"Maybe they were afraid the water would flood in," Su Lanzhi guessed, looking at the sealed garage entrance.
Jing Shu frowned, a knot of unease tightening in her stomach. "When I came back yesterday, it wasn't closed. No one else in the community would have the code or bother to shut the main garage gate. It doesn't make sense."
The entrance to Banana Community's underground garage sat right by the main community gate, a heavy rolling steel door. The iron door was usually left open during daylight for access. When Jing Shu had returned yesterday to deal with the intruders, it was still open. Why was it suddenly locked now, from the inside?
Jing An turned the wheel and drove around, easing the vehicle forward along the surface road that led into the community. Jing Shu felt something was deeply off, but a quick check of her phone's remote security feed showed nothing unusual. No human thermal signatures had approached the villa in the last hour. Not even a shadow. The system showed all doors and windows secure.
It was the same old community, dark and quiet except for the hammering rain. In the near-total darkness, broken only by their headlights and the occasional distant glow from a candle in a high window, Jing Shu looked like she was thinking hard, her senses stretched taut.
…
"I didn't expect to lose in the end, after all that," Shangguan Jun muttered to himself, a bitter soliloquy in the empty, waterlogged first-floor unit he had broken into. "I dragged this ruined, dying body all the way back to Wu City. People say fallen leaves return to their roots. I guess some part of me wanted to die here, on home ground.
But I'm not satisfied. I never got to taste that specific thrill of despair from that woman. I refuse to accept it. She was the only one among all the prisoners I… processed… who would actually discuss the methods, the theory, the artistry of punishment with me. I felt like I had found a twisted soulmate.
Such a pity I'm dying. Naturally, I will take her with me. I'm afraid she will be lonely down there, so I will send her whole family to keep her company. See how considerate I am? I already investigated her household and habits thoroughly.
I have one trigger grenade left. It is military-grade, moisture-proof and waterproof, but it is still a one-shot chance. Luckily I have also got some homemade black powder from a cache. Not much killing power by itself, but it can create a loud diversion, a flash. To make sure it ignites reliably on a rainy day, I put in a lot of work, sealing it in wax…
To get a one hundred percent hit rate on a moving vehicle, I built a simple, sturdy launcher and a propellant charge. As long as the grenade hits their car directly, it's over. The shaped charge will punch through the roof.
That car. They're here. Much earlier than I expected." A cruel smile stretched his bloodless lips.
A heavily loaded BYD Song, its suspension low, crawled forward with headlights blazing, cutting twin cones through the sheeting rain, a beacon in the night he had been waiting for.
In the pitch-black community, Shangguan Jun crouched at a shattered first-floor window, the glass long gone. Bloodlust brightened his feverish face. His knuckles whitened from his grip on the crude, pipe-like launcher resting on the sill. "Here they come. Here they come."
When the BYD Song turned the corner onto the straight road leading to the villa section, Shangguan Jun triggered the remote igniter for the black powder charge he had buried in a drain grate twenty meters ahead of the car's path.
The black powder ignited with a sharp bang and a bright flash, not powerful but startling. The driver, Jing An, instinctively swerved, the momentum sending the whole vehicle skidding on the wet asphalt and tilting dangerously. Tires screeched. Screams of surprise and fear came from inside the car, exactly as Shangguan Jun had predicted and hoped for.
"Now." This was the moment of distraction.
Shangguan Jun trembled with savage excitement. There were only two ways to reach the villas: the flooded underground garage passage or this surface road. He had gambled they would take the road. He took careful aim, leading the now-slowed car slightly. The heavy launcher kicked against his shoulder as he fired the grenade. After hundreds of mental simulations, adjusting for the rain and wind resistance, he had honed this one shot to what he believed was perfection.
It flew true, a dark blur against the grey rain.
Shangguan Jun could already visualize the car blooming into a fireball in the rain, the beautiful destruction.
Biu the sound of the launch was swallowed by the storm.
Boom
Ah, that beautiful sound of impact and the sparks he anticipated, and those lives about to be snuffed out.
But a louder, fiercer blast erupted not at the car, but right beside him, at the window ledge. Shangguan Jun's head rang with a deafening concussion. A dull, all-consuming hum swallowed the world. "Is a grenade really this powerful? I should have stood farther back," was his dazed, errant thought.
