Chapter 88 — The Otaku Squad Sets Out Again!
For the moment, no one had the spare attention to worry about the bustle beneath the city wall. Even Luo Xun and Yan Fei had stopped their respective tasks, gathering to watch the three men level up.
Before long, Sun Shaoyang was the first to be enveloped in a layer of metallic sheen. Because of his clothes, everyone could only see the metallic glow flash across his exposed arms and face. Then he opened his eyes, lowering his head to stare at his hands in a daze.
Almost at the same time, Little Li and Shen Ping also flashed with that same metallic luster.
“Did it work?!” Captain Guo’s expression grew tense as he asked the three of them to confirm.
“I think so…”
“Captain, I feel like my mental energy was instantly refilled!”
“I feel incredibly strong!”
Even Shen Ping—who had previously been in Second Squad and had never been able to use many crystal cores—successfully leveled up this time. It was clear that advancing from Level One to Level Two didn’t require many Level One crystal cores at all. Yan Fei felt a trace of regret; he still didn’t know how many crystal cores were needed for each level, nor could he estimate how many more he himself would need compared to ordinary ability users.
His ability was powerful, but the effort required in daily use and the number of crystal cores consumed were likely far greater than for normal people. It seemed that the monthly end-of-month outings to hunt crystal cores outside the base would need to be carried out even more efficiently. Fortunately, now they had little Ranran with her sand-based ability joining the team, which could help everyone speed things up. Of course, they would also have to find ways to protect the child well and help raise her ability level.
The three men who had just reached Level Two immediately rejoined the work. Sure enough, their efficiency shot up at once. What made Captain Guo feel a bit bitter, though, was that their rate of crystal core consumption also increased. Still, that wasn’t the most important thing. What mattered was that the people under his command truly had ability and promise.
While mentally planning to file a report that evening to ask for better benefits, Captain Guo quickly sent the onlookers back to the wall to cooperate with the vehicle convoy below in killing zombies. The wall had been quiet for a while, and the zombies that had been clustering there had all rushed toward the convoy. If they were accidentally surrounded, they might not make it back to base intact.
As March progressed, the weather gradually warmed. Perhaps people in City A didn’t feel it very clearly yet, but those who had once lived farther south knew that at this time of year, early-sprouting plants were already putting out fresh green shoots, and some early-spring flowers were beginning to bloom.
During the day, longer sunlight raised the temperature inside the base, though mornings and evenings were still cold. After days of tireless promotion and encouragement by the base, some households officially began trying to grow crops in their own homes. Others even rented plots of vacant land around the base to plant vegetables, and even dry rice or wheat. In the residential complex where Luo Xun lived, for example, some green spaces next to parking areas had been fenced off with various materials. The soil inside had been loosened, seeds sown, and people tended to them morning and evening.
Some people, wanting larger planting areas, even forcibly moved aside cars that looked ownerless, pried up paving bricks laid over soft ground, and reclaimed the land.
In just the past two days, these issues had already caused seven or eight conflicts within the complex. Even Luo Xun and Yan Fei’s long-unused small container truck had been secretly moved by someone (fortunately, Yan Fei had thoroughly sealed the doors with his ability). Luckily, the two of them retrieved and drove their vehicles every day, and since all the cars were parked close together, they discovered it in time. Luo Xun and Yan Fei simply moved their vehicles directly in front of their building. Yan Fei created a ring of metal fencing and drove it deep into the asphalt road; without his personal manipulation, no one could move the vehicles at all.
In the complex’s green areas, the originally planted low shrubs, ornamental flowers, even flowering trees and decorative plants had all been uprooted. These places, like the empty parking spaces, were tightly enclosed with fences made of all sorts of strange materials, and various seeds were scattered inside.
Some people with agricultural knowledge first raised seedlings at home, but more people simply planted seeds directly into the ground. Although the base arranged daily radio broadcasts to teach planting knowledge, those programs mostly aired in the mornings or afternoons—times when most people were at work. Moreover, few households even had radios, so not many people heard them. As for mutated crops, although people in the base had heard of them, few were willing to throw away the hard-earned seedlings—especially given the high proportion of mutated ones.
Besides, who could guarantee that mutated plants were definitely inedible? What if, aside from their appearance, they weren’t much different from ordinary plants?
Luo Xun and Yan Fei continued living much the same as before. Even Li Tie and the others followed their old routine, commuting daily between work and home. There was no choice—they all had jobs, which were extremely rare in the base nowadays. Even if they had spare time, they would rather grow vegetables in the incredibly sturdy rooms Yan Fei had reinforced long ago. Who would go out of their way to rent land?
