Chapter 17: Waiting for This Exact Moment
A faint scent of disinfectant washed over him.
Su Han stayed still, letting the other man bandage his wound.
To clean the trauma site earlier, the medical staff had cut away nearly his entire shirt.
Now, the boy lying on the operating table was bare-chested. Flakes and streaks of crimson bloomed across his fair, pale skin, looking like a splatter of paint on a classical Chinese landscape.
After waiting a good while without feeling any gauze being wrapped, Su Han broke the silence, teasing with a light prompt: “What are you doing? Hurry up. It hurts.”
Only then did the other man begin moving, slow and deliberate.
Layer after layer, the gauze was wound securely, and then all movement stopped. Su Han waited a beat longer before reaching up and pulling the cloth off his face.
The dressing was neat and complete, but aside from himself, the room was empty.
Gone?
Not only gone, but a clean shirt had been draped over his chest.
Making sure no one was around, Su Han discreetly peeled back a corner of the blood-stained gauze. Beneath it, his skin was smooth and intact—not a scrape in sight, let alone a bullet hole.
He carefully rewound the bandage, loop by loop, until it looked just as it had before.
“A-Han!!”
A cluster of familiar ability users burst into the room. At the front was the rough-and-tumble veteran who cared for him most, dragging a terrified doctor along by the collar.
The doctor’s mask was pulled askew, and he dangled like a limp bean sprout, shaken back and forth in the burly man’s iron grip.
“You bunch of useless bastards! Leaving a patient on the table to run outside—shit, a tiny-ass spark like that could’ve been pinched out with two fingers! You needed the whole damn ward to rush over and put it out?! Huh?!”
Straightening his crooked glasses, the medic whimpered in terror. Watching from the table, Su Han felt his heart skip a beat, genuinely afraid the brute was going to strangle the poor guy on accident.
“It’s fine, brother. The bullet’s already out,” Su Han interjected to defuse the situation. “Saving the medicine was more important anyway. I was the one who told them I could bandage it myself.”
Drenched in cold sweat, the doctor shot him a look of pure gratitude.
The surrounding ability users turned their attention to the blood-soaked bandages on Su Han’s shoulder.
Several of them were seasoned combat veterans with plenty of battlefield experience.
“Fuck… That bastard Wang Jiafu!”
If that bullet had drifted even an inch to the side, it would have punctured Su Han’s lung.
With the rudimentary medical capabilities left in the base, saving him would have been next to impossible.
Only now did it truly sink in: in Wang Jiafu’s eyes, even the lives of ability users were disposable trash.
A chill crept through the veins of every man present.
Su Han took it all in, the faint glimmer in his eyes deepening.
It couldn’t be helped. Since Wang Jiafu wanted to consolidate his grip on power by courting the metahuman elite, Su Han had no choice but to use himself as bait to shatter that foundation.
“Where’s the guard who pulled the trigger?” someone demanded.
“Tang Qiao chewed him out and dragged him away,” another spat, letting out a disgusted curse. “Damn it, Tang Qiao and Wang Jiafu are in cahoots. Neither of them is worth a damn!”
A couple of nurses busied themselves in the corner, cleaning up surgical tools in complete silence, desperate to make themselves invisible.
“If Wang Jiafu doesn’t give us a damn good explanation for this, he’d better be ready for me to snap his neck!”
Without smartphones or television to pass the hours, word of mouth spread like wildfire among idle survivors.
By evening, once most of the scavenging squads had returned to base, the news that Wang Jiafu had nearly gunned down an ability user swept through the compound like a tidal wave.
It was especially potent because of who the victim was: A-Han, one of the base’s standout talents. He was handsome, lethal in combat, and pleasantly simple-minded—the kind of kid people instinctively liked.
In an instant, an icy paranoia gripped every ability user in the settlement.
Wang Jiafu returned at dusk, his face dark as a thundercloud.
He had taken a squad to the ruins of the building he had previously brought down, only to discover that someone had indeed tampered with the site.
