In Cheng'an District, Hedong, inside a residential building.
Xue Songjie held a baseball bat in his right hand and a pair of binoculars in his left. Crouched behind the curtains, he carefully peered outside through a narrow gap.
He was a big, burly man with a full beard. If you ignored his dough-white skin and his belly, which looked like he was six months pregnant, he could have passed for Zhang Fei himself.
But Xue Songjie felt like he was about to piss himself.
Ever since he'd been jolted awake by the sound of artillery in the early hours of yesterday morning, he'd felt a deep unease. What happened next only proved his suspicions right.
A terrifyingly huge figure roamed through the city like a hurricane.
Everywhere it passed, the windows in the buildings on either side shattered. The asphalt road looked as if it had been shelled, with deep craters appearing every hundred meters or so—sometimes every few hundred.
He'd seen it with his own eyes: a sentry post not far away had turned into a pile of rubble before it could even attack. One of its gun barrels had gone flying and was still stuck in the fourth-floor wall of a nearby building, like a chimney.
It felt like he was trapped in a nightmare. The cruel part was that it wasn't a nightmare at all.
Groups of daring residents sped down the street on bicycles. He'd seen them dozens of times between yesterday and now. Every time he watched their panicked backs as they fled, Xue Songjie felt a cold sweat for them.
They were really throwing their lives away. If they ran into that terrifying figure, they'd probably be crushed into meat paste in an instant.
But as he watched them ride farther and farther away,