By the end of the month, the outer metal wall constructed by Yan Fei’s team had successfully reached two-thirds completion. That tall, imposing, jet-black wall had been built by just four metal-type ability users in less than a month!
They were fortunate to have a capable captain who was willing to fight for better benefits for his subordinates, as well as a direct superior who was flexible and understanding. After hearing that the metal-type ability users had all leveled up and now required higher-level crystal cores to replenish their abilities, the higher-ups waved a hand and instructed logistics to pay special attention to Level Two metal crystal cores for Luo Xun’s team. They also allocated an extra ten percent of Level One crystal cores to the squad each day, urging them to speed up the completion of the outer wall—the military camp’s wall was waiting on them, too.
“Today’s work ends here,” Captain Guo announced, standing in front of everyone with the large truck they had just ridden behind him. “Starting tomorrow, you’ll have four consecutive days off. Go back and rest well. On the first day of next month, everyone is to report back to work—no one is allowed to be late!”
“Yes—!!” Everyone’s faces lit up with excitement, eyes shining. After working hard for a whole month, wasn’t it all for these few days of rest?
Captain Guo waved his hand, and the team dispersed on the spot.
Luo Xun took a deep breath and smiled at Yan Fei. “Finally, no need to get up early tomorrow.”
Yan Fei smiled as well, though his smile carried a hint of deeper meaning. “Tomorrow, you can wake up whenever you want.”
Seeing the mischief in his expression, Luo Xun shot him a glare and turned toward the gate. “Li Tie and the others won’t be on break for another two days, right? But Zhang Su—he seems to be off for three days?”
“Yeah, he’s off for three days, but it’s the last two days of this month and the first day of next month,” Yan Fei replied casually. One hand slipped into his pocket while the other reached out to grab Luo Xun’s hand. With no choice, Luo Xun stopped and waited for him, and the two walked forward side by side.
As the weather grew warmer, everyone’s clothes became lighter. Once the two of them dressed more lightly, walking hand in hand became more noticeable. Fortunately, in the apocalypse, people rarely paid attention to or gossiped about passersby’s actions. Though some still noticed them, there were far fewer pointing fingers and curious stares than before the end of the world.
However, Luo Xun still felt a bit uncomfortable and kept his head down while walking.
Yan Fei suddenly leaned close to his ear and asked in a low voice, “How about wearing a mask whenever you go out from now on?”
Luo Xun shot him an annoyed glance. “Who do you think I am—you? Afraid people will be thinking about you when you go out?”
Yan Fei chuckled. “Let’s go. We’ll exchange some gasoline first.”
They were heading out to hunt zombies in a couple of days, and gasoline purchases in the base had become increasingly restricted. Public employees working for the base still had some ways to get their hands on it, but ordinary survivors could only buy a limited amount each time—and only after receiving an assignment, and only for designated vehicles.
People like Luo Xun and Yan Fei could get some “fuel coupons” through Captain Guo. Li Tie and the others could get some as well, not to mention Zhang Su, who often received gifts and enjoyed pretty good benefits.
Since Luo Xun and Yan Fei were on vacation early and got off work relatively early, Li Tie and the others gathered all their fuel coupons and handed them over, letting the two of them buy the gasoline in advance and bring it out together later—Xu Mei’s fire ability paired with gasoline was simply an unbeatable combo!
They drove to the exchange window to trade for gasoline. Besides fuel coupons, points were also required, but fortunately they had accumulated quite a lot recently.
After “sealing” all that gasoline—enough to blow up more than two high-rise buildings if ignited—together with the car, Yan Fei carried two barrels of gasoline for daily use back up to the sixteenth floor. Then the two of them began preparing for their upcoming trip outside the city to hunt zombies. The first thing on the list was—making ammunition.
Yan Fei brought out some metal scraps—taken conveniently during work hours; the captain didn’t mind anyway. Luo Xun harvested a large batch of mushrooms, planning to process them gradually over the next couple of days.
Worried that picking the mushrooms too early might cause them to lose their corrosiveness, the couple decided to tinker with them slowly just before heading out. Of course, they had experimented before with storing mushroom juice for a few days. The result was that once it exceeded a week, it was basically useless, but storing it for two or three days posed no problem at all.
Because the Luo household had recently increased the number of seedlings it needed to cultivate, the large chunks of mushroom wood in the nursery room were growing extremely vigorously. Layers of bright red mushrooms stood tall and dense, packed closely together, even emitting an eerie gray mist that looked downright terrifying.
