“The PBB military is still evacuating the last group of civilians,” Bai Chunian said while wiping blood from his rifle. “Once they confirm everyone’s out, they’ll send helicopters.”
“Right now the entire Enxi City is basically empty. The PBBW Storm Unit, led by Major Xia, is clearing infected wandering through the city. The place with the highest concentration now is this hospital.”
Ying asked cautiously, “What about the others?”
“I’ve already cleared the patients along the emergency stairwell. If they take the safe route, they should be fine.” Bai Chunian checked the communicator signal, trying to reach the other three trainees. “Now tell me—how did the Alliance Bomb Disposal Team get wiped out?”
As Ying recalled entering the hospital alongside those senior members, the despair from that moment still felt vivid.
During the Enxi City rescue operation, responsibilities had been divided:
- The PBB military handled civilian and executive evacuation.
- The Storm Unit, led by Major Xia, eliminated infected scattered around the city.
- Professor Zhong and the Alliance Medical Association treated those injured during the riots.
- The Alliance Bomb Disposal Team entered Enxi Hospital, where the infection was most concentrated, to investigate the source of the contagion and rescue trapped medical staff.
When they first entered the hospital lobby, the place was eerily silent—not a single living person in sight.
But when they pushed open the doors to the waiting hall, a dense swarm of infected patients rushed at them.
The senior bomb squad members covered the front line, ordering the trainees to escort the doctors from the Medical Association out.
But by then it was already too late to retreat.
Doors and windows suddenly locked shut, and infected patients poured in from every direction, biting and clawing wildly without discrimination.
It was the first real combat experience for the four trainees. None of them knew what to do. They fought desperately just to escort the doctors to somewhere safe, avoiding the infected along the way.
For nearly three days and nights, they barely slept.
With ammunition nearly gone and supplies exhausted, the fact that the doctors had no casualties at all was already the result of their absolute best effort.
“The bomb squad’s commander has been pretty slack lately,” Bai Chunian said, brushing dust off his sleeve. “The members haven’t been very active in internal drills either.”
“The president’s definitely going to lose his temper again. Hopefully we won’t get dragged into it.”
Ying was still bothered by the Joker access card puzzle earlier. He wanted to ask but hesitated.
Bai Chunian noticed and casually explained.
“There were four rooms—two big, two small. From Room 4, you could see the patterns under the beds in Rooms 2 and 3.”
“If your pattern matched Room 2’s—both Little Joker cards—then Room 4 would obviously know it was the Big Joker. They’re not idiots.”
“And if fifteen minutes passed and nobody from Room 4 came out, that meant your card was different from Room 2’s. They couldn’t confirm their identity.”
As he spoke, Bai Chunian suddenly remembered something.
“Oh right. I finished grading the theory exam from the beginning of the month.”
“You got every logic question wrong. Come see me after we get back.”
Ying regretted it so much he nearly slapped himself.
Between the VIP wards ran a long connecting corridor. The outer side was lined with glass windows, while the inner side was a sealed wall. In the center of that wall was a password-protected door.
This passageway was for hospital staff only. Patients were not allowed inside.
“I’m looking for a doctor named Lin Deng who works here,” Bai Chunian said. “I only know the general location. He’s trapped somewhere.”
He connected a modified chip phone to the keypad decoder.
The phone’s lock screen lit up:
Decoding… 1%
Han Xingqian glanced at him.
“I remember electronics aren’t exactly your specialty.”
Bai Chunian stared at the screen and chuckled, showing the tip of a tiger tooth.
“Recently found myself a very useful tool. A super hacker. Real computer genius.”
“Who?” Han Xingqian asked.
“Crawler Omega.”
On the phone’s lock screen was a very clear photo ofLan Bo lying inside a fish tank, hooking the bandage around his lower abdomen with his fingertip.
Han Xingqian normally avoided prying into others’ privacy, but Bai Chunian made no effort whatsoever to hide it, so he ended up seeing it clearly.
In the photo, the gold-haired merman had sharply defined brow bones and nose bridge. His pale blue eyes, unfocused like transparent gemstones, were framed by faint, light-colored lashes.
From bone to skin, he possessed a melancholic, striking beauty.
Yet despite being a demon of the sea, there was none of the seductive charm one might expect from someone who used beauty as a weapon.
Instead, his gaze carried only pride and coldness.
“He looks like he holds a fairly high status among merfolk,” Han Xingqian said. “So that’s the kind of cold, unfeeling face you like.”
“Hey, watch how you say that.” Bai Chunian turned up the brightness on the screen and held the phone closer for Han Xingqian to see. “Look at those big eyes, those little pink lips. Gorgeous as hell. That’s exactly my type.”
Han Xingqian pushed up his glasses. “The Alliance has plenty of little omegas with big eyes and pink lips. You rejected them all pretty decisively.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
Han Xingqian started to say something more, then stopped when he saw Bai Chunian’s eyes fixed entirely on the omega in the photo. He decided not to continue.
The decoding progress bar reached 100%.
The password door slowly slid open to both sides. A wave of rotting stench, trapped for a long time in the sealed space, rushed out. In the corridor—about five meters wide—more than a dozen infected figures in white lab coats wandered aimlessly.
Some held medical charts.
Some had stethoscopes hanging from their necks.
Others walked while staring at CT scans in their hands.
The moment the door opened, the infected doctors all turned toward the three of them at the same time. Identical feral grins spread across their faces before they roared and charged forward in a frenzy.
