Chapter 142: Boarded The Wrong Train
The off-road vehicle came to a sudden stop in front of the goat soup shop’s doorway.
The driver opened the car door, using it as cover for rapid shooting.
Berserk electric current spread from the feet of that black-shirted long-haired man like a spider web, and amid Lin Jin’s dazzled vision, the man threw out more than a dozen grenades, forcefully halting the madly surging zombie tide.
Just as he was about to speak, the man turned the astonishingly long sniper rifle’s muzzle toward him.
The sniper rifle was fully 1.8 meters long, its muzzle still flickering with eerie electric arcs.
The moment he looked at the muzzle, Lin Jin felt all the blood in his body freeze, his mind repeatedly replaying the blood hound that had just been torn apart by the sniper rifle.
His whole body completely froze in place.
Seeing the corners of the mouth slowly lowering behind the scope, his heart felt like it had missed a step, his whole body plummeting with a whistling sound, enveloped in endless chill.
The atmosphere instantly fell into stagnation.
Su Huan couldn’t smile now, really, not even a little.
He even suspected that General Energy Perception had sent him false battle reports.
Because the young man before him, clean and neat with clear and cautious eyes, who even looked identical to the Lin Jin in his memory through high-magnification scope, was a Tier 1 Evolver.
Newly evolved, with unstable aura, but a Tier 1 Flame Wielder with infinite potential, the future Tier 5 Flame Lord!
It was well known that, except for Defenders, Evolvers in the other four domains required massive amounts of general energy to evolve.
That is, they needed to devour large quantities of General Energy Crystals.
But at this time, Lin Jin was just an ordinary Steel Council peripheral servant soldier—where did he get General Energy Crystals to use?
And he wasn’t a Collector—did he rely entirely on raw-eating hearts?
This was also why Su Huan fell silent the instant he saw him.
The pretentious lines he had prepared were no longer in the mood to say, and those annoying zombies were surrounding them again.
Su Huan aimed at that bulky Butcher and fired a shot; blue light flashed, and the Butcher fell with a thud. With the corner of his eye, he glanced at Lin Jin frozen in place, “Do I need to invite you onto the car?”
Seeing that he didn’t seem intent on killing him, Lin Jin weighed his options and quickly climbed onto the vehicle.
Unexpectedly, the back seat held a girl who nodded in greeting.
“Bang—”
Before he could sit steady, the sound of closing doors came from the front.
The driver sharply turned the wheel and floored the accelerator; the powerful pushback pinned both of them dead in the vehicle.
The off-road vehicle shot out like an untethered wild horse.
Electric light flickered on the vehicle body; the lunging blood hounds and zombies were all zapped rigid by the electric light, then flung behind the car.
After dozens of seconds, Su Huan flipped over and climbed into the passenger seat.
Inside the car, aside from the engine’s roar, there was only silence; the driving Goat kept observing Lin Jin through the rearview mirror, an absurd thought rising and falling in his mind.
Could this war be entirely to find this fire-using young man behind him?
“How many General Energy Crystals did you use?”
Su Huan sat backward in the passenger seat, resting the sniper rifle on the car window, squinting his eyes to size up Lin Jin.
A set of camouflage clothes, jacketed with a raincoat, just like what he wore in his previous life when he rescued him.
Just the injuries on his body were different.
The Lin Jin from his previous life was far more miserable than now, with large-area burns all over, one eye blinded; now he only had burns on his right hand and arm, with redness on his neck.
He had previously thought it was some high-power skill used for mutual destruction.
Now it seemed more like how he compressed high energy on the Mo Jiang Bridge, using some dangerous method to promote his tier.
Lin Jin hesitated for a moment, “Do you mean those crystals the size of a pinky fingernail?”
“Yes.”
“One.”
Su Huan was silent for a moment, then asked again, “When did you use it?”
“Two days ago, I think, the evening of January 5th.”
Lin Jin answered cautiously, seeing Su Huan’s strange expression, his heart immediately grew uneasy.
From the look of those four Evolver comrades earlier, they didn’t seem as strong as him—could it be that he had overdrawn his vitality using an incorrect method?
But he didn’t know he had actually overdrawn the Train Conductor’s imagination of geniuses.
Lin Jin carefully asked, “Is there a problem?”
“Heh, no problem.”
Su Huan tugged the corner of his mouth into a fake smile—three parts mockery, five parts cold indifference, two parts self-deprecation.
He was numb.
Two days.
From absorbing an ordinary General Energy Crystal to awaken, then purely through battle stimulation, he had evolved all the way to Tier 1.
And Lin Jin from Tier 1 to Tier 5 took less than four years in total.
The Eighth Master of the same era had only just reached Tier 3!
He finally understood how Lin Jin became the Steel Council’s only S-rank squad Captain in his previous life.
It was all damn talent!
If there was even half a drop of sweat in this, the Train Conductor would kneel and lick it on the spot!
The entire Steel Council, aside from him, had only Tier 3 as the strongest—a blatant gap in strength.
One person propping up a top-tier major force!
After witnessing this talent with his own eyes, Su Huan even felt the Steel Council wasn’t worthy of Lin Jin; even if he were relegated to logistics later, they wouldn’t deserve him!
But greater doubts followed.
In his previous life, Lin Jin was clearly already Tier 5—why did he ignite that Great Fire in the Steel Council?
With his status and strength in the Steel Council at the time, couldn’t he protect a mere Tier 1 Evolver?
Looking at the face before him, slowly overlapping with the man in Su Huan’s memory, eyes blazing with madly burning flames.
“Su Huan, next reunion, I will clear the path for you at the end of Hell.”
What did this sentence… really mean?
Various doubts filled Su Huan’s mind; he felt the truth was just a thin sheet of paper away, but lacking key information, he couldn’t pierce it.
And all events were yet to happen; the one who knew the truth sat before him, eyes clear and cautious like a university student.
Asking wouldn’t yield anything.
This feeling frustrated Su Huan to the point of madness; his left hand pulled the trigger, a cold blue light beam flashed, taking down a lunging Night Demon; his right hand’s five fingers deeply plunged into his hair, combing back, suppressing all emotions.
He bared his teeth, flashed a standard full-toothed smile, “Right, do you know who I am?”
Lin Jin glanced at the driver, then cautiously sized up Su Huan, “Company’s elite soldier?”
“Oh? That’s how you see it?” Amusement appeared in Su Huan’s eyes; he reached out and patted the driving Goat’s shoulder, “Actually, you’re not wrong—we are indeed fighting alongside the company’s elite soldiers.”
Lin Jin breathed a sigh of relief; as long as they were on the same side, it was good.
If he boarded the wrong vehicle, that would be a real mess.
But he didn’t notice the girl’s weird expression beside him, wanting to laugh but not quite daring.
The off-road vehicle sped extremely fast, relying on Su Huan’s wide-range control to charge straight through; in three to five minutes, they broke out of the encirclement they were in.
They met head-on a squad of Steel Council soldiers on the outer blockade; Lin Jin was just about to get out.
Then he saw Su Huan’s chair suddenly recline backward, his whole body nearly flat in the vehicle, the exaggeratedly large sniper rifle’s gun stock almost poking his face, muzzle aimed at the vehicles outside the front windshield; in Lin Jin’s horrified gaze, he pulled the trigger.
The straight light beam brutally pierced the forward vehicle and driver, sending the whole car crashing into the adjacent storefront.
Su Huan tilted his head, glancing sideways at Lin Jin’s hand resting on his gun stock.
“What, you want to fire a shot too?”
