forcibly pulled from the earth!
The snake had made its home in the minefield, a place filled with the aura of death. Clearly, it was an extremely vicious venomous creature.
“This is a Thunder God Snake. It can only grow in places with extremely strong traces of gunpowder. It’s a top-grade ingredient for refining Gu.”
Huo Xiaoxie pinched the snake just behind its head, a satisfied smile spreading across his face.
And Huo Xiaoman was even more outrageous.
She pointed excitedly at a huge anti-tank mine that Dahua had just unearthed and clapped her hands.
“Brother, look! This big round metal pancake is so pretty! Can we take it home and use it as a stool?”
By this point, Huo Feng had already stepped into the minefield, every step as cautious as walking on thin ice.
Hearing his daughter, he nearly slipped and stepped on a tripwire mine.
Use an anti-tank mine as a stool?
What kind of monsters was this family made of?
“Don’t touch that! Put it down!”
Huo Feng practically roared the words.
Just then, a cold laugh came from deep within the dark forest.
“Heh. What are you so nervous about?”
“With me here, this minefield is no different from my own backyard.”
Su Man slowly emerged from behind a large tree.
She was still barefoot, carrying a lantern that emitted an eerie blue glow.
Behind her, however, the ground of the previously perilous minefield was crawling with countless different kinds of insects.
Like a team of sappers, the insects avoided every single mine, forcibly carving out a “safe passage” through the deadly zone.
“Su Man! Do you know what kind of place this is?!”
Huo Feng finally exploded as he stared at the woman who made him so furious his teeth ached, yet whose every move made his heart race with fear and worry.
Su Man walked up to him. Only a single land mine separated them.
She lifted her head, her beautiful almond-shaped eyes glimmering with an enchanting light. She showed not the slightest awareness that she had done anything wrong.
“Of course I know. It’s a minefield.”
“But Commander Huo, did you forget?”
“I clawed my way out of the Hundred Thousand Mountains.”
“This little scene is nothing compared to the Ten Thousand Poison Cave in our Miao village.”
She raised a finger and lightly tapped his tense chest, her tone both provocative and suggestive.
“But you… your heart is beating so fast.”
“Are you afraid I’ll die, or are you afraid that… there’ll be no one left to warm your bed?”
Huo Feng stared at the woman dancing on the edge of death before him.
A profound sense of helplessness collided violently with an even stronger desire to conquer her inside his chest.
Before he could respond—
Dahua, the wild boar, seemed to have gotten too excited from digging and kicked a deeply concealed bounding mine with one hoof.
“Click.”
The crisp sound of the firing pin echoed especially sharply through the silent night.
Everyone’s faces instantly turned deathly pale.
Huo Feng’s pupils contracted.
It was pure instinct.
He threw himself toward Su Man and the children without hesitation, trying to shield them from the blast with his own body.
“Get down!”
Yet the explosion everyone expected never came.
Only Su Man’s teasing voice sounded beside his ear.
“You idiot.”
“The gunpowder inside that mine was eaten up by my ‘Gold-Eating Ants’ long ago.”
Huo Feng lay on the ground, tightly shielding the woman in his arms.
He raised his head and looked at Su Man’s face only inches away, then at the little ant in her hand that was currently burping contentedly.
At that moment, Huo Feng, the Wolf Head who struck fear into everyone along the border, finally understood something.
In front of this woman, all his common sense and rules were nothing but useless scraps of paper.
But before he could even relax—
Su Man’s expression suddenly changed.
She shoved Huo Feng away and stared intently into the darkness deep within the minefield. The silver bells in her hand began trembling violently.
“Something’s wrong.”
“There’s something else in there besides my insects.”
“And… they’re alive.”
In the darkness, several red infrared laser sights silently appeared on them.
They were…
enemy snipers!
And there was more than one!
A foreign mercenary squad had been hiding in this minefield for a long time!