Chapter 42: The Cost of Firing
The question of “how strong is a Tier 2 headhunter wild dog” had already been answered in Zhong Jing’s mind, both from the records in Chu Sheng City’s database and the scene she had witnessed at the subway station.
Its displayed strength was more than enough for her to consider it an extremely dangerous entity.
Although it emerged victorious in this struggle, it was clear that the Tier 2 crawling giant lizard’s victory was not easy.
Its massive body, covered in black scales, had multiple areas where scales had fallen off.
Several wounds of varying sizes were constantly oozing blood, especially a gash nearly thirty centimeters long on its soft white underbelly, where torn skin revealed dark red flesh.
Blood gathered at the lowest point of the wound’s outline and dripped down.
Having dealt a heavy blow to its opponent, it could not change the current reality.
The headhunter wild dog, with its throat clamped, could not even let out a final wail.
The air surging from its chest was cut off before reaching its vocal cords, only squeezing out threads of bloody foam from the gap in its bitten throat.
This was merely the futile struggle of life’s final moments.
The crawling giant lizard won, trading the wounds on its body for victory.
Next, it only needed to maintain the biting force on its opponent’s throat until death was confirmed—a matter of time.
At this moment, it had focused all its attention on the headhunter wild dog it was biting, unaware of the approaching human presence.
The thick smell of blood around it masked nearly everything, and the still-unsettled dust provided effective cover for the security team’s approach.
Luo Shi, part of Combat Team One, was positioned on a street to the left of the crawling giant lizard, less than two hundred meters from the target in a straight line.
Alongside him in Combat Team One was another rifleman.
At this distance, Luo Shi had to be extremely cautious in his observations.
The crawling giant lizard had excellent vision, with eyes positioned on both sides of its head, granting a wide field of view.
Its eyeballs could move independently to adjust its line of sight, and any slight movement in its vision could attract its attention.
If the crawling giant lizard had not just fought and been injured, Luo Shi would not have made this decision so readily.
“Combat Team Two is in position!”
Combat Team Two reported to Luo Shi upon reaching their designated location, completing the security team’s positional deployment.
They now awaited Luo Shi’s order to launch the attack on the target.
Everything was ready, lacking only the final spark…
At this moment, Luo Shi’s breathing became extremely heavy.
His furrowed brows locked his gaze on every move of the two monsters.
With the arrow on the string, he could not rush to give the attack order.
He was waiting—waiting for the optimal moment to strike.
No matter what, the crawling giant lizard’s strength could not be denied.
They had to launch the fiercest attack when it was at its weakest!
The headhunter wild dog, lying on the ground near death, seemed to have exhausted the oxygen in its chest.
No more blood flowed from its wounds, and it was half a step into death’s realm.
But whether it was the crystal core in its brain resisting death or the body’s instinctive final struggle, the headhunter wild dog’s thrashing suddenly intensified at the edge of life and death.
To suppress this final defiance of life, the crawling giant lizard lowered its body to apply more force.
It was at this moment that Luo Shi pulled the trigger.
No verbal command was needed.
When the first flash of fire burst from his muzzle, the other team member in his group opened fire almost simultaneously.
The crawling giant lizard’s scales were extremely tough.
At two hundred meters, bullets had a significant chance of failing to penetrate.
Thus, from the start, they aimed for the wounds on the crawling giant lizard’s body.
The bullets that left the barrel shot toward the wounds exposed beyond the protection of the scales.
The dark red muscle could not stop the bullets’ penetration.
The next second, the wounds, which had stopped bleeding, suddenly erupted with several spurts of blood splattered by the bullets.
“Roar roar roar—”
The sudden gunfire, accompanied by the intense pain from its body, made the crawling giant lizard release the headhunter wild dog and roar.
The strange sound was like a leaking bellows.
It swiftly turned its massive body to shield its wounds from the bullets, its searching gaze locking onto Luo Shi and the others firing in an instant.
As the crawling giant lizard moved to shield its weak points, the bullets still followed their original trajectory, striking the hard black scales.
They sparked a few blinding flashes, merely creating a few dented pits without breaking the scales’ protection.
The deformed bullets ricocheted, kicking up a series of dust clouds on the surrounding ground.
“Cease fire! Retreat as planned!”
Having fired just over ten rounds, Luo Shi immediately stopped shooting.
After confirming the crawling giant lizard had targeted them, he decisively ordered a retreat.
He was well aware that the standard bullets in their guns could hardly breach the scales’ defense.
