Chapter 133: Shadow of the Past

The heavy steel treads of the two armored transports ground mercilessly through the fresh, dense snowdrifts blanketed across the high mountain pass.

Only one day prior, a fierce, howling blizzard had swept through the ridge, depositing nearly three feet of powdery white snow across the already treacherous terrain.

Though the atmospheric temperatures had begun their sudden, unseasonal rise, the valley had not yet dissolved into a sea of slush. Instead, the rapid shift created a far more hazardous phenomenon: a brittle, glass-like top layer of ice sheeted over deep, soft drifts, while massive, unstable ice cornices clung precariously to the jagged rock faces lining the narrow canyon roads.

Inside the lead transport, Lin Qing sat quietly in the front passenger seat, her eyes methodically scanning the sweeping white wilderness through the thermal scope mounted to her visor.

Beside her, Lieutenant Chen kept a firm, two-handed grip on the heavy steering wheel, carefully navigating the vehicle along the hidden contours of the buried road. In the rear passenger compartment, Zhou Ming was making final checks on their assault rifles and heavy webbing, his movements quiet and practiced.

"Watch the high ridges on the left," Lin Qing instructed over the interior comms channel, her voice steady and measured. "There are mutated ones that don’t mind the snow."

As if summoned by her warning, three gaunt shapes lunged out from behind a frost-covered boulder fifty yards ahead.

Before anyone could even reach for their sidearm, a sharp, suppressed crack echoed through the chassis from the trailing vehicle.

Fifty yards out, the lead zombie’s head violently snapped back, its skull shattered by a heavy, armor-piercing round. A split-second later, two more rhythmic shots rang out in rapid succession, dropping the remaining two mutated infected into the snowbanks before they could even breach the vehicle’s perimeter.

"Target cleared," Yang Jun’s flat, emotionless voice crackled over the squad radio link from the second transport. "One hundred meters to the facility perimeter."

"Good shooting," Lieutenant Chen muttered under his breath, turning the steering wheel to guide the transport through the rusting perimeter gates of the abandoned military medical depot.

The depot was a massive, semi-subterranean complex built directly into the sheer cliffside of the upper ridge. Designed during the old era as a heavy contingency bunker, its primary loading docks were heavily weathered, draped in massive curtains of solid ice and frozen snowdrifts.

The two armored vehicles came to a halt inside the covered outer courtyard, their engines rumbling down into a low, vibrating idle.

Lin Qing unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped out onto the frozen concrete floor, her boots crunching against the thin crust of ice. She immediately looked up at the interior iron gantry that circled the high vaulted ceiling of the bay—a perfect high-elevation vantage point overlooking both the loading docks and the main entrance corridors.

"Yang Jun," Lin Qing commanded, pointing toward the iron ladder leading up to the high catwalks. "Take the high perch on the gantry. Keep long-range overwatch over the main courtyard and the exterior ridge. If any more cold-adapted packs move down from the peak, call it out instantly."

Yang Jun shifted his long-range sniper rifle over his shoulder, his dark eyes unreadable behind his frost-tinted goggles. "Understood," he replied quietly, his voice low and raspy. He turned without another word, scaling the icy iron rungs with effortless, disciplined efficiency until he reached the shadowed catwalks thirty feet above.

Lin Qing turned to face Lieutenant Chen, Zhou Ming, and Xiao Li. "The primary medical inventory won’t be sitting out in the open on the main floor. Facilities like this store high-tier pharmaceuticals and surgical units inside reinforced climate-controlled vault rooms behind the primary logistics bay. We’ll have to search the secondary storage corridors and break through the security seals."

"Got it," Xiao Li said, slinging his rifle and pulling a heavy steel crowbar and a mechanical lock-bypass kit from his pack. "Lead the way, Boss."

The four of them moved deeper into the dark, echoing interior of the depot. The air inside was freezing and sterile, carrying the sharp, chemical odor of preserved medical alcohol and old machine oil. Dust covered every surface, preserved by the dry, cold atmosphere.

