A Narrow Road Encounter

Amid the smoke and dust, Xiang Shan came to a stop. The dust kicked up by the massive outer armor wreckage striking the ground spread rapidly like a storm.

Within a few hundred meters, he did not need to worry about "sniping." Fine dust particles could block or scatter electromagnetic waves across most frequency bands.

Judging from the bullet trajectory his vision had caught earlier, the opponent could not be at sniper points A or D among the four.

That left only the sniper points codenamed B and C.

But he could not choose wrong. The two sniper points were not in a straight line with him. If he made the wrong choice, he would lose around ten extra seconds.

He had to take a risk and "measure" the bullet more precisely.

When his vision was blocked, Xiang Shan inevitably fell into fear. It was an instinct left behind by the biological brain. For primitive creatures dependent on sight, losing vision meant losing the ability to find food and evade predators.

Don't panic...

Xiang Shan understood just how dangerous what he was about to do was. If he was unlucky, he would lose the hard-won prosthetic body. If he was even unluckier, a bullet would blow his head apart.

Trust the Martial Arts Algorithm...

Martial arts were the crystallization of human wisdom. They existed within metallic filaments and semiconductors. They transmitted information at the speed of light.

The limbs received information at the speed of light as well.

Compared to the speed of light, the speed of a bullet was not worth mentioning.

Humans could not hit flies because flies were small enough that neural signals could travel from sensory organs to neural processing structures and then to motor endpoints in an extremely short time. But in truth, arthropod neural signals traveled very slowly, at their fastest only one meter per second.

If a fly were scaled up proportionally to a meter in size, then if you touched one of its hind legs, it would only feel it more than a second later.

Because vertebrates possessed nerves wrapped in lipid myelin sheaths, electrical signals could travel through their nerves at a hundred meters per second, a hundred times faster than insects.

Even in the Carboniferous period, when Earth's oxygen content was at its highest, insects could only hover around one or two meters in size. The Cretaceous had ten percent less oxygen than the Carboniferous, yet dinosaurs easily surpassed that size and even charged toward the limit of thirty or forty meters. That was because arthropods' neural conduction speed was too low; once their bodies exceeded a meter, their reactions became sluggish.

Pterosaurs of the same era could rely on overwhelming physical ability and reaction speed to eat giant insects into extinction.

And now, a martial artist's reactions were controlled by electrical signals racing through metal-based artificial nerves. That speed was even faster than within the myelin-wrapped nerves of chordates.

If I can see it... I can do it...

If that gunner fires a bullet the moment I land, then that bullet will arrive here at a fixed time. Even if I can't determine which of the two sniper points it came from, the bullet will still arrive within a "window" lasting several milliseconds...

Within that several-millisecond window, there had to be a microsecond in which the bullet could fall between his two fingers.

Perhaps because he stood between life and death, Xiang Shan once again recalled the things he had learned in the past...

The lenses inside his artificial eyes expanded, switching to infrared and far-infrared vision.

Cast aside stray thoughts, cast aside desire, cast aside instinct...

A crimson "dot" suddenly appeared in his vision!

It was coming!

Xiang Shan kicked off the ground and leaped backward, reaching out with two fingers to pinch that "red, high-temperature object."

Scorching metal passed between his fingers. The bullet's speed was undoubtedly far greater than the rate at which its material was eroded. The heat produced by air friction could not be fully dispersed through contact with the air. Xiang Shan retreated at a speed slightly lower than the bullet's, using the high-frequency vibration emitter in his fingertips and the pressure-sensitive components in his wrists to sense the bullet's force.

Trajectory... precise trajectory... The position is C!

Rage flooded into the engine. Xiang Shan burst forward in a mad sprint!

Bullets landed one after another before Xiang Shan. He ran as though treading a great road forged from heavenly fire.

First came four hundred meters obscured by dust, with no sniping at all.

Then came three hundred meters before the opponent could adjust.

Next came four hundred meters of corrective fire.

He passed through a thousand meters unharmed.

Four kilometers away, Geliad gritted his teeth. He realized that something was wrong. That guy was an expert too. He had not merely just obtained the Martial Arts Algorithm; he was intimately familiar with it, and equally familiar with the Gunfire Way. He knew what strategy sets the Gunfire Way would use.

For the Gunfire Way, "distance" meant "advantage." Of course, distance and advantage were not always directly proportional.

Within the "extreme distance" of seven to five kilometers, the Gunfire Way's advantage was immeasurable. But after four kilometers, as the distance closed, Gunfire Way martial artists gradually lost that advantage, because at that range, high-precision artificial eyes could directly observe their muzzles.

