The Reborn Otaku’s Code of Practice for the Apocalypse – CH258

Chapter 258 — The End?

In the balmy third month of lunar spring, a warm and gentle breeze swept across the land, slowly thawing the snow-capped mountains and valleys. However, the people of the City A Southwest Base were in no mood to appreciate nature’s rebirth. They had been desperately holding the line at their base for over half a month, and it was now rapidly approaching the middle of March.

Airborne zombies, strength-type zombies, and monstrosities whose forms had deviated completely from anything human…

The crushing black mass of silhouettes outside pushed the base to the absolute brink of despair. This was the first time they had ever faced a siege that dragged on for so long. Worse still—their outer city walls were about to utterly collapse!

“Quick! Earth users, earth users! The walls! Secure the walls!”

As if confirming their worst fears, panicked shrieks erupted along several sections of the fortifications. The defenders screamed themselves hoarse, desperately trying to locate earth superpower users to shore up the structural breaches that were visibly swaying.

“They’re gone! They’ve all disappeared!!”

“Who’s disappeared?”

“The earth users… and not just them! The independent superpower teams are gone too!”

In what felt like a single heartbeat, the military squads and elite superpower teams who had been anchoring the primary defensive grid along the outer perimeter systematically vanished. A hollow bewilderment settled over the ordinary defenders on the battlements, but an intrinsic survival instinct made them turn their heads in unison. They looked behind themselves toward the interior layer—the inner city walls, which rose vastly taller, sturdier, and more imposing than the outer defenses.

With a thunderous crash, a massive section of the outer wall buckled and shattered. Simultaneously, upon discovering that the high-tier superpower users and primary military forces had executed a covert retreat when no one was looking, the ordinary citizens left behind lost every single shred of their will to fight.

With a sharp clatter, a man let drop his firearm. His face was a mask of absolute, hollow despair as he collapsed flat onto the concrete pavement. He sat there laughing a mad, frantic laugh. “Why keep fighting? What left is there to defend? My friends, my family… every single one of them is holed up out here in the outer city.”

This was their home, yes, and they had been entirely willing to lay down their lives to shield their homeland. But now, with the outer perimeter broken, with the aerial raids of the airborne zombies fresh in their minds—reminding them of the loved ones who had systematically perished during the assault—and with the realization that the comrades they had bled beside had ruthlessly abandoned them to scurry into the high-security inner city, they no longer possessed a single bit of momentum to hold the line.

The inner city blocks had been systematically fitted with a massive metal ceiling overlay back in January to shield against airborne threats. Consequently, during the previous aerial bombardments, the structural damage had been heavily concentrated within the outer city zones.

At the very start of the zombie invasion, the high-ranking officials of the base had explicitly refrained from arranging for the non-combatant residents of the outer city to evacuate into the inner perimeter. The citizens had protested and rioted, but they were met with absolute bureaucratic silence. Left with no alternative, they could only deploy onto the battlements to hold the line first. Yet now, things had devolved to this point…

The zombie columns surged through the colossal fractures in the walls, howling in triumph as they waved their decayed arms. To them, they had finally pried open the heavy tin lid of a massive can. It was a glorious, blissful window to gorge themselves.

Avoiding the hours between nine in the morning and eleven-thirty daily, Luo Xun and his team plying their morning shifts to systematically harvest their household crops and organize their cargo. During the afternoon hours, they ventured outside the gates to thoroughly clear the metal trap boxes and repair the shattered pavement that had been heavily mangled by the zombie tide.

“Heavens, I never anticipated our absolute haul would be this phenomenal…” Gazing at a monumental mountain of crystals that had just been overturned onto the open ground, Luo Xun and the team panned a succession of deeply emotional looks across the pile. They let out a flurry of soft sighs while meticulously picking through the crystals, which remained caked in residual mushroom juice and zombie tissue fragments.

Virtually every single one of the metal trap casings they pre-deployed across the fields was currently packed to the absolute brim. Staggeringly, roughly seventy to eighty percent of the contents inside the vaults comprised pure crystals!

Early on, the volume of mushroom juice they had poured inside the pitfalls packed over half of every box structure. As the cavities were systematically filled with cascading zombie units, the liquid naturally overflowed slightly, which handily meant that even the rearguard zombie columns that attempted to step over the compacted remains of their fallen comrades to cross the track would invariably absorb structural corrosion across their feet and limbs.

Once the underlying zombie layers were thoroughly digested and dissolved by the chemical juice, newly arriving units would plummet inside to resume the line, absorbing a secondary round of corrosion. Consequently, whether looking inside the box structures or evaluating the surrounding open wild, one could easily catch a relentless forest of zombie carcasses.

