Chapter 246: Deadlock at Ten Thousand Feet

Han Zheng didn’t waste a heartbeat on hesitation. He pumped three fast rounds into an Apex officer attempting to raise a portable defense shield before turning his shoulder toward the rocky incline leading up toward the Research Center’s main blast gate.

"All units, break engagement!" Han Zheng’s voice boomed over the squad frequency, heavy and unyielding against the mounting roar from the sky. "Fall back to the primary entrance! Move!"

Down on the mud-slicked valley floor, Lin Qing delivered a final, tight burst into the wreckage of the secondary transport, keeping the remaining Apex survivors pinned behind burning steel. "Ah Hua, on me! Back to the threshold!"

"Copy that, Vice-Commander!" Ah Hua called out. He stepped backward up the muddy slope, using his dark steel prosthetic arm as a shield against flying gravel while squeezing off steady, left-handed suppressive fire from his sidearm.

High above on the overlook ridge, Old Wang grabbed Su Yun by her tactical harness, pulling her back from the ledge. "We’re done here, kid! Down the access ladder, move!"

Su Yun slung her rifle across her back in one fluid motion, scrambling down the iron rungs anchored to the granite rock face. Old Wang dropped right beside her, both of them hitting the concrete apron of the outer staging bay just as Han Zheng, Lin Qing, and Ah Hua burst out of the tree line.

Together, the ground team scrambled past the threshold into the entrance mouth, where Lu Feng and Song Yan stood waiting behind the reinforced inner barricades.

Outside, fifty meters down the trail, the surviving Apex soldiers scrambled through the slush, frantically attempting to establish a firing line—until their eyes caught the looming shadow descending through the cloud deck.

The roaring shadow of the bomber cut straight through the low gray mist, its sleek, jet-black fuselage gliding directly over the narrow canyon peak. Its heavy bay doors were visibly sloped open, revealing the dark, ominous tips of precision payload racks tucked inside its belly.

"Down! Cover your heads!" Han Zheng barked, shoving Ah Hua and Lin Qing behind a massive, angular granite outcrop right beside the heavy steel tracks of the outer blast gate.

Beside them, Old Wang dragged Su Yun down flat against the concrete floor, throwing his arm over his helmet as they braced for the earth-shattering impact of high-yield air-to-ground munitions.

Three seconds passed. Five seconds. Ten seconds.

No whistling dropped ordnance tore through the sky. No blinding flashes of orange fire incinerated the mountain ridge. No deafening shockwaves collapsed the subterranean tunnel network.

Instead, the massive black aircraft simply maintained a steady, sweeping arc overhead. The heavy, hollow drone of its twin jet turbines echoed off the granite cliffs, circling the valley like a patient, metallic vulture waiting over a dead battlefield.

Down in the mud, the surviving Apex vanguard troopers who had taken shelter behind the burning wreckage were equally frozen. They stared up at the sky through their mud-splattered viewfinders, their weapons lowered in confusion.

They had expected the air strike to vaporize the ridge and clear their path, yet the bomber simply loitered in the clouds.

Old Wang slowly raised his head from the cold concrete, blinking through the gray mist as he stared up at the circling silhouette. "What the hell are they doing?" Old Wang muttered, his voice raspy with disbelief as he adjusted his goggles. "They had the drop window. They knew where we were. Why didn’t they drop?"

Lin Qing peered around the side of her stone outcrop, her sharp eyes darting between the silent bomber overhead and the disoriented enemy soldiers below. "Han Zheng, do you copy? What’s the situation?"

"We’re intact," Han Zheng’s deep voice growled over the comms from his position near the gate tracks. "Nobody fire unless fired upon. Something isn’t right."

Inside the Command Hub, Sun Hao was hunched over his main terminal, his fingers flying across the interface with frantic, precise strokes. The signal diagnostic monitor was flaring with high-frequency audio bands bouncing off the circling aircraft’s directional transmitter.

"I’m patching into their -deck frequency!" Sun Hao called out over the squad’s comms network, his voice crackling with excitement. "The cipher key we swept from that depot had their high-altitude encryption protocol pre-loaded. Listen to this!"

A sharp burst of static hissed through every squad member’s earpiece, followed immediately by the digitized, clear audio feed straight from the bomber’s cockpit.

"—Flight Lead to Apex Central Control," the pilot’s voice came through, heavy with tension and breathing heavily through an oxygen mask. "We have cleared the cloud deck and established primary line-of-sight over the valley pass. Ground telemetry confirms our target grid is locked. Requesting immediate final clearance for payload release."

There was a two-second pause on the line before a cold, sharp voice cut through the static—a voice Su Yun recognized with an instantaneous, chilling shudder that ran straight down her spine. Dr. Sterling.

"Negative, Flight Lead," Dr. Sterling replied flatly from Apex Central. "Hold payload release. Repeat, abort primary strike sequence."

