Chapter 94 — A Perfect Match of Expertise
It wasn’t just that a large number of zombies had arrived—what made things even more troublesome this time was that among them were metal-type zombies, which caused the group some minor headaches.
Of course, although these were Level Two zombies, their abilities had only just awakened. Whether in terms of control or actual use of metal, they were far inferior to Yan Fei. What was even more ridiculous was how these metal-type zombies tended to use their abilities—by “absorbing” any metal they encountered along the way and sticking it onto their bodies like armor, clinging to whatever part it happened to attach to.
While this did indeed increase their defensive power and offered some protection against large-area ability attacks, it also correspondingly reduced their mobility. As a result, those metal-type zombies that lagged behind at the rear due to their heavy load were unsurprisingly and easily counter-killed by Yan Fei, whose ability level far surpassed theirs. The metal attached to their bodies was still metal, after all—when faced with a high-level, special-type metal ability user, they died ridiculously fast.
Over the course of two full days, Zhang Su drove out twice. By the afternoon of the final day, everyone had finally finished dealing with all the zombie corpses, piling them together and burning them clean. After tallying things up post-battle, the total number of zombies killed this time actually exceeded 8,300. After deducting the task crystal cores that had to be handed over to the base and setting aside the team’s shared assets, everyone’s individual gains were extremely substantial.
After discussing it with the group, Luo Xun decided that among all the Level Two crystal cores they had obtained, any that none of them could personally use would be turned over as team assets. Once they returned to the base, they would use connections to exchange those cores either for ones of types the team needed, for ordinary Level One crystal cores, or for points.
After clearing out the nearby zombies, Luo Xun and the others began collecting supplies again. This time, in addition to hauling back a large quantity of metal, they also needed to bring back at least one more refrigerator and a large amount of wood to renovate their home’s planting facilities.
“It’s finally over,” Luo Xun said, looking at the cars following behind them in the rearview mirror, as well as the massive chunks of metal being dragged along. A deep sense of satisfaction welled up in his heart.
Before returning, part of the huge metal sphere Yan Fei had gathered this time was attached to various vehicles. As for the rest, they simply took several cars, removed the upper bodies and left only the chassis, loaded the metal onto them to form container-like structures, and towed them behind three other vehicles into the base together. Although this affected their speed, there wasn’t a single thing among those materials that anyone was willing to abandon.
“Yeah. There were a lot of things we couldn’t make before—once we’re back, we can finally get them done. Next time we head out, we can focus entirely on killing zombies,” Yan Fei said with a smile, also glancing at the rearview mirror.
Luo Xun nodded, already planning what needed to be done after they returned—what to make first, what could wait, and what tasks he needed to teach Xu Mei and the others…
“What’s that?” Yan Fei suddenly frowned and pointed toward the east.
“It looks like… cars? A convoy? Why is there such a huge cloud of dust behind them?” Luo Xun froze for a moment, then looked in the direction Yan Fei was pointing. His heart tightened. “Tell the vehicles behind us to speed up! Get back as fast as possible!”
They weren’t far from the base anymore—the towering city walls were already visible. The direction where the massive dust cloud was rising was actually farther from the base, but their own vehicles were moving far too slowly due to the heavy load.
Yan Fei immediately manipulated his ability, assembling metal from the top of the container truck behind them to form four large characters: Prepare to accelerate. Their phones worked normally inside the base, and after leaving it they could still send distress signals back via satellite before their phones ran out of power, but they couldn’t make calls outside the base. At moments like this, the versatility of Yan Fei’s ability truly shone.
When Xu Mei, in the vehicle behind them, saw the characters, she immediately rolled down the window and released a burst of intense flames, flashing three times in succession—this was a prearranged signal. If they couldn’t see Yan Fei’s metal message, Xu Mei in the second car, who could see it, would transmit the signal using flames.
All four vehicles immediately accelerated, racing back toward the base. After struggling mightily, they finally made it through the main gate safely. As the massive eastern convoy was about to arrive nearby, Luo Xun and the others took the opportunity to glance outside the slowly closing gate, vaguely seeing that those vehicles appeared to bear quite a bit of damage and wear.
Only after entering the base did everyone finally breathe a little easier. After handing over the crystal cores, they still had to wait through a half-hour processing period, during which all members of the “Otaku Squad” gathered together.
“Brother Luo, what’s going on?” He Qiankun asked, confused.
Luo Xun shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure either. I just saw that convoy coming from the east kicking up a huge dust cloud and got worried, so I told everyone to speed up.”
Only then did the others relax slightly—at least nothing was wrong with their own vehicles.
