Chapter Eighty-Seven: Fierce Battle at the Airport, Part One

If it really were Darth Vader from Star Wars, the fight would never have been this one-sided. In an environment like this, those flashy black costumes were nothing but perfect targets.

The battle was going smoothly. The black-clad thugs were nothing more than a rabble. Faced with a well-trained squad, they were cut down one by one like straw dogs before a storm.

Cai Jiashu changed magazines and said with an easy smile, “I say, Xiao Zhao, isn’t this a little too easy?” He was not underestimating the so-called Dark Warriors here.

Wei Tao had come up through Wolf Fang, and so had Dagger. That was why the two of them were always so guarded about their backgrounds. They knew exactly what could be said and what could not. Even now, when there were no longer any formal secrecy rules, everyone who had once come out of the 026 Logistics Depot carried a deep brand of loyalty.

Zhao Qiang was Wei Tao’s proudest student, the first and the most diligent one. Wei Tao had taught him everything he had learned in the special forces: firearms, hand-to-hand combat, demolition, disguise and reconnaissance, infiltration behind enemy lines, special vehicle operations—anything that could be taught, he gave without the slightest reservation. The Devil’s Week, hell training, all the drills that would normally take months in the army, Wei Tao crammed into Zhao Qiang in a single week.

The squad had started training much later, but as new humans who had survived radiation, their physical abilities were already far beyond those of ordinary people. They had also received systematic military training before, so the difficulty was lower by quite a bit. With Wei Tao and Dagger drilling them together, and then a period of combat testing on top of that, this group of ordinary soldiers was no less formidable than the most elite men of Wolf Fang.

Thugs and hooligans—this trash that had always lived at the very bottom of society—might swagger around in ordinary times, bullying civilians and acting like lords of the earth, but in the eyes of regular troops they were simply nothing. Any ordinary soldier from the army, facing them one on one, could take down three or four of such scum without breaking a sweat. All the more so when facing a squad this elite.

If these so-called Dark Warriors could have gathered together, used the terrain and their numerical advantage to force a positional fight, or had some kind of organized command and crossfire, they might still have had a chance. After all, the squad only had ten men, and five were left behind to cover the rear. Only five had actually fought their way into the terminal building. In a place this large, a five-man assault team simply could not cover every angle.

The moment the shooting started, the Dark Warriors fell apart. They had killed too many people in ordinary times and grown bold from it. They did not take the five-man squad seriously at all. In noisy little groups of three or five, howling and cursing, they rushed out from behind cover with brazen recklessness, almost afraid the other side might not know they were there. Guns of all kinds rattled wildly, the noise enough to make anyone’s hair stand on end.

At first the squad was not used to it. Was this really combat? Take two steps, and someone would rush out from the opposite side, spewing filthy curses, never bothering to aim. Since bullets cost nothing, they would just keep squeezing the trigger until the magazine ran dry. Many of them even let the recoil kick their barrels high into the air, so that by the end the bullets were all punching into the ceiling. Cai Jiashu watched with a wince, muttering under his breath.

When the initial chaos passed, the squad’s precise fire pinned the Dark Warriors down so badly that none of them dared show their heads. In the first exchange alone, more than a dozen bodies were left behind. The enemy’s marksmanship was downright monstrous. On every corpse there were exactly two holes, no more and no less. When these men fired, they did it with lethal intent: once a shot rang out, someone died. The Dark Warriors learned quickly and took cover behind obstacles, peeking out now and then to fire a few random shots toward the squad.

People were still people, after all. Everyone had been born to someone. These Dark Warriors, following Li Zixin around, were nothing more than gamblers who believed they could make a fortune in chaos. They had numbers, guns, and ammunition. In ordinary days, all they met were soft targets. After squeezing soft targets so often, they naturally grew used to fighting downhill battles. As long as they stayed behind the main force, barking a few shots under the shelter of the crowd, loot and women would come rolling in.

But before they had even had time to settle in, someone came to smash the place up. It was plainly a regular army unit, well trained and fully equipped. The Dark Warriors were not fools. Which one of them did not have innocent blood on his hands? Which one did not carry a few deaths on his conscience? They had thought that in this age of chaos everyone would be too busy to care, that the so-called government had long since ceased to exist. Yet now this group had marched in so boldly, with the bright five-star flag pinned to their chests. Even an idiot could see they were regular troops. If they were caught, however many heads they had would never be enough to satisfy the blades. Since death was certain either way, they might as well fight. As long as they killed these five men, there would still be plenty of carefree days ahead.

The fighting continued. True to form, the squad kept clearing the remaining resistance inside the terminal. The battle had already reached a fever pitch. The Dark Warriors had shifted from their initial brawling to a more cautious, steady approach. Although the squad had the edge in both training and equipment, the disadvantage in numbers could not be made up in a short time.

At any time, in any place, there are always people who, to stay alive or even just to get a mouthful of food, selectively forget what justice means and what dignity means. Before the enemy, they bow and scrape in a pitiful display. Among the survivors in the airport, there were such people as well. They handed their girlfriends or wives over to the invaders as gifts, hoping to win favor.

Their presence created enormous obstacles for the squad. They had only just submitted to the invaders, with no weapons and no fresh uniforms on their backs. Before the squad arrived, they had been fawning over their new masters. The despair of the apocalypse, combined with the threat of guns, had already pushed the survivors to their limit. The sudden assault by the squad became the last straw that broke their psychological defenses. They began attacking everyone around them in a frenzy.

When the sky and earth are at stake, hostages come first. That was one line Wei Tao had given them before departure. The safety of the people was an order. So while the squad was eliminating the remaining enemies in the terminal, they also had to deal at any moment with those ordinary people driven mad. Dealing with them was not as simple as shooting them dead. To avoid harming the innocent, the squad used nonlethal methods against the crazed civilians.

The squad’s pace slowed, and that gave the Dark Warriors their chance.