Chapter 51 No More Pretending, Bro, Hand Over the Sniper!

There was once a safe chance for Lu Mingfei to return home, but he failed to cherish it, feeling a deep, agonizing regret only after it was lost.

The most painful thing in the world does not end there.

If heaven could grant Lu Mingfei a second chance, he would say three words to the heavens—funny mud pee!

Damn it all, I've been self-hypnotizing myself, telling myself this is just a rebirth and not a transmigration into a parallel world, that minor differences don't matter, and that all I needed to do was retrace my path from the previous life to take back everything I lost.

And now what?

Even the corpses from the mountains have crawled out, for crying out loud!

And right before my eyes, one of them got its head blown off by a single shot!

My worldview has been blown to absolute smithereens, just like the head of that green-faced, fanged monster, you bastards!

Seventeen-year-old Lu Mingfei stood there, his eyes reflecting his twenty-eight-year-old self.

At this moment, he felt like a husky that had sneaked into a pack of wolves, looking utterly out of place here.

Logically, following the biological instinct of seeking advantages and avoiding harm, he should have turned around and run right then and there. Yet he felt as though there was a fire burning inside his heart.

A blaze heavily surrounded by flammable materials, yet stubbornly keeping its flames from leaking outward, guarding against turning everything into ashes—a suppressed rage.

This anger helped him suppress the urge to turn and run. His nearly exhausted physical strength seemed to be ignited by the fury, instantly becoming full and vibrant once more.

In the shadows beneath the tree, the hammer and wrench hanging from his belt were silently grasped in his hands. His thin, lean figure melted into the darkness, moving forward in a stealthy advance.

"Roar—!!!"

In the distance, the fiend-like monsters had no inkling that an unrelated spectator was watching their performance with intense interest. Their scarlet-golden eyes, far more cruel and ferocious than those of wild wolves, stared fixedly at the fir tree ahead.

On a branch three meters off the ground, a black-haired young man in standard combat uniform was holding a rifle, trying to pick them off one by one.

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

A sniper possesses sufficient deterrent power only when distance is maintained and the environment is favorable; once engaged in close quarters, the threat level of a sniper rifle drops drastically.

Just like now, the aiming speed of the youth in the tree could no longer keep up with the darting and shifting of those monsters through the forest.

After finally landing a lucky shot by pure chance, hitting one of those bronze-skinned monsters, it merely staggered, stumbled a couple of steps, and then continued charging toward this side as if nothing had happened at all.

Without a moment's hesitation, Gao Mi tossed the sniper rifle aside and swung the semi-automatic rifle slung across his back to the front.

Two glittering golden eyes seemed to act as their own crosshairs as he pulled the trigger, sending the closing Corpse Keeper stumbling back step by step, scattering body parts all over the ground.

Yet these monsters seemed to retain some basic combat instincts. Pinned down by frontal firepower, they actually split into three separate routes and attacked from three different directions.

Seeing this, Gao Mi could not help a cold jolt in his heart. Amidst the gunfire that had just echoed through the valley, the crack of the sniper rifle had vanished. Clearly, the other snipers had also been ambushed, and he could not afford to wait for reinforcements.

Unable to effectively evade attacks while up in the tree, he quickly emptied the rifle magazine to create a vacuum zone for a breakthrough, and then leaped down from the tree the moment the Corpse Keepers on the other two sides sprang into the air, unleashing torrents of firepower from his two Beretta pistols at a distance of less than three meters.

Firing both guns simultaneously, the Corpse Keepers—caught mid-air with no leverage to dodge—did not even have time to raise their taut, pouncing arms to shield their heads before the bullets were right upon them.

"Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!"

Gao Mi was an unquestionable mathematical genius, and his shooting scores were among the best in his cohort. At such close range, landing headshots on every single shot was well within his ability.

However, when standard 9mm Parabellum pistol rounds struck the faces of the Corpse Keepers, they failed to recreate the glorious spectacle of a sniper rifle blowing off a head.

The bullets pierced through skin and flesh carrying a metallic sheen, embedding themselves into their skulls. The formidable kinetic energy carried by the rounds forced the monsters' heads back, throwing their bodies off balance and causing them to crash backward.

The scene looked magnificent, but the actual damage inflicted was far from impressive.

