"Fuck! Huo Yuhao! Save her, now!" Long Yao shouted.
That roar, laced with profanity and urgency, exploded through the deathly stillness of four in the morning like a thunderclap.
The voice was like an invisible, red-hot iron hammer, smashing the fragile quiet built from darkness and exhaustion to pieces.
"Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!"
Almost the instant that roar rang out, the figures in the camp below who should have been sound asleep sprang up from their sleeping bags or the rock walls they had been leaning against like battle puppets whose switches had been flipped, moving with a speed beyond ordinary imagination, almost like a conditioned reflex.
The first to react was the one who had been named—Huo Yuhao. He was practically yanked out of meditation by force, and the last trace of color instantly drained from his already pale face, leaving it like a transparent sheet of white paper. His ink-blue eyes snapped open, his pupils contracting violently into two dangerous, needle-tip black dots from the sudden fright and the unquestionable authority contained in that command.
"Yes! Brother Long Yao!"
He did not even have time to think about what had happened. His body's instincts, and the obedience to his leader long since branded into the depths of his soul, had already driven him into a blurred afterimage as he pounced toward the source of that voice—the bloody, mutilated figure that had just collapsed.
The next to be awakened was Wang Dong.
Long Yao's sudden movement as he erupted from beside her, and that furious roar full of anxiety, struck through all her drowsiness in an instant like the most direct and violent electric current. She abruptly opened those beautiful pink-blue eyes still carrying a hint of sleepy drowsiness, and the instant she saw the scene before her, all her