Song Lili smelled the smoke and immediately held her breath. In an instant, the underground base was overwhelmed with thick smoke, obscuring all visibility... She saw the few who had stayed behind begin to panic and lose composure.
In the fog, a figure leaped down from above, a silenced gun followed the aim of the infrared sight, and took out the villains one by one.
"Cough, cough—cough cough cough!"
Song Lili couldn’t hold her breath any longer, inadvertently inhaled a gulp of air, and instantly her coughing bouts became unstoppable.
Suddenly, a protective mask was placed over her face.
The next second, she was picked up. The person acted swiftly and efficiently, with agile movements, dressed in a military uniform with...Xilin’s emblem on it.
He strapped a rescue vest on her, with one rescue rope hooked to his waist and two others on his shoulders. Song Lili instinctively held on to him with all the strength she had.
The man climbed up the rope that they had descended from...
Song Lili lay on his shoulder, wearing the protective mask, her vision blurred, and as they gradually left the ground, she vaguely saw one of the figures on the ground that had fallen start to get up and aim a gun at them—
Before she could even make a sound to warn him, the man had already fired his gun.
The person she was clinging to noticeably flinched... He had been shot.
At the same time, the man on the ground was shot again.
The man rescuing Song Lili carried her through the hole that had been blasted open. To her surprise, there was no military presence outside the hole, no additional soldiers.
Had he come to save her alone...?
After he brought her out, he did not linger; he nearly ran with her in his arms toward a concealed direction in the village.
His leg was injured; his steps were uneven.
Gunshots could be heard not far away, making it easy to imagine that Duan Shen and the military personnel had encountered each other.
She was taken deep into the woods, where the man finally set her down and removed the protective mask from her face.
Song Lili’s eyes and throat were irritated, tears streaming out, and she kept coughing.
The man took gauze and clean water from the bag behind him, and after wiping her face, she felt a bit relieved.
Song Lili looked at the man—he wore a mask over his face, exposing only his eyes, which she could not clearly see even their outlines under the dark night...
"Who are you...?" she asked, moving her lips.
The man did not answer her, instead busily taking out medical supplies from his backpack. Song Lili saw that his uniform bore the emblem of the Xilin Military Region, but it was very different from those she had seen at the campus during the day.
Not just that, the man’s gear seemed overly abundant.
Without a word, he pressed his hand up her leg to her thigh, where Song Lili let out a sharp scream, biting down hard from the pain.
He quickly cut open her trousers with scissors and paused a moment upon seeing the purple swelling on her thigh, then gently applied some ointment.
Continuing up her leg and onto her abdomen, Song Lili winced in pain again...
Then came the purple swelling on her shoulder blade.
"Your leg is shot..." Song Lili observed the blood darkening his trousers.
The man simply lowered his head, packed up the medical supplies, glanced at her, and walked away.
Song Lili had been saved without clear understanding; from beginning to end, the man had not uttered even an interjection.
"What’s your name? Which unit of the military region are you from? You..."
Song Lili watched as the man disappeared into the night, the trail marked by blood dripping from his leg.