The battle between Zhang Heng and Zero looked far less intense than the previous ones, but it was even more perilous.
Zero's shooting skill had likely reached Level 3, just like Zhang Heng's. His accuracy was almost on par with Zhang Heng's, with only his rapid-fire speed slightly inferior. Zhang Heng had learned rapid firing from Simon, but he had truly honed it in the later Western instance, absorbing the cowboys' quick-draw techniques.
During the first two minutes of the fight, Zhang Heng and Zero were almost evenly matched. Their strategies and firing rhythms were identical, and even their ammunition consumption was about the same.
But afterward, Zhang Heng adopted a completely different strategy from the one he had used against Numbers Five and Seven, deliberately increasing his rate of fire. By comparison, Zero's response was somewhat sluggish. However, after being suppressed, Zero realized Zhang Heng had disrupted his rhythm, so he deliberately slowed his firing rate, hoping to drag the fight back into the previous pattern of competing in prediction and accuracy.
From then on, they were competing in more than just shooting skill. They were also testing their ability to read and control the battlefield.
Yet what astonished Zero was that Zhang Heng's combat experience was no less extensive than his own.
Unlike combat skills, combat experience could only be partially encoded into memories. Beyond familiarizing someone with techniques, it had little effect. Things like combat rhythm and the ability to assess a battlefield were too abstract to be explained clearly through a single battle.
After all, memory encoding was not omnipotent. The people who encoded their memories did not possess sufficiently rich combat experience themselves, so naturally they could not make their creations comprehend things they did not know how to describe or define.
But Zero was