Chapter 12: His Sister
The man wasn’t about to drop it.
They hadn’t even exchanged names yet, and Su Han had no intention of playing nice. He yanked the door open with a sudden burst of force and hurled a punch straight at the man’s chest.
The man raised a hand with effortless ease and blocked the strike clean.
His grip was terrifyingly strong, clamping around Su Han’s fist like an iron vice and making Su Han’s attack look like a toddler throwing a tantrum.
“Let’s be friends. I’m Li Tiangan, lightning ability user.”
“Are you out of your—”
A sharp, violent wave of numbness suddenly surged from the fist trapped in Li Tiangan’s grip. Before Su Han could finish his sentence, a muffled groan caught in his throat. His entire body turned to jelly, and he nearly collapsed flat on his face.
Hooking an arm around Su Han’s waist, Li Tiangan held him up with one hand. “I know your name. You’re pretty famous around the base—A-Han, right?”
Su Han’s heart sank like a stone.
He realized in an instant that against this man, he had virtually zero room to fight back.
A lightning ability was an absolute cheat.
Reluctantly, Su Han let out a stiff, begrudging hum.
Li Tiangan nodded, loosely pulling Su Han against him and giving the boy’s back a light, reassuring pat.
“If you run into any trouble down the road, you can always come to me. After all… we are roommates.”
With that, he let go. Su Han stumbled back, widening the distance between them with stark vigilance.
The man chuckled softly. “Don’t look at me like I’m a monster. It was just a friendly neighborly check-in. If you don’t like it, I won’t drop by again.”
Slam!
Su Han’s answer was a deafening crash as he slammed the door shut.
The panel missed Li Tiangan’s nose by a hair.
Once Li Tiangan left, any lingering trace of sleepiness evaporated completely.
That brief scuffle had hammered home the sheer helplessness of a regular fighter squaring off against a genuine ability user. If Li Tiangan truly harbored ill intentions toward him, Su Han would stand no chance at all.
[Judging by the intensity of that current, Li Tiangan has likely crossed into the primary tier,] the system stated in a measured tone.
Primary ability users were few and far between in the early months of the apocalypse; across the entire compound, Su Han had only ever encountered two or three.
On top of that, virtually every one of them had already been absorbed into Wang Jiafu’s inner guard.
For a powerhouse like Li Tiangan—a fresh face with an ostensibly clean background—to arrive at the base, it made no sense for Wang Jiafu to leave him wandering free.
“Something is definitely wrong with Li Tiangan.” The more Su Han turned it over in his head, the gloomier his expression grew.
Knowing that a lethal threat was living right across the hall would keep anyone on pins and needles.
He would just have to take it one step at a time.
He had originally intended to take today off to recover, but now that Li Tiangan had thoroughly ruined his rest, he figured he might as well head out and sniff around for news regarding Zhao Guang’s sister.
Zhao Guang had kept his sister hidden remarkably well. Su Han had pried into several channels, but even Know-It-All had come up empty regarding her whereabouts.
Su Han sat in the mission hall for the better part of the morning. He didn’t pick up a single lead on Zhao Guang’s sister, though he certainly swallowed a mountain of base gossip.
Under the ruthless weight of Wang Jiafu’s new decrees, the daily body count among the scavenging teams venturing outside the walls was climbing higher by the day.
Ordinary folks already had their hands full fending off standard walkers, to say nothing of the primary-tier mutated zombies now prowling the ruins.
If bad luck struck and a scavenger team crossed paths with a mutated infected, anyone without heavy firearms was essentially walking into an open grave.
Know-It-All shuffled over like a thief in the night. “Did you hear? Two more people were flagged as infected at the main gate last night.”
Standard survivors bitten or scratched by the infected were barred from re-entering the base under any circumstances.
Those souls suffered the cruellest fate of all, enduring three excruciating days of agony worse than death before the virus claimed them completely.
Su Han shook his head. “Didn’t hear. Did Leader Wang say how they’d be handled?”
“Handled? What else is there to handle? Once you’re dead, you’re dead.” Know-It-All let out a cynical sneer. “If you ask me, this Leader Wang can’t wait for every ordinary person in the base to die off for good.”
He didn’t bother lowering his voice as he spat the words, yet not a single person around them spoke up to contradict him.
Everything Wang Jiafu had done had been laid bare before their eyes. Hope Base had regressed from an egalitarian sanctuary where everyone had a fighting chance at survival into a slaughterhouse where the old, the weak, the sick, and the crippled were quietly discarded like trash.
Know-It-All rambled on with a string of trivial, inconsequential rumors before turning an eager, desperate gaze upon Su Han, his intent written plainly across his face.
