SCOM - Chapter 110
Chapter 110
The night was deep and pitch-black as a small team advanced in silence.
The First Military Academy was not located in the city proper, and the area grew more remote the closer they got. Zuo Luohuan led her people on a quiet detour to the mountain behind the school. The individuals she brought were all students of the First Military Academy and were familiar with the campus.
Zuo Luohuan's group crouched on the back mountain, looking down to see the school unexpectedly ablaze with lights.
At a time like this, having every part of the First Military Academy lit up made the group's hearts sink.
Countless lights shining in the dead of night resembled a manhunt scene. It was highly likely that Gashiro forces or traitors were searching for academy students.
Zuo Luohuan, half-crouching in the grass, stared at the brightly lit buildings below and actually breathed a slight sigh of relief. This posture suggested that there were still students inside who hadn't been captured.
There was no one visible on the perimeter. The First Military Academy was clearly not the main battlefield. It seemed Ren Pingbo was likely focused on besieging the Military Committee.
"Is there any signal?" Zuo Luohuan turned and asked.
A team member behind her shook their head. "No signal."
Just then, a burst of gunfire erupted from one part of the academy. Less than a minute later, the sounds of fighting also broke out in another area. The once relatively quiet campus was instantly filled with people moving like a tide through the corridors of the buildings.
"Is that... an Army Group?" someone behind her asked, puzzled, as they carefully observed the people in the hallways.
Those Army Group soldiers were holding light guns, but the shots that had just rung out were clearly from firearms. At the First Military Academy, only the Dark Department's basement had firearms. They had been used once before during the Gashiro night raid, and Zuo Luohuan had subsequently ordered the Dark Department students to move the armory.
Zuo Luohuan stared at the aggressive and menacing appearance of the Army Group soldiers in the corridors, frowned, and raised her hand in a gesture, signaling for her team to follow her down the mountain.
Gunfire echoed from several locations within the First Military Academy, and the Army Group soldiers inside began to chase and search for students again. Zuo Luohuan silently vaulted over the school's back wall.
The situation on campus was far worse than in the residential areas they had seen. There wasn't a clean spot on the ground to step, and bullet holes were visible with every pace. It was clear that a large-scale battle had taken place within the First Military Academy.
Zuo Luohuan led her team quietly toward the building where the gunfire had first erupted. They were few in number and familiar with the school, so they scaled the building directly.
Guided by the sound of firearms, Zuo Luohuan moved straight in that direction. It was an ordinary academic building, with nearly every classroom filled with desks and chairs. She climbed through a window and immediately encountered an Army Group soldier holding a light gun.
The moment the soldier saw someone in a skeletal mech, he raised his weapon to open fire. Zuo Luohuan was faster; her light gun shot him right between the eyes.
Stepping forward quickly to catch the falling soldier, Zuo Luohuan hid the body under a desk. She looked at the insignia on his uniform and sneered, "The Eighty-third Army?"
It was a relatively small army group within the Military Committee, one that had barely managed to get in by riding on the capital's coattails.
It now seemed that these army groups were 'to thank' for so many residential areas being controlled overnight. Only an army group could catch the populace completely off guard.
"Captain, there are students!" a few of the others who had climbed in after her said, looking outside.
"Rip the insignias off the arms of your skeletal mechs. From now on, we are students of the First Military Academy," Zuo Luohuan ordered.
The others did as they were told, tearing off the insignias.
Zuo Luohuan picked up the light gun from the soldier she had just killed and tossed it to one of her team members. "Go help the other students."
With that, she walked straight out.
Currently, all skeletal mechs had the same design. Once inside, it was difficult to tell who was who, which was why the skeletal mech training army always had names marked on the arms. The skeletal mechs at the First Military Academy were for public use and naturally had no names.
As Zuo Luohuan walked out so openly, the searching Army Group soldiers immediately raised their guns and sprayed fire at her.
Zuo Luohuan leaned to the side, dodging a volley of light gun fire. Without drawing her own light gun or scimitar, she leaped up and landed on the corridor railing, drawing nearly everyone's attention. Behind her, her team members ducked down and quickly departed.
The Army Group soldiers aimed their light guns and fired frantically at her. Zuo Luohuan leaped straight off the railing, still heading toward them, extended an arm to grab the railing of the floor below on the opposite side, and vaulted inside.
The soldiers from the floor above immediately rushed down, like sharks smelling blood.
The students hiding in the shadows, preparing for a life-or-death battle with these soldiers, looked at each other in dismay. Finally, someone spoke up, "Who ran up to the opposite building?"
"Looks like they've got some skills. Is that Jinhai?"
"I'm over here," said a person in a skeletal mech, hiding in the corner of a classroom.
"...Who is that then? Don't mess things up."
Someone peeked through the corridor window and was stunned by what they saw. They even wanted to rub their eyes but were stopped by the skeletal mech's helmet. Still, they couldn't help but exclaim, "Damn! That bunch of soldiers got wiped out!"
After vaulting into the floor below, Zuo Luohuan neither ran nor moved. She leaned against the outer wall of a classroom, quietly waiting for the soldiers from the upper floor to arrive.
The moment the Army Group soldiers saw the person in the skeletal mech, they didn't hesitate for a second, firing their light guns directly at Zuo Luohuan's vital points.
"You're not good enough," Zuo Luohuan said, dodging the light gun blasts from all sides as if taking a leisurely stroll, closing the distance to the soldiers step by step.
