Orion spent two days quietly observing the camp, and by the end of it he had a solid read on how things worked.

Lin Feng was in charge, a Chinese guy who looked about as threatening as a houseplant, but whose psychological composure and combat ability were both exceptional. He was also, apparently, in a relationship.

Rick handled the day-to-day. That said, Rick's dynamic with a crew-cut guy named Shane was noticeably strained, some kind of friction between them, both sides clearly trying to smooth it over without making it worse.

Those three ran the camp. And among the three, Lin Feng's word was final.

Relocating the camp, clearing out the warehouse, drawing up the farm's defensive perimeter, today's weapons training, all of it had come from him.

For some reason, Orion found himself thinking of an expression his Chinese childhood friend used to use: full of schemes.

Yeah. That was probably the right word for it.

Whatever the case, Lin Feng wasn't thinking small. The guy wanted to build something real.

Why was it that Chinese people always had these grand ideas rattling around in their heads, saving the world, unifying the realm, that whole brand of ambition?

Genuinely hard to understand.

"Orion! Stop spacing out — get over here, eat, and then it's your time to shine today!"

He snapped back to attention, nodded without a word, and walked toward the center of camp. He took a food tray from Carol and thanked Carol politely.

Carol gave him a warm smile. "Go on. Lin's waiting for you."

Orion nodded once more. Still silent.

Lin Feng fell into step beside him. "So — how's camp life been treating you these past two days?"

"Not bad," Orion said. "Everyone's pretty decent."

Lin Feng nodded and left it there.

Even while recovering, this guy had spent the time watching, assessing, keeping himself in an oddly calibrated position, never pushing to fit in, never going out of his way to stay apart. More like a satellite than a member. Deliberate about it.

"I'll need you to put some real effort in with them today. Get them comfortable with their weapons, and if you can, teach them how to take cover properly when things go sideways."

"I'll pass on what I know," Orion said. "How much they actually absorb is on them."

The subtext was clean enough: I'll do my part, nothing more.

Lin Feng didn't push back. Honestly, if Orion had come in all warmth and enthusiasm from day one, that would have been more suspicious.

"Shane and Rick will back you up. Anything you need, go through them."

Orion said nothing. He nodded.

After breakfast, Orion started running the camp members through systematic weapons training. Lin Feng, meanwhile, rounded up his three protectors and headed out to sweep the surrounding area.

Training burned through ammunition. They needed to go find more.

He said a few words to Shane before leaving, and Shane dropped the idea of coming along without argument, gaze already tracking Orion, who was demonstrating grip stance to a small group.

"I'll keep eyes on him. Go."

Lin Feng trusted Shane's judgment. Especially now, with Lori pregnant, Shane's protective instincts were dialed all the way up. No slack, no hesitation.

To put it plainly: the second Orion so much as aimed a barrel in Lori's direction, Orion would already have several new holes in him.

Lin Feng's group pushed south toward a county seat. Compared to the smaller towns nearby, it was a better bet for weapons and ammunition.

Merle drove like the road owed him money, clearly in a great mood, because Lin Feng had made a promise: if there were motorcycles down there, Merle and Daryl could each take one.

That was all it took. Lin Feng's favorability +10, indebtedness +1.

Lin Feng glanced at his EXP panel: [163/400].

Barring anything unexpected, he might hit the next level within a couple of days.

A rare flutter of anticipation settled in his chest.

Two hours later, they rolled into the county seat.

The crew stepped out of the vehicle and shouldered their packs.

Daryl raised the bow and loosed, a walker dropped, arrow through the skull. Lin Feng opened up right after, dropping into his rhythm.

Full draw, instant release. Pure instinct for aim. Fast enough to blur.

A month of hard physical work had done something to his body, nothing he could pin down precisely, but the improvement was real. He could feel it.

Hard to explain. Didn't matter. Right now there was exactly one word for it: combat was good.

THWACK. CRACK.

System notifications chimed one after another. By the time the first walkers hit the ground, he'd already banked ten-plus EXP.

They retrieved their arrows, picked up their weapons, and pushed toward the town center.

First stop: the police station. The King County station last time had practically made Lin Feng dizzy from the haul alone.