This was to say nothing of the surrounding mutated farmland. Luo Xun and the team didn’t even require drawing close to the thickets to catch a clear view from a distance—the fields were tightly caked with a dense mass of zombie remains that the wild plants hadn’t fully digested yet.

They didn’t require policing the carcasses snared within the Devil’s Vines; leaving the crystals to sit inside those thickets was vastly more worry-free than stashing them anywhere else. They could comfortably double back to execute a gradual harvest down the line anyway.

Presently, every single time Luo Xun and the team completed clearing out a metal box casing, Song Lingling would deploy her water attribute to wash the mountain of crystals clean, leaving the non-superpower users to systematically catalog and sort the gems. Yan Fei would subsequently compress the metal trap casing flat against the base of the pitfall framework, and little Xinran would step up to layer a fresh sheet of topsoil over the structure—these traps would bound to be put to perfect use again down the line, and preserving the raw metal components deep within the subterranean soil handily saved them immense effort, as they wouldn’t require carting the metal back and forth in successive loads.

They had spent a full week rolling out past the gates simply to harvest these crystals, yet over half of the coordinates remained completely untouched. Left with no choice, they simply instructed Yan Fei to temporarily fuse structural lids over the remaining boxes while little Xinran blanketed them in topsoil, allowing the team to unearth a few units daily to process them gradually.

The lone facet that left the group feeling a trace of regret was—although the absolute volume of this harvest was monumentally abundant, their sweeps failed to unearth a single level-six crystal. The absolute maximum tier parameter they managed to locate was level five. Visibly, the evolutionary boundary separating level five from level six was bound to be an immense hurdle; if a macro zombie population pool this staggering failed to yield a single specimen, it meant human superpower users would likely encounter extreme difficulty attempting to scale past that tier parameter down the line.

However, the Devil’s Vines still harbored an absolute mountain of crystals waiting for them, so they would simply evaluate the macro data once they wrapped up harvesting those thickets down the line.

Tackling their chores straight until dusk settled over the complex on this specific day, Luo Xun and the team dragged their exhausted bodies—the direct consequence of continuously carrying massive sacks of heavy crystals—back inside their base framework. A fraction of the crew deployed to the kitchen tracks to manage dinner, while the alternative team kicked off an inspection of the satellite images and inter-base communications intercepted today.

“Huh?! Did the City A Base get completely broken?!” Suddenly, Li Tie, who was evaluating the satellite files received today, let out a thunderous shout.

“What’s the story?!”

“Look at this specific photo file…” He rapidly broadcasted a string of serial codes mapping onto the image file he was currently analyzing.

Luo Xun hurriedly executed the command to pull up the file on his terminal. Sure enough! The photo clearly captured a chilling development—the pitch-black mass of zombie heads had systematically breached several specific coordinates along the outer city walls of the City A Base, and was aggressively pooling to encircle the inner city fortifications!

“How on earth did this happen?! How could the fortifications of the City A Base possibly be this fragile!” Luo Xun let out an astonished cry, rapidly shifting his focus to sift through the internal administrative data intercepted from the City A Base over the past few days—their squad had been immensely busy lately, and although they systematically reviewed the satellite maps daily, they hadn’t paid close attention to the internal files and inter-base communications network.

One had to realize that previously, even a few southern mid-scale camps—whose absolute boundaries, personnel counts, and superpower assets ran far lower than the parameters commanded by the City A Base—had successfully held out without their defenses being broken. It was explicitly because of those past metrics that Luo Xun and the team had previously harbored absolutely zero concern regarding whether the city walls of City A could handle the onslaught.

Yet looking at the layout currently…

“I unearned it! Evaluate this specific text file!!”

The group rapidly pulled up a succession of internal files leaked from the City A Base administration, reviewing the documents page by page. Before long, the brows of every single member knit tightly into a hard frown, their expressions turning intensely dark and grim.

As it turned out, from the absolute moment the City A Base welcomed this wave of the zombie tide, the high-ranking officials within the administrative core had begun broadcasting a line of thought centered around sacrificing the outer city to stubbornly hold out within the inner perimeter. Furthermore, right when the zombie columns initially locked a siege onto the outer walls, they explicitly held back, refraining from deploying the absolute mass of their inner city military forces to reinforce the vanguard lines. Coupled with the fact that they had pre-engineered a massive metal ceiling dome to shield the inner city blocks early on, as the battle line locked into a grueling match of attrition, this bureaucratic push to completely discard the outer city grew aggressively louder within the command structure, and associated internal memos and tactical debates multiplied substantially.

