Chapter Forty-Nine: The Self-Destructing Soldier

From the remaining firearms, Qin Fei disassembled several useful components. These parts could be used not only for assembling shotgun turrets, but some could also be fitted onto Qin Fei’s own shotgun.

[Muzzle Brake Module: Redirects propellant gases to reduce recoil]

[Shotgun Duckbill Choke Module: Modifies pellet spread pattern to fire horizontally rather than in the usual circular pattern]

Both of these attachments were extremely practical for Qin Fei’s shotgun—especially the duckbill choke. In the world of Seven Days to Die, almost all the enemies Qin Fei faced were zombies, whose weakness was usually the head. By modifying the shotgun’s muzzle into a duckbill shape, the pellets would be more likely to hit their heads.

Qin Fei brought back all the scavenged supplies, along with the guns and attachments, to the shelter. He let Xie Nai Nai choose one of the four shotguns he had brought back to keep for herself. The remaining three shotguns were intended as materials for the turret.

With the addition of canned beef and lamb, and the potatoes now ripe in the fields, food stores in the shelter were no longer a pressing concern. However, since there were only a few types of canned goods, meals over these past days had hardly changed: it was either potato stew with beef or potato stew with lamb. A meal or two was fine, but after a while, the monotony became hard to bear.

As for the corn Qin Fei had planted earlier—it had been sown a few days later than the potatoes, so it had yet to fully mature and wasn’t ready to eat.

With sufficient materials at hand, and thanks to his advanced engineering proficiency, assembling the shotgun turret didn’t take Qin Fei long. The turret itself wasn’t large, standing just over half a meter tall. It was mainly composed of a shotgun, a motion sensor, and a magazine that could hold up to three hundred shells at once.

The only drawback of this shotgun turret was that, unlike in the game, it couldn’t distinguish between friend and foe. Once activated, the turret would attack any moving object in its line of sight, so the muzzle had to be aimed toward the oncoming horde.

No doubt, the next wave of the undead would be even harder to defend against. The shelter’s defenses needed to be reinforced.

Qin Fei coated the walls of the deep surrounding pit with a layer of concrete. After it dried, he nailed iron plates to the surface. With the pit wall now so sturdy, not even the self-detonating fat zombies could blow it apart.

The blade traps and electric grid beneath the elevated platform were also moved down into the pit. The shotgun turrets couldn’t fire directly downward.

If Qin Fei had concentrated all his defenses beneath the wooden platform as before, taking position atop it himself, the turrets wouldn’t have been able to strike zombies directly beneath them.

To prevent the pit from filling up with piled zombie corpses, Qin Fei raised the inner wall of the pit by about half a meter with concrete.

While Qin Fei reinforced the shelter’s defenses, Xie Nai Nai was in charge of making shotgun shells. Brewing gunpowder was a delicate task, but once she understood the process, it wasn’t too difficult, and she managed just fine.

Over the course of several days, she produced nearly a thousand shells. Half of these were divided evenly among the three shotgun turrets; the rest were split between Qin Fei and Xie Nai Nai for their own use.

With these preparations complete, Qin Fei was confident that, given their current firepower and defenses, they could withstand another ten green-skinned zombies attacking at night.

On the forty-second day, as dusk fell, the blood moon in the sky shifted from bright crimson to a deep, dark red, its shape nearly a perfect circle. Qin Fei and Xie Nai Nai crouched at the edge of the pit, waiting for the horde to arrive.

Each shotgun turret could cover roughly a ninety-degree arc, so three turrets could only defend three walls. The remaining wall was left to Qin Fei and Xie Nai Nai.

At ten o’clock, the night was pierced by a chorus of shrill, spider-like screeches. As the noise faded, dozens of zombies and zombie dogs burst from the darkness, charging toward the shelter.

But they quickly fell into the pit and were slaughtered by the blade traps and barricades. The shotgun turrets proved just as lethal—some zombies were picked off by buckshot before even reaching the pit.

A few fat zombies appeared outside the shelter, but thanks to the iron-plated, concrete-reinforced pit walls, their self-detonations couldn’t breach the defenses.

Qin Fei and Xie Nai Nai held their ground until midnight. Around the shelter, figures glowing with an eerie green light began to appear.

Qin Fei immediately became alert. These were green-skinned zombies.

There were already more of them than in the previous horde—at least ten visible to Qin Fei.

“You and I focus on the same one—take them out one by one!” Qin Fei instructed Xie Nai Nai.

Green-skinned zombies had extraordinary regenerative abilities; if their firepower was too scattered, these mutants could easily recover from injuries. They had to concentrate their attacks and bring them down quickly with shotguns—Qin Fei’s method was the best way to deal with them.

As the green-skinned zombies fell into the pit, their legs were quickly shredded by the blade traps. Before they could recover, Qin Fei and Xie Nai Nai finished them off with their shotguns, focusing their fire to kill each one.

The bodies of these zombies were tough and well-armored; half of the blade traps in the pit were damaged during the fight. But this didn’t compromise the shelter’s overall defenses—after all, with the shotgun turrets in place, the loss of a few blade traps was inconsequential.

After the green-skinned zombies were all dispatched, Xie Nai Nai suddenly pointed into the distance.

“What’s that green light?”

“What green light?” Qin Fei instinctively followed the direction of her finger.

There, a zombie soldier clad in military armor was charging toward the shelter, a package emitting a green glow hanging from its chest...

What in the world was that? A new mutant?

The zombie soldier drew closer and closer to the shelter, soon entering the shotgun turrets’ range. Qin Fei and Xie Nai Nai immediately raised their shotguns and opened fire on the charging figure.