Chapter 82: Escape from Death
Huo Bin watched in absolute horror as Little Meat Bun fell rapidly through the air.
Is he going to plummet to his death?
During the descent, Little Meat Bun finally stopped roaring. With the agonizing sound waves gone, Chen Ke and her zombie family members instantly snapped back to normal. Exuding a renewed, murderous aura, they surged out of the room to give chase.
Before Huo Bin could even catch his breath, he realized he had to scramble downstairs as fast as his skeletal body could manage.
“Oh, my goodness!”
If he had known a giant panda would be more than capable of saving the day, he never would have gotten involved in the first place!
Down below, Little Meat Bun landed squarely and steadily on the first floor, keeping Song Yuqing perfectly safe.
Gasps racking her chest, Song Yuqing let out a massive sigh of relief. As expected, her luck hadn’t run out yet; she wasn’t destined to die today.
She quickly forced herself to compose her thoughts. Right now, she needed Little Meat Bun to expand to his giant form and hold the line while she focused on securing weapon support.
Song Yuqing focused her mind and tried to access her pocket dimension. This time, the connection went through seamlessly without any obstruction from the meteorite’s field.
Wasting no time, she pulled out a massive handful of tomatoes from her space and stuffed them into Little Meat Bun’s paws.
“Eat! Eat as much as you can! Make sure you hold them off!”
Without a word, Little Meat Bun began cramming the tomatoes into his mouth. Song Yuqing understood him completely; she knew that unleashing that sonic roar took a massive physical toll on his body.
As Song Yuqing turned and dashed toward the exit to secure a perimeter, Little Meat Bun finished inhaling the food. His body swelled back to its giant proportions, and he unleashed another deafening roar.
“Agh!” Up in the stairwell, the sheer force of the sound wave hit Huo Bin so hard he froze mid-step, unable to move down.
The zombies chasing right behind him fared even worse; startled and disoriented by the blast, a dozen of them lost their footing and came tumbling down the steps like a landslide. Huo Bin curled himself into a tight ball in the corner, desperate to avoid being swept up in the descending mass of flailing limbs.
He was utterly furious. Those zombies at least had flesh and muscle to pad their falls, but he was nothing but bare bones. If a zombie fell from a roof, it might fracture a limb; if he fell, he would literally shatter into a million pieces!
“Help me!” Huo Bin cried out weakly. He had originally traveled all the way back to Chen Town thinking he could display some bravery and earn some respect back from Song Yuqing, but he hadn’t expected to find himself so utterly outmatched. He was still far too weak.
Fortunately, Little Meat Bun wasn’t the type to stand by and watch someone die. Clearing the stairs in a few massive bounds, the giant panda scooped up Huo Bin, jumped back down to the first floor, and set the trembling skeleton safely behind his massive frame.
Running completely out of breath, Little Meat Bun finally had to cease his yelling, cutting himself off with a few heavy coughs. A nearby zombie rolled to its feet and lunged forward to attack, but Little Meat Bun casually brought his heavy paw down, pinning its head directly into the floorboards.
Up on the eighth floor, Chen Ke gripped the railing and peered over the edge, stamping her feet in sheer frustration. Livid, she grabbed a passing zombie by the collar and began screaming in its face.
“Go down there and bring her back to me!”
“I spent so much effort helping you idiots level up, and this is how you repay me? You’re completely pathetic!”
Chen Ke was practically vibrating with anxiety. She had secured the perfect timing and the perfect location—how on earth had Song Yuqing managed to slip through her fingers?! And what kind of freakish creature was that giant panda? The meteorite ore was supposed to completely neutralize external abilities, yet it hadn’t suppressed the bear’s power at all.
For more than a month, Chen Ke had worked tirelessly, using the primitive meteorite ore to forcibly upgrade her zombie horde until they evolved the capacity to mimic human beings. She never could have anticipated that while her forces were vulnerable in the middle of their upgrade cycle, her hidden sanctuary would be stumbled upon by customers from God’s Supermarket, resulting in a massive loss of her evolving test subjects.
Who was the idiot that coined the phrase ‘the most dangerous place is the safest place’? If she had known it would turn out like this, she never would have gathered her horde right next door to that cursed supermarket.
Useless thralls! During the evolution process, these zombies were practically paralyzed, rendering them sitting ducks.
Hissing in frustration, Chen Ke began violently shoving the remaining zombies down the stairwell one by one. Then, with a vicious snarl, she plunged her bare hand straight into her own abdomen.
There was no blood, and she felt no pain.
When she withdrew her hand, she was clutching a silver, glowing stone. The meteorite shard slowly drifted out of her palm, suspending itself in mid-air within the corridor. Sensing its pull, several more silver stones erupted through the drywall of the ninth-floor room, flying out to join the cluster. Together, the gathering meteorites began to pulse with a blinding, hazardous light.