They were just about to start curiously discussing what might have happened to those eastern vehicles—whether one of them had engine trouble—when suddenly a loud boom echoed from the massive iron gate! Everyone standing on the ground felt as if there’d been an earthquake, their footing shaking.
“What’s going on?!” Had a vehicle crashed straight into the iron gate?
“Woooo—wooo—” Without any warning, sirens blared throughout the entire base. The waiting area instantly fell silent as staff members stared nervously toward the gate.
In that eerie silence, another boom rang out. The area near the gate immediately erupted into chaos.
Luo Xun’s face tightened with shock and tension as he looked at Yan Fei and the others, issuing orders instantly: “Get back to the vehicles, now!”
“Okay!” Already panicking and completely at a loss, the others felt as though they’d found their backbone. They immediately followed Luo Xun back to where their vehicles were parked, though they didn’t get in yet, instead standing nearby.
Seeing their actions, others hurriedly ran back to their own parked vehicles as well, scrambling aboard in an attempt to drive directly into the base—only to be firmly stopped by the staff.
Some water-type ability users who had been washing the grime off vehicles also stopped their work, helping the staff maintain order while nervously watching the gate.
The waiting area quickly became noisy and chaotic. Some people who hadn’t wanted to cut themselves to offer blood for entry now demanded to leave early. Although most didn’t know what was happening outside, they were certain something had gone wrong—and they didn’t want to wait here to die.
At the same time, trucks loaded with soldiers began heading toward the gate. Though they had been summoned on short notice, their constantly taut nerves drove them to react quickly, moving to reinforce the city walls.
From the waiting area, Luo Xun and the others could hear the trucks outside the perimeter wall, the orderly sound of marching boots, and the silhouettes of armed figures gradually appearing atop the outer wall. Soon after, gunshots rang out one after another, and the sirens that had been echoing through the base finally fell silent—for the moment.
“Let us in now! Or don’t blame us for being rude!!” someone suddenly shouted nearby. When Luo Xun and the others turned around, they saw a fire-type ability user launch a fireball, blasting three staff members who were blocking them from retrieving their vehicle straight into the air.
The waiting area instantly descended into chaos. Many people, adopting a “strength in numbers” mentality, immediately began grabbing their vehicles. Most teams going out on missions were ability-user squads—who would still hold back at a time like this? One after another, they unleashed abilities at the administrators, seized their vehicles, and smashed through the waiting area gate, driving straight into the base.
With the gate already breached, the remaining people naturally refused to keep waiting foolishly. They followed suit, grabbing vehicles and charging into the base.
Luo Xun and his companions exchanged looks. Chaos reigned all around them, with everyone still in the waiting area rushing over. Some even tried to take advantage of the disorder to steal from other vehicles or loot others’ supplies.
Soldiers on nearby duty rushed over as soon as they heard the commotion. One raised his gun and fired a warning shot, shouting for everyone to calm down—but before he could even finish speaking, an ice spike shot straight out of the crowd toward the leading officer!
With a loud clang, a thick iron plate seemed to materialize out of thin air in front of the soldiers, instantly stopping several people who had been about to take advantage of the chaos to grab weapons, their scalps tingling as they froze in place.
That small squad of soldiers was clearly startled by the sudden appearance of the metal wall as well. However, the wall came fast and disappeared just as quickly. The rioters assumed it had been created by one of the soldiers’ ability users. Seeing the soldiers lower the iron plate and continue holding their submachine guns, their overheated minds gradually cooled.
Although he didn’t know who had saved them, the officer remained calm and addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker “The base is not in danger. The military has already deployed to the city walls to maintain order. Everyone, return to the waiting area immediately and proceed with entry preparations according to base regulations. When the time comes, you will be allowed to return home as usual.”
“Then what about all the other people who already went in?”
Before the officer in charge of maintaining order could respond, a group of soldiers holding riot shields quickly rushed in through the breached gate. Someone also noticed that several vehicles that had just forced their way out were now obediently driving back in, and only then did the protests die down.
Seeing that the situation had stabilized, Luo Xun and the others followed the crowd back to the previous waiting area. By sheer luck, the squad of soldiers from earlier happened to be stationed right next to Luo Xun’s vehicles. This time, the group hadn’t brought back much else—what they had in abundance was metal. So when Yan Fei had blocked that ice spike for the young squad leader earlier, he’d also taken the opportunity to quietly “smuggle” some metal into his clothes, just in case any unexpected situation arose.
