Zhang Heng kept his body low and dashed through the corridor ahead at top speed.
Just as he slipped around the stairwell corner, a stream of bullets chased after him and struck the wall to his right, leaving a row of bullet holes.
Plaster shaken loose by the gunfire littered the floor, while the dense bullet holes had turned that wall into something resembling a hornet's nest.
Less than three seconds later, the culprit behind it all—a robot with a human upper body and spider legs below—leapt directly from the low building opposite. It hooked four of its legs over the corridor railing, flipped inside with ease, and aimed the heavy machine gun in its left hand at the stairwell entrance.
But Zhang Heng was already gone.
He had just reached the front door of an apartment downstairs. The door was open, and the woman living there was wearing headphones as she prepared to take out the trash. Before she could react, an unfamiliar man burst into her home. She was about to scream when Zhang Heng knocked her unconscious first.
Zhang Heng casually tossed the unconscious woman onto the sofa, crossed the living room, jumped out through the kitchen window, and landed on a third-floor balcony. Without stopping, he slid all the way down the drainage pipe beside it to the ground.
Of course, he was not naive enough to think that would shake off the Hunter VI type robot. In truth, he merely wanted to use the time to cross the most dangerous stretch ahead.
The road before him was one of the more open areas in this district. The next intersection was roughly a hundred meters away, requiring around ten seconds to cross. Under normal circumstances, that was nothing, but now those ten seconds could prove fatal.