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 be blessing him either... We're the same. Why have you never blessed me?"

With the engine starting up, a heavy machine entered everyone's view.

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 assumed.

In truth, at the final moment of his life, Leif, the "Silver Drive Shaft," 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 headquarters.

Leif had attached one final message as well.

"Now that this guy has saved the town, you've lost even a place to stand. Now, you have one last chance to get the girl of your dreams. Understand?"

If spoken aloud, that message might have taken several seconds.

But Leif had transmitted it 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 could not use the official network to send out a 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 fireball.

Leif could only choose Enoch.

So Enoch escaped amid the chaos.

He went through an adventure in the wasteland and was even nearly killed by members of the Z Organization just before reaching his destination.

If he had not shouted, "I brought 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'll teach me a Military Martial Way technique." Enoch gazed at Yulia dreamily. "I'll become an important figure too. 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 wandering hero!" Enoch glared at Xiang Shan but did not answer his question. "They were right. Wandering heroes bring disaster. If not for you, the tax officer would never have been angered, and our town would never have had a prosthetic body that attracted those Green Forest outlaws... Lord Leif would not 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 was like the groan of a demon.

Xiang Shan nearly laughed. "A logic carrier. Not bad... Haha, yes, even in this era, there's still a market for that kind of logic."

He even gave a few utterly insincere claps.

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

"Your time to die has come, hero," Enoch declared, as though stating an objective fact.

"Suit yourself." Xiang Shan rubbed his hands together, the high-frequency oscillators in his palms poised to strike.

These hands had once belonged to Blademan Longconi. Outer armor greatly restricted blades. The materials used to forge swords and those used to forge outer armor came from the same era, so there was not much difference in their strength. Geometry dictated that, with identical materials, armor could withstand force better than a blade.

This was not something that had only emerged in modern times. Even in ancient times, heavy armor countered bladed weapons. The only difference was that cyborgs had the strength to wear heavy armor while soaring through the sky and burrowing through the earth.

For swords to cut through armor, they needed High-Frequency Blades. In this age, a swordsman or blade wielder could not establish himself without high-frequency oscillation generators in his prosthetic body.

Longkoni's device for triggering high-frequency vibrations was not on his blade but in his hands. His palms could generate high-frequency vibrations, while his sword had been specially treated to transmit those vibrations to the blade after altering their frequency.

This technology could be used with a sword, and naturally with bare hands as well. It happened to counter the Heavy Tank-Giant Warship Style within Military Martial Way.

"Military Martial Way"... he seemed to remember 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," so they placed great emphasis on achieving the greatest possible results with limited prosthetics while not being constrained by the performance of the prosthetics themselves. Powerful prosthetics could naturally bring out more of martial arts' subtleties, but even junk prosthetics could display a trace of their essence. By constantly taking prosthetics from enemies, one could keep fighting without end.

Military Martial Way was the exact 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 type and specification of vehicle corresponded to an entirely different branch of Military Martial Way.

Whether it was Heavy Tank-Giant Warship Style or Large Military Formation, neither was something a wandering hero had the means to employ.

That was one reason Military Martial Way had been classified separately from Inner Power and the Outer School.

That did not mean 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 by design, Military Martial Way was more suited to "suppressing uprisings" than "starting an uprising."

Military Martial Way had techniques specifically meant to deal with lightly armored martial artists closing in. Since the armor of massive vehicles was far stronger than the prosthetic bodies of ordinary martial artists, when an opponent got close, the vehicle had to find a way to ram out its hardest armor at the most vicious angle or use noncritical sections to withstand the enemy's attacks.

Since he said Military Martial Way, then using vibration waves to shatter metal plate armor...

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

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

"Revoke Civilization Protection?" Xiang Shan shook his head. "Not to mention I don't care about so-called Civilization Protection in the first place... He has now admitted to colluding with bandits himself. Killing him would not violate the Dyson Principles, would it?"

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

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

The functions of his artificial eyes rapidly expanded. At the edge of his vision, he caught a trace of color beyond the naked eye's ability to perceive...

Electromagnetic waves...

Xiang Shan looked up. A drone was hovering silently above them. It was electric-powered, with a set of multi-bladed propellers completely enclosed within independent nacelles, its noise reduced to the minimum.

Xiang Shan instinctively leaped up and swung a palm at the drone.

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

Sniping had its limits.

Setting aside the orbital strikes conducted from space, the "sniping" humans could perform from the ground had always had limits. After cybernetic enhancement, humanity had overcome its physiological limitations. Their eyes would not fail to aim because their sight could not reach far enough, nor would bodily tremors cause the barrel to shift 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. Computer-assisted plugins could account for it. Atmospheric currents were not impossible to overcome either. As long as detector-equipped drones were deployed in advance and arranged in designated formations across a specific area, one could grasp the airflow along a bullet's trajectory.

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 starting from his eyes. Connect the tangent point, his eyes, and the Earth's center into a right triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometric functions could determine the distance between the observer and the horizon.

If an observer's viewpoint was a little over one meter above sea level, his field of vision would extend roughly five kilometers.

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

Yet even if drones could be used to overcome that obstacle, geometry still caused trouble.

Because the line connecting the "muzzle" and the "target" would also be obstructed by the Earth's curved surface.

Of course, that obstacle could be crossed by having the bullet travel in a parabola, like a mortar shell. But bullets were weapons that relied on kinetic energy to inflict damage. Leaving aside low-arching trajectories close to a straight line, a mortar-like arc meant that the bullet's muzzle energy would have dissipated almost completely.

Unless one found high ground in advance.

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

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

While Enoch searched the town, Geliad had searched here for a suitable point from which to launch an attack.

This was how a Gunfire Way martial artist fought.

Until Xiang Shan discovered his drone.

Looks like he has at least one artificial eye with a very broad visual spectrum, or extremely sensitive artificial ears?

Geliad thought.

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

According to legend, the Martial Ancestor did not like Military Martial Way, nor did he like Gunfire Way. Why was that? 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 alone favor close-quarters combat? Was he a fighting maniac?

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

Gunfire Way was an unblessed martial art, one disdained by traditional wandering heroes.

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

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

At this distance, even the Martial Ancestor would suffer!

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

Powerful Inner Power vanished like a mud ox entering the sea.

He saw the man leap into the air.

And so...

I won.