Wearing a mask and rubber gloves, Luo Xun harvested them one by one and asked Yan Fei, who was organizing metal nearby, “What do you think—after processing them, if we freeze them in the fridge, could they last longer? Would they contaminate other things?”
Yan Fei paused, frowned at him, and said, “I don’t know if they’ll last longer, but if you’re planning to freeze them in the freezer… I suggest we’d better find a completely unused freezer just for this.”
“That works. This time when we go out, let’s look for a smaller one specifically for storing these. Otherwise, with the mushroom yield at home increasing and us not being able to go out often, it’d be too much of a waste to burn them all.”
Before knowing what these mushrooms were good for, Luo Xun had no psychological burden burning them. But now that he regarded them as lethal tools, special weapons, and trump cards, wasting them was out of the question!
Especially since he planned to stack wood on the lowest shelves in the room next door and let them grow for future use—having no way to store these things simply wouldn’t do.
Before long, Luo Xun had mashed out a pile of bright red juice in a glass ladle. Though red, it was obvious at a glance that it definitely wasn’t blood. After pouring the finished product into another container, Luo Xun continued working. Yan Fei, meanwhile, manipulated metal in midair, having it fly into the container to “scoop up” some liquid, then flipping it over to wrap the liquid inside. The metal then directly transformed into standard crossbow bolt sizes. The entire process required no hands-on operation at all—utterly overpowered!
Comparing the two of them at the moment—Luo Xun was wearing a protective suit modified from a raincoat, rubber gloves with protective effects, and a modified plastic helmet, terrified of getting even a drop of the strange liquid on himself. He even wore rain boots—fully armed to the teeth.
Yan Fei, on the other hand, lounged casually in everyday clothes against a chair, solving everything with a simple wave of his hand. Truly… comparing people only made one furious.
They started working from the evening before the vacation began. After Li Tie and the others returned, they also came to Room 1603 to have a look. Since there were no extra protective suits, each of them only had a rain poncho—and they needed to save those for combat outside—so they didn’t join in. By noon the next day, this batch of mushrooms had all been processed.
Although Luo Xun really wanted to try freezing some mushroom juice in the fridge, for the sake of future food safety, he decided to shelve the idea and wait until after this outing.
After making a pile of special weapons, the two also prepared plenty of food to take with them the day before heading out. On the morning everyone gathered after the vacation, they arrived in the stairwell loaded down with bags.
A month later, the otaku squad assembled once more. Their heavy clothing had all been replaced with outfits more suitable for movement—though still uniform. Li Tie and the others had somehow gotten several identical black tracksuits, apparently knockoffs of a well-known pre-apocalypse sports brand. Each held the same type of iron rod in one hand, carried a standard-issue crossbow on one shoulder, and wore identical large backpacks containing raincoats, ponchos, and the like.
When they saw Luo Xun and Yan Fei come out, they hurried over to help move the metal ammunition Yan Fei had prepared earlier—these were all items with tremendous killing power and absolutely couldn’t be bumped! Though in reality, they weren’t that fragile even if dropped.
After handing his prepared food to Wang Duo to carry, Luo Xun checked everyone’s clothing and equipment once again. After confirming there were no issues, he raised his hand and put on his motorcycle helmet. “Prepare to depart!”
“Yes!”
Downstairs, hearing the commotion above, the three women began locking their heavy iron doors.
When Luo Xun and the others reached the fifteenth floor, they saw two girls waiting there, dressed in sportswear, leather jackets, and rain boots, each holding a motorcycle helmet in her arms and with an iron rod stuck at her waist. Seeing them come down, Yu Youran, who had been hiding behind the two women, peeked out her little head. Luo Xun and the others didn’t see little Youran’s expression—because she was also wearing a child-sized motorcycle helmet…
Suddenly imagining how terrifying their group must look if they all went out together, Luo Xun’s heart twitched inexplicably. He quickly chased the image from his mind and waved for the three girls to come downstairs together.
Normally he didn’t notice it, but whenever it came time to go out and fight zombies, Luo Xun would subconsciously become the leader of this strange little team. Even stranger was that everyone—including the usually hard-to-handle Zhang Su and the strongest Yan Fei—tacitly accepted this arrangement. And at the same time, Luo Xun himself had absolutely no awareness of it.
Yan Fei raised his hand and “opened” the metal fences blocking their vehicles. Nearby residents, seeing such a uniformly dressed, helmeted group come out, all retreated far away, watching from a distance as they drove their cars out of the complex toward the main gate. Only then did discussions break out behind them—whose squad was that? Why did they seem unfamiliar?