This scale material was highly valued in all human bases, often processed for use in high-grade protective gear.
The HI01 advanced soft protective plates they wore contained about ten percent crawling giant lizard scales, used for critical area defense.
Unless multiple bullets hit the same spot, it was clearly impossible to achieve this while the crawling giant lizard was moving.
A mere two-person team could not use high-density barrage fire to halt the crawling giant lizard’s pursuit.
As Combat Team One, led by Luo Shi, showed signs of retreating, the crawling giant lizard abandoned the headhunter wild dog and charged toward them swiftly.
The crawling giant lizard was inherently aggressive, and the pain on its body heightened its frenzy.
Its comical crawling posture did nothing to diminish its terrifying speed.
Two hundred meters was a mere dozen seconds for it.
Its heavy footsteps during the charge made the entire street tremble, and its massive body stirred up a cloud of dust behind it.
Worse still, the cracks in the ground chased Combat Team One faster than the crawling giant lizard itself.
The heavy stomping destabilized the already fragile ground, weakened further by the earlier battle between the two monsters.
“Flashbang, prepare!”
Luo Shi pulled a flashbang from his waist.
Even without looking back, the approaching footsteps and panting were enough for him to gauge the distance between them and the crawling giant lizard.
“Throw!”
Bang! Bang!
The flashbangs, thrown backward, arced through the air.
With two successive soft bangs, blinding white light burst from the flashbangs left behind, illuminating the surroundings as if it were daylight.
In the pure light, almost nothing else could be seen.
The crawling giant lizard was naturally unaware of the humans’ tactics.
Its gaze remained fixed on the prey fleeing in the distance.
To it, these were merely a few creatures struggling in their final moments—hardly a threat.
"Just as it was preparing to accelerate its limbs to close the last few dozen meters and end the chase, it hadn't anticipated such a situation."
Intense white light suddenly flared in its vision.
Two flashbangs, one on each side, spread blinding light across its entire field of view.
In an instant, its vision was reduced to a white void.
Like endless darkness, when the light’s intensity reached its peak, everything became invisible.
Worse than darkness was the impact of the intense light on its optic nerves.
The visually sensitive crawling giant lizard endured stimulation several times greater than a human eye.
The high-frequency blinking of its nictitating membranes was evidence of this.
“Roar roar roar!!!”
The pain of losing its vision and the fear of losing control over its surroundings drove the crawling giant lizard into greater frenzy.
It spun in place, its thrashing tail slamming heavily into nearby small buildings.
Concrete pillars couldn’t withstand the fierce tail strike and shattered, collapsing into ruins as the unsupported buildings crashed to the ground.
It wasn’t just one building—every structure near the crawling giant lizard suffered.
While the crawling giant lizard recklessly created ruins, Luo Shi and the others seized the opportunity to widen the distance.
Though the crawling giant lizard had temporarily lost its ability to pursue, the monster’s recovery ability far exceeded their expectations.
“Run! Keep running! Hurry!”
As expected, the monster’s recovery was astonishingly fast.
After a brief half-minute of frenzy, the crawling giant lizard gradually calmed.
Its nictitating membranes stopped constantly moistening its eyes.
The white faded, and its vision slowly returned to normal.
At that moment, it immediately sought out Luo Shi and the others.
Having been thwarted repeatedly, it was especially enraged.
The crawling giant lizard charged again, closing the distance it had lost in mere seconds.
But this time, Luo Shi and his team had entered the planned area.
“Veer right!”
This area had a higher building density than before.
Though the crawling giant lizard was faster, its agility was far inferior.
If the earlier battle between the headhunter wild dog and the crawling giant lizard had taken place here, the wild dog might have escaped death by leveraging its agility.
The team swiftly turned into the buildings on the right.
The crawling giant lizard adjusted its stance immediately, but its charging momentum and bodily inertia caused it to slide several meters past the entrance.
Its meter-long claws dug into the asphalt, carving grooves as it swung its long body in a semicircle, following the fleeing team into the narrower road off the main street.
At this moment, its full attention was on the two humans ahead.
It failed to notice that, as it reached the middle of the road, two dark cannon barrels had already emerged from the windows of buildings on either side of its rear flank.
“Flashbang!”
As the crawling giant lizard closed in again, Luo Shi threw another flashbang.
Having learned from the previous experience, the crawling giant lizard had grown wiser.
The moment they moved, it closed its nictitating membranes to shield its vision from the intense light.