Once again, Luo Xun and his team chose to enter the city via blood testing. As long as they waited half an hour and had their blood checked, they’d be able to return home smoothly. During this time, everyone gathered together and discussed in low voices what might be happening outside. The gunfire from the city walls still hadn’t stopped.
At that moment, Luo Xun and Yan Fei suddenly felt their phones vibrate twice in their pockets. After taking them out and checking, the two exchanged slightly surprised looks before Luo Xun said to Li Tie and the others, “The captain wants us to go over and help with the city wall defense. You guys go back first and park the vehicles properly. We’ll take care of the fencing outside once we’re back.”
Li Tie and the others were momentarily stunned, then hurriedly nodded. “Be careful, Brother Luo! If anything happens, call or message us!” Now that they were back inside the base, their phones naturally worked normally.
The two stood up and raised their hands. After the staff responsible for the waiting area verified the message on their phones, soldiers directly escorted them to the city wall.
After asking where Captain Guo and his team were stationed, the two felt a jolt of surprise—it was right above the main gate!
They hurried up onto the gate. This was the first time either of them had climbed the city gate at dusk; their work hours had never been this late before.
“You got here fast!” Captain Guo was also startled when he saw them arrive.
“We just got back from a mission today and were waiting down in the holding area,” Luo Xun explained. He then looked down from the wall—and the sight nearly made him jump out of his skin. “Zombie rats?! They’re zombie rats?!”
Captain Guo didn’t have time to ask about their mission. With a pained expression, he said, “Isn’t it just?! Who knows where these things came from. They chewed through the brake lines of those vehicles and made two of them slam straight into the gate—look, the gate’s deformed! That’s why we had to call you over… Xiao Yan, take a look—can this be fixed?”
When it comes to repairing metal gates, who’s the best? Call in Little Yan from the wall-building team.
Yan Fei was exactly that kind of technically solid, highly specialized professional—someone who focused on repairing all kinds of metal equipment, crafting, and modifying objects… All right, that’s mostly off-the-cuff exaggeration. But in this small metal-ability squad of four metal-type users, no one really had more hands-on experience than him.
Every time higher-ups tossed them some bizarre new problem to deal with, he was always the first to think of a practical solution and then pass his experience on to the others.
Captain Guo had been worried earlier—if Yan Fei couldn’t make it over in time, this mission was going to be much more troublesome.
The group’s position was still some distance from the damaged section of the gate. Though they were on the gate, they weren’t directly above it. On the wall directly over the gate, several squads of soldiers were busy. They had just confirmed that there were no survivors left in the vehicles below. For some unknown reason, although the zombie rats had managed to climb onto the vehicles, they didn’t attack the drivers right away. Instead, they waited until the vehicles were close to the base gate before striking, causing them to crash straight into it.
Even more tragically, two of the vehicles hadn’t changed direction at all and smashed directly into the gate, while the remaining ones seemed to veer off for other reasons, flipping over nearby instead of hitting the gate head-on.
The zombie rats’ eyes were blood-red, their skin and flesh tattered as they frantically dug tunnels—yes, dug tunnels right in front of the main gate!
“Old Guo! How deep is your foundation?!” someone suddenly shouted in Captain Guo’s direction.
“Three meters! That’s the depth specified by higher command!” Captain Guo shouted back immediately.
“Then that’s good. Hurry! Get them to bring gasoline over!” The man let out a sigh of relief, though he was still worried that the metal foundation below might be too shallow and give the rats an opening. Zombie rats were too small; guns and ammunition couldn’t even aim properly at them, so only wide-area methods were effective.
Not to mention that in the current chaos below, no one could aim properly anyway. Against something so small and fast, even Luo Xun’s crossbow gave him a headache. The only option was close-quarters combat, or relying on area attacks from Zhang Su, Xu Mei, and Xiao Xinran to wipe them out.
“Captain, if you have fire-type ability users, they can hold the line for a while too!” Luo Xun said immediately to Captain Guo when he saw they were preparing to mobilize gasoline on the spot.
Captain Guo was busy directing Yan Fei to first deal with the deformed gate. All the metal on the outer side of the wall was interconnected as a whole, so even from some distance, Yan Fei could use metal conduction to repair the gate.
Captain Guo suddenly realized the point, but his brows quickly furrowed again. “But it’s hard to redeploy people right now…” There were fire-type ability users in the military, and with danger at the gate, arrangements should have been made—but at the moment, they didn’t know where those people were or whether they were already coming to reinforce them.
After all, even though most of the zombie rats had converged at the gate, there was no guarantee that other areas were completely clear!
