Chapter 251: Chapter 251: Xiaoyun in the battlefield
After the switch, the new wave of zombies could be seen in the distance with binoculars.
"What the hell... Is that twenty tank mutants at once?"
Xiaoyun rubbed his eyes and checked again on his binoculars, only to see twenty-five this time.
More importantly, he could only see the one in the front, with no info to be seen inside the zombie horde.
"Fuck... Yezi, is the artillery ready?" Xiaoyun urgently asked on the walkies-talkie.
"In a minute, they are ready to fire... But are you sure we are doing this? It's going to damage the road outside." Yezi warned.
"Yes. Roads can always just be repaired... Just fire as soon as you can."
As Xiaoyun ended the transmission and checked outside again, the number of tank mutants thankfully didn't change.
"Where do mutants even come from? It can't just be a bite from a normal zombie, right?" Xiaoyun murmured to himself.
"Maybe it's just random mutation." Kate pointed out.
"Random mutation? Then how come it's always so consistent? All those tank mutants almost look the same as if they are out of a lab."
"You think they are man-made?" Kate asked curiously.
"Maybe. I have a feeling it has to do with the secret society in the city."
"Perhaps... by the way, didn't you send out more spies toward the city?"
"Not anymore. I stopped Renqin from sending people inside since it's just a death trap." Xiaoyun replied.
As the zombies moved closer and closer, a loud explosion sound could be heard from inside the town.
But everyone knew what it was as they didn't react much to it.
"The artillery finally started firing... Took them long enough." Kate commented as she could feel the ground shaking a little.
The zombie horde began rapidly thinning down as the constant explosion from the artillery shell made quick work of them.
However, the tank mutant was barely affected by it as all the shells missed them.
"Everyone get ready," Xiaoyun warned in the walkies-talkie.
With several blinks of the eyes, the first wave of the new zombie horde had finally arrived at the wall.
The soldiers began firing in their assigned sections as logistics personnel ran busily behind them, carrying ammo to them.
Meanwhile, Xiaoyun was standing alongside the soldiers, with an MG-42 right in front of him.
"Holy shit! This thing uses so much bullet!" Xiaoyun yelled in excitement as he held down the trigger nonstop.
With every single bullet that was fired, he could feel the recoil in his hand as it pushed itself upward.
But being mounted on the wall meant it wasn't hard to control the recoil back down.
Within a minute, Xiaoyun had already fired over one thousand rounds at the zombies.
After shooting it nonstop for just two minutes, the barrel was glowing red, with a small little flame at the tip.
So Xiaoyun switched back to his rifles as the machine gunner took back his post and began performing emergency maintenance.
Meanwhile, Kate had been watching from the side as she looked through the surrounding walls with her thermal camera.
"Any invisible mutants?" Xiaoyun asked curiously as he walked toward the ammo stash.
"None so far..." Kate replied as she went back to her camera again.
"Okay. Keep doing it."
Xiaoyun began firing his K98K at the massive horde of zombies below the wall.
With every pull on the trigger, a zombie drops dead, as there are so many of them that he doesn't even need to aim.
"Some of those tank mutants died so fast, even without explosives," Kate commented.
"Yeah, I mean, what zombies can survive over ten thousand soldiers firing at them at once?"
---
As Xiaoyun continued to fight alongside the soldiers, all of them were extra motivated to prove themselves to be better than the first group regiments.
On top of the fact that they were defending their home behind them, nobody dared to take a step back.
As an entire hour passed, the zombie finally started thinning again.
"Finally, it's about to be over." Xiaoyun sighed as his hand was growing tired from holding down the recoil.
"Yeah... Thank god it's not the whole city that was attacked."
As Kate replied, she suddenly noticed a bunch of red marks being picked up by the thermal camera despite nothing being there.
"Everyone! One o'clock direction, there are invisible mutants!" Kate yelled as loud as she could.
A few of the soldiers switched to their thermal cameras, with some immediately firing their guns in that direction.
Within seconds, blood began flowing out of thin air, and after a while, their invisibility faded away as their body fell down the wall.
"The wall needs to be built taller... The zombies keep building human ladders to get up." Xiaoyun murmured to himself.
"To be honest, I don't think building it taller is going to prevent that. There are just too many zombies to prevent them from stacking up all the way." Kate argued.
"But we have to do something... Do you have any better suggestion?"
"Nope. I got no clue either."
As the gunshots started fading away throughout the wall, everyone knew the zombie attack was finally had been subdued.
"Geez, how many zombies are killed today?" Kate asked curiously as she could see mountains of zombie bodies lying outside.
"Probably over a million..." Xiaoyun replied as he gave an estimation from looking at the outside bodies.
"Doesn't Guangzhou only have fifteen million?"
"Yeah... I think, at this point, the city most likely has less than ten million left."
"Why ten million?" Kate curiously asked again.
"We already cleaned out all the stranglers in the city and the city outskirts in the past, which was already a million out.
Then, if we add today, that's another million gone... Then, we have to add all the people who exited the city before and after the outbreak. That's probably a million on its own."
"Where did the two million go?" Kate asked as she calculated it in her head.
"Just an estimate that the military and other factions had killed two million at this point, which leaves us exactly less than ten million zombies inside the city."
"Ten million is still a lot."
"I know. But we are making big progress... We'll regain control of the city at some point."
As the two traveled down the stairs to the floor, Xiaoyun noticed Wuli was standing in a corner and throwing up.
"You okay?" Xiaoyun worryingly asked as he gently patted Wuli's back.
"Yeah, I'm fine... It's just the smell from the rotten bodies is too strong."
"We probably need to clean all those... That's going to be such a pain,"
Xiaoyun commented as he began thinking of a cleanup plan for the outside.
After a while, he came up with the conclusion to burn all the zombie bodies outside.
But that was after checking to make sure the air wasn't being blown toward the town.
---
When the mess was finally mostly cleaned up, it was already five in the afternoon.
"How does everyone feel about that experience?" Xiaoyun asked to initiate the conversation.
None of the majors in the command center responded, except Han Bang and Yezi, who raised their hands.
"I think it went pretty well. If we continue at this rate, we will be done with the city within a month." Han Bang replied first.
All of the majors nodded in agreement as they were tired of needing to find alone or a small pack of zombies in the city.
"This is not happening. I want to show everyone something first."
Yezi stood up and pulled out a stack of paper from his backpack.
"Everyone, please take a read of all the ammo that were used."
As Yezi began passing the papers out one by one, Xiaoyun read the copy in his hand.
The ammo shortage situation was in full swing as the entire warehouse of ammo was completely emptied.
On top of that, almost several thousand of the K98K and AKM were forced to decommission due to permanent damage from firing so much.
What's more alarming for Xiaoyun was that almost thirty MG-42s needed to be taken off the wall for repair as the gun was so heavily used that the inside was deformed from the heat.
"Our stockpile is going to take at least a month to recover, if not longer, if we have the raw material. And here's the other sheet for you, Xiaoyun."
Yezi handed a piece of paper only to him.
"Wait, why do we have to pay so much?" Xiaoyun asked as he couldn't believe the number of food stamps being written on the paper.
"Fifty soldiers died, so we need to pay for their designated person to get their death gratuity. Then, we needed to pay the soldiers for being active rather than in training since we had made it into two pay categories.
Lastly, we need to pay off the contract to make more ammo and weapons to fill in the gaps that had been just created."
After hearing Yezi's explanation, Xiaoyun couldn't help but get a headache.
"Yuqi is going to be so mad after seeing this bill..." Xiaoyun murmured as he put the paper inside his jacket.