Gunfire Expert

A venomous voice suddenly cut into the conversation.

"That's impossible, Yulia. He'll die on the journey," the voice said. "And you shouldn't bless him... We're the same. Why have you never blessed me?"

As the engine started, a heavy machine entered everyone's sight.

Xiang Shan smiled. "Enoch? Haven't seen you in a while. You've really changed quite a bit..."

Enoch had already removed the cumbersome cargo bed, and spikes had been fitted onto his tires.

When Enoch had fled, he had not run aimlessly as everyone had guessed.

In truth, at the very end of his life, Silver Drive Shaft Leif had not waited peacefully for death. Instead, he had sent Enoch a data packet. It contained a series of parameters, along with a concise description of Xiang Shan.

There was also a set of coordinates.

Those coordinates pointed to the Z Organization's hideout.

Leif had attached one final message.

"That guy has saved the town now, so you've lost even the ground beneath your feet. Now you have one last chance to win the girl of your dreams. Understand?"

If spoken aloud, those words might have taken several seconds.

But Leif had transmitted the information as data.

The difference in efficiency between reading word by word and scanning an entire page before reading its contents in one's mind was worlds apart.

Leif had no way to use the official network to send out his death signal. His Inner Power was too weak; there was a fifty-percent chance the signal would be intercepted and a fifty-percent chance it would be traced. Jingbao Kui might have been able to do it, but by then, Jingbao Kui had already become a ball of fire.

Leif could only choose Enoch.

So Enoch had escaped amid the chaos.

He had gone through quite an adventure in the wasteland and had nearly been killed by Z Organization members just before reaching his destination.

If he had not shouted, "I bring news from Lord Leif!" and made them stop, he would probably have become spare parts in the Z Organization's warehouse.

"Yulia... Yulia... I'm a martial artist now too. Boss Geliad promised me that, in recognition of my service delivering Lord Leif's message, he'd teach me a Military Martial Way." Enoch gazed at Yulia with infatuation. "I'll become an important person someday. Become mine, I..."

"Hey." Xiang Shan spread his hands. "Are you blind? Who gave you the courage to show your face in front of me again?"

"Ah, you... a Vagrant of the martial world!" Enoch glared at Xiang Shan but did not answer his question. "They were right. Vagrants of the martial world bring disaster. If it weren't for you, the tax officer wouldn't have been enraged, our town wouldn't have had a prosthetic body that attracted outlaws... Lord Leif wouldn't have died. And... and... right, Vili too. Our lives were thrown into chaos because that little bastard dug you up..."

That language pack, worth half a year of Yulia's income, truly was extraordinary. It perfectly recreated Leif's emotions at that moment.

The voice from the speaker sounded almost like the moaning of a demon.

Xiang Shan nearly laughed. "A logical mastermind, huh? Not bad... Hahaha, indeed. Even in this age, there's still a market for that kind of logic."

He even gave a few halfhearted claps.

"I'm only asking you this: have you prepared yourself mentally to appear before me?"

"Your death has come, Vagrant," Enoch declared, as though stating an objective fact.

"Suit yourself." Xiang Shan rubbed his hands together, the high-frequency oscillation generators in his palms ready to activate.

These hands had once belonged to Blademan Longconi. External armor severely limited bladed weapons. The materials used to forge swords and the materials used to make external armor came from the same era, so there would not be much difference in their strength. Geometry dictated that, when the materials were the same, armor could withstand force better than a sword.

This was not something unique to the modern age. In ancient times, heavy armor countered blades. It was merely that cybernetic humans possessed the strength to fly through the heavens and burrow into the earth while wearing heavy armor.

For swords to cut through armor, they had to rely on High-Frequency Blades. In this era, if a swordsman's prosthetic body lacked a high-frequency oscillation generator, he could not establish himself.

Longkoni's device for triggering high-frequency oscillation was not in his blade, but in his hands. His palms could generate high-frequency vibrations, while his blades had been specially treated to convert and transmit those vibrations to their edges.

This technique could be used with a blade, so naturally it could also be used barehanded. It happened to counter the "Heavy Tank-Giant Warship Style" of Military Martial Way.

Military Martial Way... he seemed to recall that it was a kind of heretical martial art.

Martial arts had been designed around the concept of "using an individual body to resist tyranny." Thus, they emphasized "achieving the greatest possible results with limited prosthetic bodies," without being bound by the performance of the prosthetics themselves. Powerful prosthetics could certainly bring out far more of martial arts' subtleties, but even junk prosthetics could display a fragment of their essence. By continually taking prosthetics from enemies, one could keep fighting without end.

Military Martial Way was the complete opposite. It was highly specialized, emphasizing the use of massive weapons that ordinary people could never access—super tanks, aircraft carriers, even space warships. Every specification of every vehicle corresponded to an entirely different military martial art.

Neither "Heavy Tank-Giant Warship" nor "Large Military Formation" was something a Vagrant had the means to use.

This was one of the reasons why military martial arts were classified separately from Inner Power and the Outer School.

That was not to say Military Martial Way could not resist tyranny. In fact, Xiang Shan felt that if he captured those large vehicles, he could use Military Martial Way to operate them himself—he knew a little about it, at least. But in terms of design, Military Martial Way was more suited to "suppressing uprisings" than "starting uprisings."

