Chapter 133: Mother and Daughter Reunion
Chen Ke had originally been bursting with confidence, secure in a flawless strategic layout. She had taken meticulous precautions before the toxic clouds gathered once more. To her utter shock, however, the small outpost of Survival Base No. 3 sat completely unscathed by the downpour.
Every single structure inside Base No. 3 was securely draped under heavy weatherproofing canvas, and every esper on the defensive line was fully suited in acid-proof gear.
Long before the mutant vanguard could materialize, Base No. 3 had intercepted a comprehensive warning broadcast from God’s Supermarket, leaving them perfectly prepared to counter the siege. Chen Ke’s legion had fundamentally underestimated their opponent, deploying far too few assets to the assault. Facing a fully armed, aggressively motivated population, she stood absolutely zero chance of securing a victory.
Rage boiled through Chen Ke’s veins, and she fiercely cursed Wan Youzhi under her breath. She had fed him an absolute wealth of high-tier mutant poultry, yet his psychic foresight had still failed to predict the baseline telemetry of the battle. Naturally, she had no way of knowing that Wan Youzhi’s mutation was structurally incapable of mapping any event tied directly to God’s Supermarket. The store existed as an absolute blind spot to the universal predictive matrix.
“Forward! Let’s tear them apart and feast!” Chen Ke hissed the command, and the core vanguard of the undead swarmed the barricades of Base No. 3.
Initially, the defenders were thoroughly outmatched. It had been months since they last traded blows with a zombie horde, but the structural promise of exchanging mutated corpses for premium store inventory kept them tethered to the front. Still, a thick wave of panic fluttered through the line; the monsters sprinting toward them looked horrifyingly human.
“Don’t lose your heads, everyone! Keep your ears open and sing out! If they can’t match the tune, they’re mutants!” a voice bellowed over the roar of the rain. The shout belonged to Aunt Peng. Having previously logged shifts as a local clerk at God’s Supermarket, she had unraveled this unique identification protocol while chatting with Liu Xiaona behind the counter.
Aunt Peng had trekked to Base No. 3 in a relentless, desperate search to track down her missing daughter. She had never anticipated that her stay at the outpost would coincide with a massive undead siege.
Though she possessed nothing more than a standard, low-tier storage mutation, Aunt Peng fiercely held her ground on the ramparts, aggressively weaponizing an advanced tool provided by God’s Supermarket. The device was structured exactly like a standard crossbow, but instead of traditional bolts, it discharged microscopic, pressurized pins engineered to penetrate a zombie’s cranium with absolute precision.
But the moment Aunt Peng’s eyes locked onto Chen Ke standing at the center of the mutant legion, her mind went entirely blank. She froze mid-draw, coming within an inch of being torn apart by a charging mutant.
She had never imagined that she would find her beloved daughter under these horrific circumstances.
“Chen Ke!” Aunt Peng screamed through the downpour, thick tears spilling uncontrollably down her weathered face.
Chen Ke snapped her head toward the sound, her brow furrowing deep beneath her canvas hood. Who is that human? Why is she screaming my old designation?
As the screaming woman desperately hacked her way through the fray, dragging herself closer to the vanguard, the alpha zombie’s cognitive centers finally registered the visual data. The middle-aged woman fighting through the mud was undeniably the mother she had loved during her human existence.
The only piece of her human life she still anchored herself to was her mother.
Seeing that her mother was about to be torn to pieces by her own lower-tier thralls, Chen Ke let out a piercing screech, violently ordering the entire horde to halt the assault and fall back.
Although her heart had ceased to beat the day she turned, a sudden sensation rippled through her chest, making it feel as if her core had been violently split in two.
“Chen Ke! My baby girl!” Seeing the mutant legion executing a rapid retreat, Aunt Peng broke into a frantic sprint, chasing the tail end of the horde with a look of pure, heart-wrenching agony.
“Aunt Peng, get back here! You can’t cross the perimeter! It’s suicide!” a fighter hollered, desperately trying to catch her sleeve.
Aunt Peng ruthlessly shook him off. She had finally unearthed her daughter. She had spent a lifetime mourning her absence, and she was entirely resolved to close the distance. It didn’t matter if her child was a monster or a human now. She knew her daughter had recognized her; otherwise, why would she have thrown her that agonizing look before ordering the retreat?
Aunt Peng’s heart bled. Breaking free from the defenders attempting to anchor her to the walls, she bolted into the open desert after the retreating column.
Slowly, the toxic storm began to lose its velocity, shifting from a catastrophic deluge into a steady drizzle.
But as Aunt Peng scrambled over the sand dunes, the heavy acid-proof tarpaulin wrapped around her shoulders snagged on a jagged piece of debris, slipping completely off her body. Within a fraction of a second, the remaining chemical droplets began to ruthlessly eat through her exposed skin.
