Piercing sirens whirred in Lu Hao’s mind.

Kai was a zombie!

He shifted to the side just as a claw sliced through the air next to his heart. The long, black fingernails pierced through the leather gloves.

In a breath, Lu Hao’s body coursed with lightning. He grasped the outstretched arm. Hundreds of millions of volts of electric current snapped the atmosphere of the room in half. For a moment, everything slowed down, before a sonic boom exploded and broke everything in a bright flash of light.

The walls of the office collapsed into dust and rubble, and outside came the sound of shouts. Lu Hao quickly glanced and saw the SG members starting to fight in the chaos. He couldn’t spare more than a few seconds of attention before Kai recovered and pounced at him.

The triad boss’s human veneer had torn off; he was a high-level zombie, but not at the level of the other man. His eyes had become a terrible reddish-black, and when he opened his mouth, the long and inhuman fangs dripped with viscous saliva. A deep hatred filled his gaze as he tried to tear his claws into Lu Hao.

Lu Hao’s reflexes were faster. He deftly kicked Kai in the head and cast down another bolt of lightning. The sonic boom shook the entire base, and pieces of the ceiling crumbled and fell overhead. Without waiting for Kai to get up, Lu Hao crossed the distance in less than a second. His eyes turned white with electricity as he readied to tear off Kai’s head.

With inhuman speed, Kai dodged. Lu Hao’s attack tore off half the skull, but had missed the core. Lu Hao flicked off the piece of jaw in his hand. Kai’s face looked more and more ghoulish, but the wounds were already healing in fractions of seconds. It seemed that though Kai didn’t unleash an offensive ability when he became a zombie, his physical constitution and regeneration had become monstrous.

The two men traded blows, Lu Hao blasting off pieces of Kai’s body with every attack. Yet with every lost limb and piece of flesh, another grew in its place. The sharp claws and fangs nearly tore into Lu Hao several times. If Lu Hao were injured even once, it would be the end for him, so he had to protect himself from the rabid bites and swipes with shields made of lightning.

Lu Hao’s power drained slowly; less than a minute had passed, when Lu Hao suddenly realized he couldn’t hear any fighting from the outside corridor anymore. With a boom from another hit he had landed on Kai, the entire room rattled, and dust kicked in the air. In that short moment, Lu Hao focused his senses out the room to check on his elite SG guards.

And at that moment.

A cold, chilly aura of dread solidified in the air, aimed straight at Lu Hao’s core.

He was suddenly frozen. It was like he couldn’t move an inch. Or, more accurately, a force weighed him down, making him feel as though his body was trapped in amber.

A beautiful, ethereal man walked through the rubble. He dragged the corpse of one of the SG members behind him. The body’s neck was torn open, the spine visible within the open flesh. The man casually finished swallowing the flesh he had eaten, and wiped his mouth with a blood-stained finger.

Lu Hao could do nothing but watch this horrifying scene. His elite SG, the friends he’d brought with him, had all been annihilated in an instant… His hand trembled, the fury crackling in his eyes as he looked at the culprit. Kai, still healing in his grasp, grinned and laughed mockingly at him.

It was then that the zombie emperor looked up, the black sclera of his eyes like a deep void.

A bloody hand seized Lu Hao by the throat and threw him across the room. The abandoned the corpse of the SG member was left laying carelessly on the ground. The zombie fished Kai up with the other hand, his posture was like picking up garbage.

Lu Hao knew that this situation had gone straight to hell.

Pain seared his body from the force of the throw as he fell into the rubble. A million stray thoughts and realizations coalesced in his mind as he looked at that thin, insurmountable figure in front of him. His breathing was ragged; he felt that his organs had been half-crushed by the throw.

How could the head of the infamous triad become such a high-level zombie?

Why did that strange zombie save F City’s leader?

Why were there still humans alive in this city, while everyone else around became zombified?

Lu Hao now knew.

