The last leader of the world starts with an elite infantry squad!

Chapter 1382 The 2nd Infantry Division of Yue

The former headquarters of the 2nd Infantry Division of the 1st Military Region of the Vietnamese Army, located in Ha Quang District, Cao Bang Province, on the northern border of Vietnam.

Nearly two years after the apocalypse, this military base, located in the mountains of northern Vietnam near the Sino-Vietnamese border, resembles a scar that has struggled to survive amidst the erosion of wind and rain and violent conflict.

The base was built against the mountainside, and the outer perimeter was a hastily erected wall reinforced with concrete fragments, abandoned vehicles, and sandbags after the apocalypse. The electric fence on the wall had long since failed, and it had been replaced by rusty barbed wire and sharp wooden spikes.

The watchtower has been renovated, but the mix of building materials makes it look somewhat comical and desolate.

Inside the base, the once neatly planned barracks and training grounds are now occupied by a large number of simple shacks, vegetable gardens and clotheslines, crowded with military dependents who followed the troops to this place and a small number of surviving civilians. The air is filled with the stale smell of firewood, cheap tobacco, pickled food and the unique stench of crowded people.

Only at the deepest part of the base, in the original division headquarters building, does the military facility remain relatively intact.

The exterior walls of the three-story concrete building are riddled with bullet holes, and most of the windows are boarded up or sealed with sheet metal, leaving only narrow firing ports.

Antenna arrays and camouflaged observation posts were set up on the roof, and a faded, torn gold-starred red flag drooped listlessly in the hot afternoon wind.

The underground bunker of the command building was further reinforced and expanded, becoming the true command heart of the "Northern Border Defense Cluster".

At this moment, the atmosphere in the underground command center was so heavy it was almost frozen.

Under the dim light of the energy-saving lamp, several military maps with curled edges and repeatedly taped up hung on the wall. The largest of them was a detailed map of the Pingxiang-Lang Son section of the Sino-Vietnamese border, covered with arrows, circles, and hastily written Vietnamese annotations in different colored markers.

The air was poorly ventilated, mixed with the smells of sweat, musty old paper, and the bitter, burnt aroma of cheap coffee, along with a lingering tension that suggested a prolonged state of high alert.

Several old desks were pieced together to form a makeshift conference table.

On the table were several illegible handwritten reports, several old military radios with flickering screens filled with static, and a metal ashtray piled high with cigarette butts.

Sitting around the table were five officers dressed in old Vietnamese military uniforms, with different shoulder insignia, but all with somber expressions.

The man sitting in the main seat was about fifty years old, with dark skin, thin cheeks, and deep-set eyes.

He was wearing faded jungle camouflage, with the rank of colonel on his shoulders, and his collar was open, revealing an equally worn undershirt underneath.

His name is Nguyen Van Hung. Before the apocalypse, he was a regimental commander in the 2nd Infantry Division of the 1st Military Region of the Vietnamese Army. Now he is the supreme commander of this struggling "Northern Border Guard Group".

When the apocalypse broke out, the 1st Military District was hit hardest, suffering heavy losses in the initial chaos and the onslaught of zombies. The older high-ranking officers did not even survive the first wave of infection, and the few remaining were almost all killed or wounded in the initial chaos.

Taking advantage of this opportunity, Nguyen Van Hung managed to gather some of the defeated soldiers and equipment, and by relying on the current garrison and the surrounding mountainous terrain, he managed to gain a foothold and naturally took over the position of division commander.

However, Ruan Wenxiong, who had just become a division commander, did not have time to be happy. The threat of mutated creatures inside the territory, the scarcity of resources, and the pressure from other separatist forces in the south made him overwhelmed every day. In just two years since the apocalypse, he had aged more than ten years out of nowhere.

In the past two years, he has focused his main efforts on clearing threats around the base, organizing limited production, establishing order among the armed forces in the controlled area, and guarding against the northward expansion of more powerful warlord forces in the south.

He could only glean bits and pieces of information about the situation in the huge neighboring country to the north of the border from the occasional refugees who had crossed the border. He knew that the country was also in terrible chaos, which gave him some peace of mind—at least the north would not become an imminent and huge threat for the time being.

However, this sense of "peace of mind" was completely shattered a few months ago.

First, from across the border, in the direction of Pingxiang, came continuous and astonishing gunfire, a sound that could not have been produced by a small-scale conflict or the clearing of zombies.

Subsequently, the reconnaissance team he dispatched brought back disturbing news:

A disciplined and well-equipped force claiming to be from the Central Plains War Zone appeared in Pingxiang area, and they wiped out the local zombies and armed groups with astonishing efficiency!

Up to this point, everything that had happened so far was normal for Ruan Wenxiong. After all, Zhou Bang was a powerful state in the Central Plains for thousands of years, so it was not surprising that it had the military strength to clear out zombies and restore order.

Ruan Wenxiong had no other thoughts on this, except for a bit of sour grapes.

However, soon, news that made Ruan Wenxiong uneasy arrived: after clearing out the zombies in Pingxiang City, the army not only did not leave, but instead carried out construction. Almost every day, a huge amount of supplies came along the railway, as if they were building a fortress!

This unusual phenomenon immediately raised a red flag in Nguyen Van Hung's mind!

As a border guard, he probably knows Zhou Bang better than many ordinary people in Zhou Bang. Compared to some industrial and resource cities in the inland areas of Zhou Bang, Pingxiang may be worth sending troops to recapture due to the political concept of serving the people, but it is definitely not worth investing so many resources in its construction!

Unless Zhou Bang's country currently has so many resources that there's nowhere to put them...

That's obviously impossible!

Therefore, even though it was hard to believe, Nguyen Van Hung had a deep-seated feeling that the other party was targeting him and the entire Viet Kingdom...

Since having this unsettling and anxious guess, Nguyen Van Hung immediately deployed the most reliable sentries at several hidden observation points on his side of the border to monitor the movements in the Pingxiang direction day and night.

The intelligence came in intermittently, but the picture it painted became clearer and clearer, and it made him more and more terrified!

With the continuous arrival of armored trains, organized tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, large-scale civil engineering projects, and population growth...

All of this points to one conclusion: the enemy is frantically stockpiling resources and troops in Pingxiang...

And this afternoon, the latest and most important intelligence finally came back!