They spent the next twenty minutes navigating a labyrinth of locked storage bays and heavy steel security doors. As Lin Qing had anticipated, the main hall held nothing but empty wooden crates, discarded packaging, and useless low-grade supplies left behind during the initial evacuation.

It wasn’t until they breached a storage bunker tucked behind the main generator room that they hit paydirt.

"Over here!" Zhou Ming called out, wiping a thick layer of frost off a heavy, iron-bound transport container bolted to the wall. "The seals are still intact! It’s military-grade emergency surgical gear!"

Xiao Li stepped up, driving the tip of his crowbar beneath the frozen locking latch and throwing his full body weight against it. With a loud, echoing CRACK, the rusted iron seal snapped, revealing rows of pristine, vacuum-sealed surgical trays, specialized trauma field monitors, and high-tier military antibiotics packed neatly in thermal insulation.

Lin Qing walked over, her gloved fingers rapidly sorting through the contents with practiced, terrifying efficiency. She bypassed the standard bandages and basic intravenous fluids, instantly pulling out specialized hemostatic agents, rare broad-spectrum antivirals, and high-precision surgical instruments.

"Pack these three crates," Lin Qing ordered smoothly, her eyes calculating cargo weight versus utility. "Ignore the standard saline bags—we can synthesize those back at the base. Focus exclusively on the class-four antibiotics and the trauma surgical kits."

"You really know your stuff, Sister-in-law," Lieutenant Chen remarked with genuine admiration, carefully lifting a heavy metal case. "I wouldn’t even know what half of these chemical codes meant on sight."

Lin Qing didn’t answer, her mind focused entirely on maximizing their haul before the atmospheric shift made the mountain pass impassable.

While Lieutenant Chen and Zhou Ming began hauling the heavy, sealed crates back toward the transport bay, Lin Qing walked toward a secondary storage locker at the far end of the upper catwalk to check a set of locked medical lockers.

The upper catwalk connected the interior storage bay to the high exterior gantry where Yang Jun was posted. The metal grating beneath her feet groaned softly under her weight, frost flaking off the handrails.

Above her, perched in the deep shadows of the high structural beams, Yang Jun sat kneeling on one knee, his sniper rifle resting on the iron rail. From his vantage point, he had an unobstructed line of sight down onto Lin Qing as she inspected a small, iron-reinforced lockbox mounted to the concrete pillar.

The silence between them was thick, broken only by the distant, muffled hum of the truck engines idling down in the courtyard below.

Without turning her head, Lin Qing used a thin metal pick from her belt to feel out the tumblers of the frozen lock.

High above her on the catwalk, Yang Jun slowly adjusted his position. He did not raise his rifle, but his intense, unblinking gaze remained locked onto the back of her neck.

"Still inspecting the secondary seals before the primary locks..." Yang Jun murmured in a low, quiet voice that barely carried over the short-range tactical radio link. "...’Phantom’?"

Lin Qing’s hands froze instantly.

It was a microsecond pause—a split-second, involuntary hesitation in her movements that would have been completely invisible to an untrained eye. Her fingers, which had been fluidly working the lock pick, went completely rigid. Her dark eyes narrowed slightly, her shoulder muscles tightening under her vest as a surge of pure, cold adrenaline spiked through her veins.

Phantom.

That was not a name from this world. It was not a title found in the pages of the book she had transmigrated into, nor was it a nickname anyone in this post-apocalyptic wasteland had ever uttered.

It was her callsign from her past life—a secret classification reserved strictly for the top-tier combat medics in her former world’s most elite special operations division.

Lin Qing didn’t immediately turn around. She forced her breathing to remain calm, her face dropping into a cold, completely unreadable mask as she slowly pulled the lock pick from the steel tumbler.

In that single microsecond of frozen stillness, Yang Jun got the exact answer he had spent days looking for.

