0146 Melancholy City

That gunshot instantly snapped everyone present back to reality. The elite guards stared at the body of their fallen comrade in the distance, then turned their gazes back to the Coalition captain holding the pistol. Their expressions grew dark and filled with rage.

"What are you all looking at? That is the fate of deserters. Do you want to taste it too?" Realizing he had made a grave mistake, the captain faltered under the glare of the crowd. Before he could speak again, someone struck! From the captain's flank, a rifle butt smashed into him without warning, instantly dropping him to the ground. Immediately afterward, the elite guards split into several factions, their AK-47s leveling at their former comrades.

Lying on the ground in the distance, Hou Rui listened to the elite guards' infighting on the road. Nearly everyone there was shouting at the top of their lungs. Amidst heated arguments where no one would yield, various dialects of the Somali language intertwined, making it impossible for Hou Rui to understand a single word. Yet, even without understanding, Hou Rui could guess that the guard officers were vying for leadership of the convoy.

Unwilling to waste any more energy listening, Hou Rui gritted his teeth and dragged himself up. He tore off a sleeve of his uniform to crudely bandage the gunshot wounds on his shoulder and thigh, then limped his way forward through the tall grass. Later, he found a grenade on the body of a dead elite guard, so Hou Rui quietly made a wide detour and slipped back to the rear of the General's convoy.

After experiencing so much in Kismayo, Hou Rui had learned to maintain a necessary skepticism toward everything. Until he saw General Garcia's corpse with his own eyes, he would never simply walk away.

This time, Hou Rui skirted around to the side of an armed pickup truck mounted with an 82mm mortar.

The guard officer who should have been guarding this pickup had already gathered near the large SUV, and the remaining guard soldier was merely gazing off in that direction, showing no intention of performing guard duty. Seizing the moment, Hou Rui crept close. With a sudden lunge, using his uninjured right arm, he locked his forearm tightly around the guard's neck.

With a fierce twist of his arm, Hou Rui ruthlessly snapped the soldier's neck. He gently lowered the dead soldier to the ground, climbed up into the truck bed in a few swift movements, and adjusted the muzzle of the 82mm mortar. Finally, he grabbed a high-explosive shell from the nearby ammunition crate and decisively slid it down the mortar tube.

*Thump! Boom!*

The mortar shell plummeted straight into the crowd of elite guards and detonated. This explosion thoroughly ignited the mutual slaughter among the fractured guards. As the guards of different factions opened fire on one another, Hou Rui, a hundred meters away, continued firing shell after shell, hurling them right over the heads of the crowded guards.

The scene descended into complete chaos!

A massive barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns wreaked indiscriminate havoc. At this point, anyone not standing right beside you was an enemy.

From afar, Hou Rui watched two elite guards standing back-to-back, holding their AK-47s and sweeping fire continuously around them, coordinating to take down numerous "comrades" in rapid succession. Yet, during a lull in the combat, when the two elite guards caught each other's eyes, these two soldiers who had just been inseparable turned their barrels and opened fire on each other without hesitation, collapsing together in the end.

Thirty-four minutes later, the elite guards, having suffered over eighty percent casualties, finally routed. Most of them fled into the dark wilderness. A few oblivious stragglers wandered over toward Hou Rui and were swiftly shot down one by one. With that, General Garcia's once-mighty convoy crumbled completely under Hou Rui's relentless harassment.

Feeling both exhilarated and profoundly exhausted, Hou Rui finally stepped out of the vehicle. Holding his AK-47, he slowly approached the large SUV piled high with corpses. At the epicenter of this multi-factional firefight and infighting, nearly all the guard officers had perished here, and their bodies ended up covering General Garcia's remains.

After rummaging for over ten minutes, Hou Rui finally spotted that familiar face at the very bottom of the pile of bodies. This time, Hou Rui acted with even greater decisiveness: he took a blade to the wound on General Garcia's head and flayed the General's face off just like an Indian warrior. Finding no fillers of any kind beneath the skin, this served as indirect proof of the corpse's true identity.

Sitting amidst the pile of corpses, Hou Rui suddenly felt all his strength drain away. For the past few months in Somalia, Hou Rui's experiences had been nothing short of a nightmare. But at this moment, the nightmare had finally ended; Hou Rui had finally eliminated General Garcia himself.

A long while later, having neither the heart nor the physical strength to clean up the aftermath, Hou Rui adopted the simplest method: burning the entire pile of corpses. He walked back to retrieve the armed pickup mounted with the 82mm mortar, drove it over, crushing the bodies scattered across the road, and parked it right beside the large SUV. Then, Hou Rui tossed a grenade into the ammunition box of mortar shells and sprinted rapidly into the distance.

