Chapter 29: Target Practice
After spending an intensely sweet and tender night together, Tang Heng settled into a daily routine of leaving every morning to patrol and deliver supplies, returning home in the evening for his shift rotations. Each time he came back, he brought along personal belongings from his staff dormitory. Zhao Man stayed home, unpacking, organizing, and finding spots for every piece of gear Tang Heng carted back.
The bedroom now boasted a wardrobe, a shelving unit, and a sturdy bed fitted with a spacious storage base. The cheap wooden cot Zhao Man had bought from the roadside stall had met its demise two nights after the wedding feast; it was chopped into kindling and stacked neatly among the firewood.
The two crudely stitched quilts Zhao Man had thrown together were also taken by Tang Heng to a processing workshop, returning as genuinely thick, fluffy winter duvets.
Four ant-like utility robots were added to the household as well. Each was slightly larger than Zhao Man’s foot, resembling an oversized ant. They were the base’s foundational “maintenance mechanics”—diminutive in stature, but impressively capable.
Zhao Man watched in fascination as they cut, fitted, and joined the construction materials that had previously choked the yard, before steadily hoisting the sections atop the bedroom ceiling.
Seeing these worker ants brought Zhao Man’s mind back to the ant mound he had discovered in the wild. Tang Heng confirmed that these mechanical helpers were indeed engineered by studying mutated ant biology. However, the colony Zhao Man had stumbled across wouldn’t yield usable units until the year after next at the earliest.
Anchoring brackets had been bolted along the walls from the front courtyard all the way to the back, and the cultivation staging was already one-third laid out.
Zhao Man watched two worker ants in the yard haul out a square iron plate with a warped edge. Extending a front appendage, they cleanly sheared off the warped section and carried the plate to the base of the wall. Overhead, the two ants on the roof extended suction-tipped antennae, steadily reeling the metal plate upward inch by inch. Zhao Man scrambled up to the roof to watch. The two ants slotted the panel neatly into place, while one consumed the sheared scraps, processed them in its internal chamber into a fluid bonding agent, and injected the liquid into the seams, fusing them with unbreakable strength.
The four mechanical ants operated with seamless coordination, leaving Zhao Man zero room to intervene. Naturally, their performance came at a pretty penny: twenty points apiece. Zhao Man had covered the cost out of his pre-marital savings. Staring at the mere eighteen points left in his personal ledger, Zhao Man silently chanted like a mantra: It’s an investment. It’s absolutely necessary.
With time to kill, Zhao Man diligently drilled his marksmanship against the practice target every day. Fortunately, his efforts yielded noticeable results. While he still threw an occasional shot wide of the paper, Tang Heng hadn’t had reason to correct his stance in days.
When Tang Heng returned home, Zhao Man was wearing the high-speed motion simulation goggles, taking aim at the target. The specialized goggles could transform a static target into a bounding mutated beast, projecting it as it ran across a realistic field of view. The projection would freeze in an instant; though the projected beast remained physically aligned with the bullseye, the sudden halt played havoc with the wearer’s spatial perception, causing them to rapidly lose their sense of direction. Under these conditions, Zhao Man had to wield the Maro gun, set the simulation to Tier 1, and place rounds consistently within the target’s fifth ring before he could hope to hit a live mutated beast in the wild.
“How’s practice going today?” Tang Heng dropped two bundles of metal sheeting in the courtyard. Seeing Zhao Man drilling his shots, he called out.
Only after the mechanical ants had started assembling the planting beds did they realize they were short on materials. The supplies originally gathered fell just short of covering the living quarters with a complete cultivation deck, so over the past few days, Tang Heng had made a habit of hauling an extra load home after every shift.
“Still missing the mark. Tier 4 has my head spinning,” Zhao Man muttered, pulling off the goggles and rubbing his eyes.
“That’s completely normal. Even Alphas get dizzy for a couple of days when they first strap those goggles on. You’ve only been on Tier 4 for three days; give it another two, and you’ll be landing on paper.”
Tang Heng took the goggles from Zhao Man, slipped them over his own eyes, and dialed the simulation to Tier 1. Reacting with instant precision, he fired two shots in rapid succession—bang, bang. Both struck dead center in the bullseye. The Maro gun couldn’t be fitted with a silencer, but its discharge was quiet enough.
Clap, clap, clap.
“Incredible,” Zhao Man praised, applauding softly.
No matter how many times it happened, Tang Heng never grew tired of Zhao Man’s admiration. Smiling, he gathered Zhao Man into his arms. “These goggles don’t do much for me anymore. But when you practice, A-Man, you need to watch how the muscles coil as the beast bounds across the view. Use that to predict where its trajectory is going. Real beasts in the wild are faster and far more unpredictable than any lens projection. The creatures you encounter while scavenging aren’t heavily mutated, but there are always freak accidents. Dialing in your marksmanship is your best shot at keeping yourself alive.”
As he spoke, Tang Heng’s expression turned increasingly solemn. By the time he finished, his hands were clamped firmly onto Zhao Man’s shoulders, staring down into his eyes as if demanding a solemn vow.
“Yeah, I understand.”
Tang Heng ruffled Zhao Man’s hair, then leaned down to press two quick kisses to his lips. “Come on. Let’s make dinner.”
The translucent skylight panels on the roof had been dismantled, replaced by a frame designed to anchor and support the cultivation platform above. The platform now hung over half of the kitchen, turning the living quarters into something resembling a pitch-black container.
“Can those worker ants install transparent paneling?” Zhao Man asked. “I’d like to replace the wall facing the courtyard with transparent material and add a window. Otherwise, this room feels like an airtight box—completely dark.”
“Sure. We can repurpose the original wall material to build out the front entryway. We’ve gathered enough supplies for the overhead platform anyway; the ground beds in the courtyard will just have to wait until next year,” Tang Heng said.
