Chapter Sixty: The Last Bullet

Temporary command post—the air was thick as iron, the atmosphere frozen.
All eyes were fixed on the woman who had just uttered the forbidden words.

Li Rui, captain of the special operations team, gazed at Xiao Ran, whose face was ashen and body still trembling faintly, yet whose eyes blazed like burning coals. He swallowed hard.

He did not ask why.
As a soldier who had also survived blood and fire, he understood everything from the look in her eyes.

It was the look of someone who had placed her very soul once again on the judge’s seat—a look of utter resolve.

"...Give it to her," he ordered the weapons specialist behind him in a terse command.

The black gun case was swiftly opened.
A Type 88 sniper rifle, meticulously calibrated and gleaming with the cold luster of steel, was handed to Xiao Ran.

Time seemed to slow infinitely at that moment.

Xiao Ran reached out her hand.
The right hand that had trembled from nightmares for five long years, quivering as it reached for the weapon, spasmed ever so slightly as it neared the rifle’s cold surface.

But the instant her fingertips touched that familiar, faintly chilling texture—

All the trembling ceased, abruptly!

Steady.
Steady as a rock.

It was as if some mysterious torrent, surging from the depths of her soul, had in an instant burst through the dam called "Trauma," flooding her once-weak limbs with newfound strength.

She did not lift the rifle to aim immediately.
Instead, she slowly closed her eyes.

Like a lover reunited after years apart, she let her fingers wander inch by inch, feeling the rifle’s balance, the warmth along the barrel, the travel of the trigger, even the weight of the bullet in the magazine.

Her breathing grew long and steady.
Her heartbeat, once wild and erratic, became calm and powerful.
Even the flow of blood in her veins seemed to synchronize, in that moment, with the pulse of the rifle in some mysterious, perfect harmony.

She was the gun.
The gun was her.

The "Sharpshooter" who had lain dormant for five years, whose name once struck terror into every enemy—

Had returned.

...

In the next second, Xiao Ran opened her eyes!

As she looked once more through the scope toward the chaotic backstage area seventy-three meters away—

The entire world, within her sight, was instantly transformed.

All sound, light, color—everything seemed to slow, entering that domain reserved only for the greatest marksmen:
"Bullet Time."

No longer did her pupils reflect a scene of chaos, but rather a precise model, constructed from countless glacial data points, ripe for calculation.

[Wind speed: 0.3 meters per second, from the central air conditioning vent above, steady and consistent.]

Air humidity: 67%, resulting in a 0.01-millimeter drop in a 5.8mm caliber bullet over 73.4 meters.

[Target distance: 73.4 meters.]

[Shooting obstacle: one layer of 12mm double-tempered glass; estimated deflection of the bullet upon penetration: 0.5 to 0.7 degrees, randomly...]

First hostage (female engineer): breathing rate, 78 per minute; heart racing, pupils dilated. Microexpression analysis indicates imminent mental collapse, expected to involuntarily tilt her head back by approximately 5 centimeters in 1.2 seconds due to extreme terror...

Gang leader ("Cleaner" squad captain): heart rate, 95 per minute, highly agitated. Right thumb about to press the detonator; anticipated time from neural impulse to full muscle contraction: 0.3 seconds!

Countless streams of data flashed, collided, calculated, and modeled in Xiao Ran’s mind—her brain now a supercomputer.

And within all this, she isolated a single, theoretically possible yet almost undetectable—chance for life.

...

Backstage.

The "Cleaner" captain glanced at his military watch, a ferocious, cruel smile twisting his lips.

Five minutes were up.

"Seems your friends don’t care whether you live or die..." he sneered at the already pallid Chen Jingming and the others. "Well then... the game is over!"

Slowly, he raised the right hand clutching the remote detonator.

"...Three!"

"...Two!"

His thumb pressed heavily onto the red button, the symbol of death and annihilation!

And just as he was about to depress it fully—

The female engineer he had used as a human shield, just as Xiao Ran had calculated, utterly broke down at the sight of death looming before her. With a despairing wail, her body instinctively, ever so slightly, jerked backward!

That motion!

It created, between the gun pressed to her temple and the leader’s hand holding the detonator, a—

A gap no wider than three centimeters!

A window that would last less than 0.3 seconds!

A shooting opportunity so fleeting, so theoretically impossible to use, that it should not have existed at all—

Bang!!!

The shot rang out!
No hesitation!

In that miraculous, one-in-a-thousandth of a second window—

Xiao Ran pulled the trigger!

...

A bullet, five years overdue.
A bullet carrying redemption and judgment.
A bullet, a final farewell to the past.

Under the gaze of all, the scorching 5.8mm steel-core bullet spun and howled, tearing through space like lightning unleashed.

It pierced the damned, trajectory-bending tempered glass!

It crossed the seventy-three-point-four meters between life and death!

And with a precision that defied all laws of physics, nothing short of miraculous—

It smashed into the wrist of the gang leader just as he was about to press the detonator!

Thud—

An explosion of kinetic energy!

The leader’s entire right wrist, together with his trump card of a detonator, was in an instant shredded, twisted, pulverized into a grotesque spray of blood, shattered bone, and scattered electronics—a grisly firework.

“Ahhhhh—!”

A shriek, inhuman and gut-wrenching, burst from the leader’s throat. His body seized with agony so fierce it froze him on the spot, the sadistic smile on his face forever petrified into sheer terror and disbelief.

A chance!

Xiao Ran slowly lowered the still-hot sniper rifle.

The mask of ice and steel she had worn for five years quietly crumbled.

A single, burning, crystalline tear traced down her cheek.

She spoke into the waiting communicator, her voice tinged with release and a faint choke—but above all, with an authority that brooked no dispute. She uttered two words, words of justice and judgment.

"Full assault."

"Kill!"

The special operations police, swords long drawn, surged forward like unleashed tigers at the signal, storming into the now leaderless backstage from every entrance with thunderous force.

Gunfire and battle cries merged in a single, roaring cacophony.

And Xiao Ran stood quietly where she was.

She slowly raised her right hand—no longer trembling at last.

As if, at last, she had completed a farewell that had taken five long years.