Chapter 27: The Man Remains Aloof
The crowd stayed on their knees for what felt like an eternity, yet Shen Chengyin offered not a single word of response. Only Zhao Guang, from his vantage on the ground, caught the man subtly shifting his weight back, leaning casually against the pitted, weathered concrete behind him.
Just beneath the parapet, a roaring ocean of the infected surged and gnashed their teeth, yet the man leaned against the stone with unhurried ease—as if he were merely resting against the doorframe of his own home.
“So noisy.”
Not a soul dared to breathe, let alone reply. No one could tell whether Shen Chengyin was referring to the shrieking zombies below or their desperate, tearful supplications.
A faint smirk curved Su Han’s lips as he stood at Shen Chengyin’s side, a teasing glimmer dancing in his eyes.
“What a pity. It would be so much better if Wang Jiafu were kneeling here to beg Leader Shen for forgiveness, too.”
The words hit Zhao Guang like a live wire. Snapping his head up, he jabbed a trembling, frantic finger toward the gathered fighters: “Quick! To the holding cells! Drag Wang Jiafu up here!”
Two burly ability users bolted from the ranks at his command.
In the distance, plumes of fire flared and flickered through the dark. Separated only by a single stone barrier, the air was split between the guttural howls of the undead on one side and the desperate, weeping wails of the base survivors on the other.
Agonized cries bled into a unified din, hauntingly melodic to the ears.
A walker scrambled over a mounting pile of rotting corpses and hauled itself onto the battlements, only to be smashed backward over the edge by an ability user’s iron fist.
Zhao Guang continued to pound his forehead against the pavement. The skin of his brow had long since torn away into a bloody, mangled ruin; hot crimson dripped steadily down the bridge of his nose, pooling across the cold concrete.
With every impact, his lips worked obsessively, chanting broken, manic apologies like a cursed prayer.
More and more of the infected were scaling the heights, forcing the majority of the metahumans to rise and engage in brutal melee combat.
A handful of wayward walkers staggered recklessly toward Su Han, but before he could even draw his daggers, Shen Chengyin’s sidearm cracked repeatedly, bursting each skull in rapid, pinpoint succession.
Without an airtight defense doctrine or a logistical protocol to incinerate the fallen, this entire stretch of wall would be drowned beneath the tide within minutes.
Su Han lightly tugged Shen Chengyin’s sleeve. “We should—wait, who the hell is that?!”
From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of an intensely alien silhouette.
It was a slender, gaunt figure possessing the physique of a youth, standing in eerie stillness at the very rear of the crowd.
Its chin-length dark hair had an unnaturally sleek, wet sheen, looking as though it had been drenched in thick industrial oil.
Every survivor gathered here was an ability user blessed with razor-sharp sensory acuity, yet not a single person had noticed when this youth had materialized among them.
The crowd whipped around in unison, even Shen Chengyin lifting his dark gaze toward the figure.
The grotesque youth tilted its chin upward. Beneath the flickering, dim illumination of the torches, everyone caught sight of its eyes.
They were a pair of unbroken, blood-red spheres. There was no distinction between pupil and sclera; only countless writhing, worm-like bulges squirmed disturbingly beneath the translucent membrane of the eyeballs.
The system’s piercing shriek detonated inside Su Han’s skull: [An intermediate zombie! Run! Su Han, run!!]
In the original plot, intermediate mutated zombies appeared much later in the timeline. As their evolutionary cycle progressed toward completion, intermediate variants began exhibiting physical mimicry convergent with human biology.
They learned to imitate human behavior to lower their prey’s guard. In both speed and sheer kinetic force, they operated on a tier infinitely beyond primary variants.
Not even a full year had passed since the apocalypse began; the survivors’ powers had nowhere near developed to the point where they could stand toe-to-toe with an intermediate-tier nightmare.
In other words, the monster standing before them had the raw power to butcher every single living soul on this wall.
“It’s a zombie!”
“Look out!”
The crowd scattered in sheer hysteria.
Standing flush beside Shen Chengyin, Su Han immediately felt the man’s entire frame snap taut with lethal tension.
It truly was an intermediate variant.
The creature took two awkward, swaying strides, then suddenly lunged—snatching an ability user by the collar and tearing through his throat with a single, brutal bite.
Unlike standard walkers, which immediately fell upon fresh meat to gorge themselves in wild frenzy, the intermediate creature simply clamped its fangs through the metahuman’s jugular, released him in the next breath, and sprang toward its next victim without a second’s pause.
[Intermediate zombies carry a viral load strong enough to turn primary ability users! Anyone bitten is already a corpse! Get the hell out of here!] System 111 sounded on the brink of a complete meltdown.
Su Han spun on his heel, executing a synchronized tactical retreat with Shen Chengyin.