The otaku squad once again took on a mission to collect one hundred crystal cores and merged into the waiting convoy, driving into the gate courtyard. This time, in order to maximize profits, Luo Xun and his group brought out two connected vehicles. That meant Li Tie’s group had two cars, Xu Mei and the three women had one, plus the two connected cars of Luo Xun’s group—for a total of five vehicles waiting in the courtyard.
The courtyard by the outer wall had been raised even higher—now reaching ten meters tall. After parking, the vehicles revved their engines one after another like a competition. As soon as the gate opened, the front vehicle shot out, and the rest followed at full speed.
Perhaps because everyone was now familiar with this operation, no accidents occurred as the vehicles left the base. Just like last time, Luo Xun’s group drove out unhurriedly, soon trailing at the back of the convoy, and only turned onto a less crowded road once they reached an intersection.
Thanks to ongoing cleanup efforts, the several roads leading out of the city were much easier to travel this time than before. The road surface seemed to have been cleared, and the cars that used to be randomly abandoned along the way were nowhere to be seen.
They drove smoothly to the bank where they had stayed as a base before. All nearby supplies had long since been completely scavenged by passersby, so no one deliberately stopped here anymore. People heading into the city merely passed through quickly, continuing deeper into the urban area.
The types of missions available in the base had recently been adjusted again. Aside from crystal core collection missions, which remained the same as before, the base had begun to impose more and more specific requirements on material-gathering tasks. In other words, the practice of turning in materials the base didn’t urgently need—essentially just to justify going out to hunt crystal cores for oneself—had now been largely put to an end.
What the base was now vigorously collecting included all kinds of intact fabrics, toilet paper, seeds, metal products, processed lumber and boards, raw materials suitable for making flower pots, chemical fertilizers, and so on.
These missions even provided detailed maps—for example, the exact locations and required quantities of certain materials to be collected in specific areas. The number of teams that could accept such missions was limited, and if the materials weren’t turned in by the deadline, the task would be reposted with extra points added.
Luo Xun and his group had no interest whatsoever in this kind of mission. All their interest lay in killing zombies and digging out crystal cores.
They once again swiftly cleared out the zombies around the bank, and when they saw that the defensive structures they had used last time were still there, everyone let out a collective sigh of relief.
After checking the situation inside the bank from top to bottom and confirming there were no unexpected problems, Luo Xun looked out the window and said, “Yan Fei and I are going to get some metal materials nearby. You guys rebuild the original defensive structures—keep your movements light and don’t make too much noise.”
“Got it!”
“No problem—leave it to us!”
The number of zombies in the area wasn’t very large, and they hadn’t yet discovered the group’s presence. If they couldn’t even defend against zombies at this level, they might as well hurry back to the base and hide at home.
Carrying a box of special ammunition and ordinary crossbow bolts, Luo Xun and Yan Fei quietly climbed out through the bank’s back door. They had already taken all the nearby metal materials last time, so this time they needed to collect more from the surrounding area—partly to use as defensive structures and weapons, and partly… to take home.
The two of them ran to a nearby shopping street. Yan Fei didn’t even need to enter the stores—he could gather metal as he walked, supplying himself on the move.
From storefronts and shops on all sides, various shapes of metal—clearly torn from different places—came flying out one after another. Luo Xun watched as the metal piling up around them merged together, gradually forming a massive “shield,” and couldn’t help but shake his head with a sigh. “This could practically be used as a mobile fortress.”
One of Yan Fei’s hands rested in his pocket—the pocket that held some crystal cores. His other hand constantly drew in large pieces of metal he could sense nearby, adding them to the metal “troops” under his command. There were quite a few zombies on this street; sensing the presence of living humans, they staggered over with arms flailing. From the other directions, Luo Xun simply held his crossbow and picked them off one by one—one bolt per zombie—before they had a chance to gather together. As for the zombies drawn toward the metal shield Yan Fei was controlling… with such a massive barrier in the way, they could only be temporarily blocked on the other side, clawing uselessly at it.
After finishing off the zombies coming from the other directions, Luo Xun pointed at the group stuck behind the “shield.” “What about those?”
Yan Fei thought for a moment, then suddenly raised his hand. The huge mass of metal shot up into the air. The zombies that had been blocked on the other side howled and rushed forward—and then he flicked his hand again.
Bang!
The enormous iron mass smashed down instantly, flattening a whole crowd of them.
Thank you for reading 🙂 I hope you all liked my translations. If you enjoyed my work, please consider buying me a Ko-Fi 😉
