Chapter 13: It Was Him, Su Han
A few days later, Su Han walked into the base’s exchange center and set a handful of regular zombie crystal cores onto the counter, intending to trade them for a few bottles of water.
Uncle Wang collected the cores, then set out a pathetic half-bottle of water in return.
“Uncle Wang, that’s not very fair of you,” Su Han said with an aggrieved frown. “Usually, this many cores gets me two full bottles.”
“Sigh… It’s not that I’m trying to shortchange you on purpose, kid. The truth is, water reserves in the base have gotten real tight lately.”
In the apocalypse, virtually all outdoor water sources had been contaminated by rotting corpses, making bottled drinking water exceedingly scarce.
Under normal circumstances, aside from relying on expensive disinfection and filtration systems, the base depended heavily on the output of water-element ability users to keep daily operations afloat.
Zhao Guang was the base’s only primary water-element ability user. On an average day, he single-handedly supplied nearly a third of the entire settlement’s drinking water.
“How did drinking water suddenly get so scarce?”
Reading the look on Uncle Wang’s face, Su Han quietly slipped another core onto the counter.
Uncle Wang’s eyes crinkled into slits as he deftly pocketed the crystal.
“Zhao Guang had a falling-out with our Leader. He hasn’t supplied a single drop of drinking water to the base for two straight days now.”
Su Han feigned wide-eyed astonishment. “No way… Isn’t Leader Wang his life-saving benefactor? Everyone knows that!”
“Tell me about it. Human nature, huh…” Uncle Wang shook his head.
“Uncle Wang, do you know what they actually fought about? Heh, don’t laugh at me, I’m just dying of curiosity.” Su Han laid down two more cores.
Uncle Wang stared at the sparkling crystals, the greed in his eyes completely undisguised. But in truth, he didn’t know the real reason behind the feud either.
“Nobody knows for sure. People only saw Zhao Guang storming out of the west district a few mornings back, practically fuming, heading straight for the administrative building.”
The west district was where Zhao Guang’s sister lived.
Knowing there wasn’t much more intel to squeeze out of Uncle Wang, Su Han nudged the two cores across the wood. “Alright then, thanks, Uncle. Half a bottle it is. I’ll just bring more cores next time.”
Uncle Wang’s grin stretched from ear to ear.
At that exact moment, Wang Jiafu was in his office, nearly losing his mind with rage.
Lined up before him were several guards clad in black tactical gear, flanked by Tang Qiao, the chief captain of the guard corps, whose face was just as dark as his commander’s.
“Useless pieces of trash! Good for nothing except fucking things up! Can’t you keep your dicks in your pants for five minutes?! I know Zhao Guang’s sister is a beauty, but is this the damn time to lay a hand on her?!”
“The entire base relies on that man! Without him, what are you going to drink?! Piss?! You bunch of worthless bastards!”
God only knew how bewildered Wang Jiafu had been when Zhao Guang stormed into his home at the crack of dawn, pointing a trembling finger at his face and cursing him up and down.
It wasn’t until later that Wang Jiafu learned the cause: someone from the guard unit had violated Zhao Guang’s sister the previous night!
What an absolute nightmare. He had spent an enormous amount of effort and scheming to break that stubborn mule Zhao Guang into submission using his sister as leverage. Now, because one of his lackeys couldn’t control their lower half, half the empire he had painstakingly built was on the verge of burning to the ground!
If Zhao Guang actually spilled the truth about how Shen Chengyin had been framed, Wang Jiafu would be finished. Yet given the man’s crucial utility to the base, he couldn’t simply silence him with a bullet.
After venting a torrent of fury, Wang Jiafu turned his venomous glare onto Tang Qiao.
“Captain Tang, you tell me. Your men couldn’t keep it in their pants. How do you plan to handle this?”
There were four guards assigned to watch Zhao Guang’s sister, and not a single one admitted to the crime.
Tang Qiao hesitated for a fraction of a second before speaking cold and flat: “Since none of them will confess, kill all four.”
In an instant, arcs of purple lightning danced across the tips of his fingers.
The four guards panicked immediately. “Captain, it really wasn’t us! We were doing our normal shift rotations yesterday. When it happened, all four of us were off-duty resting!”
Tang Qiao stepped forward and delivered a vicious backhand across the speaker’s face.
“Do you take me for an idiot?”
If all four of them were resting, did a ghost slip into the house and do it?
The guards were choked with bitter despair, but they knew all too well that whoever confessed was as good as dead anyway.
A sharp, throbbing headache hammered at Wang Jiafu’s temples.
