Chapter 161 - 160: Killing Intent

Chapter 161: Chapter 160: Killing Intent

"Zhaozhao, would you dare to kill a person?"

Lin Fan had told Chu Zhaotian and Xu Qian to stay and guard the RV, not to come any closer.

He then had Chu Zhaozhao fly him and Su Qing directly from the balcony of 301 to the rooftop of the opposite building.

Staring at the crowd and the situation in the distance, Lin Fan looked Chu Zhaozhao seriously in the eyes and asked.

"Kill a person?"

Chu Zhaozhao froze, glancing at the spear in her hand. She had killed at least a hundred zombies; some of those "people" were mangled messes of flesh and blood, while others, if you didn’t look too closely, just seemed like crazed living humans.

They looked like people, or rather, they had once been people.

She fought them, piercing their skulls with her spear and Flying Sword for one reason only: their naked killing intent.

She could feel it. They wanted to kill her, and then eat her.

Her counterattacks and slaughter were just instinct, so she had never really thought about this question.

"Like when we first got back? You, Big Brother, just BANG! One punch, like that?"

Chu Zhaozhao recalled the man who had been grabbing at their car door, trying to steal their vehicle, and sizing her up with a disgusting gaze. She made a fist and asked.

"Something like that... Could you do it?"

Lin Fan then remembered that Chu Zhaozhao had been sitting right there at the time, and he nodded.

"Then I think I can! I just couldn’t beat him back then, or else I would’ve pounded him. That guy was so disgusting. If it were now, I’d just SWOOSH and slice his head clean off!"

Chu Zhaozhao made a disgusted face, waved her little hand, and said with certainty.

"It wouldn’t disgust you?"

The three of them walked along the rooftop, facing the rising sun as they headed east. The orange sunlight felt incredibly warm on their skin.

"It’s disgusting... but I can stomach the disgust. Killing zombies is disgusting, killing people is disgusting, it’s all disgusting..."

Chu Zhaozhao swung the spear in her hand and said thoughtfully,

"But the disgust from killing zombies and killing people is about the same. Maybe you get used to it after killing enough. It’s much harder to get used to people being disgusting to you, because people will always find new ways to be disgusting..."

"Hmm... That makes a lot of sense..."

Lin Fan looked at the wisdom-filled gaze in her eyes and nodded in praise.

Beside them, Su Qing remained silent. It wasn’t that she disagreed; rather, her thoughts were running deeper, further.

’Wherever you go, I will go...’ Maybe back then, it was meant literally. But now, that sentence had clearly taken on a new meaning.

When their conversations shifted from "What’s for breakfast?" to "Would you dare to kill a person?", the path she and Zhaozhao were following Lin Fan down became nothing more than a hazy concept in Su Qing’s mind.

The morning sun cast a shadow from Lin Fan’s figure.

And in that shadow, the views and beliefs Su Qing had held for nearly thirty years quietly blurred.

She couldn’t clearly grasp what she was truly thinking, but she knew one thing: if Lin Fan were to ask her the same question, her final answer would be the same as Chu Zhaozhao’s...

「...」

BANG!

Under the control of Chu Zhaozhao’s power, the triggers were pulled almost simultaneously, so that everyone heard only a single gunshot.

With a series of THUDS, seven bodies collapsed to the ground, twitching uncontrollably.

The high-powered rifle rounds blew the tops of their skulls clean off. A spray of red and white spattered on the ground and the doors of the assault vehicle behind them.

At the same moment the shot rang out, the other five surviving soldiers squeezed their eyes shut and fell to the ground, a dark liquid slowly soaking out from beneath their trousers...

CLATTER-CLATTER-CLATTER...

The moment the gunfire ceased, a clattering of objects hitting the ground followed. The guns that had been floating in mid-air lost control, falling like puppets with their strings cut. And the one responsible for it all was bent over in front of everyone, retching violently...

Although Su Qing had nothing to do during this process, she knew what was likely to happen, so she had been standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Chu Zhaozhao the whole time.

Now, she was gently rubbing Chu Zhaozhao’s back to comfort her, even though Su Qing herself was also dry-heaving uncontrollably.

But neither she nor Chu Zhaozhao had closed their eyes from beginning to end. Because they were beginning to understand: this was something they had to adapt to after making their promise to Lin Fan, ’Wherever you go, I will go.’