He was hoping for a repeat.

The street wasn't crawling with walkers, but they'd clumped into loose clusters, twos and threes, drifting without direction across the asphalt.

The station's signage was easy enough to spot. Four streets, and they were standing in front of it.

Lin Feng put an arrow through a walker, then his gaze sharpened.

The front doors were intact. Closed tight. No sign of forced entry.

Could there still be someone inside?

"Everyone stay sharp. We might have living people in there."

Merle brought up the Remington, racked the slide with a hard clack, and scoffed. "Then they'd better be smart about it and stay out of our way."

Lin Feng rolled his eyes. Anyone watching from the outside would think they were the bad guys.

The four advanced to the entrance. Through the blood-smeared glass, they could make out a few walkers shuffling around inside, which was, paradoxically, a relief.

Walkers meant no survivors holed up in there. Fair game.

Lin Feng stepped up, cut-resistant glove closing around the cold metal handle, and gave a light push.

Unlocked.

Daryl and Merle moved immediately, slipping through the gap and fanning out to clear the room.

Where Daryl was precise and controlled, Merle was the opposite. Pure power, minimum finesse. Merle swung the rifle stock straight into a walker's forehead with a sickening crack, dropped it, then hammered it again and again until the skull caved into something unrecognizable.

Once Marcus entered, Lin Feng came in last. He locked the door behind him, drew the Bowie knife, and got to work.

Step forward, drop low, drive the arm out, blade tip punching up through the jaw, shredding the brainstem, withdraw, move on. Not pretty. Extremely efficient.

The ground floor was clear in short order.

"Standard split. You two take upstairs, Marcus and I search down here. Watch yourselves."

"Yeah, yeah, quit lecturing, this isn't a classroom." Merle was already heading for the stairs, Daryl falling in behind.

Lin Feng let it go. He turned and walked straight for the armory, same route as last time.

The door swung open.

Lin Feng's brain flat-out stalled.

"Holy shit — we hit the jackpot!"

➤ Next: Acute Iron Poisoning

Chapter 66 - Acute Iron Poisoning

The moment the dust-sealed steel door swung open, air thick with gun oil washed over him.

Lin Feng swept the room in one glance. Six Remingtons sat arranged in neat rows on the racks, along with four AR-15s.

On the other side of the racks sat more than a dozen Glock 17s.

In the corner, two large black trunks and four individual long gun cases were stacked together, beside several neatly piled ammo crates.

"Holy shit! I hit the jackpot!"

The delight in Lin Feng's eyes practically spilled over. A county police station, and it had this kind of arsenal?

This was lottery-winning levels of absurd.

Lin Feng crossed straight to the black cases in the corner, fingers finding the cold latches. He popped one open. Inside, four M4 carbines sat in perfect order.

He reached in, grasped the receiver, and lifted one free from its slot. Up close, the finish was glossy black without a single scratch. "Holy shit — don't tell me these are brand new?!"

He racked the bolt. The sound was crisp, carrying a fresh whiff of gun oil. He dropped the magazine: empty. Which only locked in the suspicion.

Factory fresh. Every last one.

But why would they be here?

This was a small county seat in an agricultural district. No port, no coastline, no high-value industrial zone, no military base for miles around. How did a place like this end up with this tier of firepower?

He couldn't figure it out, so he stopped trying. Who cared about this or that? It was here, which meant it all belonged to Lord Lin now.

He set the M4 back, snapped the lid shut, and cracked open the next case. Another M4, this one fitted out: three loaded magazines, a Beretta M9, three pistol magazines, a rifle suppressor, an optical scope, a gun cleaning kit, and an M9 bayonet. (Pure fiction, in reality, it'd just be the rifle and magazines.)

The only empty spaces were four small, round recesses.

Lin Feng knew exactly what belonged there: grenades.

His expression went flat. This was a complete individual combat loadout, and those empty slots meant someone had already pulled the grenades before leaving.

A theory took shape. What if these weren't supplies transferred here before the cataclysm, but military materiel dispatched here after it?

Except there were no proper military positions anywhere in this town. Spent casings were almost nonexistent.