*Boom! Boom!*

Three seconds later, a chain of explosions erupted behind Hou Rui. Soon, that stretch of road piled with corpses was engulfed in raging flames. Only then did Hou Rui feel completely relieved; he had finally completed the lonely task assigned by the organization.

Gazing at the hazy white sky in the distance, Hou Rui pulled out his phone and checked it. The screen displayed 4:11. Afterward, Hou Rui climbed into the armed pickup abandoned by the elite guards, skillfully turned the vehicle around on the road, and began driving toward Kismayo, where plumes of black smoke were rising in the distance. Before leaving this literal hell, Hou Rui had one more thing to do: he needed to pick up Little Camel, Judy, and the others so they could leave together.

Over an hour later, the armed pickup driven by Hou Rui returned to the outskirts of Kismayo. Seeing heavily armed Coalition soldiers standing guard everywhere looking as if facing an impending crisis, Hou Rui guessed that the US-led raid had ultimately failed. Judging by the vast areas of the city center still burning, it appeared that after his departure, the Coalition forces had deployed "Hail" multiple rocket launchers to annihilate the bulk of the joint forces, thereby retaking control of the city.

By this time, the news of General Garcia's death surely had not reached Kismayo yet, which meant Hou Rui's betrayal should still remain unexposed.

Following this simple reasoning, Hou Rui boldly chose to drive openly into the city center, heading straight to the battle zone where he had parted ways with Little Camel and the others, determined to search from the spot where they separated until he found them.

On the street where Hou Rui had abandoned the liquefied petroleum gas tanks, he quickly spotted Stone, who had been killed by a gunshot to the head. Without a word, Hou Rui lifted him up and placed him into the armed pickup.

Following the trail of dead Coalition soldiers along the route of the Coalition's retreat for two blocks, Hou Rui saw Little Yang's shoulder and head protruding from a pile of bricks by the roadside. She had been buried beneath a house collapsed by a rocket-propelled grenade. Looking at Little Yang's deep purple lips and the petechiae in her eyes, Hou Rui knew she had been suffocated to death after her chest was crushed.

Silently, Hou Rui dug out Little Yang's corpse as well, carried it to the pickup, and laid it side by side with Stone.

Continuing to drive forward, when Hou Rui reached the ruins of a temporary camp after a fierce battle, he discovered a large number of joint forces soldiers' corpses. Judging by the bullet holes on the houses and walls, along with the craters left by rocket explosions, Hou Rui estimated this must have been the temporary camp of the joint forces. However, they had suffered a ferocious attack by Coalition soldiers here, forcing them to abandon the camp and retreat.

After searching a circle with no results, just as Hou Rui was about to leave and continue his search elsewhere, his peripheral vision suddenly caught sight of a familiar pair of legs beneath the eaves of a building by the street! Grief flooding his heart, Hou Rui walked over and looked: leaning against the wall in the shadows was indeed Judy's corpse.

A quick glance at Judy's bruised and battered body allowed Hou Rui to roughly deduce what she had gone through before her death. Staring at Judy's hands—which had likely been severed because she resisted—Hou Rui's heart was filled with intense remorse. In order to pursue Garcia and complete the organization's mission, he had abandoned this girl, resulting in her tragic death here.

Removing his outer shirt, Hou Rui loaded Judy's corpse onto the pickup bed as well. He then turned back to search for Judy's severed hands, but after searching for an hour, he found nothing. The battlefield was simply too chaotic. In the end, Hou Rui had to abandon the search because daybreak had arrived, and time was running out before his exposure, while he still needed to find Little Camel.

Over the next two hours or so, Hou Rui drove the pickup through nearly all of Kismayo. During this time, he continuously inquired among the Coalition soldiers, but in the battle that had just concluded, hundreds of Coalition child soldiers had fallen on the battlefield; who would pay special attention to the whereabouts of a single child?

While searching for Little Camel, Hou Rui also witnessed dense masses of dead Coalition child soldiers, all killed by the gunfire of American ground-attack aircraft. Hou Rui spent a long time searching among the corpses, seeing far too many child bodies similar to Little Camel's, but regrettably, none of them were the person he was looking for.

Soon, noon approached, and the situation forced Hou Rui to delay no longer. Looking out over the shattered city, he silently whispered an apology in his heart, then drove the pickup out of the city. Before the Liberation Coalition learned of his betrayal, he needed to leave the country. Right now, he had to hurry and bury the corpses in the truck bed.