Chapter 402: Annihilation

With a flourish of her long sword, Abbess Miejing stabbed the policeman. In an instant, her sword pierced his chest, and blood splattered everywhere.

Her public act of murder threw the entire street into chaos. Hawkers and pedestrians scattered, and the shop assistants who had been watching the excitement from their doorways vanished.

A whistle suddenly blew sharply. Several plainclothes natives and naturalized citizens nearby drew their pistols and batons and rushed towards her.

“Die!” Having made her move, Abbess Miejing cast aside all thoughts of luck and attacked with all her might, shouting, “What are you waiting for? Let’s get them together!”

The other disciples and martial artists at her side drew their weapons. Caught off guard, several plainclothes policemen were stabbed and cut down in the close-quarters combat. Others fired their guns hastily. There were casualties on both sides. The scene instantly descended into a chaotic mess of smoke and confusion.

Abbess Miejing’s new opponent, however, was quite skilled. He didn’t panic in the sudden chaos, but leaped back a step, dodging her fatal blow, though the net cap on his head was swept off by the wind of her sword.

“Good swordsmanship, good skills. So you’re from the Hengshan Sect! Let me, ‘Jiang Jieshi of the Forest-Piercing Northern Legs,’ test you!”

The plainclothes policeman took a deep breath, his presence swelling, his gaze sharp. A short baton slid from his sleeve and, with a flick, extended into a three-section staff, which he swung towards Abbess Miejing’s lower body. For a moment, sand and stones flew. Abbess Miejing was startled, thinking to herself, So there are such people among the Aussies! They must be dregs of the martial world!

She was highly skilled and experienced. She leaped over the attack and, with a series of a dozen or so sword flourishes, stabbed at her opponent, forcing Jiang Jieshi to retreat repeatedly. While fending off her attacks with his baton, he raised the whistle to his lips and blew several sharp blasts.

The heroes, with their superior numbers, quickly dispatched the few plainclothesmen. Although they had lost several of their own, the remaining members’ morale was greatly boosted. So the Aussies’ firearms are nothing special after all. As long as we engage them in close combat, they are no match for us.

One of them, caught up in the thrill of the kill, shouted, “Kill the Aussie scoundrels—” Suddenly, there was a loud bang. A cloud of thick smoke erupted from a window along the street. A dozen lead balls hit him squarely, and seven or eight bloody holes instantly appeared on his body from head to toe. He collapsed to the ground, his limbs twitching, clearly not long for this world.

“Senior Brother!” a young girl among the heroes cried out in grief and rushed to the corpse, weeping.

“Junior Sister Lanhui, don’t cry. We must avenge Junior Brother by killing the Aussie scoundrels!” another young disciple said, standing beside her with his sword drawn, his expression righteous. “The dead cannot be brought back to life! Junior Sister, please restrain your grief. I will kill a few more Aussie scoundrels—”

Before he could finish his sentence, there was another loud bang. Half of his skull, mixed with blood and brain matter, flew into the air. Blood and brains splattered all over Junior Sister Lanhui, causing her to scream in terror. Her body went limp, and she fainted.

Abbess Miejing cursed these disciples from minor sects as useless. In that instant of rapid attacks, she had already forced Jiang Jieshi into a desperate defense. His police uniform was torn and cut in several places, and blood was flowing freely. He was clearly on the verge of collapse.

However, at this moment, the sound of whistles filled the street. The pedestrians were gone. The sound of hurried footsteps was everywhere. In a moment, policemen in black uniforms appeared at both ends of the street.

“It’s a trap!” Abbess Miejing was horrified. The Aussies were prepared for this. They set a trap for us to walk into! In that moment of distraction, Jiang Jieshi rolled away, covering a distance of three or four zhang. He didn’t care about his disheveled appearance and turned to run.

“Where do you think you’re going, you dog!” someone shouted, about to give chase.

Abbess Miejing shouted, “Don’t pursue! The Aussies are strong. We must leave first!”

“Drop your weapons! Hands on your heads, kneel! Or you will be shot on sight!” With the deafening shout, the policemen on both sides of the street gradually closed in. In the front were men with rattan shields and helmets, armed with a mix of long and short batons. Behind them were men with double-barreled police shotguns. They advanced slowly to the beat of a drum, their steps in perfect unison, pressing forward like a wall.

The heroes’ faces turned pale. They were best at single combat, but the Aussies’ firearms were powerful and had already killed or wounded several of them in an instant. If they were to fight head-on, they would likely be annihilated.

“To the roofs!” Abbess Miejing brandished her sword. “As long as the green hills remain, there will be no lack of firewood! Go!”

Pan Jiexin was observing the situation on the street from the roof of a nearby tall building with a pair of binoculars. This area was close to the stadium, so the command headquarters had deployed heavy forces, including police, special agents, and a riot control team. The Special Reconnaissance Team had also placed snipers in various locations along the street.

To be honest, he was not very satisfied with the reaction and coordination of the police, special agents, and the Special Reconnaissance Team today. It felt like they were always a step behind.

“This professional level, this tactical quality…” Pan Jiexin couldn’t help but grumble to himself.