Warm liquid seemed to leak from his ears. Sharp, burning pain tugged at several places on his body, his chest, his arms. After squatting there in the cold damp all night, his limbs had gone numb and now refused to obey him.
The smoke and dust from the explosion thinned quickly in the rain. The car's headlights still flashed stubbornly, illuminating the scene.
He blinked hard, vision swimming. The car lay there, intact, its body unbreached. How? Impossible. He had simulated that throw a hundred times in his mind. How could he have missed? It was only a dozen meters away. How could he miss at that distance?
"What is that?" His blurring eyes focused with difficulty. "A pile of boulders?" By the car's harsh light, he saw more than twenty stones of different sizes layered across the road between him and the vehicle, stacked like a sudden, solid wall.
The front stones in the pile were shattered into gravel from the blast. The larger rocks behind remained unbroken, having absorbed the force.
"How can there be rocks here? There weren't any a moment ago. It's like they appeared out of thin air just to shield her family and block the grenade. How is that possible?" The paradox pierced his fading logic.
Still reeling, he suddenly remembered the intelligence report from the failed "Zhetian" raid months ago, when over a hundred hired thugs tried to blow up this very villa and got mysteriously stopped. The message that had eventually reached the armed police back then said the road had been inexplicably filled with rubble and boulders, blocking the attackers.
Now the same impossible scene played out again. Shangguan Jun stared at the car, then at the jagged rock wall, stunned. Was there really something supernatural, something beyond his understanding, in this world? The thought was a final, chilling epiphany.
His consciousness wavered, darkness creeping in from the edges. He touched his ear, his fingers coming away wet and dark. He lowered his head and smelled the coppery blood now soaking through his clothes. "Oh. So it wasn't that the grenade was too powerful. The grenade I fired… it hit something and bounced back. The rocks. I was too close to my own blast." The realization was absurdly simple, and fatal.
A figure, a woman, stepped out of the passenger side of the BYD Song. She didn't run or scream. She simply turned and met his gaze across the short, rubble-strewn distance, her eyes cold and frighteningly bright in the ambient light.
Step by deliberate step, she came toward him, walking through the rain and the scattered stone debris. Shangguan Jun thought, his mind slowing, "So this is the mysterious homeowner from the file, Jing Shu, right? The one Wu You'ai was willing to die to protect? This is her."
So Jing Shu really did have some hidden secret, some power. Too bad it did him no good to know now. The knowledge was pointless.
"She is speaking," Shangguan Jun noticed, seeing her lips move. "But I can't hear her anymore." The world was silent except for the ringing. He strained to look past her, into the car's windows, hoping to catch a last glimpse of Wu You'ai, the object of his obsession, but there was no sign of her. Disappointment was his final emotion.
"What a pity. But I can't wait any longer. For me, this way of dying is not so bad. Quick. If there's another life, I hope I will be born into a normal family, with parents who love me.
If there really is another life.
Goodbye, Wu You'ai." The thought was his last.
…
By the time Jing Shu sprinted the short distance through the darkness and rain, leaping over the smaller rocks, Shangguan Jun was already dead, utterly dead, slumped against the wall below the window, his eyes open and vacant. Even so, gripped by a cold, furious rage at the attack on her family, she stabbed his corpse dozens of times with her knife, venting her fury, making absolutely sure.
If she hadn't had her night vision, if she hadn't spent countless hours training with the shifting Rubik's Cube and grown hypersensitive to sudden color and movement changes in her peripheral vision, she wouldn't have noticed the dark projectile incoming against the grey rain in that split second. She wouldn't have reacted fast enough to mentally expose a section of her Rubik's Cube Space directly in its path, dumping a pile of heavy stones and rubble stored inside as an instantaneous shield.
Fortunately, the family inside the car, shaken and terrified by the initial flash-bang and the skid, had been facing forward, their view blocked by the sudden wall of rock. They had no clear idea what had just happened beyond a loud explosion and the car jolting. They didn't see the grenade or the precise moment the rocks appeared. Their minds filled in the gaps with the assumption of a nearby lightning strike or a freak explosion from a flooded transformer. The reality was too bizarre to comprehend.