Yan Fei pressed both hands against the metal wall. Visible to the naked eye, the two sections of the metal gate that had been dented by the collision were slowly returning to their original shape! Even the two vehicles jammed against the gate were being pushed slightly outward by this force!
While listening to the conversation behind him, a thought stirred in his mind. Without turning his head, he said to Captain Guo, “Can you spare part of the city wall to attack the zombie rats below?”
“Huh?” Captain Guo was utterly confused, looking at him in puzzlement.
“The wall is one meter thick. If we separate about a third of its thickness and slam it straight down, it should crush quite a few of them.” As he spoke, he looked toward the other metal-type ability users nearby. “My mental strength is limited—we’ll need all four of us working together.”
Little Li and the others’ eyes lit up as they listened to Yan Fei finish speaking. One by one, they looked at Captain Guo with hopeful expressions—ever since they’d started building walls, they’d almost forgotten that they were still ability users, and that their metal abilities could also be used in combat! They’d practically started thinking of themselves as professional wall builders!
Luo Xun also smiled and persuaded him, “Since the gasoline won’t get here anytime soon anyway, if they don’t object, we might as well give it a try.”
Looking down at the group of zombie rats below—red-eyed, already grinding their teeth against the smooth metal wall—Captain Guo’s eyes flashed with ferocity. He stood up and walked toward the area directly above the gate.
In less than two minutes, the commanding officer who had earlier questioned Captain Guo came over with him. With a grave expression, he asked the group, “How confident are you?”
Yan Fei pointed at the two vehicles that had been flattened against the gate. “If we move those two cars out of the way, we should have a sixty to seventy percent chance. After that, we’ll still need to burn the ground with gasoline to eliminate any remaining threats, and once the fighting’s over, earth-type ability users will need to repair the soil in front of the gate.”
“We can try it.” He had just checked on the gasoline situation. Although it was being sent over, it seemed that because of those people from the waiting area who had fled through the gate earlier, a traffic accident had occurred on one of the base’s main roads, blocking it completely! Those people really were good for nothing when it came to helping and masters at making things worse!
Yan Fei immediately explained the working principle to the other three—it was simply a matter of “lifting” the metal plate and slamming it straight down. As for what came after, he could perform fine control to make sure none of the zombie rats gathered outside would be spared. On the other side, several earth-type ability users on the wall jointly “pushed” those vehicles back more than ten meters.
As with anything, building something up might require tremendous effort, painstakingly accumulated and constructed bit by bit—but destroying it could take just an instant.
With a thunderous “boom,” the ten-meter-high section of the city wall toppled straight outward. The massive shock made everyone in the waiting area—and those closer to the gate—stop what they were doing, staring blankly toward the gate. Had the city gate been breached? Were they about to die?!
The soldiers who’d been forced to abandon their vehicles because of the traffic jam and were sprinting toward the gate with gasoline cans in hand—what the hell, it’s already broken?! Our reinforcements haven’t even arrived yet!!
When the dust finally settled atop the gate, everyone looked at the large, slightly twisted slab of metal on the ground, and at the eerie calm below the wall—no sound at all. They exchanged fearful, uncertain glances. Did… did that count as success?
At that moment, everyone’s gaze converged on the small group of just four people, their eyes filled with questions they wanted to ask but didn’t dare voice.
Suddenly, Yan Fei’s sweat-dampened face hardened. He pressed his hands harder against the metal wall, and before everyone’s eyes, the huge metal plate that had been “slapped” down below abruptly began to twist! It was as if a pair of giant hands were wringing out a towel, curling the entire metal slab into a tangled mass!
Shen Ping, whose ability range couldn’t reach that far and whose mental energy reserves were the lowest, was the first to gasp for breath and let go, slumping down to sit on the side as he panted and recovered.
“How is it? Are you okay?” A soldier who usually looked after him immediately stepped forward and handed him a towel. Shen Ping shook his head, then looked up at Captain Guo with a bitter smile. “Captain, I’m out of mental energy.”
Captain Guo forced a stiff smile, still worried about the situation below the wall. “Rest for now. Supplies will be here shortly—crystal cores will be issued to you then.”
The remaining two, together with Yan Fei, continued to hold on. Their mental energy probed into the metal plate, and they could clearly feel a powerful current of mental force guiding theirs outward in all directions. The farther it extended, the harder it was to control—but their mental energy coordinated perfectly with that stronger force, together crushing, pinching, stamping out… whatever below still seemed to be writhing.
Thank you for reading 🙂 I hope you all liked my translations. If you enjoyed my work, please consider buying me a Ko-Fi 😉
