Apocalypse: I Raised the Ultimate Antagonist from Scratch
Chapter 83: The Trigger
Inside the cabin of the lead transport, the brilliant glare of the high-intensity LED headlights cast sharp, stark shadows across Han Zheng’s face.
He was not a coward, nor was he a man prone to panic; he was a battle-hardened veteran who had stared down mutated monstrosities and ruthless post-apocalyptic warlords alike since the world fell apart.
But the sight of the scarred man walking through the snow sent a freezing jolt of pure animosity and disbelief through his veins. This wasn’t just a threat; it was a ghost pulling at the loose threads of a life he thought he had left behind long before the world ended.
"You know him?" Lin Qing asked, her fingers flexing against the textured steering wheel as she picked up on the sudden, rigid shift in Han Zheng’s posture. The atmosphere inside the vehicle had instantly turned toxic, thick with a historical malice that she couldn’t quite identify.
"Gao Feng," Han Zheng spat, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low register as his eyes locked onto the man with the scarred eyebrow through the reinforced glass. "He was my squad leader in the special forces, long before the apocalypse. We were deployed on a classified black-ops mission near the northern border. He was greedy, compromised, and sold out our positioning to a rival syndicate for a massive payout. I personally pinned him down when the ambush hit us, and during the ensuing firefight, I watched him take a high-caliber round directly to the chest before he tumbled over a cliff into a raging river. The military officially declared him dead years ago."
Han Zheng’s jaw clenched, his knuckles turning white as he stared through the windshield. "He survived. And it looks like he’s still doing the exact same thing—leading wolves to the slaughter."
Outside, Gao Feng’s patience completely evaporated. He walked forward, his heavy boots crunching in the thick powder, and violently snatched the megaphone out of Lin Tao’s hands.
Lin Tao stumbled back against the hood of an ATV, his mouth opening in a brief flash of protest, but one freezing, murderous glare from Gao Feng silenced him instantly. Lin Tao scrambled backward into the ranks of the camouflaged mercenaries, suddenly realizing he was entirely out of his depth among true professionals.
Gao Feng raised the megaphone to his lips. His voice burst through the plastic horn, amplified into a harsh, metallic rattle that cut effortlessly through the howling mountain gale.
"Han Zheng! I know you can hear me inside that premium rig!" Gao Feng barked, his tone dripping with a cold, familiar arrogance that sent a wave of disgust through the commander. He stepped closer, completely unafraid of the idling transport. "The world has changed since we last met on that border ridge, old friend. I know all about the awakenings. I know about the freaks out there who can manipulate fire, ice, and metal. That’s why my men are equipped with specialized, high-frequency dampening gear and armor-piercing ordnance specifically designed to put down powered users."
Gao Feng let out a cold, mocking laugh that echoed off the granite face of the mountain fortress towering above them. He was a formidable strategist, but he was operating completely in the dark.
He knew superpowers existed in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but he had absolutely no idea that Han Zheng or anyone else in the extraction team had actually awakened.
Because they had kept their abilities strictly confidential within the sanctuary of the research center, he assumed Han Zheng was still just the same highly skilled, completely mundane human soldier he had betrayed years ago.
"I don’t care if you’ve hired some powered mercenaries to guard this cargo," Gao Feng shouted, leveling a high-caliber sidearm directly at the lead truck’s windshield. "You’re completely boxed in. Your diesel engines are idling, and my men have thermite charges trained directly on your fuel tanks. I’ll give you exactly ten seconds to cut the power, step down from that cabin, and drop to your knees. If you don’t, I will personally melt these trucks into scrap metal and execute every single person inside. Ten!"
"Nine! Eight!" Lin Tao’s voice echoed eagerly from the back of the blockade, trying to regain his status.
Inside the cabin, the tension reached a suffocating peak. Han Zheng silently tried to force his internal core to spark, but his vision swam for a brief second.
The absolute exhaustion from holding Old Wang’s multi-ton truck over the ravine earlier had left his pathways completely fried, his energy reserves hollowed out to a dangerous degree. He could barely muster enough energy to project a localized force barrier to protect the windshield, let alone take down a dozen heavily armed mercenaries. They were out of energy, out of position, and completely surrounded by an elite force.
Lin Qing’s heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. Her hands were shaking with pure adrenaline, her eyes darting across the complex dashboard matrix as the countdown continued.
