Chapter 280

At the gate of Lightwater Residences, a patrol car sat crooked in the dark. A dead sparrow had been skewered on the roof, animal blood splashed across the metal, and the nose of the car pointed straight at the electrified main gate.

The headlights flashed three times.

So they knew the trick with animal blood now.

And three flashes... that was probably a signal.

Magnus Specter sat behind the wheel, fingers resting on the steering wheel, but his mind was tight as a drawn bowstring. He had no clue what the signal meant. This wasn’t some cash machine that gave you three tries. Get it wrong once, and the mask would likely come off on the spot.

The electric fence was only about five meters high. If he stood on the roof, he was confident he could vault it. But now he had already driven right up to the gate. If he turned around and left, that would look wrong too. Too wrong.

Damn it.

He cursed himself in silence.

Then the patrol car on the other side flashed its headlights three more times, sharper this time, like it was urging him on.

Magnus killed the engine. With Metal Crystal active in his body, he sat there for more than ten seconds, still as stone, thoughts racing wild in his head.

No signal. No password.

So what now?

He eased the door open and got out slowly, lazy-like, as if he had all the time in the world. He tilted his head up and glanced at the sky. There was moonlight tonight. Enough to make things out.

Far off, a black mass of bats was flying this way.

The men in the opposite patrol car clearly hadn’t expected anyone to get out. And without Super Fire Crystal active, at that. He had just stepped out like that, bare and easy.

Was this fool tired of living?

Then they looked closer. The car was theirs. The clothes matched too.

So what the hell was this brat trying to do?

Magnus walked around to the front of his patrol car. Facing the other vehicle, he raised his right fist. Then he stretched out one finger.

Then a second.

Then a third.

He played dumb on purpose. Stir the water first. Make them confused.

He extended all the way to the fifth finger. Then he turned his head slightly and saw the swarm of bats was closer now, almost on top of him. A few more seconds at most.

He twisted sideways toward his own hood and slapped it hard, twice, then began flailing both arms, gesturing wildly, as if trying to explain something urgent and impossible.

The men in the other car just stared.

They were completely dumbfounded. No one could tell what in hell he was trying to say.

Then the driver suddenly saw it.

A cloud of bats had rushed over. One giant bat folded its wings, dove straight down, and drove its two massive claws toward the man outside.

The driver slammed the horn, trying to warn him.

Magnus had been waiting for exactly this moment.

He pretended not to notice the bat at all and kept waving frantically at the patrol car inside, like some idiot who couldn’t even hear danger breathing down his neck.

Then his body went light.

In the next instant, the giant bat snatched him into the air.

He let out a panicked yell, all acting, all noise. Whether the people inside heard him or not, he didn’t know.

Up in the air, the bat’s huge ugly head swung down. Four sharp fangs glinted in the moonlight as it bit toward his body. Magnus had Metal Crystal active, and even in that split second he noticed one thing clearly—

The bat had already carried him dozens of meters up, and it was flying toward the inside of Lightwater Residences.

Right direction.

For a moment, he almost wanted to laugh.

He thought, Heaven’s got eyes after all.

Without hesitation, he yanked the meter-long military spike from the sheath strapped along his trouser leg and drove it upward with a brutal thrust.

The blade punched into the bat’s armpit.

The giant thing shrieked, a raw tearing scream. Its claws opened at once.

Magnus dropped from midair and crashed straight into a landscaped greenbelt inside the residential compound.

Good.

Damn good.

He held his breath hard, afraid another bat might swoop down and snatch him again. The moment he hit the ground, he rolled left, sprang to his feet, and first looked up at the sky.

No bat came down.

Only then did he suck in two quick breaths, hold one again, and dart away at speed, slipping to the side of a residential building.

There, he switched to Super Fire Crystal.

Now he was in.

So what next?

Before coming in, Magnus’s plan had been simple enough—take one step, look one step. First get inside, then talk. Best case, catch a live one, pry his mouth open, and find out where the generator feeding the electric fence was.

But now the place had gone very quiet.

Magnus stood still and listened, ears pricked.

From the far diagonal side of the compound, from the most distant stretch, he seemed to catch a low humming sound.

A buzz.

A droning mechanical hum.

That electric fence enclosed a whole residential complex. Whatever powered it had to be something big. Either one huge generator, or several power units working together.

Magnus didn’t understand electricity.

Didn’t matter.

He understood how to wreck a generator. That was enough.

Following the sound, he moved slowly along the side of the buildings, sticking close to the walls like a shadow. On the way, he passed seven or eight metal boxes—something like transformers, maybe voltage regulators, whatever they were called.

The hum grew louder.

Probably a large diesel generator set.

Magnus stopped under the base of a building and stamped lightly once, as if settling his stance. Then a thought hit him out of nowhere.

The rats he and Emily Ward had seen crashing into the electric fence...

They hadn’t been electrocuted to death.

They had hit the fence, then pulled back.

What did that mean?

Didn’t that mean the fence voltage probably wasn’t that high?

It made sense the more he thought about it.

If a rat, or a chicken, duck, goose—whatever—touched truly lethal high voltage, it would die on contact. The corpse would stay hanging by the fence. Then another rat or animal touched that corpse, and it would die too.

One after another.

Chain after chain.

Sooner or later that kind of constant load would drag the whole fence system down.

And a 1000-kilowatt diesel generator burned more than two hundred liters of diesel an hour. Over a day, that was more than 4,800 liters. Over a month...

The number was ugly enough to make a man’s scalp tighten.

Unless they had large wind-power equipment.

So the fence’s main use was intimidation.

A threat. A warning. A wall to scare.

Which meant if he had just rammed his car through earlier, maybe nothing much would’ve happened at all.

The diesel generating equipment had been placed inside a one-story building. The building had originally been designed for the state power grid company. Around it stood six infantry fighting vehicles in a hard ring.

Magnus reckoned every one of those vehicles had men on duty around the clock.

And this place was the lifeline of Cliff Baxter’s force. It definitely wouldn’t be as easy to fool as the patrol cars at the gate.

The buildings Grace Reid had blown apart before were still lying there in heaps. No one had cleaned the ruins yet.

Magnus quietly slipped into the wreckage of one collapsed building, buried himself among broken bricks and shattered concrete, and raised his night-vision binoculars.

He watched carefully.

His mind never stopped.

One possibility after another. One way to blast that generating station. One way to break it. One way to kill the lights. He kept turning the plans over, measuring the odds.

Six infantry fighting vehicles in a ring.

At least fifty soldiers inside, maybe more.

And each one, at the very least, probably carried a Metal Crystal.

That was his most conservative estimate.

It could be worse.

Much worse.

Maybe there were a hundred Metal Crystal soldiers here.

And he was alone.

Just one man.

How was he supposed to smash this place with that kind of defense wrapped around it?

If this place was destroyed, then no matter how many men Cliff Baxter still had left in Springvale City, they might all be wiped out in a single night.

Gone like smoke.

Gone clean.

So what the hell should he do?

If only he had brought out a shoulder-fired rocket launcher.

That thought bit him hard.

Next time, he swore, he’d remember. A shoulder-fired rocket launcher and twenty rockets—those could fit completely inside his space.

A weapon made for ambush.

Pure killing force.

It was midnight. Another vast black tide of bats swept over the sky above.

Magnus looked up.

He had relied on them to get inside.

Now he had to face one against a hundred.

It seemed the best way forward... was still to rely on them.