Subsequently, around the tenth day of the zombie siege, the high-ranking officials within the inner city officially rammed the directive through. Regarding the underlying catalyst driving the decision to abandon the outer city, the leaked text files explicitly detailed the logic as follows—the entire population nesting within the outer city comprised individuals who were strictly unwilling to unreservedly support the base’s economic directives, stubbornly refused to comply with administrative management protocols, possessed substandard combat traits, and overwhelmingly represented a collection of lazy, idle gluttons who explicitly dragged down the defensive efficiency of the entire base framework. Consequently, they could perfectly exploit this incoming zombie tide to thoroughly sever these loose ends, permitting them to re-stabilize, aggressively scale up, and beautifully concentrate the efficacy of the base’s command structure.

Under these dynamics, just yesterday, the high-ranking officials within the military structure quietly executed a total tactical withdrawal of the forces guarding the outer battlements, retreating into the inner city zones with absolute velocity and completely surrendering the outer city. True to their bureaucratic calculations, lacking primary military support, the outer city walls aggressively buckled and shattered…

“Bastards! A pack of absolute bastards!!” He Qiankun’s eyes ran completely bloodshot, his fists forcefully hammering against the wooden tabletop over and over again. “They had long since systematically absorbed the overwhelming majority of the high-tier superpower users from the populace into specialized official teams, and subsequently dragged almost every elite independent squad straight into the inner city sectors! The population left anchoring the exterior blocks comprised strictly ordinary citizens! How on earth could their combat output match the tier parameters of those elite classes?! But if you completely run out of ordinary citizens, exactly how far can a superpower user expect to march relying strictly on themselves?! Once the ordinary citizens are thoroughly slaughtered and discarded past completion, will the next batch to be classified as ‘loose ends’ and ruthlessly cut loose be those superpower users whose elemental traits don’t touch premium parameters?!”

The room plummeted into a heavy, deathly silence. The eyes of every single member burned with raw fury, bitter injustice, and absolute resentment.

A prolonged stretch of time ticked past before Luo Xun finally let out a sharp breath, raising his eyes to evaluate every single face holed inside the vault. “Presently, the outer fortifications of the City A Base have been completely broken. Personally, I evaluate that even if the inner city core manages to survive this ordeal down the line, provided our squad doesn’t hit an absolute critical bottleneck, there is zero necessity for us to maintain a single shred of connection with the City A Base ever again.”

He wasn’t merely executing a snap decision triggered by a sudden surge of raw fury over the City A Base high-ranking officials choosing to ruthlessly discard ordinary citizens; rather, his reasoning was structurally linked to a long chain of past events—the underlying atmosphere dominating the City A Base carried a profound, structural sickness from the absolute roots up. If their squad blundered into managing trades with them down the line, only to trigger their suspicion or have a high-ranking official lock their greedy eyes onto some asset owned by their family, what on earth would they do if that faction launched a plot against their coordinates?

The City A Base wasn’t anywhere near identical to that compact independent caravan they had crossed paths with previously; the structural backing and macro resources they commanded sat on entirely separate dimensions. Luo Xun explicitly harbored zero desire to maintain an operational partnership with a faction that normalized ruthlessly discarding its assets the absolute moment their utility ran dry—the high-ranking officials dominating the current base management threw out code parameters and baseline regulations with vastly more disregard than past regimes.

Following Luo Xun’s executive statement, every single member of the squad nodded in grim, silent agreement. They completely and thoroughly harbored zero desire to deal with a base of that caliber ever again; even evaluating the prospect of being forced to execute a baseline communication with them down the line left a chilling sensation radiating deep within their chests.

The March sun was perfectly radiant—not overly hot, yet completely free of the winter chill.

Precisely on the third evening following the outer fortifications of the City A Base being completely smashed open, a colossal, cloud-like shadow materialized across the southern horizon once more, charting a trajectory from south to north.

At that exact hour, Luo Xun and his team were actively busy assembling components around a specific pitfall trap. They were plotting to rapidly finalize the structural layout of this unit before heading back inside the complex to rest for the evening. Their three dogs were the absolute vanguard to detect the anomaly. Catching those massive “storm clouds” aggressively blanketing toward their coordinates, the predators panned their gazes straight toward the southern horizon, barking furiously to signal the group.

Luo Xun and the team hurriedly raised their eyes to evaluate the horizon. Catching sight of the immense visual display, the expressions of every single member shifted dramatically. They rapidly packed their gear and hopped into the truck cabs, steering the vehicle straight back toward their primary gate threshold.

