Chapter 122: The Evacuation Column from Firefly City
Midnight.
Two hundred and forty kilometers northeast of Seed City.
“Commander! Several derelict warehouses spotted up ahead!”
“Warehouses?”
A woman’s voice replied through the dark.
Her protective suit already torn and battered, Joyce turned away from the wind and dropped to one knee, using her body to shield against the driving rain.
She unfolded a map onto the muddy earth, cross-referencing it with her compass under the dim beam of a hand lantern.
An abandoned industrial complex was supposed to lie east of Seed City, but going by their marching pace, there was no way they could have reached the factory ruins yet.
Had they veered off course?
“Commander.”
A city guard with gauze bound around his arm ran up from the rear, giving Joyce a hushed report.
As she listened, Joyce’s brow furrowed tightly.
The civilian column was riddled with sick and dying. From the moment they marched out of Firefly City, the downpour had never let up for a single second.
The damp, bone-chilling cold, coupled with relentless assaults from mutated horrors… the civilian casualties suffered along the trek were staggering.
At noon on the seventeenth, she had received orders to lead 3,012 citizens of Firefly City, along with 185 city guards and 45 overseers, evacuating in a fleet of transport haulers from the West Gate.
Now, the nineteenth had just passed, crossing into the midnight hours of the twentieth.
In merely two and a half days of flight, only 1,390 civilians remained.
Her fellow soldiers were down to just seventy.
The scout had just reported that most of the refugees were burning up with stubborn, raging fevers. Days and nights of ceaseless marching, compounded by festering lacerations from predator attacks along the trail… dozens had already lapsed into comas.
Those suffering from critical trauma, severe toxic corruption, hacking coughs, and high fevers were simply too numerous to count.
The column could not take another step.
“Is the perimeter around the warehouses secure?” Joyce asked the scout who had returned from forward reconnaissance.
“No mutant organisms detected.”
“How large are the structures? What used to be there?”
“Three connected storage units in total, each roughly two hundred square meters. Crumbling ramparts surround the perimeter. Judging from leftover demolition residue and heavy machinery, it appears to be the ruins of Cloud City, which fell five years ago. There may be residential housing and other structures further back, but to avoid alerting local beasts, we didn’t push our reconnaissance.”
Joyce pondered for a moment. “Advance toward the warehouses. Dispatch Macho’s scout squad to secure the interior. If it’s safe, we make camp.”
“…Commander, Second Lieutenant Macho fell this afternoon.”
Joyce froze.
Right.
Macho was already gone.
Too many variables had battered them along the way. Every crisis had fallen upon them too quickly, catching them entirely off guard.
The perished civilians left no bodies behind, and the fallen soldiers were no different.
She had long lost count of how many familiar names she had heard reported among the dead.
In this wasteland, human life was as cheap as dirt.
Now, she couldn’t even afford a spare second to mourn a comrade who had fought by her side for years.
The wound on her shoulder throbbed with a dull, persistent agony—a souvenir from a mutant bear monster that had ambushed them from the dark.
Medical supplies were virtually nonexistent. Joyce had merely bound it with crude dressings, and now she could feel the toxic taint creeping outward from the puncture. Pain pulsed up through her neck, stabbing into her brain like a cluster of white-hot needles.
She forcefully suppressed the surging tide of grief within her breast; there was no time to mourn anyone.
As the acting evacuation commander, she bore a far heavier mandate.
“Send Campbell’s squad instead. Make it swift!”
“Yes, ma’am!”
…
The drumming of rain never ceased.
The staggering, exhausted column finally managed to set up camp inside the shelter of the warehouses.
Hacking coughs, muffled groans of agony, and faint, broken cries of despair echoed through the gloom.
Their plight didn’t seem to improve in the slightest, even with a temporary roof over their heads to keep the downpour at bay.
Forcing her weary mind to focus, Joyce listened as a subordinate read off the latest headcount.
Compared to the previous tally, another forty-three were gone.
Forty-three living souls.
“Commander… the security detail reports they just thwarted seven suicide attempts among the refugees. Two have already succeeded.”
Hearing this, Joyce tore her gaze away from the map. “Have the patrols issue a severe warning: anyone who attempts to take their own life again…”
Her voice trailed off into silence.
If it happened again, what could she possibly do?
Since the second day of the evacuation, people had begun killing themselves.
Warning after warning had been passed down the ranks, with the threatened punishment escalating all the way to “expulsion from the column,” yet the attempts never stopped.
By this point, no one feared being cast out anymore.
This supposed “grand evacuation” that had set out from Firefly City had, in truth, already been driven straight into a blind alley.
No hope. No future.
They were trapped in a hell where heaven would not answer and the earth offered no solace.
