Chapter 3

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

After a brief electrical hum, the six-barrel Gatling guns mounted on the three heavy off-road vehicles instantly spat out half-meter-long tongues of rabid fire.

The dense barrage of tracer rounds sliced through the darkness like the Reaper’s scythe, weaving an inescapable, blazing net of crossfire.

Before the thousands of armor-piercing incendiary rounds firing every minute, the massive volcanic rock hiding us was as fragile as a cracker. Stone shards flew everywhere. The pulverized rock dust and searing heat instantly pinned us down so hard we couldn't even lift a finger.

"Damn it! How do they know exactly where we are?!" Gail clutched his head tightly, curled up in the deepest part of our cover. His voice pitched into a scream over the deafening gunfire.

Marcus was scared utterly pale, his entire body pressed flat against the mud, shivering violently.

My back was against the rapidly disintegrating rock. Feeling the heat of bullets singeing my scalp, I didn't answer Gail.

My icy gaze swept over Marcus, and the spine-chilling theory in my head finally snapped together into a perfect, undeniable circle.

Predicting our escape route. Setting up an ambush at the finish line in advance.

From beginning to end, our team was being hunted by someone playing with a "maphack," looking down with a God's-eye view.

"This cover won't last another thirty seconds!" Gail roared in despair.

The crossfire from the left was pulling closer; the enemy was compressing our survival space.

"Arthur."

Suddenly, Gail turned to look at me.

On that face, roughened and cracked by three years of wasteland wind and sand, there was no fear of death. Instead, he was unusually calm.

He looked at the high-explosive frag grenades hanging from my belt—looted from the trackers we just killed—and the bundle of scrap-made dynamite I had swiped back in Black Iron Town.

"Over a hundred neighbors, and now it's just the three of us. I'm dumb. I don't know if that's a pre-war ruin or some deadly surveillance setup..." Gail cracked a terrible, ugly smile. "But I do know this: you're smarter than me, and you're more ruthless. You can survive."

I suddenly realized what he was doing and my pupils shrank. "Gail, don't move!"

But it was too late.

With an agility that completely defied his bulky frame, the rugged man snatched the explosives and grenades off my belt, clutching them tightly to his chest.

"Make 'em pay the debt for those hundred-plus lives." He gave me one last, deep look.

The next moment, Gail let out a desperate, howling roar like a lone wolf in the wilderness. His legs exploded with force as he bolted out from the blind spot of our cover, charging straight into the sky-filling storm of metal!

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Miraculously, the barrage of bullets didn't obliterate him instantly. His body rapidly closed the distance to the vehicles.

My heart leaped into my throat. For a split second, I thought maybe he could actually blow up those three cars untouched.

But the next second—

Squelch!

Two heavy machine-gun rounds tore right through his thigh and left shoulder, sending blood and flesh flying.

The massive kinetic force sent him staggering, forcing him to his knees.

"Gail!!!" For the first time in three years, I lost my composure. It felt as if a cold hand had violently crushed my heart.

"Come on! You ball-less bastard dogs!"

Spitting blood, Gail forcefully propped himself up with his scrap-shotgun. Bathed in the blinding white glare of the searchlights, he stood like an unyielding god of war.

Laughing maniacally, he bit out the pin of a grenade.

BOOOM————!!!

The lead armored vehicle didn't even have time to reverse.

The dynamite and high-explosive grenades that Gail detonated triggered a massive sympathetic explosion less than five meters from the first truck.

A blinding, colossal fireball erupted into the sky.

A shockwave wrapped in searing heat and armor shrapnel swept outward in a ring. The lead vehicle's Gatling gun was instantly silenced as the truck itself was flipped on its side. Thick black smoke and burning diesel completely blinded the two vehicles behind it.

Gail didn't leave behind a single intact piece of flesh.

To let me live, the only true brother in this wasteland—the man who had taken three knife thrusts for me—had turned himself into ash.

The firelight cast a red glare across my goggles.

I gritted my teeth violently, tasting a heavy tang of blood in my mouth.

There were no tears, no hysterical wailing.

In the deafening aftermath of the explosion, my heart completely froze into a block of absolute-zero ice.

They're dead.

Everyone is dead.

If this really is some "reality show" orchestrated by a so-called Director, then congratulations: you have successfully turned a rat struggling to survive into an outright demon hungry only for revenge!

I have to get behind that door! Find those pulling the strings, and kill them all!

Beep... Beep...

Right through the tinnitus caused by the explosion, an incredibly faint, high-frequency electronic keypad sound—something that absolutely did not belong in the wasteland—pierced my eardrum.

I whipped my head around.

Covered by the rising dust and black smoke, Marcus wasn't staring in the direction of Gail's sacrifice like I was.

His back was pressed against the cover, and his hands were rapidly operating something hidden at a dead angle.

From the side of those taped-up, broken glasses of his, a microscopic holographic keyboard had extended!

A cold, blue-purple light illuminated his face. The expression that was always full of "rationality and cowardice" was now twisted with an impatient apathy.

It was him!

Marcus was the traitor!

My murderous intent skyrocketed. I stalked silently toward him.

