Chapter 313 - 244: Covering the Vast Wilderness

Chapter 313: Chapter 244: Covering the Vast Wilderness

BOOM!

A muffled, short explosion echoed across the open bridgehead.

In a flash, Lin Fan bent his knees slightly, lowered his center of gravity, and gripped the sword’s hilt like an iron vise, holding it vertically in front of him.

The burst of force was like two invisible hands pushing on the pommel and the tip of the blade simultaneously.

Before, the sword would have been sent spinning away. But this time, through a combination of Lin Fan’s micro-adjustments and physical strength, he locked the two opposing torques, perfectly converting them into pure forward momentum.

SCRAAAPE—

Propelled by the two-hundred-jin greatsword, Lin Fan maintained his sword-wielding stance as he was forced to slide a full meter across the concrete road!

The thick soles of his work boots scraped two smoking, scorched lines onto the ground.

This wasn’t just about strength; it was an almost inhuman control over his body’s center of gravity and the balance of external forces.

"Hoo..."

Lin Fan let out a slow breath, the soles of his feet feeling hot. He held the position he’d landed in after the slide and looked back at Ye Qingzhou.

"How about that? Is this the ’vector translation’ you wanted?"

"Mm, your form is still a bit ugly, but the core logic is sound."

Ye Qingzhou’s pen flew across the paper in her hand, sketching a complex force-body diagram. Her meticulous attitude made it seem as if she weren’t facing a super-powered Warrior holding a greatsword, but a patient undergoing a physical examination.

"It’s not just sound..."

She stopped writing, looking up to re-examine Lin Fan, a trace of genuine admiration in her eyes.

"Being a veterinarian is a waste of your talents. With your balance and coordination, you should have been a gymnast or a fighter pilot."

She was serious.

To a layman, it looked as if Lin Fan had just been pushed and slid a bit.

But in Ye Qingzhou’s eyes, that single moment contained at least a dozen minute torque corrections.

To control two extremely unstable jets of force in an instant, moving his own hundred-kilogram body with precision without falling flat on his face—the neural reaction speed and muscle control he displayed could no longer be explained away as a simple ’physical enhancement of an Awakened One’.

This was talent.

The innate talent of a "pilot."

SNAP.

She snapped the notebook shut, its pages already crammed with dense notes.

Countless scattered data points, formulas, and parameters collided and rearranged in her mind, finally coalescing into a blurry blueprint.

"All right, experimental data collection complete."

Ye Qingzhou deftly tucked the notebook into an inner pocket of her tactical vest for safekeeping, then turned to face the people who had just gotten out of the cars.

"You’re just in time," she said to Hu Chen, who was standing by one of the vehicles, as she walked toward them. "Hu Chen, you’re with me. Take some men, find me a quiet room in the main building, get the biggest table you can find, and all the paper and pens. I need to start on the schematics immediately."

Then she turned her head to Lin Fan, asking for his input.

"Colonel Lin, I’ll do my best to pull an all-nighter and finish the blueprints tonight. We can discuss any other requirements after the first draft is done, is that okay?"

"Yes, no problem. You’re the expert. I’ll follow your lead."

Lin Fan agreed readily. With a thought, he made a light wiping motion with his hand, and the greatsword vanished.

He then walked toward the other vehicle, greeting the newcomers. "Zhaotian, Xu Qian, let’s head back too. Time to eat, I’m starving..."

"Time to eat!" Chu Zhaozhao leaped down from the car roof with a WHOOSH, scrambling into the back seat with Su Qing and Ye Qingzhou. Ye Qingniao also hopped off the hood, shot Lin Fan a glare, and firmly planted herself back in the passenger seat, refusing to give up an inch of her territory.

The others piled into the second car, leaving Lin Fan once again without a seat, hanging onto the outside.

With a screech of tires, the two vehicles carved a pair of wide semicircles on the bridgehead—a space left devastated by Lin Fan’s earlier efforts.

Blinding columns of light from their headlights swept like sharp blades across the distant horde of corpses, then turned away without a second thought.

Their taillights streaked away in two red lines, speeding toward the unfinished-building camp, leaving the broken bridge and the roaring water below to be swallowed by the night wind and the boundless dark...

The night wind blowing over the broken bridge carried the scorched smell from the soles of Lin Fan’s boots, mixing it with damp water vapor and the stench of decay as it flew toward the higher, more distant darkness.

The deathly silent urban district, the occasional window flashing with light, the inexplicably collapsed overpass, the streets congested with a long dragon of scrap metal, the hordes of corpses shambling like walking dead in the flickering shadows—and even, in the extreme distance, two tentacles reaching for the night sky as if probing the infinite universe—all formed a series of silent film stills under the thin moonlight.

The night wind swept over this wasteland of death, over the surging boundary river, heading ever northward, ever eastward.

Finally, at the edge of the horizon, a patch of light appeared.

There lay the "safe zone," sealed by layers of high walls and barbed wire. It was the only island in this dead sea of darkness—the Linjiang University City Quarantine Zone.

Powerful searchlights crisscrossed along the top of the walls, and machine gun nests stood like grim fortresses.

In front of the main fortifications were a number of temporary wooden watchtowers. On one of them, a faint, dark red light blinked for a brief moment.

The gunshot, muffled by a silencer, was much quieter than normal but still loud. Just as the sound rang out, the head of a zombie that had wandered around a street corner and into the light suddenly burst open. It collapsed to the ground, kicking up a small cloud of dust.