Joyce knew it, the guards and overseers knew it, and the refugees knew it all too well.
The road ahead was just as hopeless as the road behind.
Not a shred of light remained to show them a way forward.
In the end, Joyce could only whisper, “…Tell the patrols to stop them with everything they have.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
…
When they first evacuated, the remaining reserves of clean water and rations had all been loaded onto the haulers.
Firefly City possessed a respectable fleet of transports, having to tithe a massive quota of iron black wheat each season.
The convoy had been sizable, just barely able to cram in every civilian who needed to leave.
They had rolled out on schedule.
Yet a vehicular column made far too much noise. Even with the armed escort laying down suppressive fire, B-rank mutant beasts descended like ravenous fiends, dead set on tearing into fresh, living flesh.
Three transport haulers were battered into scrap.
Ten hours after leaving the city, the evacuation column preserved the bulk of its people at the cost of twenty-eight soldiers’ lives.
In the early hours of the eighteenth, another ambush struck mid-transit.
Blind in the stormy night, they scrambled to mount a hasty defense.
Fourteen guards from the defense unit fell, five transports were wrecked, one hundred and ninety-six civilians were caught in the carnage, and over three hundred suffered injuries.
On the morning of the eighteenth, the column collided with a full-scale beast surge.
Forty-eight soldiers laid down their lives, and four hundred and ninety refugees perished.
Out of options, the evacuation column abandoned the vehicles entirely.
Staff Sergeant Xie Wu, Thera, and several others used themselves as bait, driving the near-wrecked haulers away to lead the beast tide off their trail.
The vast majority of their stored rations and potable water tumbled over a sheer precipice alongside the condemned haulers, lost forever to the abyss.
At ten that morning…
The misery and horrors endured along the march defied all description.
Their numbers dwindled with every passing hour, while rations and water had run completely dry.
Where was the hope?
Joyce was the one who had taken the command directly from Colonel Wen Lin’s hands.
Back then, she had sworn an oath: she would bring this evacuation column to Seed City or die trying.
Colonel Wen Lin…
Half an hour after the column set off in the haulers, a muffled, distant detonation had rolled over the horizon from behind them.
The garrison who had stayed behind to fight to the death used that final blast to buy them precious time.
Yet she didn’t even know—if Firefly City, an outpost several times larger and more fortified than Seed City, was torn apart so effortlessly before a premature rainy season and a beast surge, what could Seed City’s status possibly be right now?
The four courier details carrying the distress dispatches had no vehicles; they were traveling on bicycles salvaged from before the Cataclysm.
With deadly peril lurking behind every shadow, could they even deliver the letters?
—And even if they did.
As a fellow frontier outpost, what surplus strength could Seed City possibly spare to mount a rescue?
Joyce had just recalibrated their coordinates. They had strayed severely from their planned bearing, veering far to the north, which was how they had stumbled into the ruins of Cloud City.
The dense veil of rain and mist made navigation an ordeal in itself, and yesterday, in an effort to steer clear of a B-rank monstrosity detected by the scouts, they had detoured a vast distance off course.
Lost.
Not just in path and direction, but within the hearts of nearly everyone still drawing breath.
Joyce gritted her teeth, blinking hard to force the double vision in her eyes back into focus.
The venom had likely begun invading her brain.
The map before her was beginning to blur; the drumming of rain outside the walls grew muffled and distant.
Reaching up, she pinched the mangled flesh of her wounded shoulder with brutal force.
The searing agony shocked her murky consciousness back to clarity for a fleeting instant.
“Commander!”
A guard burst through the entrance at that very second. “To the north! Two o’clock position! A massive swarm of mutant mosquitoes has appeared!”
“Fang Peng!” Joyce shouted at the top of her lungs.
A city guard quickly hurried inside from the perimeter, snapping to attention before Joyce.
“Captain Fang Peng! If I fall in the line of duty, you assume command of this evacuation column! You must see these people to Seed City!”
Fang Peng’s expression hardened instantly.
Noticing the faint greenish tint spreading through Joyce’s pupils, he clenched his fists tight. “Yes, ma’am!”
“Now, you stay here! Guard the map and compass with your life! Defense Squads One and Two, muster on me immediately—we engage the swarm!”
“Understood!”
“Commander!”
Right then, another guard stumbled through the doorway, breathless and panicked. “Report! Unidentified noises from the southwest!”
“A beast surge?”
Joyce drew her sidearm blade with tremendous effort.
The escort detail was at the end of its rope. They still held their rifles, but their magazines had run entirely dry long ago.
“No… it’s a light!”
“What kind of light?”
His lips parched and split, the guard’s voice trembled with stunned bewilderment. “…It looks like headlights from a convoy!”