BANG—
A deafening gunshot echoed through the atrium, shattering the forming cluster. The meteorite stones, which had been seconds away from merging completely, detonated outward in all directions. Several fragments smashed through the windows and vanished into the snow outside, while others rained down toward the lobby.
Standing right behind the massive form of Little Meat Bun, Song Yuqing lowered her smoking weapon.
“What on earth is that?” Huo Bin asked, staring up at the scattered, glowing fragments in total bewilderment.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a primitive meteorite. That’s the thing accelerating the zombie mutations and suppressing human espers,” Song Yuqing explained, keeping her hands steady on the grip. She had played plenty of first-person shooters before the apocalypse, and it turned out the muscle memory was actually transferring well to the real thing.
The firearm had been brought back from her venture into the parallel world. It possessed immense destructive power, but the recoil was brutal; fortunately, Little Meat Bun was acting as a solid brace behind her.
Up above, Chen Ke scrambled after the flying debris, desperately snatching a few glowing shards out of the air and stuffing them back into her hollow torso.
She wasn’t the weak, submissive Chen Ke of the past anymore. She was the leader of the horde. She would never allow herself to be bullied or forced to bow to anyone ever again.
Marshalling every ounce of her strength, Chen Ke forced the recovered shards to piece themselves together. Grasping the hovering, jagged stone firmly in her hands, she leaned over the banister and locked eyes with Song Yuqing below.
Hmph.
Letting out a cold, venomous hiss, Chen Ke slowly dragged a finger across her own throat in a universal gesture of execution.
Song Yuqing stared back, momentarily stunned. Compared to the monstrous entity standing before her now, she realized the half-human, half-zombie version of Chen Ke from before had actually been pleasant.
“Charge!!!”
Zhang Yimiao’s furious war cry shattered the tension as she burst through the front entrance, a massive coalition of combat espers flooding in right behind her.
Her group had been scouring the immediate grid for pink-core zombies—basically thrashing any creature they encountered and harvesting their skulls to check the color. But the moment they heard that piercing, unnatural panda roar echo across the district, Zhang Yimiao had made a executive decision to rally the troops and head straight toward the source.
Lo and behold, they had run right into a disheveled Song Yuqing.
This was perfect. They had finally stumbled onto the regional zombie headquarters! Zhang Yimiao had been itching for a massive raid like this for ages; once she returned to Base Zero, this exploit would cement her reputation.
Seeing the massive wave of elite reinforcements arrive, Huo Bin finally let out a true breath of relief. Peeking out from behind Little Meat Bun, he nudged Song Yuqing.
“Hey, where did you get a gun like that?”
“I bought it.”
“Do you have any spares? Think you could spare one for me?”
Song Yuqing offered Huo Bin a quick sidelong glance. Ever since his return, the skeleton was visibly trying to act more courageous. There was no telling what kind of trials he had faced during his time away.
“Here,” Song Yuqing said, reaching into her space to pull out an identical model and handing it over. “Consider it a thank you for trying to pull me out of that room.”
“Heh… thanks,” Huo Bin mumbled, scratching his skull awkwardly.
“When exactly did you get back to town anyway? What were you even doing in this building?”
Huo Bin hesitated, his bony jaw shifting. To be perfectly honest, the truth was a little humiliating. “I… it was just a coincidence.”
He was too embarrassed to admit that after striking out on his own, he realized how brutally difficult it was to survive in the wild and had quietly slunk back to civilization. As for why he was in this specific high-rise, it was simply because he hadn’t realized the residents were actually disguised zombies. He had just been hiding out in the crawlspaces, occasionally sneaking down to steal some of their roasted pigeons when they weren’t looking.
Sensing the obvious embarrassment in his eyes, Song Yuqing dropped the subject.
“Once we’re safely back within the supermarket’s perimeter, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee,” she promised. Perhaps a dose of the ability coffee could help jumpstart Huo Bin’s dormant powers, or at least grant him enough utility to defend himself.
“Really?” Huo Bin’s eye sockets practically lit up, and he swallowed back the question of whether he could finally come home for good.
The combat espers Zhang Yimiao had brought along were incredibly efficient. It was immediately obvious that every member of the squad possessed extensive field experience and rigorous tactical training.
Even with their elemental abilities partially dampened by the ambient radiation of Chen Ke’s meteorite shards, the Base Zero operatives relied on raw martial prowess and coordinated physical strikes to brutally suppress the horde. The only major tactical hurdle was the zombies’ appearance; because the creatures looked so unsettlingly human, the fighters would occasionally hesitate for a crucial second before delivering a lethal blow, second-guessing whether they were striking an actual civilian.
And in a live combat zone against evolving mutants, that single second of hesitation was nearly enough to get several operatives bitten.