This zombie man’s faction had taken over F City. Kai had become one of his people.

By taking over F City and converting its power into his own forces, he secretly consumed all the other survivors of this area without anyone in the SG or other survivor bases realizing.

This man was the most powerful and terrifying existence he had ever met.

Lu Hao knew he couldn’t win. But running wasn’t an option. If Lu Hao ran… if Lu Hao couldn’t find a way to stop this zombie now… then what would happen to the rest of the people in the SG?

The secret was out. There was no way the SG could make it out of the zombie entrapment. This zombie-man alone could tear everyone apart in the blink of an eye.

The children that had just been born in these past few years… Lisa Xi’s progress on the zombie vaccine… and even Hong Sheng—

If the zombie wanted to kill them, nothing Lu Hao did could save them. Lu Hao wasn’t strong enough to resist. It was only if the zombie chose to let them survive that they could just barely make it.

But that kind of weak, subservient existence,, that kind of uncertain chance, was one Lu Hao refused to accept.

He grit his teeth. Even in death, he had to resist!

This thought drove him to act in an instant. The atmosphere condensed. Lu Hao became a streak of light, the air splitting apart in his wake. His very veins burned like they were separating from his flesh. The nose-tingling scent of ozone and bitter ash cleaved the air. Lu Hao’s molecules became fuel; he was the center of a storm, lightning bolts raging around him in a brilliant, searing white.

He had failed to save so many people.

Despite how much his own people had looked up to him, despite how desperately he pretended to be strong and know everything, in Lu Hao’s own heart, it was clear: he was a failure.

That was why he couldn’t afford to fail again, here.

Lu Hao staked it all in one blow. It didn’t matter what happened to him, as long as those people… as long as that person could make it out alive—

He arrived by the two zombies before they could run, and detonated himself.

 

 

In the far distance, the people in the SG base could hear an explosion.

The shockwave rippled the dry grass and clouds miles away.

At the same time, multiple other explosions boomed within the base, and the constructed walls clattered with the force of so many nearby detonations. The sound of gunfire, and the cries and shouts of people fighting and fleeing for their lives, filled the air.

A few days after the elite troop of SG lead by Lu Hao had left, a single elite SG member crawled back to base.

She had been part of a detachment of a different squad. They had gone out to scout the situation in other bases, but in the end, only one person had survived. She was covered in blood, and half her body was gone.

Who knew how she’d survived, but when she saw the other SG members, her haunted and horrified expression foretold that something terrible was coming. And when she spoke, everyone soon knew what that terrible thing would be.

“From every direction… the zombies are coming here.”

No escape. Nowhere to run. The base was surrounded by a massive ocean of zombies, their many bodies rolling over the landscape like worms in the distance. After the scout’s warning, the people of the base desperately tried to shore up the defenses, but once the zombies were finally in view over the distant horizon, everyone knew—it was all useless.

Today was the third day of the zombie siege.

At first, the ability users held the line. Fire surged and lightning crashed; the earth erupted and water swept away the corpses. But there were too few ability users to the thousands of zombies swarming the base. The traps and explosives had then come in handy, buying some more time.

By now, the zombies had breached the base.

With the civilians evacuated to the most highly defended area, the rest of the Survivor Guard tightly encircled their last remaining territory.

Lisa Xi, as the highest priority person to be defended, had held Hong Sheng’s arm in a death grip and tried to drag him with her to the secured safehouse. Everyone’s last hope rested on Lu Hao’s team returning to save them, and the best chance of surviving that long was to be in that safehouse.

But Hong Sheng had shaken off her grip.

He was the only person left in the villa right now. This villa had been the starting point of the SG, once upon a time. It had been a vacation home for Lu Hao’s family. Over the years, the base had rapidly expanded to the point the villa was unrecognizable. Walking through this nostalgic home, Hong Sheng slung a sniper rifle over his shoulder and climbed to the top floor.