She moved with effortless grace, but to others, her speed was simply heaven-defying.
The soldiers only saw a blur before this student appeared right in front of them. Before they could even react, their necks were snapped.
Zuo Luohuan didn't let go of the soldier. Instead, she grabbed him, spun around, and used his light gun to shoot the others.
Compared to the soldiers' aim, not a single one of Zuo Luohuan's shots missed. Using the man as her shield, all she had to do was fire, and the entire group of soldiers that had come down from the two stairwells was annihilated.
"Who is this badass?" a student hiding in a classroom couldn't help but marvel. "Aren't they even stronger than Ji Yuezhi and Zuo Luohuan?"
"Stop watching. Let's take this chance to get down and find Instructor Jiao," the student named Jinhai said, patting the others by the window and urging them to move.
The bursts of gunfire they had deliberately set off in various buildings were purely to attract the Army Group soldiers and create an opportunity for other students to find the captured instructors and classmates. Most of them didn't expect to survive.
Jinhai led his classmates down the stairs. He had been prepared to run into more soldiers, but unexpectedly, the entire way was littered with fallen ones.
"What's going on?" A student next to him kicked a dead soldier on the ground. "Did other classmates come to support us?"
Jinhai didn't know either. He picked up the light guns and distributed them. "Let's head downstairs to the other buildings first."
As soon as the group stepped outside, they saw the tail end of a squad in skeletal mechs swiftly climbing the roof of the opposite academic building like spiders, then leaping to another building.
"Holy crap!" one student exclaimed, his voice filled with unconcealed shock. "They can jump that far and climb that fast even in skeletal mechs? Which class are those upperclassmen from?"
The most outstanding batch of students from the First Military Academy had already been selected, but that was only three thousand people. There were still many excellent students left.
"Let's go to another building," Jinhai quickly changed his plan.
This time, they were responsible for creating diversions in four different directions, hoping to disperse the Army Group's forces as much as possible and buy time for other students to find the instructors and their classmates.
This group of students ran toward another building where gunfire had been heard. By this time, Zuo Luohuan had already dealt with the soldiers in that building; her speed was more than double that of her team members.
Jinhai had just encountered a few soldiers. With no time to shoot, he could only engage in close combat. He slammed a man hard against the railing, but his gaze was drawn to a familiar black shadow flitting past below.
Was that a speed a human could even achieve?!
Sensing a change in the situation, more and more Army Group soldiers began to converge on their position. Jinhai and the others stood on the building and started firing down, forcing the soldiers to take cover temporarily. But soon, the soldiers began to counterattack, not only with shields but also preparing to bring over boxes of fourth-generation robot dogs.
"Retreat!" Seeing that they were about to release the fourth-generation robot dogs, Jinhai immediately told the students around him to prepare to leave.
He hadn't taken more than a few steps before a classmate pulled him back. "Look!"
Down below, after the fourth-generation robot dogs were released, their red eyes flickered erratically. They weren't zipping around; instead, their bodies moved in slow, contorted motions, as if they were malfunctioning simpletons.
"Are they broken? Hahaha!" a student couldn't help but laugh.
The soldiers below hadn't expected this to happen either. They immediately smashed open the other boxes of fourth-generation robot dogs, but not a single one of them could move.
Jinhai, who was about to leave, stopped. If it weren't for these robot dogs, with Instructor Jiao present two days ago, plus their skeletal mechs and weapons, they would have been able to overturn these Army Group soldiers long ago.
Zuo Luohuan and her team moved extremely fast. The groups of soldiers that had been drawn to those few buildings were not large in number, so dealing with them wasn't too difficult.
She glanced down at Jinhai's building but didn't go over. Her skeletal mech team members were nearby.
There weren't many students in these few buildings. Zuo Luohuan guessed they were likely just a diversion and that other students were carrying out some other operation.
"What are you trying to do?" Zuo Luohuan asked, grabbing a student on the floor above.
"Huh?" The student stared at her as if facing a great enemy, even trying to aim his gun at Zuo Luohuan. "Who are you!"
Zuo Luohuan knocked his gun aside. "Next time an enemy gets this close, hold your gun steady first."
With that, she deactivated her skeletal mech's helmet, revealing her face, then quickly put it back on.
Who in the entire First Military Academy didn't know Zuo Luohuan? This student immediately revealed his own face as well. "Senior, it's me!"
Zuo Luohuan raised an eyebrow. It was a freshman from the Dark Department.
"Senior, you're all back?"
"We'll talk later. What are you doing right now?" Zuo Luohuan asked.
"Two days ago, Instructor Jiao and over three hundred students she was protecting were captured," the female student immediately explained. "We want to find them. Most of the school has been occupied by those traitorous army groups."
"They only captured over three hundred students?" Zuo Luohuan asked.
The other person shook their head. "At the very beginning, they captured over two thousand students in the parking lot. It happened to be the weekend. Later, when they tried to enter the campus, they were stopped by the Disciplinary Committee. They couldn't produce any identification and tried to force their way in."
Zuo Luohuan became thoughtful. The Disciplinary Committee probably never expected an army group to rebel.
Sure enough, the female student continued, "They fought their way in directly. Fortunately, the instructors were here and organized us to assemble quickly, but the academy was surrounded. We've been stuck here for days, fighting a guerrilla war every day."
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