He was dissatisfied with two things: first, the plainclothes police force’s on-site command was clearly flawed. The enemy had more than twenty people, while his side only had about ten people responsible for surveillance in the vicinity. Most of the men were on standby at a distance. As a result, when the first arrest team encountered resistance, their reinforcements were weak. Not only did they fail to capture anyone, but their own team was wiped out.

Second, the reaction of the support personnel on the roofs and in the shops was too slow. By the time they reacted, the arrest team and the enemy were already in a melee, and they couldn’t provide timely fire support.

Fortunately, they still had the overall advantage and quickly turned the situation around. It seemed the enemy was trying to retreat.

“This is too amateurish, not at all like I imagined,” Pan Jiexin muttered as he watched. This time, his complaint was directed at the heroes.

It was understandable that the heroes were powerless against the firearms; the weapon disparity was too great. But what was this about them climbing the eaves one by one? Shouldn’t they be able to leap onto the roofs in a single bound? Why did they have to grab the eaves first and then pull themselves up? If that was considered lightness skill, then parkour practitioners had much better lightness skill than them…

Of course, even from a modern perspective, their movements were agile and their muscles were strong. The problem was that it didn’t match the “flying over eaves and walking on walls” impression Pan Jiexin had gotten from wuxia stories.

Thick smoke erupted from the roofs and windows on both sides of the street from time to time, and the sound of gunfire was incessant. The heroes attempting to climb onto the roofs were shot and fell to the ground one after another. Someone tried to rush into a shop to clear out the musketeers, only to be met with a volley of buckshot and left dead on the spot.

“This is not very entertaining. The fight between Jiang Jieshi and the old nun was more interesting…” Pan Jiexin shook his head and lowered his binoculars. He had lost interest in watching.

Seeing that they couldn’t get onto the roofs, and with lead balls still being fired from the shops on both sides, the surviving heroes were forced to hide behind the market stalls on the street, not daring to show their heads. Yet they were still being picked off by the snipers on the roofs, their bodies littering the street. The two walls of policemen were slowly closing in, and the shops and roofs were filled with musketeers, firing deadly shots from time to time. Even lying still, it was hard to escape death… There was truly no way to heaven and no door to hell. Looking at the street full of corpses, the original group of more than twenty people had been reduced to only five or six gathered around Abbess Miejing. The sound of the drums seemed to beat on their hearts.

Suddenly, the drums and gunfire stopped.

The electric megaphone blared again: “Listen up, you inside! You have five minutes to drop your weapons and come out into the middle of the street one by one with your hands up!”

“Abbess…”

“Say no more!” Abbess Miejing said. “It has come to this. We can only seek life in death. Let’s fight our way out together. For every one that gets out, it’s a victory!” she said righteously. “Even if we can’t fight our way out, we’ll fight to our heart’s content! And leave behind a heroic name!” With that, she charged forward with her sword.

But her arm was grabbed. She looked back and saw that the few survivors were all pale-faced, their morning’s bravado completely gone. A few even had a malicious glint in their eyes. Abbess Miejing was furious. “What are you doing?!”

One of them said, “Abbess, if you want to die, we won’t stop you. But we still want to live. If you charge out, the Aussies will open fire, and none of us will survive…”

Lanhui, who had just been revived, also said with tears in her eyes, “Abbess, as long as the green hills remain, there will be no lack of firewood. I think, we, we… should…”

Before the word “surrender” could be spoken, the electric megaphone shouted again: “Time’s up! If you don’t come out now, we will open fire!” The shotguns behind the rattan shields were all leveled. The dark muzzles were all aimed at the few people in the middle of the street.

Abbess Miejing sneered, leaped into the middle of the street, and charged towards the shield wall with her sword.

Mu Min had already received a phone call. The terrorists disguised as female students had been captured in the plaza. At the same time, another group of terrorists had been eliminated on the street near the stadium.

“…Also captured in the plaza were three women and one man. Another man was killed by a Special Reconnaissance Team sniper while setting off a signal rocket, and one man was killed while resisting arrest. They were all wearing naturalized citizen clothing. Weapons were found on the suspects and the deceased, and some were carrying throwing darts,” Zhou Shizhai reported over the phone. “The Security Army and uniformed police have now sealed off the entire plaza and are checking identification papers one by one.”

“…A total of ten terrorists were killed on the street, and another six were arrested. We lost four police officers, and one was seriously injured.”

“Very good. What’s the status of the people on the list the Political Security Bureau gave you?”

“We are currently comparing the bodies and prisoners. It seems the number of people captured does not match the number on the list. We’re about halfway there.”

Mu Min shook the phone once, then twice. “Connect me to Wu Mu’s office!”

In his office, Wu Mu silently looked at the latest phone records sent by the communications officer. The arrest at the Qiong’an Inn was over. The group of enemies who had stayed behind at the inn had failed to set a fire and were all killed while trying to break out.

Another group of enemies who were preparing to carry out sabotage in Dongmen Market had also been eliminated in time. Most of them had now been annihilated, with only a few taken prisoner.