Chapter 125: Water, and Food?!
More footsteps approached.
Accompanied by the harsh glare of flashlights, guards from the defense unit stepped into the warehouse.
A few survivors glanced over, while others showed no interest whatsoever.
The figures in black uniforms moved swiftly to the critically wounded, lifting them onto stretchers to carry them away.
The patrol squad had a general grasp of the conditions in each warehouse. Their movements were light, practiced, and swift.
They carried away one, two, three…
“What are you doing?!”
As the guards moved to lift a fourth person, a man nearby braced himself against the wall and struggled to his feet, trying to block them.
“New orders. All critically wounded must be evacuated.”
Seeing his agitation, the lead guard offered a terse explanation.
“Abandoned? Or just put down on the spot? We’ve already made it this far!”
The man threw himself over the stretcher, shielding his young daughter, who lay in a deep coma from a raging fever and festering wounds.
Emaciated, skeletal arms gripped the frame of the stretcher with desperate intensity, his starved, dehydrated frame conjuring immense strength from somewhere deep within.
A guard pulled at him, but couldn’t break his grip.
A crude rag bound around his own leg soaked through with fresh blood as he strained.
When the evacuation from Firefly City began, they had set out as a family of four.
When the B-rank abomination ambushed the convoy, grotesque tentacles shattered the hauler’s window, whipping inside to snatch his son away in the blink of an eye.
Later, after abandoning the trucks to march on foot… a beast surge ambushed them. A spike pierced his wife’s skull, and a mutant wolf clamped its jaws onto his daughter’s arm.
The man had screamed at the top of his lungs, hurling himself forward to tear at the beast with his bare hands.
Only when the guards arrived and opened fire on the wolf did he manage to drag his daughter back from the brink.
Along the grueling march, parched and utterly spent, with the soles of his feet worn down to raw, weeping flesh, he carried his daughter on his back. He never set her down once.
His wife and son were gone; his daughter was the sole reason he had clung to life this long.
Over the past few days, he had watched her go from smiling and comforting him, saying it didn’t hurt, to watching the wounds turn necrotic, watching her lose the strength to walk, and finally slipping into a delirious, burning coma.
When mutant horrors attacked that afternoon, he still refused to drop her, taking a vicious bite to his leg in the process.
People driven to a dead end needed something to hold onto.
The little girl lying on that stretcher was his only anchor to this world.
He had watched countless people around him suffer wounds and thrash in agony before drawing their last breath.
Yet he stubbornly believed his daughter would pull through.
He had to believe it.
And now, these people wanted to strip away his last shred of hope. He would never let go.
The commotion drew the attention of many in the warehouse.
Or rather, people had been watching ever since the guards started carrying bodies out.
“Are you… going to abandon those who can’t walk?”
A teenage boy asked timidly.
He gave voice to the dread suffocating everyone in the room.
Having marched this far, everyone understood the harsh reality.
Dragging the wounded—especially the critically injured—drastically slowed the entire column’s pace.
The soldiers in black uniforms were dwindling by the day.
Some survivors, broken beyond endurance, slipped into the dense woods when no one was looking, never to be seen again.
Others snapped under the sheer weight of despair, screaming hysterically about being parched before taking a blade to their own wrists to drink their own blood.
The reason things hadn’t descended into pure savagery—the reason no one had turned on their fellow human beings for meat—was because the city guards were still watching.
Those uniformed soldiers had endured the same starvation and thirst, holding the line purely through sheer military discipline and iron will.
When they first evacuated, many civilians harbored bitter resentment toward Firefly City’s administration, sneering and tossing blame.
They blamed the authorities for failing to foresee the monsoon, for the sudden outbreak of plague, for the loss of clean water, for the breach of the outer ramparts, and for the humiliating flight into the wastes.
Even before the walls fell, such grievances had been rampant.
Factions had mobilized their ranks, and some had even attempted an uprising while the garrison was stretched thin repelling the beast surge.
People inevitably viewed the world through their own narrow prism.
Lacking an omniscient perspective, they naturally measured right and wrong by their own immediate suffering.
Yet those voices and complaints… had evaporated within twenty-four hours of stepping onto the road.
Before the crushing weight of immediate survival, petty grievances were stripped of all meaning.
Later on… no one had the spare breath to think about such things at all.
New rules and an unspoken hierarchy took shape along the flight. Everyone came to understand one undeniable truth: out here beyond the walls, in a wasteland choked by mutant abominations, the only thing standing between them and death was that black uniform.
Just like right now.
Even as they suspected the guards intended to discard the dead weight, no one dared to speak up first.
Yet the desperate father acted like a chisel, cracking open their hardened, numb shells.
Buried emotions stirred to life.
Was it sorrow for a kindred spirit? Shared empathy?
Perhaps both.
After all, no one could guarantee they wouldn’t be the next to drop.
“Could you please not take my mother?”
A young woman clutched the hem of a soldier’s coat. By the flashlight’s beam, one could see another motionless figure sprawled on the ground beside her, clinging to a thread of life.
“You don’t have to carry him! We’ll carry him ourselves!”
“We’re already injured anyway. Dying is just a matter of time!”
This time, a husband and wife spoke up. Both were covered in wounds bound with filthy, tattered rags.
The husband cradled a tall, lanky teenage boy of fifteen or sixteen in his arms, burning with a violent fever.
“I…”
“Hold on. We aren’t abandoning or executing them,” the patrol guard said, raising a hand in a firm halt gesture. “This is for medical treatment.”
“…Medical treatment?”
“Who’s treating them? Didn’t all the medics…”
The crowd’s voices dripped with open disbelief, yet the desperate gazes they cast held a sliver of hope they hardly dared acknowledge.
“The unit that just rolled in… is it a relief force from Seed City?”
A man who had been observing quietly from the side finally spoke.
It was the second-in-command of a major syndicate.
Several hardened fighters flanked him.
“Yes.”
The single word fell like a thunderclap.
Those who had remained silent from start to finish suddenly broke their silence.
“A relief force?!”
“People from Seed City?”
“…Someone actually came for us?”
“How many soldiers came… cough, cough, cough… Is there water to drink?!”
The moment the question left his lips, another squad of black-uniformed guards appeared at the warehouse threshold.
They carried heavy-duty flashlights.
In the sweeping beams, the survivors could see their arms laden with stacked crates and parcels.
The last two guards carried a massive insulated drum between them.
The supplies were set down right at the entrance.
Before anyone could ask, the lead officer projected his voice across the hall: “Attention, everyone! Supply distribution begins in five minutes! Form orderly lines now to receive water and rations! Uninjured personnel queue on the right, injured on the left! Bring your canteens to the line! No shoving, no fighting, and follow the queue protocol!”
…The desperate question had received a resounding confirmation.
Yet the survivors could scarcely believe the words reaching their ears.
Supply distribution…
Water, and food?!