She refused to lose. They had fought through a ruined city, survived a collapsing warehouse, and defied a treacherous mountain pass to bring this solar cargo back to their sanctuary. She wasn’t going to let a resurrected ghost and her pathetic loser of a cousin take it all away at the final threshold.
In her intense, mounting panic, Lin Qing’s movements became frantic. As she shifted her posture to brace for an inevitable impact, her right elbow accidentally slammed hard against the auxiliary climate control toggle and the high-vibration engine purge switch on the central console. Simultaneously, her heavy winter boot slipped slightly off the stiff, ice-chilled brake pedal, catching the lower edge of the air-brake release valve.
It was a complete, chaotic fluke—a string of accidental, clumsy mechanical inputs born from pure, panicked tension.
The massive, high-tech military transport reacted instantly to the conflicting commands. The sudden internal air-purge caused the heavy diesel engine to choke for a microsecond before letting out a catastrophic, deafening ’backfire’. A massive, low-frequency acoustic shockwave boomed from the dual exhaust stacks, vibrating through the metallic chassis of the truck with a violent, chest-rattling rumble that shook the snow off the front hood.
Normally, a backfire would do nothing but startle the enemy and draw a round of gunfire. But Lin Qing’s incredible, unexplainable luck was already deeply woven into the fabric of the universe, turning a simple mistake into a miracle.
The deep, booming acoustic frequency of the engine’s backfire rippled through the freezing air, traveling straight up the vertical granite cliffside. At that exact microsecond, the vibration hit a critical resonance point with a massive, highly unstable shelf of overhanging snow and compressed ice that had been teetering precariously over the lip of the mountain ledge directly above the enemy blockade.
A sharp, crystalline crack echoed through the pass, instantly drowning out Lin Tao’s countdown.
"What the—" Gao Feng lowered the megaphone, his eyes snapping upward just as the entire mountain overhang sheared apart under the sudden acoustic shock.
Without warning, a localized, roaring avalanche of hundreds of tons of white powder and jagged ice sheets thundered down the cliffside. The sheer velocity and weight of the collapse were terrifying, transforming the quiet mountain pass into a roaring vortex of white fury.
Miraculously—due to the exact, precise position where Lin Qing had stopped the truck moments before—the primary path of the roaring snowslide missed the transport’s reinforced cab by mere inches, cascading harmlessly off the side of the front bumper and filling the ravine next to them.
But Gao Feng and his mercenaries weren’t so lucky.
The wall of white snow slammed directly onto the center of the enemy blockade. The heavy ATVs and armored vehicles were instantly pushed sideways, trapped and half-buried under the sudden, crushing weight of the slide.
Gao Feng was forced to dive out of the way, his arrogant composure shattering as he scrambled through the drifts to avoid being crushed alive by his own vehicles.
Lin Tao let out a high-pitched, undignified shriek as a wave of compressed snow completely knocked him off his feet, burying him up to his chest in freezing powder and leaving him gasping for air. The entire tightly coordinated defensive line was thrown into total, screaming chaos, their laser-sights blinded by the cloud of ice and their weapons jammed with frozen slush.
"Hold on!" Lin Qing screamed, her survival instincts taking complete control of her body as the world turned white around them.
Seeing the massive cloud of whiteout smoke erupting before them and realizing the blockade was severely compromised, she didn’t waste a single millisecond. She slammed the heavy transport into low-range first gear, stomped her boot straight down on the accelerator, and let the massive engine roar to life.
The multi-ton truck surged forward like a metal beast breaking its chains, its heavy tires catching purchase on the ice as it rammed straight through the half-buried, shattered remnants of the razor-wire barricade and the displaced ATVs. Sparks flew into the freezing air as the reinforced steel bumper cleared the path, breaking the enemy line in a matter of seconds. Behind them, Old Wang followed perfectly in their tracks, his heavy vehicle barreling through the breach before the shifting snow could settle and block the road again.
Through the rear-view monitor, Han Zheng watched a cursing, snow-covered Gao Feng drag himself out of a drift, his face twisted in absolute, murderous rage as he realized his perfect trap had been destroyed by a freak act of nature.
But the convoy was already gone, racing up the remaining stretch of the asphalt road toward the pristine, mountain gates of the research center, leaving the ruined ambush far behind in the freezing dark. They had survived by the absolute skin of their teeth, carried forward by a wave of impossible fortune.