With a loud "thud," the bus shook, and then, as if injected with stimulants, it rushed forward even faster.
At the same time, Zhou Ziwei stood on the roof of the car, coldly snorted, and said, "Cars in front, get out of the way. If you don't, I... I'm going to lose my temper."
Zhou Ziwei's words were as if he were sending the other party's words back to him, except that he changed the word "fire" to "get angry." The voice inside the armored vehicle on the other side, which was about to speak again to persuade him, couldn't help but burst out laughing.
The laughter was crisp and sweet, almost like that of a mischievous girl.
Zhou Ziwei was slightly taken aback, but then he didn't take it to heart. In his eyes, he was now at odds with the entire military of the United States, and the only two sides were soldiers. As for whether the soldiers the other side sent were men or women, it didn't matter to Zhou Ziwei.
"Listen up, everyone in the bus..." The clear female voice rang out again after less than five seconds of silence, saying, "You are completely surrounded. Please stop the bus and surrender immediately. If you don't get off and surrender within five seconds... you will bear the consequences!"
"Five, four, three, two, one... Fire!" As the countdown ended, the crisp voice suddenly gave a somewhat helpless shout, and the machine guns on the two armored vehicles opposite immediately opened fire, firing a series of whistling bullets.
However, the other side clearly did not intend to kill Zhou Ziwei and the others directly, so this round of bullets were all fired at extremely low angles, but were aimed at the tires of the bus.
Zhou Ziwei snorted coldly, naturally not allowing the wheels to be blown up. He immediately spread his hands, and wisps of water vapor appeared in the air. These water vapors quickly condensed into one, like all rivers flowing into the sea, and then coalesced into small water arrows, each three inches long. With a light wave of his sleeve, the water arrows that had condensed in the air in front of him immediately streaked across the sky, directly meeting the barrage of bullets aimed at the wheels.
Machine gun bullets, even in a single instant, can fire dozens of bullets. And Zhou Ziwei, as if he had made an agreement with them, managed to conjure up the exact same number of water arrows as the two machine guns firing at the exact same moment the machine guns opened fire. One water arrow matched one bullet perfectly, without exception.
Could a small arrow made of water vapor really withstand the powerful bullets fired from a machine gun?
Zhou Ziwei absorbed water vapor using water energy, but it was ultimately impossible to solidify it like water taken directly from a river. Therefore, the condensed water arrows were somewhat ethereal and unreliable. However, Zhou Ziwei was not confident that he could completely withstand these small water arrows.
So Zhou Ziwei decided to be unconventional. With a thought, he suddenly clenched his fist in mid-air and uttered a single word: "凝!"
With a "whoosh," countless tiny water jets collided with the string of bullets, instantly deforming the water jets as if they were dough.
Just as the water arrow, nearly destroyed by the impact, was about to dissipate, Zhou Ziwei suddenly had a thought. Almost instantly, his soul consciousness, which had permeated almost every water molecule, made a sudden change. Using water energy as a medium, he abruptly altered the spacing between the water molecules, naturally turning the water arrow into clusters of ice balls. And within each ice ball, without exception, a bullet was encased.
When water melts into ice, a large amount of heat energy is released outward the instant the ice is formed. However, this heat energy released from the water does not flow outward. Instead, under Zhou Ziwei's deliberate guidance, it begins to rush inward rapidly. Surprisingly, this inexplicably appearing energy completely negates the momentum that was already largely neutralized by the appearance of the water arrow.
"Crackling..." A series of crisp sounds came, and just a dozen meters in front of the bus, hundreds of bullets frozen in ice beads fell to the ground. Not a single bullet escaped and flew to the front of the bus.
Silence... In the entire area in front of the dock, apart from the planes circling and roaring overhead, everyone who witnessed the scene was utterly horrified.
This time, Zhou Ziwei no longer tried to hide his amazing abilities. He had come to realize that there would always be some people in the world who were self-righteous and thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that they were the center of the Earth, as if it were a heinous crime that the sun did not revolve around them.
As for those who are so arrogant and ignorant, you can only use a method that far exceeds their capabilities, or a miracle that they can never understand, to give them a severe blow, and only then might they understand how high the sky is and how thick the earth is.
Gathering air into water, transforming water into arrows, and freezing the arrows into ice—each step of this process was astonishing. However, Zhou Ziwei's speed was so fast that, despite the thousands of people watching, very few could see his movements. Everyone felt as if Zhou Ziwei was performing magic from beginning to end.
However, no one saw the magic of Zhou Ziwei's movements, but almost everyone could clearly see the hundreds of shiny ice beads that enveloped each bullet head shining brightly in the sunlight.
The fact that hundreds of bullets fired were shot down mid-flight was witnessed by everyone.