Right as her knees buckled and she collapsed into the wet sand, Aunt Peng caught sight of her beloved daughter sprinting back through the rain, catching her body in a fierce embrace.
“Mom,” Chen Ke whispered softly against her ear.
Submerged in the agonizing corrosion of the rain, Aunt Peng managed to force a bright, ecstatic smile, though her blistering features rendered the expression incomplete.
Thick tears rolled from Chen Ke’s dead eyes, dripping onto Aunt Peng’s exposed shoulder blades, where the flesh had already been stripped away by the chemicals. A long moment passed before Chen Ke felt her mother’s breathing cease entirely, the distinct aroma of human life evaporating from her container.
Chen Ke slowly unclasped her arms, allowing Aunt Peng’s body to settle onto the sand to be dissolved by the remaining drizzle.
“It’s better this way,” Chen Ke murmured, her voice hollow. “At least your suffering is over. At the end of the day, every human in this grid is scheduled to die anyway.”
She turned her back on the corpse and walked away without looking back.
The moment she integrated back into the main column, Chen Ke systematically re-locked her emotions, her mind shifting back into the cold, clinical sanity of a zombie alpha. Her initial blueprint of splitting her forces to overwhelm multiple outposts simultaneously had fractured; humans weren’t all mindless sheep. Moving with absolute executive authority, she issued a systemic recall to the legions marching toward the separate bastions, resolving to consolidate her forces and conquer the bases one by one.
Next, she dispatched two high-tier communicator zombies to track down Wan Youzhi and Lin Han, who had left the main column days prior. She required them to return to her side immediately to synchronize their logistics. If Base No. 3 had been flawlessly fortified, it meant God’s Supermarket had almost certainly orchestrated the defense. She had zero intention of letting Wan Youzhi and Lin Han waste her valuable assets in a reckless, uncalculated assault.
Miles away across the wastes, Wan Youzhi’s heart skipped a frantic beat when the messenger thrall delivered Chen Ke’s decree. Did the store manager somehow intercept our exact operational coordinates?
Lin Han vehemently bristled at the command to retreat, but with a vanguard of advanced mutants baring their teeth at his throat, he had no choice but to comply with the alpha’s demands.
“Calm your nerves, Lin Han. I can still manipulate this layout,” Wan Youzhi spoke up, his features smoothing into a calm mask as a new tactical plan formed in his brain.
He called over two high-tier zombies whose skin mutations rendered them completely indistinguishable from human survivors, leaning in to whisper a series of detailed instructions directly into their ears.
“Execute these parameters flawlessly,” Wan Youzhi ordered grimly.
The two disguised infiltrators traded a slow look before offering a rigid, wooden nod of compliance.
Back within the safe perimeter of God’s Supermarket, Song Yuqing had just seen off the final deployment of the Guard. She sat quietly by the front display window, tracking the steady rhythm of the toxic rain hammering the glass.
Is this storm ever going to run out of capacity?
Right as the thought crossed her mind, the heavy plastic flap of the entrance was thrown back. The Xie brothers marched into the lobby, escorting two bedraggled young men tightly wrapped in acid-proof canvas.
“What’s the situation?” Song Yuqing asked, pushing herself up from her chair. The grim, tense expressions locked onto the Xie brothers’ faces signaled that a severe operational breach had occurred.
“These two worms just systematically sabotaged a section of our newly reinforced perimeter wall,” Xie Hao reported, his voice thick with fury.
“Oh?” Song Yuqing narrowed her eyes, scanning the unfamiliar faces of the captives. Alarm bells instantly began ringing inside her head. “Why on earth would you launch an attack against our infrastructure?”
One of the travelers lifted a pitiful, desperate gaze to meet hers, his voice cracking. “We… we intercepted data streams stating that God’s Supermarket was a supreme sanctuary for refugees. We traveled across the quadrant just to seek asylum under your roof.”
“My question was explicit: why did you destroy our wall?” Song Yuqing pressed, her tone turning dangerously cold.
The young man frantically wiped at the corners of his eyes, effectively creating the illusion that he was weeping. “We… we were forced to steal these swatches of acid-proof canvas from the elite storehouses back at our old base, and the guards have been hunting us ever since. We can’t ever go back. We only compromised your wall because we were in an absolute panic to escape the open waste. We screamed for help from the exterior, but the storm drowned out our voices, and nobody unlatched the gates… We aren’t hostile elements, Manager. We only stole the gear to stay alive. If we hadn’t taken the canvas, the acid rain would have corroded us into nothingness out in the desert.”
“Which baseline base did you defect from?”
“Survival Base No. 10,” the youth answered without a shred of hesitation.
Xie Hao looked at his brother, his anger softening slightly. “Their parameters look plausible, Manager. Given the circumstances, should we log them into our housing census?”
“Fine,” Song Yuqing agreed smoothly, her features completely relaxed. “Let’s get them registered.”