Behind them, the defense perimeter on the battlements devolved into absolute bedlam.
Some accidentally slashed their own comrades in the frantic melee; others watched bitten allies stagger back upright, mistook it for a miraculous survival, and were dragged screaming into the dark as their throats were torn out from behind.
Survival instinct took over, and Zhao Guang abandoned all thought of groveling. Spurred by sheer adrenaline, he exploded with unnatural velocity, shoving through the panicking crowd to burst out of the melee.
His eyes were locked dead onto Su Han and Shen Chengyin—they had to have an escape route!
The intermediate zombie trailed hot on their heels. Just as its razor-sharp claws were about to close around Su Han’s shoulder, a high-caliber round slammed through its palm, tearing the hand into shredded meat.
The impact checked the monster’s momentum for a split second, buying the surrounding survivors a precious heartbeat to breathe.
Smoke drifted from the muzzle of Shen Chengyin’s gun. Zhao Guang saw it with crystal clarity, his throat bobbing as he swallowed hard. “Leader Shen! Save us!”
Only Shen Chengyin possessed the raw capability to put this abomination down… only him!
Desperate, Zhao Guang threw himself forward and clamped his arms around Shen Chengyin’s thigh.
“I beg of you, Leader Shen! As long as you pull us out of this, I’ll do anything you ask! I can give you my sister… I’ll let her belong to you!”
Shen Chengyin’s expression turned pitch-black. Delivering a brutal kick into Zhao Guang’s ribs, he sent the man sprawling across the stone.
“Get the fuck off me!”
Rolling across the pavement like a resilient roach, Zhao Guang scrambled back on hands and knees, reaching out with blood-soaked fingers to latch tightly onto Shen Chengyin’s boot.
That fleeting second of interference was all it took. Shen Chengyin was a fraction of a second too late to intercept the lunging intermediate zombie.
The monster’s iron talons clamped around Su Han’s throat. Gritting his teeth, Su Han wedged a dagger horizontally into the creature’s gaping maw to keep the fangs off his flesh. Locked in a frantic, tumbling grapple, the boy and the beast rolled over the low parapet, plummeting straight down into the boundless ocean of the infected below.
Shen Chengyin moved to vault after them, only to feel an anchor dragging at his heels.
Refusing to let go, Zhao Guang clung to the man’s ankle with frenzied strength, his face a grotesque mask of blood, tears, and snot. “Leader! If you abandon us, Hope Base is completely finished! You can’t do this, Shen Chengyin! You—you saved me once before, can’t you save me a second time?!”
He had only told a single lie! He hadn’t committed some unforgivable sin against the heavens!
Shen Chengyin had returned alive and well anyway, hadn’t he?! Why did the entire base have to be dragged to the grave alongside him?!
If Su Han died, he died—what was one life compared to the tens of thousands breathing inside Hope Base?!
His answer was the deafening crack of a gunshot.
Zhao Guang’s eyes bulged in shock. A bloody crater blossomed right between his brows, and his frame collapsed backward onto the cold stone, lifeless.
Before the horrified, frozen stares of the surviving fighters, Shen Chengyin turned without a shred of hesitation and threw himself off the towering battlements.
“Leader Shen!”
“Leader Shen!!”
The few survivors still standing rushed to the edge, cutting down several climbing walkers before frantically leaning over to peer into the abyss below.
Beneath the towering wall, an undulating sea of rotting flesh churned like black breakers rising from the depths of hell, crashing in wave after ravenous wave.
Not a single human silhouette could be seen.
Finished… it was all over!
When Wang Jiafu was dragged to the battlements by two metahumans, the apocalyptic carnage before his eyes nearly stopped his heart.
The infected roamed freely along the avenues; the base had clearly fallen into complete ruin. Shen Chengyin was a useless piece of trash after all—placing him in command of the defenses had been an absolute failure.
An ugly surge of smug satisfaction bloomed in Wang Jiafu’s chest. The ability users had obviously come to their senses and dragged him here to take the reins.
Though his tongue was gone, he straightened his posture with dignity and smoothed down his rumpled collar, waiting for the men to beg for his leadership.
The lead ability user, dragging a battered, bleeding frame, strode forward and drove a combat blade straight through Wang Jiafu’s left shoulder without a word.
Amidst Wang Jiafu’s shrill, muffled shrieks of agony, the man wrenched the blade downward with savage force, carving his torso open from breastbone to belly in one merciless stroke.
“Wang Jiafu, you are the one who deserves to die!”
“It was all because of you that Leader Shen abandoned Hope Base—that he abandoned all of us!”
“Go down to hell and pave the road for Leader Shen!”
Apocalypse: Becoming The White Moonlight Of A Possessive Mad Dog
