Chapter 28: Base Brawl
The employees of God’s Supermarket leaned against the display window, watching the fierce battle unfolding in the alley.
A familiar figure scrambled out of the overturned, armored vehicle.
It was Xie Hao.
Channeling his superpower with his single hand, Xie Hao manifested a thick earthen wall to absorb the incoming fire, before violently pulling Xie Zetian—who was still frantically blindly shooting his rifle—out of the wrecked cabin.
The moment Xie Zetian managed to lower his weapon, he unleashed a barrage of furious curses, split evenly between his pursuers and Xie Hao.
“How the hell do you drive?! And you used to brag about being a professional racer!”
“Hey, even professional racers roll their cars sometimes,” Xie Hao grunted, dragging Xie Zetian by the collar toward the entrance of God’s Supermarket.
Glancing up at the window, Xie Hao noticed the entire shop staff casually leaning against the glass to watch the entertainment. His face instantly filled with dark lines.
“Open the door!” he bellowed.
“Don’t you dare open that door!” Liu Xiaona yelped, immediately lunging forward to grab Song Yuqing’s arm—even though the manager hadn’t made a single move toward the latch.
Xie Zetian was draped in a loud, purple leopard-print shirt, his heavily scratched face twisting into a mask of pure disdain as he surveyed the storefront.
“Is this the legendary God’s Supermarket you kept hyping up? How the hell are we supposed to wage a counter-offensive against Lin Han out of a shabby shack like this?”
Xie Hao was currently pushing his limits to reinforce the earthen barricade against their pursuers, while simultaneously trying to shut his cousin’s mouth. But operating with only one arm made the multi-tasking physically impossible.
“Boss Song! Do you want to do business or what?!” he screamed.
The stump where his arm used to be had been violently re-injured when the vehicle flipped. Between the impact and the sheer physical strain of channeling his power, a fresh line of dark blood began to seep through his clothes.
“Open the door,” Song Yuqing said gently, patting Liu Xiaona’s arm to reassure him. She needed to know exactly what kind of catastrophe had just decimated Base No. 27.
“But Manager Song, Xie Zetian is a ruthless tyrant,” Liu Xiaona whispered, terrified of letting a wolf straight into their sanctuary. “He’s dangerous.”
“It’s fine. Between you, me, Little Meat Bun, and Gaha, not a single one of us can be touched inside these walls.”
Reluctantly, Liu Xiaona slid the deadbolt open, allowing Xie Hao and Xie Zetian to stumble inside.
The absolute millisecond they crossed the threshold into God’s Supermarket, both men took a deep, desperate breath. The interior was crisp, comfortable, and beautifully air-conditioned—a total paradise.
Xie Zetian didn’t waste a second, immediately claiming a nearby chair and sinking into the cushions. He scanned the pristine aisles and the deeply unconventional staff with a highly suspicious glare.
“Wait a minute… is that one a zombie?” His sharp gaze swept past Song Yuqing, Liu Xiaona, and Little Meat Bun, locking squarely onto Gaha.
“Gaha!” the girl shrieked in sudden desperation, rapidly ducking behind Song Yuqing’s back to hide.
Beside them, the giant panda straightened his spine, taking a heavy, protective step forward as he bared his fangs, entirely ready to throw down.
“What?!” Xie Hao gasped, staring at his cousin in absolute shock. “Gaha is a walker?!”
Xie Zetian quickly raised his hands, offering a smooth, dismissive laugh. “Relax, I was just making a joke. Her skin pigment just looks similar, that’s all.”
“No,” Song Yuqing corrected him flatly, offering a firm nod. “She is indeed a zombie. But she is also an officially registered clerk here at God’s Supermarket.”
Liu Xiaona’s jaw dropped as he stared at Gaha. Holy crap, she really is a zombie? It was a massive revelation to his system; he had never realized a member of the undead could exist without actively trying to consume human flesh.
Xie Hao and Xie Zetian exchanged a highly tense, sweating look, simultaneously swallowing hard. A terrifying question hung in the air: Was this mystical shop an ally, or a cannibalistic trap?
“Gaha…” Gaha poked her index fingers together gently, doing her absolute best to communicate that she didn’t eat people and they had no reason to be terrified of her.