The half-finished structure right beside it had collapsed as well—demolished with charges. Within three days at most, the shockwave and noise would draw a massive wave of the infected straight toward Hope Base.
While the horde might not match the scale of the first siege, the base’s combat power was severely depleted; facing another encirclement was a lethal gamble.
Wang Jiafu cursed violently under his breath.
Back then, he had personally put down Shen Chengyin’s closest confidants, leaving not a single living witness among his circle.
Who the hell was trying to avenge him?
Before he could reach his office, a mob of furious ability users who had been lying in wait swarmed him from all sides.
“Wang Jiafu! You think you’re fit to lead this place?!”
“Get the fuck off that throne right now!”
Wang Jiafu was utterly bewildered.
He had only stepped outside the walls for a single day—how were the ability users already staging an open revolt?
Tang Qiao possessed sharper foresight; the moment Wang Jiafu was cornered, he arrived with a detachment of guards to break up the mob.
Surrounded by a protective wall of shields and rifles, Wang Jiafu listened as Tang Qiao leaned in and whispered the details into his ear.
Wang Jiafu’s expression darkened into an icy scowl. Turning toward the dissenting mob, he barked in a low, authoritative rasp: “Replace the leader? A second zombie siege is bearing down on us right now! If you replace me, are you going to step up and command the defenses?!”
The guards behind him chimed in on cue: “The only reason the Leader left the perimeter today was because our scouts spotted an enormous wave of unidentified infected converging near our borders! It’s the prelude to a full-scale siege!”
The scavenging teams that returned today had indeed reported seeing abnormal clusters of walkers, unusually dense in number.
A zombie siege.
Hearing those words, the ability users knit their brows into grim furrows.
The first siege had been commanded by Wang Jiafu, and it had still resulted in catastrophic casualties. Even the formidable Leader Shen had perished in the meat grinder.
Now months had passed, and the incoming ranks would surely contain agile, deadly primary-tier mutated variants; there was no telling how badly they would be mauled this time.
A wave of dread washed over them. No matter how furious those who wanted justice for Su Han were, none of them were stupid enough to pick a fight with Wang Jiafu at a critical juncture like this.
Watching the metahumans seethe with suppressed rage, unable to strike, Wang Jiafu finally let out a quiet sigh of relief.
A pack of brainless brutes with all muscle and no wits—how dare they try to play games with him?
Still, it was high time he dealt with that brat, A-Han.
This coming siege would be the perfect hunting ground.
When word reached Su Han that Wang Jiafu had deftly defused the standoff, he wasn’t surprised in the least.
If Wang Jiafu were an incompetent fool, the male lead in the original novel wouldn’t have been driven to such a wretched, miserable end.
Right now, he was holed up at home pretending to be bedridden, chatting with the system to pass the time.
Shen Chengyin hadn’t returned to the safehouse for several days, which left him feeling uneasy.
If the male lead went and died in some forgotten ditch again, Su Han would be thoroughly screwed.
“Around when will this siege hit?”
[In the original plot, after Wang Jiafu blew up the building, it took about three days for the horde to encircle the base. This time should be roughly the same, right?] System 111 offered after some thought.
The window between the two sieges was narrow, so the horde’s numbers certainly wouldn’t match the initial assault, but their arrival would be much faster.
A clear plan formed in Su Han’s mind.
Rolling out of bed, he walked across the hall and knocked on Li Tiangan’s door.
Li Tiangan opened it, running a hand through his tangled mop of curls. He was bare-chested, utterly unbothered by his lack of attire.
“The man you want dead is Tang Qiao, isn’t he?” Su Han got straight to the point.
A flash of approval gleamed in Li Tiangan’s eyes. “I don’t necessarily want him dead. I just want him dragged down from that high perch of his.”
Su Han didn’t ask for the reason.
He couldn’t care less what bad blood existed between Li Tiangan and Tang Qiao; all that mattered was whether Li Tiangan could be of use to him.
“Deal. I’ll help you,” he answered without missing a beat. “Do me a favor in return. Within one week, I’ll see Tang Qiao stripped of his rank.”