Su Han hadn’t brought any spare food or water with him today. Just as he reached into his pocket to pull out a couple of standard zombie crystal cores to pay the informant, his fingertips brushed against a foreign slip of paper tucked inside the lining.
He froze. Hurriedly tossing the payment to Know-It-All, he slipped away to a deserted corner and unfolded the note.
Su Han’s eyes went wide with shock.
Scrawled in hasty handwriting were several concise sentences detailing how Wang Jiafu had used Zhao Guang’s sister as collateral to coerce him into fabricating lies and smearing Shen Chengyin’s name.
The note went on to reveal that both Zhao Guang and his sister were currently under heavy surveillance by Wang Jiafu’s inner circle. The sister was being held at a detached villa on the outskirts of the base, kept under twenty-four-hour lockdown by a rotating guard of four sentries.
It even laid out the villa’s precise address.
Su Han’s thoughts instantly flashed back to Li Tiangan’s bizarre embrace earlier that morning. The slip of paper had almost certainly been slipped into his pocket right then.
A chill crawled over his scalp.
Su Han had already suspected that Li Tiangan was tied to Wang Jiafu, but judging by this note, Li Tiangan appeared to stand directly opposed to him.
Flicking his lighter, Su Han watched the slip of paper burn to ash before setting off toward the marked location to survey the ground himself.
In the dead of night, after Shen Chengyin had flipped through a dozen pages of his book, Su Han finally trudged back inside with weary, dragged steps.
Watching the hollow, vacant daze in the boy’s eyes, Shen Chengyin waited in silence for him to speak.
“It’s bizarre. Is this Li Tiangan guy actually a friend or a foe?”
Su Han laid out the events of the day. He had staked out the villa for hours, but far from catching a glimpse of Zhao Guang’s sister, he hadn’t seen so much as a shadow through the windows.
With security that tight, staging an extraction would be an uphill battle.
“I’m guessing Li Tiangan is Wang Jiafu’s lackey, and Wang Jiafu must have caught onto something unusual about my recent movements,” Su Han analyzed out loud.
Which would explain why he dispatched a trusted enforcer like Li Tiangan to keep him under lock and key.
It also explained how Li Tiangan could know so much about the sister’s imprisonment.
“As for why Li Tiangan would pass this intel to me… either he wants to screw Wang Jiafu over, or he’s dangling bait to buy my loyalty. But…”
Su Han couldn’t shake a nagging sense of contradiction.
If Li Tiangan held a grudge against Wang Jiafu, with his level of combat prowess, he could have just killed the bastard outright.
After all, though Wang Jiafu held the seat of power, his personal offensive capability was pathetically low.
If it was just an attempt to buy him off, that didn’t add up either.
How could Li Tiangan be so sure a scrap of information would secure his allegiance? What if he took the prize and bit the hand that fed him?
“There is someone he wants dead, but cannot kill himself,” Shen Chengyin interjected, his tone deep and measured.
Su Han jumped in surprise.
While he had been rambling, the man had been flipping through his book without looking up; Su Han had assumed he was tuning him out completely.
Someone he wanted dead, but couldn’t kill?
Su Han pondered for a beat. “Another primary-tier ability user?”
He had experienced Li Tiangan’s methods firsthand; the instant contact was made, total paralysis set in. Ordinary primary ability users wouldn’t stand a chance against him.
“The commander of Wang Jiafu’s personal guard, Tang Qiao, is also a primary lightning ability user.”
“The commander? I haven’t seen him around.”
“He operates exclusively in the shadows on Wang Jiafu’s behalf. He rarely shows his face in public.”
As if recalling a past memory, Shen Chengyin’s expression darkened slightly.
Suddenly, every piece of the puzzle fell into place. Li Tiangan held a blood feud with Tang Qiao, but couldn’t take him down alone, so he sought to borrow their blades to tear down Wang Jiafu’s regime.
Li Tiangan had likely deduced that whether Shen Chengyin’s name was cleared or not, Su Han had no intention of sparing Wang Jiafu and his lapdogs.
And Su Han truly thought that way. If the subtle plan went up in smoke, he would just hack Wang Jiafu’s head clean off his shoulders and walk away.
He held an open hand out toward Shen Chengyin. “I need to borrow something from you.”
“What?”
Su Han whispered a few words under his breath.
Shen Chengyin’s expression shifted subtly, taking on a peculiar cast. “Mine is going to be a bit large on you.”
“No problem, I can just pad it out.”
Su Han waved off the concern without a second thought.
How big could it possibly be?
