Chapter 91: Camping (7)

Lily continued her account: “About ten minutes after Dan, Hans, and Christina left, they came back once with the axe, hunting rifle, bow and arrows, and shields. Dan said the hunting rifle in the manager’s office was just a decoration—it had no bullets. But they found a map of the area, which could be used to locate nearby houses to borrow bullets or even a car directly.”

“We tried to convince them to stay put, but by then it had already been more than an hour since you left. They waited a while, but didn’t see you return. Plus, we didn’t have a satellite phone, so there was no way to get any information. Dan thought we had been abandoned, so he decided to take matters into his own hands and seek help from nearby households. Dan and Hans are real-life shooting game enthusiasts; they’re good with guns in the game, and figured that if they could get bullets or firearms, even the killer wouldn’t stand a chance. Christina went with them. The three of them only left this for us,” Lily said, pointing to the wooden shield Molly was holding.

So that’s where it had come from—Dan and the others had left it behind.

Everly cast her gaze toward the path they had taken and asked, “How long ago did they leave?”

“Almost twenty minutes.”

Everly nodded.

If these three weren’t dead, they should be back in about ten more minutes.

So, should they wait here for them?

Everly’s answer was no.

The two groups had only met by chance; neither owed the other anything. Everly, as the one who had promised, had kept her word and returned with the fuses. Dan and his group had chosen to stop trusting her, so whatever happened afterward was their own responsibility.

Moreover, according to the Blood Camp series films, the more people Gary kills, the stronger he becomes. Everly recalled a movie commentary by an uploader who mentioned that the earliest Gary hadn’t yet donned his iconic ceramic mask. He liked to sneak around in a doll’s head costume, ambushing anyone who was alone. His style relied on surprise attacks, though occasionally, against particularly strong opponents, he would take a couple of hits himself.

By the time the latest installments in the series came out, he had evolved to the point where even grenades couldn’t pierce his skin. Although Gary still liked to lurk in the shadows and kill quietly, it was mostly for scare effect; he no longer avoided confrontations simply because there were too many people. The same uploader even joked that it was precisely because Gary was portrayed so powerfully that, in the sixth installment, he was brought to other film sets to battle the bosses of other horror movies…

From this, it was clear: if all five of the people who had left were killed by Gary, his abilities would increase dramatically. Everly didn’t want to gamble on that.

So she took the fuses she had bought and went to each of the four cars, opening the doors and placing the corresponding fuse on the dashboard of each vehicle. For ease of repair, all four cars were left unlocked. If the five returned alive, they would at least see the fuses she had bought.

As for the actual installation—that would be up to them. Everly didn’t have time for that.

While placing the last fuse, her hand trembled, and she accidentally knocked a small ornament off the dashboard.

She bent down to pick it up when she suddenly heard a sharp, slicing sound in the air.

“Whoosh! Whoosh whoosh!”

“Duck!”

Old John’s shout reached her. From her prior training, Everly had conditioned reflexes—upon hearing the command, she instinctively brought her hands over her head and curled her body into the space between the steering wheel and the car seat.

“Clang!”

Just as she got down, a lethal arrow pierced the windshield at the front of the car, slanting with unstoppable force and embedding itself into the nearby seat cushion.

It was one of the arrows from the archery range!

“Whoosh whoosh! Whoosh whoosh whoosh!”

The first arrow had merely been a teaser. Missing its target, it was immediately followed by seven or eight more arrows shot from a nearby hillside. Each one had a different release point, but all landed with deadly precision, aiming straight for the corner of the parking lot where the group had gathered—each arrow intent on taking a life.

To avoid being hit by the arrows, Everly had no choice but to curl herself down even further, compressing her body into a flattened ball.

She shouldn’t have had to be this desperate. The trees around the parking lot were sparse, and the cars were parked close to the recreational area. From the forest edge to the lot was at least a hundred meters.

At that distance, even with long-range archery, killing someone would be difficult. Take the camping range’s standard bows, for example—the arrows they provide have an effective lethal range of about 80 meters. Beyond that, the kinetic energy drops sharply, and penetration power diminishes. Even if an arrow struck a person, it would likely only scratch the skin—and that assumes the target doesn’t move or dodge.

Yet these arrows were fired from nearly 120 meters up the hillside and still pierced the windshield, embedding deeply into the seat cushions. This clearly indicated that the archer’s strength far exceeded that of a normal human, and the bow itself had likely been modified.

Everly suspected that Gary, through continuous killings, had greatly enhanced his physical abilities.

Those disobedient people who had run off earlier had probably all become nothing more than a “full-strength tonic” fueling the killer’s growth.

Truly a group of people good for nothing but making things worse!

“Everly, everyone else, find a place to hide! That person is in the woods on the hill—I’ll take him down!”

Seeing the arrows raining down endlessly, with no sign of stopping, Old John shouted and turned to the back seat to retrieve a rectangular case.

Inside was a black sniper rifle with a scope—Old John’s prized AWM sniper, commonly called the “Super Magnum.” Its power and range ranked among the top snipers; it could maintain devastating force even beyond 1,300 meters, making it a true sniper’s weapon of legend.