Only a single unlucky bastard took a round straight through its scarlet-golden eyeball, the high-speed rotating projectile plunging into the cranial cavity and instantly creating a massive void, finally bringing a definitive end to this monster awakened from a long slumber.

Mid-air, he executed a spin, landed, and rolled to dissipate the impact force. The class of '04 assistant agent moved like the wire-walking secret agents in movies, flashing through the forest at high speed with dual pistols in hand.

There had been thirteen Corpse Keepers ambushing him; one got its head blown off, another suffered a cranial blowout, and the remaining eleven were all slightly maimed. Fighting a running battle was not without a chance of winning.

Thinking along these lines, he unhooked a grenade hanging from the front of his tactical vest. Anyway, the on-site cleanup work was already this difficult; tossing a few grenades shouldn't make much difference.

He pulled the pin, counted silently to two, and chucked it straight behind him!

"Boom—!!!"

The defensive grenade detonated mid-air with a thunderous roar, flashing brilliant light and fire through the forest. Propelled by the explosives, the high-speed steel pellets instantly riddled several gaunt, thorny Corpse Keepers like a sieve.

"I knew it! Those madmen in the Equipment Department definitely added extra spices on the sly!"

Gao Mi shook his head as he hid behind a tree, continuing his detour toward the main force.

If he hadn't ducked quickly just now, he might well have been the one turned into a sieve.

Soon, the bullets on his person were completely exhausted, and the three prepared grenades had also yielded reasonably satisfactory results, reducing the number of Corpse Keepers still chasing him from eleven down to five.

Although the number had been cut by more than half, five was still too many, exceeding the limit of what Gao Mi could handle in close combat.

He was a brain worker, and his close-quarters combat grades were actually quite mediocre. Against ordinary people, he could transform into Wong Fei-hung, but against these monsters bearing dragon blood, he could only manage to skim across the tops of the grass.

The footsteps and roars behind him were drawing closer and closer, and Gao Mi did not dare run in a straight line as he twisted and turned through the woods.

His less-than-stellar physical stamina was draining away at a terrifying speed. The four-hundred-meter dash, previously considered nothing more than a warm-up, now felt like an impassable chasm, stretching out with the distance between mountains and seas.

Worse still, just as he was distracted and keeping a wary eye on the pursuers behind him, his foot suddenly stepped into thin air!

Without any warning, yet utterly fatal!

The momentum of his full-speed sprint instantly threw him off balance, and his entire body tumbled through the forest like a tumbleweed raging across the American West, crashing straight into a blocking tree.

A violent pain like being torn apart washed over him. Gao Mi felt as though several of his ribs might have snapped, and even his spine had experienced displacement.

Yet he forced himself to ignore the pain, struggling to draw his knife and stand up for a desperate final struggle.

However, the violent impact had nearly dislodged his internal organs, and his pain receptors were practically about to override his cranial nerves in taking over his brain. He simply could not stand up.

"Roar, roar, roar—"

Seeing the prey tumble into its own trap, the pursuing Corpse Keepers shrieked in excited, shrill cries, accelerating by another thirty percent as if each wanted to tear this irritating hedgehog to pieces before their companions could.

The Corpse Keeper in the very front could no longer wait, leaping forward to grab Gao Mi at the earliest possible moment.

To drink his fresh blood, devour his flesh, and suck clean his bone marrow, thereby appeasing a hunger that had accumulated for a thousand years.

At this moment, having barely regained control over the upper half of his body and leaning slowly against the tree trunk, a look of despair flashed in Gao Mi's eyes.

"Damn it, and I was planning to confess to Boqian after this mission."

The youth gritted his teeth, stubbornly raising his short blade in an attempt to pierce the heart of the green-faced, fanged monster before it lunged forward to bite through his neck.

Yet before those fangs—dripping with extreme stench and lethal pathogens—could sink into his neck, the Corpse Keeper's head was struck as if by a heavy hammer, undergoing violent deformation in mid-air while dragging its body down to crash aside.

Looking at the headless corpse rolling on the ground and the foul-smelling liquid splattered across his face, the youth—already showing utter despair—suddenly jerked his head up, looking in the exact opposite direction from where the Corpse Keeper had been batted away.

There, amidst the flickering shadows of the trees and the darkness, a slender figure pulled back the bolt, sending a glowing cartridge casing flying off like a falling leaf.

"Click!"

A bullet chambered, the muzzle aimed, the trigger pulled.

"Bang—!!!"