Noticing the surprised look on Zhao Man’s face, Tang Heng added, “The batch of decommissioned materials from the Fourth Ring is being commandeered by the base to construct the new sand yam cultivation facility. They’re halting all public surplus distributions for now.”
Zhao Man nodded in understanding. Fair enough.
The base didn’t charge points for decommissioned materials, but because they were free, the competition was cutthroat. If you heard about a drop ten minutes late, not a scrap would be left.
After polishing off a dinner of minced meat mashed potatoes, Tang Heng mounted a newly delivered heater onto the wall outside the kitchen, with Zhao Man standing by as his assistant.
“Do we really need another heater?” Zhao Man asked, genuinely perplexed. The current heating setup felt more than sufficient to him.
“The old one won’t cut it on its own. We’re about to hit another severe cold snap, and the blizzards will follow right behind it. Even cranked to maximum output, the current unit barely takes the chill off the courtyard. We’ll mount this one in the yard so you can keep it running while doing target practice. The original unit will stay dedicated to the bedroom and kitchen.”
Another cold snap? Nearly a month had passed since the second freeze. Outdoor temperatures were already hovering at -50°C, and the base’s meteorological alerts projected that the third severe cold wave would strike in roughly two days.
Securing the heater to the wall, Tang Heng climbed down the ladder and set to work wiring the control switch.
“Once this cold snap hits, I won’t be able to make it home until the storm passes. A-Man, remember to—”
“Don’t go outside, monitor the base notices closely, don’t miss scheduled alerts, and no matter how many bonus points the base offers, don’t get greedy.”
Before Tang Heng could finish his lecture, Zhao Man rattled off the rules in one breath. Ever since the cold snap warning was issued, Tang Heng had drilled this into his head daily.
Tang Heng set down his tools, pulled Zhao Man into his arms, and planted a firm, lingering kiss on his mouth. “As long as you remember.”
The next morning, after Tang Heng headed out, Zhao Man downed a vial of nutrient solution and resumed drilling his marksmanship by the rear window. A fresh heap of mutated carcasses lay sprawled across the sulfur rocks outside, having arrived abruptly following the alert for the third cold wave.
Tang Heng had explained that this was entirely normal. Every year following the second freeze, hardier cold-adapted beasts would aggressively claim wind-sheltered dens that were already occupied by other creatures. The displaced beasts that were closer to the perimeter would charge the base in desperation, while those caught further out either froze or starved to death.
Crack.
The shot grazed past the hindquarters of the projected beast. Zhao Man slid his goggles up to check: it had nicked the outer rim of the target.
A spark of genuine delight flared in his chest. He had been drilling on Tier 4 for nearly two weeks, and only now was he barely able to match the split-second pause where the projected beast broke its stride.
The higher the tier, the harder it became to catch that fleeting moment of stillness. Zhao Man tried his best to apply Tang Heng’s advice, studying the beast’s muscle tension, but the creature moved with such blistering speed that he could only catch broad impressions.
Beside him, two of the worker ants were busy cutting through the partition wall. Zhao Man had cleared everything away from that corner first thing in the morning. The other two ants stood on the rooftop cultivation platform, extending their suction appendages to grip the wall panel securely. The instant the cuts went through, they hauled the slab upward, securing it over the kitchen roof.
The worker ants then cut a sheet of transparent material in half, spewing molten bonding agent to fuse it into the wall frame. The remaining half was stacked against the wall, following the pre-set parameters Tang Heng had configured.
Wrapping up his target practice, Zhao Man returned to the bedroom. Digging two magnetic pins from his tool kit, he pressed them into the top corners of the new window. He threaded a length of cord through a hemmed piece of fabric and secured both ends, completing a rudimentary curtain.
Drawing the curtain aside without switching on the lights, the room remained dim, but it was a massive improvement over being locked in a windowless, lightless box.
Finding himself with time on his hands once more, Zhao Man ran a diagnostic sweep of the home defense network, then counted the carcasses on the sulfur rocks outside: twenty-eight beasts. Yesterday he had counted thirty, and twenty-nine the day before. Just as he was gearing up for another recount, an advance billing notice flashed across his terminal: forty points due.
Advance deposit? Zhao Man remembered paying twenty-five points before the blizzard season even started. Barely forty-odd days had passed, and it was already tapped dry?
Tapping into the line items, he scanned the itemized breakdown: electricity, water, supply delivery surcharges, personal security fees, and disaster relief levies. Tallying it all together, he actually owed the base a five-point deficit.
He clicked into the disaster relief fee. The explanation stated that on humanitarian grounds, residents who did not host evacuees were mandated to co-fund the public relief apparatus alongside the base administration. The base covered two shares, while the remaining burden was apportioned across the residential rings. The Sixth Ring shouldered a 0.5-share allocation, amounting to an assessment of 5.8 points against his account.
Aside from the relief levy, the lion’s share of the bill came from electricity. Winter power was subsidized at a half-price discount of five cents per kilowatt-hour, but running their heater non-stop around the clock—coupled with the active perimeter defense grid—had racked up over 400 kilowatt-hours across the past month, and that was even with the heater drawing on its integrated solar storage.
As for delivery surcharges and defense dispatch fees, those dated back to the single order placed before their wedding and the official report filed after the first mutated beast incursion.
With nothing to contest, Zhao Man authorized a payment of forty-five points from their joint marital account.
The blizzard season wasn’t even half over, yet he had already surrendered sixty points in municipal advances alone. Fortunately, Tang Heng had been pulling continuous shifts all winter at double pay, leaving them with over a hundred points pooled in their joint account. Zhao Man couldn’t help but wonder how households without active employment managed to survive the winter at all.