"I'm in the blind spot of gorge three... Vehicle one is destroyed. The target is emotionally compromised, carpet bomb the area with thermobaric weapons immediately! Leave no survivors, this monkey is too dangerous!" Marcus whispered rapidly into a micro-mic on his collar.

It was the arrogant, condescending tone of an "actor" giving a status report to base.

Suddenly, Marcus's body froze.

Because a blood-soaked, iron-cold hand had locked onto his neck like a vice.

Like a silent ghost, I had slipped behind him under the cover of the explosive smoke.

"A-Arthur..." Beads of cold sweat instantly erupted on Marcus's forehead.

He frantically tried to shut off the micro-device, but I was much faster.

I ripped the glasses off his face, threw them to the ground, and stomped them into powder.

The high-tech blue light was instantly extinguished.

"So, this has been your job for the past three years?" My voice didn't have a single fluctuation; it was as soft as if I were making small talk.

Marcus trembled violently. He looked into my eyes—eyes that were staring at a dead object—and swallowed hard. He instantly threw on a hypocritical mask of sorrow. "Arthur, listen to me! I just looted this communicator off the Mayor's men back there! I was trying to intercept their frequen—"

CRASH!

Without a single word, I swung the heavy AK assault rifle in my hands.

The solid wooden stock howled through the air and smashed down with brutal, merciless force directly onto Marcus's right knee!

Crack!

The muffled crack of shattering bone and the squelching sound of a completely pulverized meniscus exploded in the air.

"AAAAAGGGGGHHH!!!"

Marcus let out a bloodcurdling shriek like a slaughtered pig.

He curled up on the ground like a cooked shrimp in utter agony, his hands desperately clutching a right leg that was now bent backward at a horrible, impossible angle.

Pain. Genuine pain.

Not acting. Not drinking coffee in front of a monitor watching someone else bleed.

This was raw, primal, physical destruction of the wasteland!

I watched him roll in the dirt with absolute indifference. The rifle stock rose again.

"No... No! Arthur, let me go! They forced me to act in this!" Snot and tears smeared all over Marcus's face. The guise of the "squad's tactical brains" was ripped to shreds by absolute violence.

Looking desperately at the descending rifle stock, he shrieked for mercy.

"This one is for Luke."

CRASH!

Another scalp-numbing, meaty thud.

I smashed his left knee into a puddle of mush. Jagged bone fragments pierced through his skin and pants, sticking straight out into the open air as blood instantly soaked the mud.

"Gkh-aahk—!" Marcus's eyes rolled back; he was on the verge of passing out from the pain.

But I wasn't going to let him pass out.

I grabbed him by the hair, violently jerking his horribly contorted face up to mine.

The bloody water from my face dripped onto his nose. My eyes contained nothing but the purest, most concentrated savagery.

"Three years! Over a hundred lives! You hid comfortably among us, using Gail, Elena, and Luke as stepping stones to get rich!"

I stared directly into his eyes, my voice scraping against his eardrums like a blade. "You like watching the show? You think I'm just a monkey in a cage? Today, I'm going to show you exactly who the monkey is."

I let go of his hair and grabbed the back collar of his tactical vest.

The black smoke ahead was beginning to clear, and the two remaining armored vehicles had readjusted the angles of their machine guns.

Dragging the double-amputated Marcus with one hand like a dead dog, I dove into a narrow rock crevice on the flank where the armored firepower couldn't reach.

"Let me go... just kill me... Arthur, you can't fight them..." Marcus dragged across the rocks, his broken bones grinding against the ground, forcing inhuman howls from his throat.

"Shut up." I didn't look back. "Since you're an actor, you're going to use those eyes to watch this show's grand finale."

Dragging him, I continued forward through the howling wind and black sand.

The sounds of gunfire behind us were slowly insulated by the terrain.

The crevice led to a complete dead end in the deepest part of Death Canyon.

As we ventured deeper into the fissure, the roaring gale miraculously subsided.

In this basin-like dead end, the sandstorm was kept out as if by a massive, invisible hand.

I stopped in my tracks.

Marcus's wailing stopped too. He seemed to realize something. His eyes widened in horror as he stared straight ahead.

At the very end of this trail where I had dragged a long, bloody path through the mud...

A massive, titanium blast door—completely out of place among the rough volcanic rocks—was set perfectly into the center of the mountain.

It was flawless.

In a wasteland world defined by rust, rot, and radiation, it looked like an industrial masterpiece forged by God.

There were no seams, no welding marks. The silver-gray metallic surface flowed with an icy luminescence in the dark.

On the wall next to the center of the door, a sleek, modern black touch screen—technology completely beyond my past life's knowledge—sat in hibernation mode.

And right above that screen...

Whir...

With the faint, nearly silent hum of a motorized bracket, a high-definition, black dome security camera slowly adjusted its angle.

Its cold glass lens, blinking with a steady red light, locked dead onto me, holding a gun, and onto Marcus, pinned under my boot like a puddle of trash.

No alarms. No auto-turrets.

Just that blinking red light, looking exactly like the "ON AIR" indicator on a broadcast van.

The boundaries of the cage had finally appeared before my eyes.

I tilted my head up slightly. Through the dirty visor of my gas mask, facing that elevated, arrogant camera, my lips slowly curled into an extremely vicious, terrifying smile.

Whoever you are behind this door.

I've come for you.