Xie Hao’s defensive instinct instantly softened, before entirely shattering into a million pieces.
Before Xie Zetian could fully process the operational setup, a thunderous commotion erupted right outside the glass. The elite mercenaries pursuing them had violently smashed through the earthen wall, rapidly swarming the lane. They lined up in dense rows right outside the perimeter, staring intensely through the display windows.
“Open fire! Level the place!”
The squad unleashed a chaotic barrage of elemental superpowers, violently hammering the exterior of God’s Supermarket. Xie Hao and Xie Zetian flinched, instinctively bracing themselves to deploy a counter-shield, only to realize the building remained completely safe and sound, without a single scratch on the brickwork.
“So? Pretty badass, right?” Liu Xiaona bragged, proudly crossing his arms.
Infuriated by the total lack of structural damage, the mercenaries outside pushed their elemental reserves to the absolute limit, preparing a secondary strike. But before they could launch, the vibrant branches of the supernatural bamboo grove violently whipped forward, delivering a series of loud, stinging slaps across every single attacker’s face.
“Fall back! Retreat!” a harsh voice barked over the panicked screams of the mercenaries.
It was Lin Han. He marched into the alleyway, flanked by a burly superhuman who was casually hoisting the heavy, crushed wreckage of their overturned armored car over his shoulder like a prop.
Locking eyes with Song Yuqing and her staff through the glass, the heavy-labor psychic violently hurled the multi-ton vehicle onto the pavement, letting it crash right outside the storefront boundary.
Lin Han strolled right up to the display window. He lifted his chin, staring down at Song Yuqing, Liu Xiaona, and Xie Zetian with a smug, superior expression, a toxic smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. He was well aware that God’s Supermarket obeyed anomalous laws and couldn’t be easily leveled by brute force. He had been biding his time, waiting for the perfect political window to claim the stronghold for himself.
“Move out!”
At Lin Han’s sharp command, the strike team instantly fell into formation and marched out of the alley. His directives operated like imperial decrees to them; these men had been thoroughly transformed into his personal assassins, lackeys, and mindless puppets. As long as they were guaranteed survival under his monopoly, they didn’t care about being exploited.
Left inside, Xie Zetian was thoroughly disoriented. What the hell just happened? He had been standing right there, separated from his executioners by nothing more than a sheet of glass, yet an entire squad of elite psychics couldn’t land a single blow. The local bamboo had actively fought them off, and a tyrannical army had simply turned around and left at a word.
“Alright, fill me in,” Song Yuqing demanded, crossing her arms as her eyes narrowed into a sharp glare. She looked directly at the cousins. “What exactly happened to Base No. 27?”
Xie Zetian let out a bitter, cold snort. “That spineless bastard Lin Han… he possessed the suicidal audacity to conspire with foreign factions to stage a coup against my administration!”
Xie Hao let out a heavy sigh, nudging his cousin aside. “Drop the arrogant dictator act for five seconds, Xie Zetian. Let me explain the logistics.”
The breakdown was brutal.
As Lin Han’s operational influence inside the camp matured, and his supermarket monopoly allowed him to secure the loyalty of a massive faction of superpowered hunters, he began subtly challenging Xie Zetian’s executive authority. For the sake of utilizing the massive, unspoiled food reserves locked inside Lin Han’s spatial void, Xie Zetian had tolerated the passive-aggressive insubordination, issuing nothing more than standard warnings.
He hadn’t anticipated that Lin Han was playing a far more ruthless game. The spatial user had systematically bribed Xie Zetian’s inner circle, even engineering a highly calculated honey trap—deliberately pushing Chen Ke into the supreme founder’s bed explicitly to extract his private schedules and structural intelligence.
By the time Xie Zetian finally connected the dots, it was catastrophically too late. His private stronghold had been entirely compromised from the inside out.
“I kept telling you that chasing after a treacherous woman like that would breed ruin, not a blessing,” Liu Xiaona couldn’t help but interject, earning an incredibly icy, murderous glare from Xie Zetian.
