23: Chapter 23: The Three Top Beauties of Jiangcheng Meet!

The car door opened.

Shen Wanxing poked half her head out, her gaze crossing over Chen Chen's shoulder to meet eyes that were colder than blades.

"Xiaoxue?"

This exclamation slipped out before Shen Wanxing even realized it.

Jiang Yanxue's feet were nailed to the spot.

She clearly saw the people inside the carriage—Shen Wanxing was wrapped in a man's black windbreaker, her hair disheveled, cheeks flushed, sitting on a brand-new hard bed.

Further ahead, in the passenger seat, Shen Wanbing was draped in a blanket, turned sideways. Her high-end professional attire was torn in several places, and while she still maintained her icy expression, the exhaustion in her eyes could not be hidden.

Jiangcheng Noble Girls' School, Class of 2007.

The three of them had sat in the same classroom for three years. But in those three years, the total number of words exchanged between them didn't exceed ten sentences.

The Shen sisters were at the pinnacle of Jiangcheng's orthodox business world; Shen Wanbing was the student council president, and Shen Wanxing was the school beauty and the center of the choir, surrounded by flowers and applause wherever she went.

And she, Jiang Yanxue, was the daughter of the Black Dragon Society's leader.

If they met in the school hallway, they would at most nod at each other.

After graduation, they went their separate ways: one steering a hundred-billion-dollar conglomerate, one dominating entertainment trending topics, and one taking over an underground kingdom.

Every year at the top charity gala in Jiangcheng, they would raise their glasses from across the banquet hall, not even bothering with pleasantries.

These three women, who would never have appeared in the same car in their entire lives, were now squeezed into a tin box, staring blankly at each other.

Jiang Yanxue's gaze moved from Shen Wanxing to Shen Wanbing, then back to Shen Wanxing again.

Finally, it landed on Chen Chen's back.

When Shen Wanxing called her "Xiaoxue," there was no social pleasantry in her tone; it carried a natural intimacy that only comes after being protected by someone—

Not intimacy toward her, Jiang Yanxue, but a conditioned reflex toward "one of their own."

Shen Wanbing sat in the passenger seat without moving, but her body was slightly turned, facing not Jiang Yanxue, but Chen Chen.

As if confirming his attitude.

These two women—one the helm of a hundred-billion-dollar conglomerate, the other a national idol with over a hundred million followers online.

In Jiangcheng, they were the center of attention wherever they went.

Now, their focus was entirely on the same man.

What on earth was this man?

His individual strength was freakishly high, a point she had just verified with her own body—

He had carried her while slaughtering his way through over thirty rampaging Aberrants, his heart rate as steady as if he were taking a stroll.

But what made her scalp tingle even more was that he had actually managed to keep both Shen sisters under his control.

That person, Shen Wanbing—when she was student council president, all the male teachers in the school combined couldn't suppress her.

Now, she was sitting obediently in the passenger seat, waiting for this man to make the call.

No time was given for reminiscing.

The commotion coming from the distance shattered the brief silence.

It wasn't the roar of one or two monsters, but the shrieks of dozens of throats simultaneously, overlapping. The sound wave rolled up from the ground, making even the gravel under their feet tremble.

The scent of blood from the military factory had spread too far in the night wind.

Those Aberrants scattered within a few kilometers had their bloodthirsty instincts triggered by the scent and were gathering from all directions.

In the goggles, dense, dark red thermal signals were closing in.

A small-scale horde.

"Save the reminiscing for after we survive."

Chen Chen slapped Jiang Yanxue on the back, pushing her into the carriage.

Before she could steady herself, he had already strode into the driver's seat, slamming the armored car door shut behind him.

He reached his hand out of the window, retrieving the mental shielding device hovering above the car roof into his storage space.

The moment the shielding field vanished.

The horde's advance speed surged—the RV's thermal signal exploded in the monsters' perception, and dozens of red-eyed Aberrants turned simultaneously, sprinting toward this direction at full speed.

He inserted the key into the lock and turned it to the right.

The level five RV's C-class turbo engine woke from its slumber, the exhaust pipe spewing two jets of scorching air, scorching the sand behind the car into a layer of charred black.

Chen Chen shifted gears and floored the accelerator.

Seven point eight tons.

Launch start.

The all-terrain tires spun wildly on the gravel surface for half a turn before biting into the road. The car body lurched forward violently, and the acceleration threw Jiang Yanxue, who hadn't sat steadily in the carriage, directly onto the metal floor.