“What on earth is that asset?”

“No idea, the clearance clearance is far too immense; I can’t parse the outlines. Don’t tell me it’s another wave of the zombie tide?!”

“How could that be possible? That previous wave mapped onto the absolute maximum population pool circulating through this region; these silhouettes can’t possibly be zombie units!”

“Then what exactly do you evaluate those shadows represent?”

Zhang Su, who had kept his arms crossed flat over his chest while remaining entirely detached from the jumbled debate, suddenly spoke up: “Cut the racket. Those are birds—migratory fowl.” He had only just intercepted the atmospheric data streams sifting through the currents, and after a brief analysis, deduced that the silhouettes mapped onto migratory bird columns.

The group fell into a brief silence, before sequentially letting out a succession of casual chuckles to break the tension. “Ah, talk about a total memory blank! We completely busy-minded ourselves into erasing the parameter that this is precisely the stretch of the year when the migratory flocks wing back north, isn’t it?”

By late March, the migratory flocks executed their seasonal trek back to the northern territories. The expanded marsh ponds engineered flanking the perimeter of the Otaku Team’s base true to form welcomed back these seasonal neighbors who had nested across their coordinates in the past.

For three consecutive days, Luo Xun and his team explicitly refrained from stepping past the gates, resolving to wait until the bulk of these migratory flocks completed their flight before resuming field operations. As for the waterfowl that chose to drop down to nest within their immediate perimeter—the vast majority comprised the exact specimens that had established breeding grounds across these coordinates last summer, meaning they counted as old acquaintances.

Ever since catching sight of these migratory flocks arrive, although Da Lang and Er Lang knew with absolute certainty that a heavy density of waterfowl currently blanketed the wild and that rolling out past the threshold was strictly ill-advised, the pair would persistently run to stand before the main gate barrier daily, licking their chops with a highly ravenous cadence, putting on an absolute display of craving fresh meat.

What left Luo Xun and the team even more astonished was—on the secondary day following the arrival of the migratory flocks, they systematically processed the satellite imagery from the previous day alongside a medley of internal communications intercepted from the base network, unearthing a highly stunning update. It appeared that specifically due to the sudden convergence of these migratory bird columns, those zombie tides had unexpectedly begun retreating sequentially, abandoning their positions across the battle lines…

Although they lacked explicit data to parse the precise biological catalyst triggering the shift, it was nonetheless an absolute, monumental blessing. Because the outer sections of the City A Base hadn’t completely fallen past redemption! Yes, they remarkably hadn’t.

Following the breaching of the City A battlements, although a substantial fraction of the residents holed inside the ground-level blocks and single-story shanties had unluckily perished beneath the initial surge of the zombie tide, the overwhelming majority of the remaining survivors had long since scaled the structural heights of the city walls. The citizens who remained trapped inside the sectors the absolute moment the walls buckled had similarly executed lightning-fast retreats, barricading themselves inside the high-rise concrete structures to hide.

It was profoundly fortunate that right at the absolute commencement of the zombie siege, a heavy volume of airborne zombie units had already been systematically annihilated by the joint efforts of the defenders. Consequently, with the structural threat of airborne zombies thoroughly neutralized, those survivors holed deep inside the upper stories of the high-rises or anchoring the surviving segments of the battlements were exposed to a relatively superior safety margin. As long as they retained the physiological capacity to fight, they could barely compromise to hold out.

What injected a trace of pure survival luck into the hearts of these ordinary citizens was—these zombie units seemingly displayed a remarkably low baseline of interest toward standard humans or low-tier superpower users. Instead, they swarmed in a unified column to lunge straight toward the direction of the inner city fortifications, tightly packing the perimeter of those soaring inner walls to resume their high-intensity assaults.

Thus, the moment the zombie tide executed its eventual retreat, the citizens holed inside the outer city tracks gradually cleared their consciousness. Stepping down from the battlements and exiting the high-rise apartments, the survivors of this gruesome ordeal fell into one another’s arms, weeping with absolute intensity.

“Personally, I harbor zero desire to stay inside a place like this ever again.”

“Where exactly do you plot to deploy? At the very least, the base framework still retains operational battlements to deliver defenses, and a survivor can openly purchase firearms and ammunition here…”

“Continue staying here simply to wait for that pack of high-ranking officials to discard our lives a secondary time?! I command functional arms and legs. Although the urban core ruins still house a scattering of loose zombies, it isn’t an environment where a survivor faces an absolute impossibility of fighting back. If our faction crosses paths with a zombie tide down the line, I would vastly prefer to manually construct my own defensive fortifications rather than stay here simply to absorb a treacherous knife in my back from behind the scenes!”