However… This was exactly Luo Shi’s plan.
Closing its membranes protected it from the light but obstructed its vision, slowing its reaction.
The moment the crawling giant lizard shut its eyes, Luo Shi and his teammate leaped forward, crashing through the glass of a storefront window with their bodies.
At the same time, Combat Team Two, positioned in the upper buildings, sprang into action.
Their rocket launchers aimed at the ground behind the crawling giant lizard.
“Whoosh!”
The tail flames of the rocket launchers stirred the dust in the room into a frenzied storm.
White and black smoke billowed from the windows.
The fleeting fire at the launcher’s rear flared and extinguished instantly.
The rockets, trailing long flames, flew straight toward their pre-aimed target.
The rockets from both sides targeted the ground behind the crawling giant lizard.
Though the lizard was fast, the security team’s weapon expertise was superior, having calculated the lead time in advance.
“Boom boom boom!!!”
At the same moment, the rockets hit their targets along their predetermined paths.
The combined explosive force was not simply additive.
Large and small debris, along with erupting dust, scattered in all directions.
The powerful shockwave spread across a radius of nearly ten meters at a speed barely visible to the naked eye.
The crawling giant lizard, near the explosion’s center, was naturally hit hard by the blast wave.
The explosion points of the two rockets were precisely calculated, targeting the rear half of the lizard’s body—its center of gravity.
Struck during its charge, the shockwave lifted it off the ground, flipping it onto its back in an instant!
The wound!
Struggling on its back, the crawling giant lizard fully exposed the wound on its underbelly.
The dark red gash stood out starkly against its white abdomen.
“Roar roar roar!!!”
“Sniper!”
Too late!
The crawling giant lizard’s reaction was faster than Luo Shi had expected.
The shockwave’s reverberations had not yet faded when Luo Shi scrambled to his feet, ignoring the glass shards and debris hitting his gas mask, and shouted the order.
“Captain! Visibility is blocked, unable to fire!”
The expected gunshot did not come.
Instead, the sniper’s anxious shout rang out.
Luo Shi realized then that the dust kicked up by the rockets had gathered in this confined area.
The thick dust made it impossible for the sniper, hundreds of meters away, to see the crawling giant lizard’s position, let alone hit the wound on its abdomen.
Damn it!
He had calculated every detail and accounted for deviations in the plan.
To ensure the crawling giant lizard was fully flipped, he had deliberately arranged for two rocket launchers.
Yet, his contingency plan had become the obstacle to the critical follow-up shot.
What now?!
The crawling giant lizard was about to flip back over.
Missing this chance meant the odds of finding another were nearly zero.
With its guard up, the lizard was unlikely to fall for the same trick again.
Blocked routes to the west and north left little room for maneuvering.
The zombie horde from the rear was closing in.
Was there no way to salvage this?
Closest to the target, he had only a standard rifle.
To ensure speed, he and his teammate carried only two extra flashbangs.
Was he to stake everything on this rifle?
Just as Luo Shi gritted his teeth, preparing to make a desperate stand, a pillar of blood several meters high suddenly erupted from the crawling giant lizard’s wound.
Splattering blood droplets, propelled by immense force, split into a vibrant blood mist drifting in the air, layering bit by bit onto Luo Shi’s mask over ten meters away.
The wound had become a hole about half a meter in diameter, piercing through the lizard’s body.
The surrounding muscle tissue was nearly carbonized, the blood completely evaporated.
A charred black smokescreen slowly spread outward.
“Bang!!!”
A moment later, the gunshot, like muffled thunder, rippled through layers of air, reaching Luo Shi’s ears.
Paired with the earlier scene, it struck and shook his heart.
This was the sound of the JC-1001 sniper rifle.
Besides the sniper, could it be Researcher Han?
Unfortunately, Luo Shi’s guess was slightly off…
Hundreds of meters away, on the rooftop, the dust kicked up by the bullet’s departure had not yet settled.
The rifle’s immense kinetic force pushed the prone shooter back over a meter, partly due to her extremely light weight.
Zhong Jing, the shooter, curled up in pain on the ground.
Her left arm, numb and senseless, wasn’t the source of the pain.
The agony radiated through her entire left chest, front to back, making breathing difficult.
Han Nianling’s warning was far too understated.
The consequences were far worse than she had described…
But she didn’t notice that the necklace tucked in her collar faintly emitted a dark red glow.
The crystal core, separated from the necklace by only a layer of clothing, was visibly losing its original luster.