The heavy-duty RV surged out from the cover of the rock pillars, meeting the surrounding horde head-on.

The inverted V-shaped serrated bumper on the front, thickened to double its size, slammed into the dense crowd of monsters at ninety kilometers per hour.

The first row of Aberrants didn't even have time to scream—the serrated edges sliced through their gray-purple bodies, and the immense kinetic energy flung the severed limbs to both sides.

Their bones were no different from cookie crumbs in front of the steel plate, and their flesh was smeared onto the armor plating, ground into pulp by the tires.

A continuous dull thudding came from under the car, the entire vehicle bouncing and jolting over the pile of corpses.

The windshield was splattered with black blood, and the wipers were set to the highest speed, clearing two fan-shaped gaps of vision.

The second row, the third row, the fourth row.

The steel beast plowed a straight, bloody path through the sea of corpses in the most primitive way.

Jiang Yanxue climbed up from the floor, gripping the window frame to look outside.

Outside the metal protective mesh were faces after faces being crushed.

Gray-purple skin, bulging veins, fangs, and sharp claws—in front of this RV, they were all paper-thin.

Rampaging Aberrants with a 50% boost to all attributes at night.

They were no different from trash bags run over by a truck.

Her palms were sweating.

A wave of lingering fear.

She had been trapped in that military factory for an entire day, relying on her SS-rank talent to control low-level Aberrants as sentries, and surviving with a dulled machete and three daggers.

During that time, she had killed eleven low-level monsters and almost had her neck bitten off by that mutant dog.

And this man, driving this tin beast, hadn't even let up on the accelerator once.

Breaking through the encirclement.

The RV turned onto a branch road, its speed continuing to climb.

In the rearview mirror, the monsters that couldn't keep up grew smaller and smaller, their roars drowned out by the engine's roar, eventually submerged in the wind and sand.

Shaken off.

The tense air inside the carriage loosened a bit.

Shen Wanxing let out a long breath, releasing the corner of the blanket she had been clutching, the white marks on her ten fingers slowly turning red.

Chen Chen maintained cruising speed as he pushed forward.

The high beams swept across the road ahead—

He stepped on the brake.

Right in the middle of the road, a silver-gray Wuling Hongguang was parked there.

The car wasn't turned off, and the taillights were on.

But the car was shaking violently at an extremely unnatural frequency, the shock absorbers emitting squeaking groans, accompanied by the sounds coming from inside the cabin—

That was not the roar of an Aberrant.

It was the sound of humans.

And there were two of them.

Chen Chen frowned, raising his hand to press the modified high-pitched horn.

"Woooo—"

The horn sounded far across the empty wilderness.

The Wuling Hongguang's shaking stopped for two seconds.

The driver's side window rolled down, and a shirtless young man, holding a disheveled girl, poked half his body out, his face full of irritation at having his good time interrupted.

"Honk your mother's horn! Can't you see I'm busy—!"

He was halfway through cursing when the high beams hit his face, and he squinted to look behind him.

A few hundred meters behind the RV, the horde that had been shaken off hadn't completely dispersed.

A dark, dense mass, with red eyes, was chasing along the direction of the road.

The speed at which the young man's expression changed was an industry benchmark—from irate red to deathly pale, taking only 0.3 seconds.

"F*ck, f*ck, f*ck, f*ck, f*ck—"

He ducked back in, his pants pulled up halfway and stuck at his hips, frantically starting the car and shifting gears.

The Wuling Hongguang's engine gagged twice before turning over, tires spinning as it swerved out, the tail end whipping three or four times, nearly flipping into a ditch.

The girl was still pulling at her clothes in the passenger seat.

In the back of the cabin, Shen Wanxing watched the Wuling Hongguang fleeing like a twisting pretzel, and the nerves she had kept taut all night snapped.

She covered her mouth and laughed out loud, laughing until she curled into the blanket, her shoulders heaving.

Jiang Yanxue's mouth twitched, and she turned her head away, her ears a bit red—she didn't know if it was because the scene was too stupid, or because she had remembered something.

Even Shen Wanbing rarely looked away, using the back of her hand to cover her mouth.

Chen Chen glanced at the rearview mirror.

The two taillights of the Wuling Hongguang swayed crookedly in the dark night, with a large group of red-eyed monsters chasing behind.

"If this guy can survive tonight, he probably won't dare to park in the middle of the road again."