The jeep had been modified by Old John, with the body and all the glass made from bulletproof materials—strong and nearly indestructible. Old John angled the vehicle so that the windows faced the hillside, then rolled one down just enough to tilt the gun barrel through the opening. Peering through the scope, he scanned the hillside for the enemy.

The archer was clearly skilled and, to avoid being spotted, kept moving through the trees, changing positions with every shot.

Huddled behind the glass, Old John’s eyes were like a hawk’s, locking onto that section of the hillside. The moment a new arrow was released, he moved the barrel, instantly locking onto the area, and squeezed the trigger—

“Bang!”

A 0.338-inch Magnum bullet spun rapidly out of the barrel, tearing through the bushes along its path and striking a flash of a white-masked figure.

Bad luck—it only hit the enemy’s arm.

The masked figure was hit, and the arrows from the hillside momentarily stopped.

Seizing the opportunity, Everly bolted from her hiding spot inside the wrecked car. She had only taken a couple of steps when “whoosh whoosh” rang out again—Gary above had already regained his mobility!

With no other option, Everly crouched low and, along with the other three, ducked behind another nearby car.

Inside the jeep, Old John adjusted the gun and continued aiming.

The pattern was clear: each arrow fired was followed by the archer moving to a new hiding spot. What Old John needed to do was find that new position in the brief moment after one arrow had been shot and before the next was released, and take a shot en route—creating a window for the four outside to scramble into the car safely. Now was that moment.

As a new arrow was released and the surrounding bushes trembled with the archer’s movement, Old John’s reflexes were lightning-fast. He pulled the trigger immediately.

“Bang!”

Another bullet shot out of the window. At that exact moment, an arrow came flying from a completely different direction, far from the bullet’s impact point. It sliced through the air with a sharp whistle, and in the blink of an eye, it reached the front of the vehicle. The slender shaft squeezed through the narrow two-finger-wide gap in the window and shot straight into the jeep.

—Gary had used a feint; he hadn’t gone anywhere near that patch of bushes!

The arrow was about to strike Misha, who was hiding in the passenger seat. At the critical moment, Old John put down the sniper rifle and pressed the girl down onto the seat cushion. She narrowly avoided the deadly shot.

But in doing so, Old John’s right arm was injured—the arrow pinned his entire arm to the seat frame.

“Ugh…”

He was old, after all, and such a severe injury made cold sweat break out on his forehead.

Yet now was far from the time to relax. After that first sneaky shot, Gary changed positions and fired a second arrow at the car through the window gap.

By the story’s setup, he had only just escaped his mother’s dungeon and should have been handling a bow for the first time. Yet his aim was impossibly precise. No wonder in her previous life people ranked him among the top four killers in film history—he was a born killer!

The arrowhead lodged deep into the metal frame of the seat, leaving Old John’s arm immobile. Before he could pull it out and free his arm, he had no strength left to snipe Gary on the hillside.

As a new arrow was about to fly, Old John gritted his teeth and, using the only hand he could still move, pulled back the sniper barrel stuck in the window gap. He pressed the button and rolled the car window up.

“Clang! Clang!”

The incoming arrows struck the hard bulletproof glass, sending out sharp metallic sounds. With the interior temporarily safe, Old John turned to attend to the injury on his arm as quickly as possible.

In the brief few seconds when both sides were sniping at each other, Everly used the wooden shield as cover and rolled from behind the sedan to the rear of the jeep.

She cautiously raised the shield—“thud thud thud”—and the incoming arrows seemed to lock onto it like a magnet, rattling the wood so hard that her palms went numb. In mere moments, the fragile shield was riddled with holes, on the verge of splintering completely.

Before the shield could be destroyed, Everly sprang up and quickly grabbed a heavy, reinforced case from the back of the jeep. She crouched behind the vehicle for cover, opened the case, and pulled out a long, army-green tube-like weapon. She removed the front and rear covers, hoisted it onto her right shoulder, pressed her right eye against the mechanical sight, and took a deep breath.

One… two… three—!

At the count of three, Everly threw her jacket outward, using it to momentarily distract Gary’s attention. In that split second, she rolled into the open, dropped to one knee, and firmly braced the rocket launcher on her shoulder. She aimed at the hillside from which the arrows were raining down and pressed the trigger.

“Go to hell!” Her eyes were blood-red as she let out a furious roar toward the hill.

“Boom!”

With a deafening blast that could have shattered eardrums, thick smoke and fire erupted from both ends of the army-green launcher. The massive 1.8-kilogram rocket soared in a gentle arc through the air and landed precisely on the hillside where the arrows had been fired.

“Boom—crash!”

The violent explosion lit up the entire hillside in a flash of intense fire.

—The M72 LAW light anti-tank rocket launcher had a maximum effective range of 200 meters and could penetrate 200 millimeters of armor. Once the fuze triggered, its Octol explosive would produce a metal jet at 3000°C, capable of destroying light tanks, armored vehicles, and even buildings.

This was the trump card that Everly and Old John had brought for this mission.