The roar of the assault rifle died away, replaced by the heavy, rhythmic thud-thud of Zhang Yi dropping the empty weapon into the snow. Without missing a beat, he drew two police-issue pistols from his waistband.
The survivors were trapped. In the waist-deep snow, their frantic attempts to flee looked like a slow-motion nightmare. Zhang Yi tracked them with the cold precision of a hunter. Crack. Crack. Crack. Each shot was a period at the end of a life. In twenty seconds, the courtyard fell silent.
Only a handful remained, huddled in the red-stained slush with their hands raised, their breath coming in ragged, terrified plumes of white.
"Zhang Yi, wait! We weren't with them!" one man shrieked, his face twisted in a mask of pure terror. "We didn't move! We swear, we had nothing to do with this!"
Zhang Yi recognized them. They were the neutral building leaders—the ones who had stood frozen when the "Mad Wolf" gang attacked. They were likely telling the truth. They were likely innocent.
Zhang Yi pulled the trigger anyway.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The bullets punched through their skulls, throwing them backward into the drifts. The last one left was Chen Lingyu, the leader of Building 9.
She had collapsed to her knees, the snow beneath her turning yellow as her bladder failed. She was sobbing, a broken, hysterical sound. "Zhang Yi, please... I didn't know! I have a daughter abroad... thirteen years old... I have to see her again. Please, I'm all she has!"
Zhang Yi stared at her through the sights of his pistol. His expression was a void. For two seconds, the only sound was the wind and her weeping. Then, a single shot silenced both.
He stood alone among forty corpses. It was the first time he had truly reaped a harvest of this scale. He knew most of these people hadn't been part of the conspiracy—people like Chen Lingyu or the lower-level patrolmen. But innocence was a luxury he couldn't afford to gamble on. Suspicion was a death sentence. To Zhang Yi, the dead were the only people who couldn't betray him.
"You were all going to die eventually," Zhang Yi muttered, his voice a low rasp. He exhaled a cloud of frost, watching it dissipate. "Life out here is a slow rot. Consider this a mercy. You should thank me for the shortcut."
If the dead could have answered, their gratitude would have been written in screams.
Zhang Yi scanned the perimeter. Behind the frosted glass of the surrounding buildings, hundreds of eyes were watching. Some neighbors looked on with horror; others with a sickening sense of relief.
His gaze drifted to Buildings 26 and 21—the nests of the Tianhe and Mad Wolf gangs. Their leaders were dead, but their footmen were still watching from the shadows, paralyzed.
Xiao Lu, the Mad Wolf Gang's second-in-command, took a stumbling step back from his window. "Retreat!" he hissed to his men, his voice cracking. "Get back! Don't let that demon see you!"
Zhang Yi ignored the cowards and holstered his pistols, moving toward the spot where Uncle You lay. Nearby, the bodies of his "loyal" lieutenants, Li Chengbing and Jiang Lei, were cooling. They had betrayed him for a bigger slice of a dying world. He didn't care why. Betrayal was the natural state of man. Even Uncle You or the doctor, Zhou Ke'er, could turn at any moment.
But as he looked at the old man in the snow, something shifted in Zhang Yi's chest.
"Uncle You? You still with me?"
Zhang Yi knelt, his eyes scanning for any signs of a secondary ambush as he reached for a pulse. Nothing. He swore, then remembered he was wearing thick, cut-resistant gloves. He ripped them off and flipped the old man over. Three entry wounds. Bloody, but clear of the heart.
Zhang Yi didn't know if he could save him, but the weight of the guilt—a rare, heavy pressure in his chest—forced his hand. He pulled an adrenaline autoinjector from his "inventory" and slammed it through the old man's coat into his chest.
"GET OVER HERE!" Zhang Yi roared at the onlookers from Building 25.
The neighbors, who had been watching the "Demon of Yuelu Estate" in a trance of fear, jolted into motion. They scrambled toward him, slipping and sliding in the gore.
"Carry him to my place. Gently," Zhang Yi commanded, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "If you drop him, I'll burn you as paper offerings at his funeral."
Terrified, the men handled Uncle You like he was made of spun glass. Zhang Yi followed behind them, his hands hovering over his holstered guns.
As they reached the seventh floor, the silence was shattered by a piercing wail.
"Brother You! No! Don't leave us!" Xie Limei came charging down the stairs, clutching her child, her face a ruin of tears and snot. As her cries echoed through the stairwell, Zhang Yi noticed Uncle You's eyelids give a frantic, microscopic flutter.
Zhang Yi let out a slow, tired sigh. Old You, you're too soft for this world. But if you weren't, I'd have had to kill you long ago.
Xie Limei threw herself toward the stretcher, her wails increasing in volume as she got closer to Zhang Yi. "Husband! Open your eyes! You promised me! You said we'd be a family... you said you'd watch our daughter grow up!"
She looked up at Zhang Yi, her eyes brimming with a calculated, desperate grief. "Why did you have to be so brave? Why take bullets for someone else? What are we supposed to do now? We're just orphans in the cold!"
Zhang Yi felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. She never mentioned his name, but every word was a barbed hook. He died for you. You owe us his life. You owe us everything.
The trap was closed. And for the first time, Zhang Yi didn't have the heart to shoot his way out of it.