A sharp gasp of frustration broke from the pilot over the radio feed. "Control, are you reading our telemetry? The target base’s outer perimeter is completely exposed! The third vanguard’s ground team has been heavily compromised in a bottleneck trap—their lead armor is complete scrap! If we don’t drop now, the enemy squad will fall back behind their blast gates!"

"Your orders are absolute, Flight Lead," Dr. Sterling stated, his tone dropping into an icy, unyielding register that admitted no argument. "Sensors confirm the Primary Subject is currently located directly within your primary blast radius on that ridge line. You will not release a single round into that valley."

The pilot’s voice flared with rising anger and sheer disbelief. "Control, respectfully, this is a heavy long-range tactical bomber! We burnt forty percent of our non-renewable aviation fuel reserves just to reach this altitude! We don’t have the fuel capacity to hover over a mountain peak for an hour waiting for ground teams to reorganize! If we loiter here another fifteen minutes, we won’t have enough fuel to reach the emergency landing strip! We’ll be gliders in a dead zone!"

"Shut your mouth and maintain your orbit, Flight Lead," a second voice boomed over the channel—Commander Lu’s deep, terrifyingly calm voice cutting off the pilot like a blade. "If you drop those munitions and destroy her core, I will personally see to it that you are stripped and strapped to an extraction chair the moment your boots touch the tarmac. You will hover until she is isolated or secured by secondary ground elements. Do you understand your orders?"

A heavy, suffocating silence hung over the radio feed for five long seconds before the pilot responded in a clipped, bitterly defeated tone.

"...Understood, Central Control. Holding orbit at ten thousand feet. Awaiting ground isolation."

The transmission clicked off into low, static white noise.

Up near the entrance threshold, Su Yun stood up slowly from behind the rock outcrop, her hands trembling slightly against the cold metal body of her rifle. Her pale face was turned toward the sky, her eyes fixed on the circling black bomber as it carved silent loops through the grey cloud layer.

Every person in the squad had heard the transmission over their headsets. The entire valley fell into an eerie silence, punctuated only by the distant, steady hum of the jet engines overhead and the soft dripping of melting ice from the granite walls.

Old Wang picked up his rangefinder, looking over at Su Yun with his eyes wide in total realization. "They... they aren’t holding back to protect their disoriented ground troops," he whispered softly, the cold wind blowing his hair across his

forehead. "They’re holding back because of you."

"I..." Su Yun’s voice cracked slightly, a cold wave of nausea washing over her stomach. "They’re holding an entire air strike back... because I’m standing here?"

Lin Qing stepped out from behind her boulder, her rifle held low as she looked up at the sky, then turned her eyes toward Han Zheng. The reality hit her with startling clarity: Su Yun was an unwitting, absolute human shield for the entire Research Center. As long as Su Yun remained near the bunker entrance, Commander Lu refused to drop a single bomb on the mountain.

Lin Qing instantly tapped her comms unit. "Han Zheng, did you hear that?"

"I heard it," Han Zheng replied, stepping out into the open mouth of the blast gate and gesturing toward the interior staging bay. "They can’t shoot while Su Yun is near us. They’re trapped by their own obsession with retrieving her."

Han Zheng gestured toward the disoriented Apex troopers down in the gorge, who were frantically trying to retreat on foot through the slush now that they realized their air support wasn’t going to cover them or clear the debris.

"Ah Hua, Lin Qing, keep your sights on those retreating infantry," Han Zheng ordered sharply, gesturing backward toward the open vault of the primary entrance. "Old Wang, get Su Yun inside right now. We fall back through the primary gate and seal the outer blast doors behind us. Let that iron bird burn its fuel in the cold air until it’s forced to turn back."

"On it, Commander!" Ah Hua called out. He backed up toward the threshold, keeping his sidearm raised in his left hand while keeping his mechanical arm raised to guard his chest, firing a short, deliberate suppressive volley to keep the retreating Apex ground troops pinned in the mud far down the trail.

High above, the solitary Apex bomber completed another wide, frustrating circle through the grey cloud layer. Its pilot was forced to maintain an agonizing hold, watching helplessly through high-altitude optics as the squad calmly backed through the massive, reinforced doorway.

As Su Yun stepped through the heavy steel threshold of the outer bunker bay, guided gently by Lin Qing’s steady hand on her shoulder, Lu Feng and Song Yan slammed the manual engagement levers. With a heavy, grinding roar of hydraulic gears, the blast doors slid shut, sealing out the cold mountain wind and the hum of the aircraft overhead.

Su Yun glanced back one last time just before the steel plates clicked locked. The dark, terrifying weight of Commander Lu’s relentless hunt settled onto her shoulders like iron chains—leaving her to wonder just what dark secret was buried deep inside her mind that made her worth more to Apex than an entire mountain.