“Exactly! Personally, I command explicit data confirming that a fair collection of compact independent bases operates throughout the urban ruins! Certain factions nest inside high-rise blocks, cultivating greens and crops across the rooftops, while alternative groups simply excavate subterranean tunnels to live out their lives. It’s merely that I lack data to parse whether they successfully held out throughout this zombie tide…”

“Personally, I intend to venture outside to check out the layout. Even if every single one of those compact camps unluckily failed to survive the ordeal, I would vastly prefer to perish across a coordinate where I command absolute sovereignty over my own destiny! That way, even if I have to grind my body to splinters to fight for my own home until the final breath, it beats staying holed inside these walls to act as a literal beast of burden for those high-ranking officials—especially since every single time a survivor steps past the threshold, they have to surrender the absolute majority of their hard-earned income to a pack of tyrants who will unceremoniously dump our lives when a crisis hits!”

“Ain’t that the truth! Even if I end up dead across the wild ruins, I refuse to stay cooped up inside this place!”

“Spot on! Well said!”

“Every single member of my family perished inside these blocks, and it was entirely those officials who systematically murdered them!”

“My biological daughter was ruthlessly abducted by a high-ranking official team, and to this exact hour, I possess zero data to verify whether she is alive or dead! I can’t even secure an administrative pass to step inside the inner city to verify whether she is living a decent life…”

“Heh, you evaluate your scenario runs tragic? My lawful wife was forcefully torn from my arms by their squads right in front of my face, and she currently stands locked inside the inner base parameters to this exact hour…”

…

Furious, intense voices echoed out from every single corner of the assembled crowd. Although a fraction of the survivors still lacked the courage to step past the threshold—evaluating that venturing into the wild wild carried zero hope of survival—the reality currently was that at least over a small half of the population that had successfully survived the outer city ordeal had finalized their resolution to execute a total evacuation.

The battlements anchoring the outer base had long since been smashed open by the zombies. This time around, without waiting for the high-ranking officials of the inner city to execute an administrative response, the survivors circulating along the fringes rapidly poured past the broken walls, frantically gouging out the crystals from the skulls of the dead zombies.

None of these citizens were fools; they systematically targeted their extraction tools strictly toward zombie units whose physical profiles ran exceptionally monstrous or showcased high parameters of structural mutation, ensuring every single harvest yielded a level-three or superior crystal gem. By the time the high-ranking officials of the inner city finally finalized a command directive—evaluating that plying their current military assets meant they harbored zero requirement to dread these outer city ordinary citizens who lacked combat output—and rolled their armored columns and heavily armed squads past the gates in a majestic, thunderous display, they were met with a blank slate.

The independent survivors actively harvesting crystals outside had long since received sharp warnings from their pre-deployed spotters. The crowd handily scattered in a flash, rapidly running back to the privacy of their individual apartments.

By the time the military high-ranking officials detected that the crystals from the advanced zombie units outside had been thoroughly harvested by the populace—and prepared to launch a comprehensive sweep across the outer city apartments to execute a forced search of the ordinary citizens—they intercepted a devastating update. During the dead of night just yesterday, several industrial factories engineered within the outer city that hadn’t found a window to relocate their facilities inside the inner city had been completely cleaned out under the cover of darkness. An immense volume of heavy manufacturing equipment, machinery, and precision instruments had been systematically looted. Crucially, at least over half of the outer city’s remaining population had executed a total evacuation under the cover of night to leave the base…

The executive high-ranking officials of the City A Base instantaneously broadcasted an absolute directive—launch a total sweep across the outer city ruins, locate and apprehend the perpetrators at all costs!

This administrative call handily drove the outer city residents who were still caught in a state of hesitation into a state of absolute, boundless fury. Especially when certain households watched the high-tier crystals they had painstakingly harvested and hidden inside their rooms forcefully confiscated by the search squads, the two factions exploded into a full-scale, brutal internal armed conflict that raged for two full days. Absorbing a casualty rate that systematically slaughtered roughly a quarter of the remaining residents who had chosen to stay behind, the entire remaining block of survivors sequentially packed their gear to completely exit the City A Base.

By the time Luo Xun and his team intercepted associated updates from the highly classified internal files of the City A command grid, the City A Base currently retained nothing but a single, isolated inner city block. That past outer city—that specialized, newly engineered outer city sector—had completely ceased to exist…

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