“The moment the heatwave spiked, I reached out to an independent broker to establish contact with the administration at Base No. 7,” Xie Zetian continued, grinding his teeth. “I offered them a formal alliance: supply a heavy mercenary vanguard to help me liquidate Lin Han, and once his corpse was cleared, we would split the food stockpiles inside his spatial inventory fifty-fifty between our bases.”
“A broker?” Song Yuqing’s chest suddenly tightened with a horrible premonition. “Are you talking about Ruan Fanfan?”
Xie Zetian slowly snapped his head up, his eyes flashing with pure, unbridled rage.
“Yes. Ruan. Fan. Fan. That deceitful little rat. She acted like a common messenger, yet she possessed the nerve to completely play me for a fool.”
In Xie Zetian’s version of the timeline, Ruan Fanfan’s character was completely unrecognizable from the sweet childhood friend etched in Song Yuqing’s memories. In the post-apocalyptic landscape, she operated as a cold, calculating independent intelligence broker, traveling between localized strongholds to trade secure dossiers, relying on absolutely no one to secure her own survival. Because of her independent status, Xie Zetian had deemed her neutral and highly trustworthy. The moment she arrived at his villa to deliver a routine dispatch, he had hired her to transport the confidential alliance offer to Base No. 7, paying her a massive upfront fee of five hundred high-tier crystal cores.
However, the moment Ruan Fanfan walked out of his villa with the reward, she immediately turned around and sold the entire strategic blueprint directly to Lin Han for a premium payout. Xie Zetian had been kept completely in the dark. By the time the supreme commander of Base No. 7, Wan Youzhi, arrived at the perimeter with his mercenary vanguard, Xie Zetian realized he had been lured into a catastrophic ambush. Wan Youzhi and Lin Han had already formed a secondary pact, combining their forces to deliver a fatal, crushing blow to his loyalists.
The moment Xie Zetian finished his recount, a heavy, suffocating silence descended over the shop floor.
“Gaha…” Gaha tilted her head, tapping a pale finger against her cheek. Her dead cells scrambled, a recent memory flashing through the fog—she was certain she had seen this ‘Ruan Fanfan’ sharing a bed and acting sweet with Song Yuqing just a few days ago…
Little Meat Bun let out a low huff from his corner: I knew it. That human female is just as inherently annoying as her blue chicken.
“Ruan Fanfan! Yes! That’s the one!” Liu Xiaona roared in sudden realization, slamming a fist against the counter. “If it weren’t for her pushing those garbage regional maps onto us, Sister Qin and I never would have set foot inside that corrupt, miserable base! The entire compound is absolute trash!”
Song Yuqing said absolutely nothing.
She felt as though she were drowning in a vast, freezing ocean of profound sorrow, disappointment, and absolute disbelief.
Xie Zetian continued to pace the floor, muttering a non-stop stream of vitriol. He refused to believe his political fortunes could permanently sink this low.
“Look… can you grant us sanctuary inside the shop for a few days?” Xie Hao asked quietly, anxiously rubbing his large hands together as he broke the silence.
“This is a commercial supermarket, not a refugee hotel,” Song Yuqing replied, her voice entirely flat as she fought to keep her emotional breakdown under lock and key. Her face looked as incredibly bitter as a raw melon. “Right, Gaha?”
“Gah!”
Xie Hao winced, unable to handle the word ‘Gaha’ anymore. Every single time the zombie girl made a sound, his romantic illusions fractured a bit more.
“Honestly, this walker carries herself entirely like a normal civilian,” Xie Zetian observed, studying Gaha’s dreadlocks with a thoughtful, analytical nod.
“Gah~”
Gaha proudly lifted her chin, instantly interpreting the dictator’s clinical observation as a high-tier compliment.
“We’ll pay a premium rate for our lodging—exactly fifty zombie kills,” Xie Hao bargained quickly. He thought it over for a tense second, before thumping his thigh decisively. “And I’ll clear the entire balance for my new prosthetic arm at the exact same time! I’ll deliver the full corpse count!”
“Oh, I completely forgot to inform you,” Song Yuqing stated, her voice utterly devoid of emotion as she delivered a crushing blow straight to his hopes. “Due to global inventory restrictions, the procurement line for prosthetic limbs is permanently out of stock for the current month.”
