The last soft sound.
Su Tang's hand stopped.
The entire process, from beginning to end, was eerily quiet.
She slowly removed her blindfold, and her clear, water-like eyes calmly looked at Old Man Sun amidst the stunned gazes of the crowd.
Old Sun seemed to be struck by an electric current, and suddenly snapped back to his senses. He subconsciously pressed the stopwatch.
The entire gun repair workshop was deathly silent.
All eyes were fixed on Old Man Sun and the stopwatch in his hand.
Gao Kai's Adam's apple bobbed with difficulty. He stared at the stopwatch in Old Sun's hand, his heart pounding, and an absurd and terrifying thought surged into his mind.
"Master Sun...how much...how much?"
Old Sun raised his stopwatch, but his hand, which had repaired tens of thousands of guns and was as steady as a rock, was now trembling violently.
He stared at the numbers above, too astonished to utter a single word.
"Master Sun?" Gao Kai's heart sank.
Old Sun raised his head, looking at Su An with the eyes of someone looking at a monster, then lowered his head again. He opened his mouth and, in a dreamlike voice, read aloud:
"Ten...seventeen seconds..."
The two words, seemingly light and airy, struck like two heavy hammers, slamming into the hearts of everyone in the workshop.
Seventeen seconds.
It's not twenty-seven seconds.
It's seventeen seconds!
"What?!" Wang Jin was the first to scream, his voice as shrill as a cat whose tail had been stepped on. "Seventeen seconds? Master Sun, you...you must have seen wrong?!"
"Impossible!" another male soldier shouted. "Absolutely impossible! Gao Kaige's record was only 27.5 seconds, how could she be 10 seconds faster than him! This doesn't make sense!"
The air seemed to freeze.
Gao Kai stood there, motionless, like a stone statue. The color drained from his face at a visible speed, turning from bright red to deathly ashen.
His mind went blank with a "buzz".
Seventeen seconds?
How could it be seventeen seconds?
He gave it his all, performing beyond his usual limits, and barely managed to break his own record of twenty-eight seconds. He thought that was the limit of human capability, an insurmountable monument in this camp.
But now, this woman, this female soldier he had looked down on from beginning to end, who was as thin as a bean sprout, actually... took only seventeen seconds?
It was a full ten seconds faster!
This isn't surpassing, it's crushing!
He felt his entire worldview shattered at that moment by those two simple words.
His prized talent, his years of relentless training, and the pride and confidence he relied on for survival all became a colossal joke in the face of the number "seventeen seconds".
"Stopwatch!" Gao Kai turned sharply to Old Man Sun and roared hoarsely, "Your stopwatch is broken! Yes! It must be the stopwatch that's broken! Old Man Sun, how many years have you been using that old watch? It should have been replaced a long time ago!"
Like a wild beast driven to the brink, he began to speak recklessly.
Old Sun was taken aback by his shout, then his face turned a deep purplish-red. He slammed his fist on the table, his beard bristling and eyes wide, and retorted with a furious tirade:
"Bullshit! This Seagull watch of mine was won back in the day from a Soviet expert! It's been with me since the battlefield, it's older than you! It keeps more accurate than an observatory! You're saying it's broken?!"
The old man was trembling with rage. He pointed at Gao Kai's nose and cursed, "If you can't accept defeat, just admit it! Throwing mud at our weapons, what kind of man are you!"
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