Chapter 48: Survival Instinct
A retainer stepped forward immediately and dragged the limp, boneless form of Li Goudan away.
Wang Ba’s gaze swept across the remaining soldiers in the front row once more.
"Anyone else who cannot bring themselves to do it?"
Silence.
A deathly silence.
No one dared to utter a single word of dissent!
"Good." Wang Ba nodded with satisfaction. "Since you all know how now, let's increase the difficulty a bit."
He shouted loudly toward the prisoners, "Want to live?!"
The prisoners clutched at the question like drowning men grasping at straws, nodding frantically.
"Then run!"
"From here, run to the wall opposite!"
"Whoever makes it across lives!"
Wang Ba’s words left all the prisoners momentarily stunned.
Immediately afterward, the primal instinct for survival conquered their fear!
"Run, everyone!!!"
Someone let out a hoarse scream!
Over a hundred prisoners instantly erupted into chaos! Howling and pouring every ounce of strength they had left into their limbs, they sprinted wildly toward the enclosing wall a hundred paces away!
They had become moving targets!
"Open fire!"
Wang Ba issued the ruthless command!
"Open fire!"
Those two words struck the hearts of the nearly three hundred soldiers like a death curse!
Run!
Those prisoners were running for their lives!
Their terrified shrieks, heavy gasps, and the clanking of manacles against the earth wove together into a symphony of despair!
The soldiers' hands shook even more violently!
Shooting a stationary target and shooting a moving target were two entirely different concepts!
Shooting a living person begging for mercy on their knees and shooting a living person fighting desperately to survive were psychological tortures of completely different magnitudes!
"Bang!"
Finally, someone fired!
The bullet shrieked through the air, grazing the scalp of a prisoner and kicking up a puff of dust on the distant ground!
The prisoner stumbled from shock and fell to the ground, but he immediately scrambled up on all fours and resumed his frantic run forward!
That single gunshot acted like a switch.
"Bang! Bang, bang! Bang!"
A dense volley of gunfire instantly reverberated across the entire drill ground!
The drill ground transformed into a true hell!
Bullets flew wantonly through the air!
Prisoners kept collapsing in pools of blood!
Some were struck squarely in the chest, their bodies tumbling backward like torn sacks of grain.
Some were hit in the legs, falling to the ground with piercing screams, yet still dragging their bloody, shattered limbs as they struggled forward.
Others, blessed with good luck, dodged bullet after bullet, a flash of wild ecstasy bursting in their eyes as they drew closer and closer to the wall that symbolized life!
Meanwhile, the shooting soldiers descended into madness!
Their eyes were bloodshot!
They no longer cared about morality or mercy!
In their minds, only Wang Ba’s icy voice and Li Goudan’s miserable fate remained!
In their minds, only a single obsession burned:
Hit him!
You must hit him!
This was no longer a slaughter.
This was a hunt!
The bloodiest, cruelest hunt imaginable, using living human beings as prey!
Wang Ba paced back and forth behind the formation.
In his hand, he held the oil-soaked oxhide whip.
"Useless trash! Raise your arms! Align the sights! Have you forgotten everything I taught you?!"
A soldier, trembling with tension, let the muzzle of his rifle droop slightly.
"Crack!"
Wang Ba’s whip lashed fiercely across his back!
The soldier shuddered from the pain, but the rifle in his hands jerked upward instinctively!
"And you! Breathe! What happened to your breath? You have to hold your breath when you pull the trigger! Are you a pig?!"
"Crack!"
Another lash of the whip!
"Your eyes! Where are you looking?! Look at the front sight! Not at that dying prisoner!"
"Crack! Crack! Crack!"
The whip became the clearest accompaniment to the gunfire on the drill ground!
Like the strictest, most demonic drill instructor, Wang Ba used the most direct and brutal methods to correct every single mistake!
He was not teaching them how to shoot.
He was using pain and fear to brand the correct shooting posture deep into the bones of every single one of them!
The first round of firing ended quickly.
Out of more than a hundred prisoners, only seven or eight managed to stumble, crawl, and drag themselves to the corner of the wall.
Covered in blood—some belonging to others, some their own—they pressed against the wall, panting heavily. As they gazed out over the shambles of the killing field, their faces mirrored the numbness and terror of those who had narrowly escaped death.
The center of the drill ground, however, was already a sea of blood.
Maimed corpses lay strewn in pools of blood, and the air was thick with a heavy, sickening stench compounded of gunpowder and gore.
Several soldiers vomited on the spot.
Yet many more panted heavily, their faces flushed with a morbid, unnatural red.
Their arms trembled slightly.
Not from fear, but from... excitement!
An unprecedented thrill—the absolute mastery over the lives of others—coursed through their veins like an electric current.
"How does it feel?" Wang Ba walked up to them, a cruel smile playing on his lips.
" Awesome... fucking awesome..." one soldier answered instinctively.
The moment the words left his mouth, he startled himself.
Yet he realized that was genuinely how he felt!
The sensation of a bullet leaving the barrel and a living target in the distance collapsing in response, the feeling of clutching another person's life firmly in the palm of one's own hand...
It felt too damn good!
"Good," Wang Ba nodded.
He walked over to the few surviving prisoners.
Trembling all over, those prisoners were certain they could not escape death in the end.
Instead, Wang Ba instructed the retainers beside him: "Release their bindings, give each of them ten taels of silver and a decent set of clothes, and let them go through the back door."
"My Lord said that whoever reaches the wall lives. We in the Ghost Unit keep our word."
With that, he ignored the bewildered prisoners, turned around, and issued new orders to all the soldiers.
"First row, fall back! Reload your ammunition!"
"Second row, step forward!"
"Bring out the next batch of 'targets'!"
The hell continued.
Round after round.
The corpses on the drill ground piled ever higher.
The blood had merged into streams.
The soldiers transitioned from initial terror, trembling, and vomiting, to numbness, and finally, to enjoyment!
Their eyes changed.
They looked like wolves!
A pack of bloodthirsty wolves that had tasted fresh blood and could never forget the flavor!
They began to strive for precision!
They began to compete to see who could score a headshot! Who could hit the most difficult, fast-moving target!
Here, life had become the cheapest tool for showing off skills.
On the reviewing platform.
Zhang Wei's face had gone as pale as a sheet of paper.
As he watched the soldiers below, their eyes glowing red with slaughter, a chill surged straight from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
"They're mad... they've all gone fucking mad..." he muttered to himself.
Qin Cang’s chest was also heaving violently.
He was not afraid.