If they hadn't witnessed this incredible event firsthand, they would never have believed it, even if they were beaten to death. But now... even after seeing it with their own eyes, they still couldn't quite believe it because... in that very short moment, the ice balls wrapped in bullet casings that had fallen to the ground had mysteriously floated back up.
The originally round ice balls suddenly transformed into new shapes under the sunlight, as if each ice ball had become a cute little angel, with a pair of transparent, water-like ice wings growing from the angel's back.
Each of the hundreds of ice-sculpted angels had swallowed a gleaming bullet, then floated in mid-air, like a beautiful, poetic dream, inspiring a sense of awe.
Volume 3, King of the City, Chapter 559: The Big Bang
After injecting some water energy back into the ice balls that had been frozen with a bullet, Zhou Ziwei suddenly discovered that although the essence of the matter did not change after the water turned into ice, only its form of existence changed, this subtle change in form also caused the water energy injected into it to be subtly affected, and then undergo subtle and indescribable changes.
When water turns into ice, it loses its original formless flexibility but gains a cold and hard feeling. The water energy infused into it also becomes ambiguous, losing its original characteristics but giving rise to many new sensations... So this is what ice energy is like.
Zhou Ziwei's eyes lit up, and a sudden realization dawned on him.
Although he was able to freeze water into ice in an instant, that was only by using knowledge of physics and chemistry, taking the breakthrough of water energy penetrating into the microscopic world of each water molecule, and changing the distance between water molecules in one fell swoop, which turned water into ice.
It can be said that Zhou Ziwei was only using scientific knowledge at that moment, but he did not have a deep understanding of the fundamental properties of ice. Only after personally experiencing the entire process of water energy naturally transforming into ice energy did he finally gain a deeper understanding of ice energy.
It was precisely because of this new understanding that Zhou Ziwei was able to change the shape of the ice blocks that had originally turned into ice balls at will, making each one like an angel, with pairs of wings.
Water has no fixed shape, but ice does. Once ice is shaped, it is difficult to change it. Water can transform into arrows, which can be shot into the air, but they often only have the power of a single strike and no source of follow-up, so their power is often very limited.
By giving ice a normal shape, it can possess other kinds of energy that water cannot withstand, such as wind...
Wings grew on the ice hockey puck, and with each flap, the power of the wind was naturally generated.
Originally, the wind energy generated by those tiny wings, which were smaller than a small bird, was quite limited. However, it gave Zhou Ziwei a way to help. He then used the wind energy to push the previously stagnant speed back to its limit...
"Whoosh whoosh whoosh—" Under the astonished gazes of the onlookers, the ice balls that had frozen a bullet suddenly seemed to transform into angels and grow wings. In the blink of an eye, they merely flapped their transparent wings and immediately turned into streaks of light, suddenly scattering away like celestial maidens scattering flowers, flying in all directions.
As the puck flies, it experiences friction due to air resistance. Gradually, the originally round front end is vaporized and dissipates. After flying only a short distance, it has already lost about one-third of its volume.
However, it was precisely because of the loss of this third of its volume that these spherical ice balls eventually transformed into cone shapes.
Then... one after another, sharp ice spikes suddenly shot into the bodies of those armored vehicles and troop carriers.
Zhou Ziwei was now truly enraged and determined to give these American devils a taste of their own medicine, so this time he had no intention of showing any mercy.
It's just a few hundred bullets. Even if Zhou Ziwei freezes these hundreds of bullets with ice, it's unlikely to kill many people directly. If each bullet kills one person, it would only kill a few hundred people.
However, the number of M troops constantly pouring in at the scene must have reached at least several thousand, or even close to ten thousand, in a short period of time.
Injuring only a few hundred people at a time is hardly a deterrent, so Zhou Ziwei decided to let it go if he didn't want to, but since they've already broken off relations and started fighting, then... let's go all out against them!
"Crack crack crack..." As if they had eyes, the icicles that had grown wings all at once identified the fuel tanks on the armored vehicles, military jeeps, and troop carriers around them and suddenly pierced into them.
The sounds of "crack" and "snap" were incessant. Under the combined effect of the toughness of the ice energy and the speed of the wind energy, the small ice pick pierced through the thick outer skin of the fuel tank in one fell swoop.
However, by this point, the ice energy that had been incorporated into the ice cone and the wind energy that had acted upon it had been almost completely exhausted.
Due to the intense friction as it pierced the metal, the ice spikes eventually vaporized, vanishing into nothingness the same moment the fuel tank was punctured...
Although the fuel tank was punctured, at most a little oil would leak out. Without further action, it would only pose a slight threat and cause some trouble for the M army.
