Chapter 167

A whistling sound suddenly came and the four of us covered our heads right as a mortar shell exploded beside us. After so many years, this wasn’t the first—or even second—time that I had been bombed, but it was definitely the first time that I had been bombarded by mortars. Not to mention the ringing in my ears, dead leaves and mud were falling all over the sky and I spat out a mouthful of black gunk.

Kan Jian looked at me in horror and stuttered, “Bo- Bo- Boss, why is there a war here?”

I climbed to the edge of the pit and picked up my binoculars, but I couldn’t see anything because of the tree canopies. I heard another whistle and knew another mortar was coming in. But as I listened, my instincts told me that something was wrong. Before I could speak, Liu Sang’s complexion drastically changed.

“Run!” He shouted.

We all rolled out of the pit and ran more than a dozen steps just as the shell hit our pit. We fell to the ground and Liu Sang shouted, “Turn off the flashlights, turn off the flashlights!”

“Don’t turn them off,” I shouted, “Throw them away!”

Kan Jian pulled his big white arm back in a big arc, bulged his muscles, and threw the flashlight directly into the air. It slowly fell down and landed firmly at his feet. I looked at him and he looked at me before he made a move like he was going to stretch.

I went up with a flying kick, “Throw it out! Don’t throw it up!”

I picked up the flashlight and threw it into the distance. Liu Sang used a kick-off action to kick his own flashlight more than ten meters away.

Wolf-Eye flashlights were very heavy and could even be used as weapons, so Liu Sang hurt his foot with that kick. But there was another whistle in the air, so I quickly grabbed Liu Sang and Kan Jian and ran into the darkness. The shell exploded right where we had been standing just now. We instinctively ducked our heads and looked back. Liu Sang, who was leaning against a tree, started cursing, “You motherfucker! What’s wrong with your men? He was basically setting off a signal flare to the others!”

I looked at his foot and thought to myself, you’re not that fucking smart, either.

I started wiping the black mud on my face and figured that this was probably what it was like during the war. Liu Sang pointed in a certain direction: it was where the shells were coming from. The beams of our flashlights were so bright in the surrounding darkness that the other party could easily determine our location. It was obvious that they were trying to kill us and I figured they were launching their attack from the mountainside.

It was dark all around, so our flashlights were a glimmer of light that was easily spotted in the distance. Then, there was a whistling sound and a loud noise. The light was immediately blown up.

I couldn’t even see Liu Sang’s face as he leaned against the tree trunk, but another shot quickly destroyed the flashlight that he had kicked far away. Then, the whole area became quiet again.

“Is it Boss Jiao’s team?” I reached for my knife. The powerlessness that I felt at this time was beyond words. It would be nice to have a 98K (1) right now.

Liu Sang started cursing, “Fuck, do you have other enemies besides Jiao? Did you send them invitations or something? Why don’t you ask?” As he spoke, he looked at the surrounding darkness and then glanced at his watch. “We’re dead meat. The poisonous gas should be descending right now.”

That thing didn’t cover the whole valley bottom, so there was a chance we wouldn’t be so unlucky. When I saw it just now, it looked like it only spanned the canopies of six or seven trees.

Liu Sang suddenly shouted to the sky, “Kong San, we know each other. Show some mercy. How much money did that man surnamed Jiao give you to blow us up? We’re all fucking human beings here! You’re just an artillery expert, so do you need to be that serious?”

I was surprised and asked, “Do you know this man?”

Liu Sang scolded, “I saw him on the fourth floor. He’s really skilled at artillery. His name is Kong San and he’s from Yinchuan. We’ve also played mahjong together. That bastard definitely doesn’t want to pay back the money.” After he said that, he shouted, “I don’t need the mahjong money!”

A strong northwest accent soon came from the mountainside and echoed throughout the valley, “I’m not here to negotiate that with you. Just hand over Wu Xie and you can go. I don’t want you.”

Liu Sang yelled back, “They have three people and I’m here alone. I going to fucking lose if I fight them.” Then he said to me, “Why don’t you sacrifice yourself?”

I scolded him for being so nervous about the poisonous gas. If we hid here, it didn’t necessarily mean that we would die. In fact, if Boss Jiao’s people came down to the bottom of this valley, it might save us some trouble. Moreover, we didn’t know whether it was actually poisonous gas or not.

Liu Sang looked at me and said, “Wu Xie, do you think I’m being dramatic? If I’m not being dramatic, then do you think I’m acting so scared just to mess with you? Let me fucking lay it out for you. I know what I’m talking about. I’m in this team because my ears can extend your range of perception from a hundred meters up to two kilometers. I’m telling you that within two kilometers of this area, I can hear more than two hundred clusters of poisonous gas. More than two hundred! Get that into that thick skull of yours! The number of clusters is more than the number of your stupid brain cells combined! We have to bury ourselves!”

When he was finished screaming at me, I looked at him coldly. “You want a pit?” I snapped on my flashlight, threw it six or seven meters away from us, and then hid behind the tree. A mortar shell arrived the very next instant. With a loud “bong”, dead leaves and mud rained down from the sky. Before everything had finished falling, I grabbed Liu Sang and rushed to where the shell had landed. There was now a big crater in the ground, so I quickly kicked him into it.

<Chapter 166><Table of Contents><Chapter 168>

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TN Notes:

(1) I think he’s talking about the Karabiner 98k rifle.