He waved a dismissive hand at Tang Qiao. “Drag all four to the square and execute them by firing squad. Consider it an accounting for Zhao Guang. While we’re at it, let the rest of the survivors see what happens to anyone who breaks the rules.”
Let them see what awaited anyone who dared cross his line.
Hearing their sentence, the four guards grew frantic, scrambling to plead for their lives.
Yet before a single scream could tear from their throats, Tang Qiao raised a hand, sending a violent current surging through their bodies in a flash of blinding light.
The four men collapsed into a heap without uttering a single sound.
“There is a price to pay for crossing the line. Giving you a clean death is already doing you a massive courtesy.”
Tang Qiao’s gaze was bone-chillingly cold, regarding the twitching bodies on the floor as if they were already rotting meat.
The moment Su Han stepped out of the exchange center, word reached him that a public execution was about to take place in the square near the mission hall.
He didn’t need a second guess to know who was about to take the fall.
Following the tide of spectators toward the heart of the square, he spotted four men in black tactical gear kneeling dejectedly in the dirt, their heads hung low.
Standing beside them was a man Su Han had never seen before. But observing the deferential respect the surrounding sentries showed him, Su Han easily deduced that this was the elusive guard captain, Tang Qiao.
Tang Qiao stood beside the condemned men, his expression chiseled and aloof. He rarely made public appearances, but because these four were skilled combatants, only he possessed the raw power to keep them suppressed; his personal presence was required.
He had stationed sentries around the perimeter to maintain crowd control. Whenever someone asked what was going on, the guards would offer a concise summary of the transgressions.
Su Han listened in on the chatter. The official story claimed these four men had assaulted the sister of Mr. Zhao Guang, violating the base’s strict decrees protecting women, and were to be publicly executed on the Leader’s direct orders.
For a fleeting second, Su Han felt as though he had stepped right back into an ancient feudal dynasty.
Hearing this righteous decree, the numb, sunken faces of many survivors in the crowd lit up with a fragile glimmer of hope.
“Leader Wang really is… a fair and just man. He’s even willing to execute his own elite soldiers.”
“In times like these, to still uphold the law and protect the families of our ability users… it’s not easy.”
“In our Hope Base, as long as you follow the rules, you’ll have a way to live…”
Naturally, those voicing such praise were mostly relatives and cronies of the “high-borns.” The survivors of the “Lower Sector” had already been tormented to the brink of despair by Wang Jiafu’s brutal policies; not an ounce of goodwill toward the Leader remained in their hearts.
Still, since Wang Jiafu wanted to use these four lives to harvest public sympathy and buy loyalty, Su Han had no intention of letting him have his way.
“Wait a second! Hold on!”
Su Han suddenly sprang forward from the dense crowd.
Tang Qiao’s gaze locked instantly onto the harmless-looking youth.
He remembered this kid. Remarkably agile, highly skilled in combat, yet subtly responsible for fanning unsavory rumors against Leader Wang throughout the compound. The Leader had specifically instructed him to assign a shadow to keep an eye on this “A-Han.”
“Does the guard corps even listen to the people?!” Su Han proclaimed with righteous fury, staring straight into Tang Qiao’s eyes without a trace of flinching. “I clearly reported it—that very night, I saw a suspicious figure in the base! He was dressed in head-to-toe black, bolted the second he saw me, and I chased him across half the sector without catching up. He ended up vanishing right near West Street in the west district!”
Standing tall, Su Han continued his passionate interrogation: “Sneaking around like a phantom, he was obviously up to no good! And it happened at the exact same hour Mr. Zhao Guang’s sister was attacked! Why didn’t anyone investigate that lead?!”
Tang Qiao narrowed his eyes into lethal slits.
“Little brother, lying in this base will get your tongue carved out.”
“I’m not lying! The moment I lost him, I reported it straight to the nearest patrol squad. If you don’t believe me, go ask them yourself!”
Su Han wasn’t lying in the slightest. That night, a shadowy figure dressed in black had indeed crept through the alleys.
And Su Han had indeed flagged down the nearest patrol unit afterward, recounting the sighting to all ten sentries loud and clear.
He also knew, with absolute certainty, that this phantom in black was the true culprit behind the “violation” of Zhao Guang’s sister.
Because that phantom had been him, Su Han.
He was the one who had borrowed the oversized black tactical uniform from Shen Chengyin. He was the one who had disguised himself as a guard to infiltrate Zhao Guang’s sister’s residence. And he was the one who had struck a private deal with Zhao Yue, staging the entire scene to make it look as though she had been brutally defiled.