That left two possibilities. Either they had received higher-level orders, pulled back, and written this place off.

Or they had run into something outside their projections entirely. Something like... mutated walkers.

Lin Feng closed the case and glanced back. Marcus was still searching elsewhere.

He moved fast, slipping two of the individual weapon cases into his spatial inventory and grabbing a crate of rifle ammunition on the way out.

Don't ask why. Ask, and the answer was that his pack-rat instinct had kicked in.

Only after that did he start properly clearing the room, loading weapons into backpacks one by one so everything could be bundled up and hauled out.

Sure enough, tucked away in another corner, he found a large cache of individual combat rations. A quick mental calculation gave him a headcount: roughly a standard infantry platoon's worth.

Lin Feng quietly crossed his second theory off the list. Far more likely they had received higher orders and executed an emergency reinforcement or evacuation.

Because there was no way a mutated walker could put down a full infantry platoon. A mutated walker swarm, maybe, but was that even a real possibility?

Nobody could spin a lie that tall...

Yeah. Absolutely impossible.

---

On the other side of the building, Marcus finished packing up the weapons from the evidence room and moved into the storehouse.

He stopped at the corner. Sat there, looking back at him, was an M5 medic field pack.

He stared at it for a long moment.

A police station with one of those? That didn't track.

Then his gaze dropped to what was stacked beneath it: two rigid sealed military medical transport containers, one elongated standalone storage case, a sealed metal chest, and a sealed wooden crate.

He started to make his peace with the M5.

Then he moved the pack aside and opened the metal chest.

Whatever was left of his hope died on the spot.

Bagged normal saline IV infusion bags. Freeze-dried blood plasma powder. IV puncture needles. Infusion tubing. Hemostatic infusion patches.

Right. Great. Very hardcore.

These were military prepositioned supplies.

Which meant what they were doing right now wasn't looting.

It was pulling teeth from a tiger's mouth.

One wrong move, and they would all come down with collective, acute metal poisoning, the kind that came with zero explanation.

"Holy shit."

He let out a rare curse, turned on his heel, and walked straight toward the weapon vault.

He pushed the door open. Lin Feng was in there, blissfully packing up gear and supplies, and the most eye-catching items were the military weapon transit cases sitting near his feet.

"Lin, these things could—"

"I know." Lin Feng didn't look up. "Doesn't matter. They already pulled out on an emergency evacuation."

"How do you know that?"

"They left the weapons. But they took the grenades."

Marcus stopped. Then a wave of pure, unhinged excitement broke across his face. "Lin, we hit it big this time!"

Lin Feng stood up grinning. "Then why are you still standing there? You want to leave it for people who don't even know how to use it?"

"You're right!" Marcus was already turning back toward the storehouse.

---

Up on the second floor, Daryl kicked a walker onto its back, drove a hunting knife in through the eye socket, twisted, and pulled it free.

But the look on that face was curious.

The gear said soldier. But there were no obvious fatal wounds, no bite marks, and nothing missing from the kit. This one hadn't gone down fighting walkers or survivors.

Natural infection from the walker virus?

That seemed the most likely answer.

Daryl got up and moved toward the next room, and walked straight into Merle coming out of it, dragging a corpse by one hand.

"What're you lookin' at, little brother? Already cleared out every last one of 'em. Right now the only thing that matters is stripping the gear off these bastards."

Where they'd come from or what they'd been doing here? Merle couldn't care less.

Not a flicker of unease at the corpses. Just pure excitement at the prospect of new gear.

Daryl rolled both eyes, but Merle wasn't wrong. The chest rigs, body armor, and combat boots on these bodies were valuable, take them back, wash them off, and they'd be perfectly usable.

The two of them worked through the bodies, and from the corpse still in hand, Merle dug out a folded military map. Shaking it open, several triangle markers stood out, each one annotated with clear emphasis.

Merle bared a mouthful of yellow teeth. "Well. Didn't expect a bonus on top of everything else."

"Can you even read it?" Daryl asked.

The grin pulled tight. "What — I look that uneducated to you?"

Daryl didn't answer.

But those eyes said everything.

You?

➤ Next: Reunion with Old Friends