However, Zhou Ziwei had already prepared a backup plan. When the water first turned into ice, it released a large amount of heat. Instead of dissipating the released heat into the air, it was completely concentrated inside, offsetting most of the aftershocks of the bullet's forward momentum.
However... at that time, those bullets were already at their last gasp after being hit by the water arrows, so the heat released when the water turned into ice did not dissipate much of the impact force of the bullets.
Zhou Ziwei naturally couldn't allow the remaining heat to be reflected back, otherwise the ice ball that had just solidified would inevitably break apart again.
So Zhou Ziwei condensed all that heat together and hid it inside the core of that tiny bullet.
The small ball of heat energy that was originally hidden within the ice puck to avoid disrupting its solidification played a decisive role at this crucial moment. The fuel tank was pierced, and the bullet, following the trajectory of the ice spike, penetrated directly into the fuel tank. Immediately afterward, the small ball of heat energy hidden within the bullet suddenly erupted at this critical instant.
Thermal energy and fire energy are only separated by a fine line. These were the only two similar energy forms that Zhou Ziwei was confident he could convert outside his body before analyzing ice energy. So… the small ball of thermal energy hidden within the bullet was suddenly catalyzed in a flash of Zhou Ziwei's consciousness, completely transformed into fire energy, and then…
"Boom, boom, boom boom..." The explosions rang out one after another like dumplings being dropped into a pot. Centered on the bus, the armored vehicles and troop carriers that were pouring in from all directions suddenly burst into flames in an instant. The violent explosions blew some small jeeps into the air, and messy parts such as doors, front axles and rear bumpers flew everywhere like rain.
In the blink of an eye, most of the M soldiers who were still sitting in the vehicles perished in the violent explosion. Those M soldiers who got off the troop carriers first and got close to the blast zone were also wiped out almost immediately. In a short moment, nearly 10,000 M soldiers on the dock were wiped out by Zhou Ziwei with just a few hundred bullets fired by the enemy.
"Keep driving forward, don't stop!"
Because the explosion came so suddenly, even the lieutenant colonel who had been instructed by Zhou Ziwei was taken aback. He almost instinctively slammed on the brakes, nearly throwing Zhou Ziwei, who was standing proudly on the roof of the car, off the vehicle.
Fortunately, Zhou Ziwei had a fairly good grasp of energy control. With just a thought, a gust of wind energy formed in front of him, which naturally supported his body, which was leaning slightly forward due to inertia, preventing him from falling off the car.
Zhou Ziwei was speechless at the lieutenant colonel's performance. The guy was too cowardly. He believed that if some members of the Dragon Group were driving the car, they would definitely not have acted so spinelessly.
They believed that as long as Zhou Ziwei let them keep driving, even if they saw mountains of knives and seas of fire ahead, they would not be afraid in the slightest.
Zhou Ziwei had no choice but to stomp on the bus hood again, shouting a warning to the lieutenant colonel: "If you stop parking like that again, I'll freeze you into an ice sculpture!"
If these words had been spoken moments before, the lieutenant colonel would have taken them as a harmless joke and wouldn't have taken them seriously. However… having just witnessed the miraculous scene of turning water into arrows and freezing water into ice, the lieutenant colonel's admiration for Zhou Ziwei had risen to the level of awe and fear. Upon hearing this warning, he was immediately terrified and shivered, as if his body had unknowingly begun to grow cold.
The lieutenant colonel dared not disobey Zhou Ziwei's words in the slightest. Upon hearing the anger in Zhou Ziwei's words, he couldn't help but wipe the cold sweat from his forehead with some shame. Then, facing the armored vehicles that were burning fiercely in front of him, he charged straight ahead without hesitation.
Although under normal circumstances, their ordinary bus driving into the inferno still raging from the explosion would be tantamount to suicide, Zhou Ziwei had already told him to keep driving forward and not to stop until he was told to.
Therefore, the lieutenant colonel naturally had reason to believe that the sea of fire in front of them would not pose any harm to them.
With that demonic figure on the roof, everything should be under his terrifying control...
"Boom..." Another earth-shattering explosion rang out, this time at the wreckage of an armored vehicle not far in front of the bus. The fuel tank of that armored vehicle had already exploded once before, but this explosion was even more astonishing than the previous fuel tank explosion, obviously because the ammunition boxes inside had burst open.
This armored vehicle is equipped not only with machine guns but also with small-caliber cannons. With cannons, there are naturally shells. Nowadays, shells are relatively safe and generally do not explode easily. However, no matter how safe they are, they are still made of explosives. Once they are subjected to intense combustion and reach the critical temperature, they will naturally explode.
