Nancy's cooking talent seemed to be maxed out. In under half an hour, Nancy had effortlessly put together breakfast for more than a dozen people, and managed to nail the look, the smell, and the taste all at once.

Lin Feng slurped down his pasta and gave a thumbs-up.

The young girl smiled and accepted the praise without any false modesty, clearly proud of it.

Over the meal, Rick and Lin Feng took turns giving a quick account of what each group had been through over the past few days. Both paused when Jacqui came up. Regret moved through the table.

If Jacqui had just held on a little longer, or if they had pushed a little harder, maybe everyone would have been sitting here sharing this hard-earned meal together.

When Lin Feng finished his side of the story, the table erupted in a string of disbelieving gasps.

"Man, you sure you're not pulling our leg? That sounds like something out of a legend. Like a prince leading his knights, hacking through every obstacle in his path, and finally slaying the dragon."

Before Lin Feng could respond, Merle cut in with a derisive snort. "What else did you expect? Tour the world in police uniforms like you lot? Give me a break. We're not some family vacation package."

The room went quiet. The words landed exactly where they were aimed.

Shane set down the fork, looked up, and fixed a hard stare on Merle. "You'd better watch your mouth, or I won't mind teaching you some manners."

"Tsk—" Merle was gearing up to fire back when Lin Feng gave the smallest shake of his head. Merle swallowed whatever was coming and let it go.

Rick caught that. Caught the whole thing. Something shifted in his expression, somewhere between disbelief and quiet calculation.

The group's loose cannon was actually taking cues from Lin Feng?

Lin Feng kept his eyes on his bowl, slurping pasta like nothing had happened. "Andrew, do me a favor later and look over Dale's RV. Write up a list of whatever parts and materials it needs. I'll see if I can bring everything back in one run."

Andrew nodded. "No problem, Lin. I've got it."

Lin Feng nodded. "Glenn, T-Dog, and Shane — you free in a bit? I need you to come with me. We're cleaning out a supermarket warehouse."

Glenn and T-Dog glanced over at Rick. A beat of hesitation, then both nodded. "Sure."

Shane's expression flickered. The roll call had rubbed something the wrong way, but with everyone watching, Shane nodded in silence.

Maybe it was time to have a proper conversation with this Asian kid. Shane wasn't anyone's underling. Lin Feng needed to drop the whole boss act.

Lin Feng clocked the reaction and let it go. Shane wasn't all that different from Merle, really, just a little better at looking respectable on the surface.

As for why a certain someone hadn't been called up, well, no comment on that one.

"Why aren't you taking me along? Lin, more hands makes lighter work, doesn't it?"

Lin Feng glanced up and gestured loosely. "Someone needs to hold down the camp while you all get set up. And don't you want to go smooth things over with Hershel?"

Rick nodded slowly. "Fair enough. Stay safe out there. Radio us if anything comes up."

Breakfast wrapped up. Lin Feng took the notepad from Andrew and led the group out to the vehicles, heading for the supermarket warehouse.

Shane paused getting in, shooting Lin Feng a curious look. "I figured you'd ride with your own people."

Lin Feng read it immediately. Shane was staking out ground, making it clear they were on the same level, that neither one got to call the shots for the other.

He smiled, started the car with easy confidence, and said, "Shane, what makes you think I'm your enemy?"

The directness caught Shane off guard. Before Shane could work out a response, Lin Feng kept going:

"Honestly, we're the same kind of person, you and me. Both just trying to figure out how to keep breathing in this godforsaken world."

"Back at breakfast — I actually got one thing wrong. The truth is, even if Andrew's family had never been taken, I still would've killed every last one of those bastards."

Lin Feng said it the same way he'd say anything, unhurried and unbothered, as if Shane's stunned expression simply wasn't registering. "My thinking has always been simple. Keep my people alive. Together. In this godforsaken world. Even if that means walking out of it with blood on my hands every single time."

"Maybe on some quiet afternoon I'll feel something like guilt. But I won't regret it. Not once."

The car rounded a bend and settled in smoothly behind the lead vehicle. Sunlight pushed through the window and fell across Lin Feng's shoulders, then slowly climbed to his cheek.

Shane didn't say anything. Stayed quiet for a long stretch, unable to name what was happening inside, just a tangle of things pulling in different directions.