Bai Chunian glanced back at Ying. “Got any spare ammo?”
Ying shook his head.
“I only requested solo support,” Bai Chunian said. “Didn’t get much equipment approved.”
He tossed his M98B to Ying. “Take mine. I’ll clear them out first. You two come in afterward.”
Ying nodded, holding the heavy rifle and carefully staying close to Doctor Han, trying to shield the alpha with his small body.
Bai Chunian pulled a tactical dagger from the holster strapped to his thigh, flipped it once in the air, and caught it in a reverse grip in his left hand before walking straight toward the roaring infected.
The infected patient at the front grabbed Bai Chunian’s right arm first, opening a rotting, blood-dripping mouth and biting down viciously.
Bai Chunian lifted the dagger to block the bite. With a twist of his wrist, he flipped the blade downward—cold steel flashed—and the infected’s lower jaw was sliced clean off, clattering to the floor.
As the force of the cut sent the body pitching forward, Bai Chunian smoothly severed its spine and the back of its skull.
Another infected body, completely rotten, lunged from his side.
Bai Chunian barely shifted his gaze. With a backhand motion, he drove the dagger point into the infected’s neck, deliberately avoiding the artery to prevent a spray of blood. His elbow slammed into the man’s shoulder. Loose, decaying flesh burst with a wet splitting sound, and the shoulder blade snapped at an impossible angle.
The next downward slash cut the spine, leaving the infected unable to move.
Ying’s shooting was already considered top-tier—every shot a headshot—yet he still couldn’t match Bai Chunian’s kill speed with the dagger.
In Ying’s eyes, Bai Chunian’s movements were unbelievably fast, each strike vicious and lethal. Even if the opponent weren’t infected but a well-trained Sanda champion, they probably wouldn’t last one minute under their instructor.
Gradually, the roars in the corridor faded.
Bai Chunian flicked the blood from his blade and casually crushed the skull of the last fallen infected beneath his boot.
Ying swapped magazines and moved to escort Doctor Han quickly through the corridor.
Han Xingqian looked around at the walls and noticed something unusual in the tile patterns.
Small seams were hidden among the tiles.
Each seam was roughly ten centimeters long, but only about one millimeter wide. Faint red light leaked through them.
“Xiaobai. Heat sensors.”
Almost as soon as Han Xingqian finished speaking, the seams in the wall suddenly glowed red. The two walls were instantly covered with narrow red slits about ten centimeters long.
A moment later—
Sharp metal blades shot out of the gaps.
The thin iron plates fired at incredible speed. The corpses on the floor were immediately shredded into pieces by the dense storm of blades.
One **Joker card—Big Joker—**embedded itself into a corpse’s skull.
They were all metal playing cards, with sharpened edges on all four sides. A single touch would easily slice through skin, even cut through bone.
What made it even more horrifying was that the cards didn’t simply fall and stop.
Only then did Ying realize the floor was also filled with red-lit slits facing different directions. The metal poker blades launched from the walls followed carefully calculated trajectories, falling precisely into the floor slots where they were recycled and fired again.
An endless cycle.
The storm would continue until the corridor detected no heat signatures outside the preset parameters.
And those recovered poker blades were coated with infected blood. If one of them cut you—even if you didn’t die immediately—you’d eventually become infected by the circulating virus and turn into a violent walking corpse.
“Instructor, watch out!” Ying shouted.
He fired the M98B at the whirling blades in the air, but they moved so fast the human eye could barely track them. Shooting them down was impossible.
The hurricane-like poker storm trapped Bai Chunian in the middle of the corridor.
He twisted his body sideways to dodge one card, then flipped backward in a leap, catching two cards between his fingers just before they pierced his eyes and pulling them into his hand.
His reaction speed had already surpassed what any normal human could achieve.
As he moved, a dense brandy-scented pheromone spilled out naturally with the energy he was expending.
Ying was forced to his knees under the pressure of the high-level pheromone, his hands braced against the ground as cold sweat dripped from his forehead.
Han Xingqian, meanwhile, simply stood there calmly holding his silver briefcase, one hand in the pocket of his white coat, watching the corridor.
Bai Chunian wasn’t merely dodging the cards.
He was moving through them in a pattern, collecting them one by one into his hands.
Although Ying couldn’t clearly see his movements, he could tell the number of cards firing from the walls was gradually decreasing, while the stack in Bai Chunian’s hand grew larger and larger.
Soon enough, the walls ran out of cards.
Bai Chunian finally stopped.
“I knew it wasn’t infinite,” he said.
A thick stack of metal cards rested in his hand. He performed a flourish, shuffling them smoothly before spreading them open.
It was a full deck—from Ace to King—all the numbers arranged in order.
“I counted them after the first wave finished,” he said. “No duplicate suits.”
Bai Chunian bent down and pulled the last card—the colorful Big Joker—from the corpse’s skull. He lifted the hem of his shirt and carefully wiped it clean before adding it to the rest of the deck.
After sliding the cards together and squaring the deck, he looked up toward the surveillance camera in the corner of the corridor and narrowed his eyes with a smile.
“Samael, turning yourself in now is very different from the execution you’ll get when I drag you out later.”
“And at best you’re just a Little Joker, so learn your place.”
From the deck in his hand, Bai Chunian flicked out the gray Little Joker.
He pressed it to his lips for a brief kiss, then snapped his fingers.
The metal card shot forward, spinning at high speed. It shattered the camera lens and embedded firmly into the wall.