The SG base had several rings of defense. The outer walls had collapsed, and now the zombies were just about to breach the inner circle. Hong Sheng walked into a room—someone’s personal bedroom, he didn’t care to remember whose—and opened the doors to the balcony. As screeches and blasts from the fighting erupted below, he climbed up onto the roof.

The weight of the rifle, ammo, and supplies he carried nearly made him slip off. He clambered up slowly, then found a position defended on several sides by the raised ornamentation of the eaves. Once set up, Hong Sheng looked through the rifle’s sights. Hundreds of zombie faces came into view.

He took aim.

Fired.

The shells flew and clattered next to him as shot after shot erupted from the weapon in his hands. The recoil bashed and bruised his shoulder, but like an emotionless machine, Hong Sheng had no reaction to that pain at all. He only reloaded the magazine, aimed, and fired.

The zombies soon noticed his open position. One of them, a high-level zombie, rushed off the walls and bounded across several of the encampment obstacles, trying to leap its way up toward Hong Sheng.

Hong Sheng reached into his pack, trying to pull out a grenade, but it was too late; the zombie was too close, already mid-leap toward the roof where Hong Sheng was. The snarling jaws and horrifically far-too-human-eyes were right in front of him.

Then, a burst of heat surged through the air. Flames erupted over the zombie’s body. The fire was too weak to damage it, but the force was enough to knock its trajectory and force it to land. The other SG members converged somewhere below the roof, the blasts of abilities being used and the smell of ozone filling the air. The zombie died with a cut-off snarl.

“Hong ge!” Yu Qiu’s voice came from below. Hong Sheng looked down to see the girl start climbing up the roof after him. “I—I’m here to help you!” Her young face was smeared with blood and ash, and below the grime, her expression was set with determination.

Hong Sheng turned away from her to reload his rifle. He shook his head at her. “Go back.”

“I won’t.” Yu Qiu stubbornly found another defensive position near him. She curled up like an aggressive little cat, ready to unsheathe her claws should another zombie get near.

Hong Sheng didn’t bother talking more with her. He took aim and continued to fire at the endless zombie wave. The bullets did nothing against higher-level zombies, so he picked out the intermediate ones. But no matter how many fell, the wave didn’t stop coming, and even grew over time. It was an absolutely hopeless situation.

Seeing this, anyone would be scared. But somehow, the two of them had a faint semblance of calm. It was too late to cry. This day—the end of everything—had always loomed since the beginning of the apocalypse.

The two of them had already experienced near-death. And just like back then, their only hope lied in a savior coming to rescue them.

The spent bullet shells clattered on the roof as they fell. Yu Qiu blasted her fire as more and more zombies raced their way to Hong Sheng’s position. From their view up on the roof, the entire horizon below, from the SG base all the way to the distant mountains, was filled with dark and writhing bodies, moving in an unstoppable, inevitable wave.

Yet even then, in such impossible odds, both of them looked to the scarlet horizon lit by the slowly setting sun and hoped to see the figure of that man parting the dark wave, bringing them hope.

 

 

In the aftermath of the explosion, a dense cloud of dust and debris settled in the open air. The sky was dark, and tinted red. Lu Hao’s unfocused eyes blurred in and out of vision.

A hoarse, rattling breath drew a thread of air into his lungs.

Not a single part of his body was free from pain. The blood leaked from his skull and out from every orifice on his head. His brain pounded as if someone had taken a jackhammer and thrust it into his skull, mashing its insides into a pulp. It was a miracle any thought survived in this mire at all.

Detonation was a suicidal act. An ability user could explode their own core to cause a destructive attack at the cost of their own life. No one had ever survived this.

Yet… he was still… alive?

His vision faded in and out of black. He seemed to hear a foggy voice calling his name.

“…Hao!”

“Lu Hao!”

Right before everything faded, Lu Hao saw—

Ji Ling appeared above him.