Watching the commander ranked mutant from a distance while continuing to obliterate its countless tentacles, I continued to run away. Even though all I could see were those tentacles, I couldn't believe they all originated from a single thing. Whatever it was, it had to be huge…much bigger than a building, maybe.
Just how big was the thing?
It finally emerged from the ground, a misshape blob that resembled a slug or arthropod with dozens of tentacles protruding from its fleshy body. It must have consumed whatever mutants and zombies that were within the research facility, for I saw masses writhing along its surface, moaning faces and disembodied limbs pressing outward.
That was thanks to my glasses being able to magnify and allow me to observe it from range. I immediately clicked off the magnification, not wanting to see those horrific features.
"How massive!" Lei Shu exclaimed, his voice failing him for a bit. "It's so huge! As big as a building!"
Yeah, that was what I just thought…never mind.
"Keep moving!" I told my friends. "Don't give it an easy target!"
I aimed my plasma rifles at the writhing center of mass, blasting the slug-like body. There was a horrendous wail and it lashed out with its remaining tentacles, leveling buildings and reducing wreckage to dust.
Running through the cloud of dust and particles, I coughed. Our evolver energies shimmered around us as protective auras, protecting us from the worst of the smog, but visibility was cut down drastically. Even so, I could barely make out dark silhouettes as the flailing appendages whipped through the storm and smashed another abandoned building to bits.
How were we ever going to be able to defeat something so colossal and powerful? Not only that, if this was a commander ranked mutant, then…what was a disaster ranked mutant? I simply couldn't imagine what could be more dangerous than this thing.
We continued to sprint across the roads, which were filled with debris and wreckage. Lei Shu spun around and fired off a barrage of lightning bolts that caused a pursuing tentacle to recoil, and then I finished it off with my hovering plasma rifles.
"Do you think the rest have gotten far enough by now?" Lei Shu asked breathlessly, trying not to choke on the billowing cloud of dust. "Can we retreat?"
"That will be a good idea." I was helping Lisa up, making sure she could catch up with us. She was a healer, not a combat type, so her physical prowess was lacking when compared to us. Even so, as an evolver, she was still stronger, faster and fitter than an average human, so I was probably being overly concerned.
But she was my girlfriend, so I guess that was natural.
"Let's retreat then," I said, pushing my glasses up and scanning the area. The colossal form of the commander ranked mutant was still barely hidden behind that cloud of dust, and we were probably so tiny compared to it that it couldn't see us. We should take advantage of that to escape while we were beneath its notice.
So I withdrew my plasma rifles. Lei Shu noted my action and stopped generating electricity too. Relying on my glasses, I conjured a holographic map to guide us along the dusty maze of buildings and streets.
There was another roar behind us as the commander ranked mutant heaved itself over, using its tentacles to pull itself forward. It was finally free, and now it was going to wreak havoc on the surface world.
No…it was calling for minions. As my little group ran, I spotted zombies clambering out of the ruins of buildings and heading toward the commander ranked mutant. A few of them were in our path, and they immediately ran at us, their aggression compounded now that the sunlight was obscured by the thick fog of dust. Snarling, they clawed at the air as they rushed toward us, the lethargy that they normally suffered during the day momentarily gone.
"Damn, we have no choice but to fight, huh?" Lei Shu complained.
"Be careful," Lisa said, preparing her evolver energy to heal us whenever it became necessary. Given the numbers of zombies sprinting toward us, injuries would be inevitable. Nonetheless, I gently pushed her behind me and drew both of my pistols.
"Yeah. You too. Stay behind me."
Then both Lei Shu and I fired. Lightning bolts and plasma bullets streaked through the air, momentarily tearing apart the fog of dust and leaving a trace of ozone. The first row of zombies were blown apart, their heads scorched by electricity or incinerated by superheated plasma. They fell over, only to be trampled by their comrades behind them.
There were way too many of them. Lei Shu converged forks of lightning to take out huge swathes of them while I summoned my plasma rifles once more. Charging up the heavy weapons, I blew huge craters in the zombies' ranks, temporarily opening up a path for us to run through.
"Follow me!" I ordered, grabbing Lisa's hand and pulling her along. Lei Shu followed, taking the rear and keeping the zombies at the flanks at bay with his lightning. I assisted him, blowing more holes in the hordes with gigantic beams of plasma. Unleashing the power of the sun upon my enemies, I turned them into clouds of flaking ash.
I wished I was driving a tank. An Executioner-patterned tank, in particular, an Executioner plasma cannon for its turret and sponson plasma cannons. Maybe I could ask my brother to help me to build one in the future…but it was going to cost a lot. Plus I would need a crew to pilot it. On the bright side, regular people could crew it, I didn't need evolvers crewing a tank when their abilities could be put to better use elsewhere.
That would be the ideal scenario. Regular soldiers operating tanks, armored vehicles and artillery while evolvers fought as frontline infantry. Combined arms warfare. Regular people still had an important role to play, even in a world full of monsters and evolvers. Evolvers were few in number anyway, so we still needed regular people to help us.
Unfortunately, only in stupid Chinese cultivation stories would you have nonsensical scenarios where "strong eat the weak" and regular people were treated as trash simply because they didn't have superhuman abilities. Come on…
Look, I wasn't naïve enough to claim that people wouldn't abuse their power, or that bullying would never happen. But the cultivation stories always followed the same pattern and made you think that the whole world operated like that. Compare Lord of the Abyss with Solo Leveling/Only I Level Up, for example. And yeah, Lord of the Abyss even acknowledged that it was a Chinese rip off of Solo Leveling. Anyway, Solo Leveling, the Hunters protected the miners, and there were laws in place to ensure Hunters didn't abuse their power and kill regular people indiscriminately. You didn't have Hunters swaggering about, behaving like tyrants and calling normal people trash, or murdering them for laughs. And then you read Lord of the Abyss, and you had Players treating normal miners as trash and outright murdering them for no reason other than because "I'm strong and you're weak trash." What the fuck? Only characters in Chinese stories had this sort of stupid mentality.