The jolt of hearing the truth out loud. The low thrum of finding someone who thought the same way. The resonance of beliefs lining up perfectly. The stubborn, unkillable refusal to be the one who bends first. And underneath all of it, something quieter, something Shane hadn't even noticed until it was already there.

Reassurance.

Yeah. Reassurance.

No idea where it came from or how it got there. But there it was.

"So... what are you planning later?"

Lin Feng caught the shift. The corner of his mouth moved, just barely.

The old wisdom held: sincerity played alone is a dead hand, but pair it with the right card and it's an instant win.

Hey, it wasn't like he'd been running some elaborate play. He'd just said a couple of things off the cuff, and Shane had gone quiet and started drifting closer. Hardly his fault. ╭(╯ε╰)╮

"Daryl and I are going to clear walkers first. I left an axe in the back, want in?"

"I'll take the axe. What about you, that little knife?" Shane's gaze dropped to the Bowie knife at Lin Feng's hip, openly skeptical.

Lin Feng waved a hand. "I'll make do with whatever. Just tell me if you're up for a bet or not."

"...Fine. Call it post-meal exercise."

"Loser drinks three glasses of whiskey when we get back, plus owes the winner one condition. Deal?"

The corner of Shane's mouth pulled into something sharp, a dangerous glint rising in those eyes. "Then I hope you live to see the moon tonight."

The convoy rolled off the country road and onto the highway, threading gradually into a small town before pulling to a stop on a street near the edge of town.

Merle stepped down and swept a slow look across the surrounding buildings, cross-referencing something internally. After a long moment, there was a nod.

"This is it. Big roll-up shutter door, closed but not locked. White Chevrolet parked out front."

Shane moved to the back of the pickup and pulled out the fire axe. The smooth warmth of the wooden handle, the blade catching the light in a cold gleam, something settled into place. A feral brightness kindled in those eyes.

Lin Feng was drinking those three glasses of vodka tonight. That was decided. Non-negotiable. Shane had spoken.

Fire axe in hand, Shane headed toward the street, and never once noticed the faint, knowing smirk on Lin Feng's face. Or the long black bag sitting right next to where the axe had been.

➤ Next: Watch Me Play Dumb and Blindside Them

Chapter 46 - Watch Me Play Dumb and Blindside Them

Glenn and T-Dog fell into a brief silence.

Who am I, where am I, and what am I even doing here?

And who the hell was this guy up front drawing the bow? How could anyone be this ferocious?

Two days ago, walkers had them pinned under cars on the highway. Now they were strolling down the street like it was a weekend outing.

Put those two things side by side, and there was really only one conclusion: everything before this had been absolute dogshit.

The two helped retrieve arrows while chatting idly. Security level: through the roof.

Shane glanced down at the fire axe in hand, then over at the recurve bow in Lin Feng's grip, expression darkening.

By now, there was no pretending otherwise. Lin Feng had played Shane for a complete fool.

"Anything works," huh? Only to turn around and pull out an instrument of mass slaughter.

Lin Feng didn't spare a glance for the sulking axe-wielder beside him. The recurve bow barely needed aiming, full draw, release, arrow through skull. Over and over, at a pace that looked like it should strike sparks.

"Hey, Shane, don't look at me like that. Everything I do is for the group's safety. You don't mind, do you?"

Shane said nothing. Just quietly thought about all the ways to kill this little maniac standing right there.

Ten minutes passed. The walkers on the street thinned at a visible rate, bodies dropping across the asphalt like exhausted people crashing for a nap.

Lin Feng swept a look around, confirmed the area was clean, and checked the tally: [43/400]. A satisfied nod.

Progress was good. This spot was worth coming back to.

Merle stepped forward and hauled up the roll-up shutter. The screech tore down the street. The group ducked inside fast, and once the shutter rattled back down, a stale wave of dust, canned grease, and expired food hit them all at once.

Eyes adjusted. The warehouse layout came into focus.

Everyone went quiet.

Then, after a long beat:

"Holy fuck — are we about to be rich?"

"Oh my GOD. This has to be at least ten years of food?!"

"I'm thinking more like fifteen..."

"Stop running your mouths. Get to work!"

T-Dog and Glenn sorted through everything stacked on the middle shelves, flour, peanut butter, canned meat, bagged pasta, salt, white sugar, cooking oil, and packed it all into large woven sacks pulled from a nearby shelf, stacking them up and ready to move.