An enemy did not need to be faster than a bullet, or even faster than the movement of the muzzle, because at this range, a bullet took at least several seconds to travel from the barrel to the target. Yet light needed less than one ten-thousandth of a second to project that information into artificial eyes. For cybernetic martial artists, the process was no more difficult than a rhythm game or parkour game.

As the distance closed, the opponent would only see more clearly.

Only within a hundred meters would a Gunfire Way martial artist regain the advantage. Although electrical signals alone could travel at light speed, the biological brain's neural signals, the process of calculation, and the response of prosthetic hardware all required time. At that point, there was almost no reaction time left for a close-combat martial artist.

Only within one meter could fighting techniques reclaim "absolute advantage."

The moment his gaze met the enemy's, Geliad understood that the opponent had entered a relatively safe zone. The ground no longer obstructed his line of sight, and even the refraction of light caused by uneven air had reached a level computers could correct.

Geliad continued firing bullet after bullet, creating an "obstruction" effect to limit the enemy's advance. At the same time, a two-meter-tall iron box standing behind him opened, releasing hundreds of drones less than ten centimeters thick, like a dense black swarm of bees.

The drones that had already gone far away could not be recalled in time. Drones of this design could not keep up with a martial artist's running speed at all. To a rapidly moving martial artist, they were practically motionless.

The next battlefield for the decisive fight would be at the Golden Hundred Meters.

So now, he would redeploy the drones...

Xiang Shan spotted his enemy. He saw countless drones scattering in the distance and watched a tank leap down from a metallic peak.

It truly was a tank, and the kind with an exceptionally tall turret. That Gunfire Way martial artist had replaced his lower body with two tracks, complete with seven pairs of road wheels. His upper body was like a turret, entirely covered in heavy armor plates. His shoulders stood far higher than his head, and the arms extending from them had been replaced by a multi-barrel rotary machine gun and a cannon... No, that was not right. Looking closely, there was still a pair of heavily modified "arms" outside the gun barrel and cannon barrel. They looked more like the working arms of construction machinery, with shielded forearms completely transformed into heavy armor for dealing with close attacks from martial arts experts.

Xiang Shan had read Leif's memories.

"Chain Missiles" Geliad, leader of the Green Forest Stronghold's "Z Organization," the ninety-eighth-ranked "Earth Fiend Star" on the Greenwood Tiger List...

This was a man who killed without blinking.

He's deliberately closing in... Right. For a cybernetic martial artist, climbing a wall perpendicular to the ground barehanded isn't difficult. But the structure of his prosthetic body means he can't effectively shoot an enemy on the wall below him. And judging by that heavy armor, there's a high chance he also practices military martial arts such as Tank Way and War Chariot Fist. On elevated ground, techniques like those have no room to be used...

Xiang Shan dodged the incoming bullets like a dancer as he thought.

Geliad's goal was to seize the "final hundred meters"... the hundred meters where the Gunfire Way held the greatest advantage over close-combat techniques!

He wanted that "hundred meters" to occur on terrain most suited to him.

The current distance is... two kilometers...

No matter. Accelerate.

Even though every ten meters Xiang Shan advanced cost him several microseconds of reaction time—the light from the event of a bullet leaving the barrel entered Xiang Shan's artificial eyes first, and the bullet itself only appeared before him less than a second later.

The closer he got, the shorter the gap between light and bullet became, and the greater the danger.

It was like a rhythm game, where the markers fell faster and faster.

And in this "game," the price of a miss was death.

But there was no choice. Xiang Shan had no long-range weaponry. If he wanted to defeat this enemy, he had to enter the range where close-combat techniques could take effect.

When enemies met on a narrow road, the brave prevailed!

Facing this accelerating enemy, Geliad forced a vicious grin onto his face behind his mask and raised the cannon barrel he had not yet used. Like raising a flag, he lifted the barrel diagonally upward.

Geliad felt the few remaining blood vessels in his body expanding. He had not felt this sensation in some time.

Because he could not obtain the energy core of a fission reactor, he could not compress air, ionize it, and fire it out, nor could he use laser weapons. He could only use physical shells. And such shells were inevitably limited by ammunition capacity. Geliad could carry only ten shells.

But martial artists did not face "war." In a one-on-one fight, ten shells were more than enough.

With prosthetic bodies of the same specifications, no one could withstand a single shell.

A gleaming yellow metal shell screamed out. The instant it left the barrel, Xiang Shan abruptly veered left, carving a circular arc of one hundred and twenty degrees across the ground and moving as far from the shell as possible. But in that instant, Geliad fired the second shell he had just loaded as well.

The two shells crashed into the garbage mountain. Then came a violent explosion. Firelight carried vast quantities of nonflammable wreckage into the sky. Two shockwaves erupted simultaneously from the left and right.