His jaw clenched tightly, his breath catching in his throat as a wave of bitter, suffocating grief crashed over his heart. The quiet, methodical way she held herself, the precise hand movements, the micro-reaction to that forgotten callsign—it was her. It was really her.

’The woman who abandoned my sister in the rubble’, Yang Jun thought bitterly, his hand gripping the cold stock of his sniper rifle so tightly his knuckles turned white. ’The cold, unfeeling medic who decided my sister wasn’t worth saving...’

Before Lin Qing could speak into her comms channel or turn to confront him, a sharp, frantic shout rang out from the lower loading dock.

"Sister-in-law!" Xiao Li’s voice screamed over the radio, punctuated by sudden, heavy automatic gunfire. "We’ve got a breach! A massive pack of cold-adapted infected just rounded the cliff face! They’re pushing into the loading bay!"

"Hold your positions!" Lin Qing shouted, immediately abandoning the lockbox and sprinting across the upper catwalk toward the exterior exit ledge that overlooked the loading docks.

Below her, a pack of nearly twenty cold-adapted zombies—their bodies covered in frost, moving with terrifying, predatory speed—were swarming through the shattered perimeter gates.

Lieutenant Chen and Zhou Ming were firing in disciplined bursts from behind the armored transports, but the cold-adapted mutants were taking heavy damage without slowing down.

Lin Qing reached the high exterior concrete ledge jutting out from the cliffside, drawing her sidearm and rifle in one seamless motion. From her high position, she had a clear firing angle down into the flank of the swarming pack.

"Xiao Li, fall back to the primary vehicle!" Lin Qing ordered sharply, taking aim and dropping two fast-moving infected with precise headshots. "Zhou Ming, provide suppressing fire on the left flank!"

She stepped directly out onto the exposed edge of the concrete shelf to draw the horde’s attention away from the transports, her rifle barking in controlled, lethal three-round bursts.

Directly above her head, extending from the towering cliff wall fifty feet up, hung a massive, multi-ton ice cornice. Formed over the weeks of freezing winds and recently loosened by the sudden spike in atmospheric temperature, the giant ice overhang was heavily fractured at its root, clinging to the rock face by a fragile, melting anchor.

On the high iron gantry thirty yards away, Yang Jun raised his long-range sniper rifle.

Through his high-magnification scope, he didn’t target the cold-adapted zombies swarming the loading dock below. Instead, his crosshairs centered squarely on the fragile, structural root of the massive ice cornice directly above Lin Qing’s head.

His finger rested against the cold metal trigger. His heart pounded wildly against his ribs, filled with the phantom echoes of his sister’s dying screams.

’You took everything from me, ’Phantom’,’ Yang Jun thought, his eyes turning stone cold behind his scope. ’Now... let the mountain take you.

THWACK!’

A heavy round shattered the brittle rock anchor at the base of the ice overhang.

A split-second later, a sickening, thunderous CRACK boomed through the canyon as the massive, multi-ton slab of ice completely detached from the cliff wall.

Lin Qing’s instincts flared instantly. She looked up just as the shadow of the falling ice shelf eclipsed the daylight above her.

"Lin Qing!" Lieutenant Chen’s horrified scream echoed from the courtyard below.

Before Lin Qing could leap backward off the exposed shelf, the massive wall of ice and snow crashed down onto the concrete ledge with terrifying, destructive force.

The sheer impact shattered the concrete platform into rubble, sweeping the entire ledge out from under her feet.

Engulfed in a blinding avalanche of heavy ice and snow, Lin Qing was swept off the cliff edge, plunging down into the deep, abyss-like mountain ravine hundreds of feet below as the roar of the collapse echoed across the frozen wilderness.

On the gantry above, Yang Jun slowly lowered his sniper rifle, his face pale and completely expressionless as he watched the cloud of snow and ice dust settle over the empty, shattered edge of the cliff.