This massive explosion occurred less than ten meters in front of the bus. The armored vehicle, which was originally more than half intact, was completely disintegrated in the explosion. A large piece of the armored vehicle, along with a huge fireball, was sent hurtling towards the bus's windshield with the loud bang.
The lieutenant colonel was terrified, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets. However… after being reprimanded twice by Zhou Ziwei, the ruthlessness in his bones had been fully unleashed. Even though he clearly saw danger right in front of him, he remembered Zhou Ziwei's instructions and gritted his teeth, gripping the steering wheel tightly without the slightest tremor. He also kept a steady foot on the accelerator, and the bus continued to move straight forward at its original unhurried speed, heading head-on towards the huge, menacing fireball…
With a whoosh, just as the large fireball flew less than a meter from the bus window, and just as the lieutenant colonel's eyes were briefly blinded by the flames, the fireball seemed to hit an invisible barrier. It paused slightly, then, like a ball hitting the ground, it rebounded with tremendous force, flying even faster than it had come, and hurtling far away. In the process, it also knocked away another fireball that was flying towards them due to a new explosion.
Sure enough... he really is an omnipotent demon god. As long as I listen to him, nothing will happen. Nothing will happen. We won't die... not a single one of us will die.
The lieutenant colonel's cheeks flushed with excitement, his eyes gleamed with a blue light as if he were in the throes of spring, and his body trembled slightly uncontrollably.
It's not fair to blame the lieutenant colonel for being incompetent; anyone who encountered a freak like Zhou Ziwei, whose terror level was outrageously high, would find it difficult to remain calm.
What's more... Under Zhou Ziwei's orders, the lieutenant colonel had to grit his teeth and force his way into a sea of fire. Fortunately, the lieutenant colonel was a well-trained special agent with a fairly good mental fortitude. If an ordinary person had been driving at this time, no matter how healthy their heart was, they would probably have already gone into shock due to rapid heartbeat.
Charge, charge, charge!
The lieutenant colonel gritted his teeth, and even though he saw a large area of armored vehicle wreckage ahead, he did not slow down, stop, or turn around to go around it.
He has now completely entrusted his life and the lives of everyone on this bus to Zhou Ziwei's hands.
He only remembered that Zhou Ziwei told him to drive straight ahead, and he could not stop without Zhou Ziwei's order.
With a deafening roar, just as the bus was about to collide with the burning wreckage of the armored vehicle, the wreckage, nearly half the size of the vehicle, suddenly exploded in a small explosion. This small explosion, for reasons unknown, instantly broke the large piece of armored vehicle debris into dozens of fragments, which flew in all directions and landed far away. But... strangely enough, the bus, which was right next to it, was not hit by any of the dozens or hundreds of fragments that suddenly flew up.
As the bus ventured deeper into the inferno, strange things kept happening. All obstacles in its path seemed to be paper tigers, inexplicably bouncing away on their own. The bus passed through a smooth road without encountering any resistance whatsoever.
What a tragic scene.
General Clavel sat in his plane, looking down at the sea of fire on the dock below. He was so shocked that his mouth dropped open, and he didn't utter a single command for a long time.
Prior to this, General Clavel had also considered that there might be extraordinary individuals among the people on this bus, or, in official terms, most of them might be people with superpowers.
Given the previous incident where a transport plane crashed into a building more than ten stories high, yet everyone inside landed safely and unharmed, it's not hard to guess the reason.
If the people on that plane were ordinary people, even the most well-trained elite soldiers would have had a hard time jumping out of the plane unharmed in that situation. Let alone the fact that everyone on the plane was completely unharmed, which makes it even more terrifying.
Considering that countless missiles had previously detonated themselves about 200 meters before hitting the transport plane, General Clavel guessed that it was probably not the result of being remotely controlled by some high-tech equipment.
But even if there are a few legendary superhumans among the targets, so what? As a high-ranking military officer, General Clavel has seen his fair share of arrogant superhumans who always look down on everyone.
However, as a veteran general who rose through the ranks of the military and climbed his way to his current position step by step through his military achievements, he held those so-called superhumans in contempt.
In his view, in the face of his well-commanded army, all superpowers are worthless. No matter what magical abilities you have, my army can simply overwhelm you and crush everything in an instant.
If those ridiculous superpowers could really fight off an army, then what's the point of having soldiers? Doesn't that mean that simply supporting one or two superpowered individuals would be enough to keep a country safe?
In fact, the so-called superhumans whom General Clavel had met, who were supported by the US military, did not have anything that General Clavel respected.
General Clavel had to admit that they did indeed possess special abilities that ordinary people did not have, but... in General Clavel's eyes, those special abilities were no different from magic tricks.
But now... the little child standing on the bus that he was facing was clearly not an ordinary... magician.