The two worked with building momentum, getting louder and more energized as they went. Because this was real food. The kind that actually steadied people's nerves.

Even before the collapse, stockpiling this much would have had people waking up grinning in the middle of the night.

Merle and Daryl kept the high-calorie items separate, chocolates, compressed biscuits, energy bars, packed apart from the daily supplies, reserved strictly as portable rations for long hauls and quick fights.

Marcus went straight to the household section. Toilet paper, wet wipes, anything in that category got its own packaging, and Marcus took the extra time to haul those bundles to the warehouse entrance so they'd be first on the vehicles.

It sounded absurd, but the camp was currently shorter on paper than on food.

Only after that did Marcus loop back to the medical aisle to scavenge. Povidone-iodine, gauze, anything with a long shelf life, none of it was left behind. It all got bundled into small parcels and set aside.

Lin Feng and Shane headed to the hardware shelves in the corner and started working through the stock.

Not much variety, and inventory wasn't deep, but all of it was going.

Once Phase Two construction kicked off, it would devour resources without mercy. Machetes, steel nails, iron wire, wrenches, screwdrivers, all of it got swept up. At a moment like this, resource-scarcity anxiety ran hot. The only thought was: extra trips were fine. Leaving something behind was not.

Last was the seed section. Close to farming territory, but the variety was thin. The stock quantity, at least, was decent.

Lin Feng quietly slipped a portion of everything into his dimensional storage, moving with the energy of someone doing something they weren't supposed to be doing.

Seeds were the foundation of any future worth having. The thing that would hold people together when food ran short. He needed to keep a reserve that was purely his.

Before long, the first batch was fully packed. Lin Feng sent the others to get the vehicles while he and Daryl held the entrance and kept clearing any walkers that drifted close.

When it came to cold-weapons combat, those two were the camp's ceiling. And both were still climbing.

It wasn't long before Shane and the others pulled the vehicles up. By then, Lin Feng and Daryl had cleared out everything in the immediate area. Another wave of experience logged: [63/400].

"Go, go, go — move it, people! Whether we score big in one run is all riding on today. Once this load is packed, get every cargo-capable vehicle from camp over here. We're clearing this whole place out before dark."

Lin Feng fired everyone up, then swapped in for Glenn, whose stamina was starting to flag. Glenn took over lookout; Lin Feng took over hauling.

Half an hour later, the whole crew was on a rest break, and every single one of them was staring at Lin Feng with the same expression.

Like they'd just noticed some kind of entity that didn't fully qualify as human.

Looking back at the last thirty minutes: the sentry rotation had shuffled over and over, rest shifts had cycled through the whole group. Lin Feng had not stopped once. The most he'd done was pause to drink some water before going right back to hauling without missing a beat.

Bluntly put, this one Asian man had single-handedly covered a fifth of the entire team's workload.

It was the first time any of them had seen Lin Feng's physical conditioning up close. Preposterously unreasonable was putting it mildly.

Shane sat on the ground, back against the wall, pouring water down the throat, and couldn't stop from muttering: "What the hell... Is that guy a robot?"

Daryl thought back to the haul after their last hunt. Stopped chewing. "I don't think he was this strong last time."

"Seems that way. But we're not bad ourselves, right, little brother?" Merle blew out a lungful of smoke and flashed a grin full of yellow teeth.

Daryl didn't dignify that with a response. Just rolled both eyes and looked away.

Glenn, sitting near the door, caught something, a sound, maybe a shift in the air. Stood up and peered outside.

A convoy was rolling slowly toward them.

"Lin." Glenn turned, voice tight. "People coming."

The words hit like a key turning in a clockwork spring. Weapons were up and the whole group was on their feet in an instant.

"Marcus, Daryl — take your gear and get out of sight. The moment I make a move, you open fire from cover."

Both nodded immediately and slipped away to their positions.

"I'm handling the talking. Get your angles. But if this goes sideways: no hesitation, no surrender. Not until you've run dry."

Shane looked at Lin Feng a moment longer than necessary. Something shifted in those eyes, approval, briefly and unmistakably, before it was gone.

Lin Feng was already bending down. He grabbed a handful of dirt off the ground and smeared it across his face: road-worn, harmless, nothing to see here. Then he stepped outside.

Glenn watched this and called after him, "Lin... what are you doing?"

"Stay inside. Watch me play dumb and take them by surprise."

"?"

➤ Next: You Won't Even Point a Gun at Me