Just as Chu Zhaozhao had said, ’After being disgusted enough, you get used to it...’

The sounds of retching also came from the crowd of people behind Lin Fan. Although they frequently moved zombie corpses, which had died in all sorts of bizarre and grotesque ways, seeing several living people’s brains splatter in an instant—seeing such fresh red and white gore splash everywhere—still made them feel nauseous.

Even Liu Bin, Zhang Ziyi, and the others standing at the front were stunned. The concrete block in Wang Yuanhua’s hands crashed to the ground.

First, they never expected the other side would actually dare to order a massacre. Likewise, they never expected Lin Fan’s counterattack to be so decisive.

This wasn’t even a battle. It was more like... divine punishment.

No warning, no process, only the result.

One moment, the enemy was arrogantly brandishing their power; the next, they were corpses, judged by their own weapons.

This was completely different from anything they had imagined.

They might have hoped for Lin Fan to appear suddenly with his spear, wreaking havoc. They might have envisioned the little girl’s Flying Sword descending from the sky to slaughter them all.

But they had never, ever imagined such a bizarre scene.

For a moment, they didn’t know what would happen next. They just stared blankly at the figure of the man before them, at a complete loss.

"Liu Bin, you guys who’ve been soldiers, pick up the guns. Strip them of all their gear... and throw the bodies into that building over there."

’No drops, no increase in blood volume... These guys are really... completely useless.’

Lin Fan had already anticipated this scene, so he wasn’t psychologically affected.

He looked at the two women retching by the side and suddenly smiled, feeling a bit fortunate. ’Good thing we left in a hurry and didn’t eat breakfast, otherwise it would’ve been a waste.’

In his eyes, that leader—whoever he was—and those unlucky bastards who actually dared to shoot didn’t even count as enemies. And what he had just done wasn’t a battle either.

It was just a necessary cleanup. A bit messy, that’s all. In any case, he had already gotten what he wanted.

One of the surviving soldiers opened his eyes. He glanced left and right, scared out of his wits, and frantically reached up to feel if his head was still intact.

"Th-thank you for sparing my life, sir! We’re just grunts, we were only following orders! Thank you, sir! Thank you for sparing us!"

Looking up and seeing the man standing before him, he scrambled to his feet and began kowtowing repeatedly.

Hearing this, the other living soldiers also opened their eyes. Seeing they weren’t dead, they quickly followed his lead, kowtowing and begging for mercy.

’Four of them raised their muzzles... so why is there an extra one? Let me see...’

Realizing the numbers didn’t match what he’d told Chu Zhaozhao, Lin Fan walked over to one of the men, picked up his rifle to inspect it, and couldn’t help but chuckle before speaking:

"Oh, this one didn’t take the safety off...

You don’t have to thank me. It wasn’t me who let you live. It was your own shred of kindness toward ordinary people, and... and luck."

He nodded, then glanced at the backs of Chu Zhaozhao and Su Qing, who were still squatting and retching, and continued,

"Get up. Take off your gear. Did you eat breakfast this morning? If not, come have some food with us..."

Then, he turned and shouted to the dozen or so survivors in the distance who were trying to inch their way out of the alley while no one was watching:

"You guys can stop trying to sneak away. We’re all common folk here, this has nothing to do with you..."

Without waiting for a reaction from either group, he turned his head and spoke to Liu Bin and the others, who had finally recovered and were getting back to work:

"Brother Liu, have someone start cooking. Get them something to eat, too. Some of those people over there look like they’re about to pass out from hunger... Clean this place up. We’re getting ready to head to the gas station."

As he spoke, he walked over to Chu Zhaozhao and Su Qing, squatted down beside them on the roadside, and began patting them on the back.

Meanwhile, the surviving soldiers and the group of ordinary people who had been preparing to flee for their lives could hardly believe their ears.

One second, they were trembling in fear of their impending deaths; the next, the man who held all their lives in his hands was asking them... if they had eaten?

They all just stood there, stunned. It wasn’t until the people from the community composed themselves and started cooking again, until the smoke began to rise from the stoves and the wheaty fragrance of griddle cakes finally overpowered the smell of blood, that they began to process the scene. Watching the survivor community whose rhythm they had disrupted now slowly return to a semblance of order,

one of the soldiers in the crowd finally broke down, collapsing to the ground and bursting into tears...