Military Martial Way had techniques specifically for dealing with light martial artists at close range. Since massive vehicles possessed armor far stronger than ordinary martial artists' prosthetic bodies, when martial artists closed in, the vehicle had to find a way to ram out its hardest armor at the most vicious angle, or use nonessential parts to absorb the enemy's attacks.

Since he mentioned Military Martial Way, then crushing metal plate armor with vibration waves...

If there were enemies nearby, he was confident he could wipe out Enoch's accomplices in one sweep. He had obtained part of Leif's memories and had a rough understanding of the so-called Z Organization.

Mayor Schultz seized Xiang Shan in terror. "Wait, Shan, are you going to kill him now? No, no, you can't, this will..."

"Revoke my protection?" Xiang Shan shook his head. "Not to mention that I don't care about so-called Civilization Protection... He has admitted himself that he colluded with thugs. Killing him wouldn't violate the Dyson Principles, would it?"

"No, there's no concrete evidence. Doing this here is extremely dangerous. What if..."

At that moment, Xiang Shan suddenly felt a stab of "heart palpitations"—though he no longer had a heart. Yet that flash of intuition nearly made him activate the internal combustion engine in his chest.

The functions of his prosthetic eyes rapidly expanded. At the edge of his vision, he saw a trace of color beyond the recognition capacity of the naked eye...

Electromagnetic waves...

Xiang Shan looked up. A drone hovered silently above them. It was electrically powered, its multi-bladed propellers completely shielded by separate ducts, its sound reduced to the bare minimum.

Xiang Shan instinctively leaped up and struck the drone with his palm.

"Ah, it's been discovered." Seven kilometers away, a man lying prone atop a mountain of garbage chuckled softly.

Sniping had its limits.

Leaving aside orbital sniping from space, the "sniping" humans could conduct from the ground had always possessed limits. After cybernetic enhancement, humans had overcome physiological constraints. Their eyes would not fail to aim because the target was beyond visual range, nor would bodily tremors make the barrel deviate by even one-thousandth of a degree.

At that point, air, gravity, and geometry became the greatest obstacles to sniping.

Gravity was not too difficult to handle. Computational assistance plugins could account for it. Atmospheric flow was not impossible to overcome either. As long as drones containing sensors were released beforehand and arranged in a specific formation within a particular region, one could grasp the air currents along a bullet's path.

But geometry was difficult to overcome, unless the first four axioms of Euclidean geometry could be overturned.

The "horizon" a person saw was actually the tangent point between his line of sight and the Earth. Draw a tangent line across the Earth's cross-section from his eyes. Connect the tangent point, his eyes, and the Earth's center into a right triangle, and the distance between the observer and the horizon could be calculated through the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometric functions.

If an observer's viewpoint stood just over one meter above sea level, his field of vision would be roughly five kilometers.

Flat, open terrain was the best battlefield for sniping. But in such an area, a sniper's field of vision was only five kilometers.

But even if one could use drones to overcome that obstacle, geometry still interfered.

Because the line connecting the "muzzle" and the "target" would likewise be blocked by the curved Earth.

Of course, one could overcome this obstacle by making the bullet trace a parabola—like a mortar shell. But bullets were weapons that inflicted damage through kinetic energy. Leaving aside low-arc trajectories that were almost straight, an arc like that of a mortar shell meant the bullet's muzzle energy would have been completely exhausted.

Unless one first found high ground.

This garbage mountain was an ideal sniping position. It had originally been the cabin of some warship. From here to the entrance of the village where Xiang Shan was staying, there was only one road. Most of the useful materials along it had been salvaged by the town, leaving only low garbage heaps and nothing that could serve as cover.

Geliad had sent Enoch to look for Xiang Shan and dispatched a drone to follow him. Enoch had initially wanted to find Yulia, but Jingbao Kui's parasite was still inside him, and Geliad could easily punish him.

While Enoch searched the town, Geliad had searched here for a suitable place to launch his attack.

This was how a Gunfire Way martial artist fought.

Until Xiang Shan discovered his drone.

It looks like he has at least one prosthetic eye with a very broad visible spectrum, or an exceptionally sensitive prosthetic ear?

Geliad thought.

But no matter what, at this distance, a Gunfire Way martial artist was "invincible."

Legend said that the Martial Ancestor did not like Military Martial Way, nor did he like Gunfire Way. Why? The history Geliad knew did not explain it in such detail. But he guessed that perhaps the old Martial Ancestor had feared that if Gunfire Way flourished, it would wipe out the other traditions.

Did he only like close-quarters combat? Was he a fighting fanatic?

The earliest martial artists had even wanted to remove Gunfire Way from the foundational design of martial arts.

Gunfire Way was a martial art without blessing, one traditional Vagrants disdained.

But precisely because of that, Geliad possessed a pride unique to Gunfire Way.

Even if the earth did not allow it, even if this planet did not allow it, even if the Martial Ancestor did not allow it... I would persist!

At this distance, even the Martial Ancestor would suffer!

In the image transmitted from ahead, the instant that man's gaze touched the lens, Geliad almost lost control of the drone. Something was attacking it. But the drone had been designed from the start with clashes against Inner Power experts in mind. Its hardware limited the speed of information uploads, even lowering image quality for that purpose.

Powerful Inner Power vanished into it like a clay ox entering the sea.

He saw that man leap into the air.

And so...

I won.