It wasn't even Chinese culture. I bet it was simply because Chinese authors looked at each other's stories, saw what was popular (the trash, weak to strong, system, evil one-dimensional bully-type villains and other clichés) and just copied each other. And now everyone assumed this was "Chinese culture" or "Chinese behavior" when it wasn't. Many Chinese were fairly respectful and polite, and bullies constitute a minority. Were there many bullies? Yeah, but out of a population of one billion, even one percent of them being bullies would mean there were ten million bullies. The majority of normal people minding their business tended to get overshadowed by the ugly clichés so predominant in modern media.
"Oi! Focus, Zhi Ming! We're in the middle of a battle here!"
Lei Shu's voice snapped me back to reality. The exhaustion was getting to me and I was mentally drifting off. That was bad. I couldn't get complacent. Shaking my head, I raised a pistol and blasted the head of a zombie off. Above me, my plasma rifles bellowed once more, unleashing the fury of a sun upon another horde to clear the way.
Behind us, the commander-ranked mutant roared. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the thrashing tentacles. The majority of the zombies were shambling toward it, either to heed its call or be devoured.
It was a "Commander" type mutant, after all. It was only natural that it had the ability to command hundreds, if not thousands of minion type zombies and mutants. I saw that it wasn't just human zombies, but also rat and insect type mutants crawling out of the dirt and ruin to unite with the gigantic arthropod mutant.
That couldn't be good. If it mustered an army, then it would assault the walls. I wondered if the barriers would be able to withstand a sustained attack from a commander-ranked mutant. The higher-ups would be rallying all the Solar ranked evolvers to launch a strike on the commander type mutant.
Otherwise the monstrosity would force a breach in the fortress city's walls…and then the fall of the city would follow shortly.
At that moment, my smartphone crackled to life.
"Classmate Feng Zhi Ming! Classmate Lei Shu! Classmate Lisa! Are you there?"
"Lou Qian?" I was surprised that she would call us. "Where are you guys now? Are you at a safe distance?"
"Don't worry about us. We're safe. But we spotted a flurry of activity in your direction, it's like all the zombies in the sector have woken up…and they are running toward the commander ranked mutant."
"That's exactly what is happening," I confirmed. "The good news is that the commander ranked mutant appears to have to stop chasing us and is waiting for the minion-ranked zombies and mutants to gather around it. I see several warrior ranked mutants too."
"I don't know if that's good news," Lou Qian muttered, a hologram of her face floating in front of us and looking grim. "But I do have some good news of my own. We managed to contact the authorities in District 4 after we got to a safe distance, and they are preparing an attack of their own."
"That's fast," Lei Shu remarked. "I thought they would be sitting around with their thumbs stuck in their asses, panicking and paralyzed."
"Oh, they are definitely panicking. They've activated scorched earth protocols." Lou Qian's expression turned grimmer than ever. "They plan to sterilize the area with a cruise missile strike. So the three of you had best get out of there as quickly as possible. The cruise missile will be launched any minute now."
"You've got to be kidding me…" I stared at her in disbelief, then shook my head. "Those stingy bastards in the government actually authorized the use of a cruise missile?!"
"That's how seriously they are taking this threat. It's a commander ranked mutant, after all."
"That's true…"
"We had best get out of here then," Lei Shu muttered, his face pale. I understood how he felt.
The government running the fortress city had a limited number of cruise missiles – less than twelve, if I recalled. They were extremely rare and precious, and so they were hoarded almost zealously. The government would never use them unless absolutely necessary since they were so few. That was why we weren't bombarding the wastelands with cruise missiles to clean out the place and wipe the zombies out. They were expensive and almost impossible to replace.
However, each one had a payload almost equivalent to a nuclear weapon, able to unleash several giga tons worth of energy in a single detonation, and ensuring that even a Commander ranked mutant would be disintegrated.
Yeah…there was absolutely no use saving up these precious cruise missiles when there was a Commander ranked mutant right on your doorstep. What was the use of having these weapons if you didn't use it against an enemy capable of breaking into your city and laying waste to the people living within? Including yourselves?
"Uh oh…" Lisa raised her eyes to the skies. "I see it!"
"God damn, they sure don't waste any time, do they?!" Lei Shu exclaimed. We stared at the white contrail left behind by the cruise missile as it streaked across the heavens, launched from the direction of the fortress-city.
It swerved about in the skies and dove rapidly toward the commander-ranked mutant, who tried to swat it. However, the projectile was traveling too quickly and the tentacles missed. Realizing what was coming next, I immediately grabbed hold of Lisa and shielded her in a protective embrace, trusting my boosted Endurance to help me survive what was to follow.
"Brace!" I yelled at Lei Shu, who was also scrambling. "Take cover!"
The cruise missile struck the commander ranked mutant and exploded, transforming into a vast conflagration that spread out for a couple of miles in all directions, a colossal fireball that consumed and incinerated whatever was within the vicinity and leaving a scorched, fuming crater. The inferno itself expanded into a miniature sun, pumping a dense cloud of heat upward that resembled a mushroom cloud that blotted out the heavens.
The last thing I remembered was being buffeted by the shockwaves and thrown off my feet, Lisa held tightly in my embrace, and hurled into what felt like oblivion.