Chapter Fifty-Two: Inferno on Earth

The missile, with a fiery tail blazing behind it, shot up into the sky. Outside the base’s outer city, everyone—whether evolved or ordinary people—hurried frantically toward the inner city at the command, their cries and wails echoing through the base. Ragged, emaciated civilians stumbled and fell, tripping up others in their panic; some were trampled to death, others barely managed to get up before being knocked down again by the surging crowd. In an instant, the scene became more chaotic than when the zombies broke into the city.

The evolved ran the fastest—the higher the level, the more they led the crowd, and within the fleeing masses, a clear pyramid of hierarchy emerged. At the forefront were the seventh-level evolvers, whose speed exceeded even that of flight; behind them came the sixth and fifth levels, including commanders and officers; then came the lower-level evolvers, and finally, ordinary people closest to the inner city. Looking back, the line stretched from robust men to the elderly, weak, sick, and disabled. There were also those who knelt before their wooden shacks, wailing in anguish, for whom survival seemed a harsher fate than death itself. They knelt, sobbing, awaiting the end.

“Come on, let’s get farther away.” Ma Yi grabbed Li Li, slung her over his shoulder, and sprinted in the opposite direction. At this point Li Li was only a second-level evolver; if even the seventh-level evolvers were fleeing for their lives, someone like her would be less than cannon fodder before a missile strike.

The Zombie Queen was momentarily stunned, her position awkward, but she could only keep charging into the base. Once inside, it should, by all logic, be much safer. Led by the Zombie Queen, the J-type and S-type zombies surged up the slope made from their own kind, storming into the base. Spotting fleeing humans, they immediately went berserk, ready to massacre.

The nearest humans to the Zombie Queen were no more than three hundred meters away. At her command, zombies began leaping from the city walls in droves. Fifty meters was a deadly height for ordinary zombies, but under her orders, they threw themselves down without fear, crashing to their deaths or crippling themselves. In just a few minutes, the inner side of the city wall was again piled high with a slope of zombie corpses.

The whistling roar of the missile’s return split the air again. After tracing a circle in the sky, the missile plunged straight down at the ground—its descent obviously faster than its climb, and accelerating still.

The Zombie Queen, with her elite followers, pressed toward the inner city, but a mass of ordinary people blocked their path, becoming obstacles to their advance.

A deafening explosion erupted, centered at the city gate and engulfing everything within a two-kilometer radius. The terror of the blast wave spread rapidly outward, shaking the very ground. Ma Yi, standing seven or eight li from the epicenter, felt the fierce wind rush over him and gave a wry smile—perhaps he’d been overly cautious; the bomb wasn’t as fearsome as he’d expected.

He quickly found an excuse to comfort himself: “It’s not the explosion I’m worried about—it’s whether Li Li could withstand the aftershock. Yes, that’s it.”

It was more than twenty minutes before the dust settled. Only then did Ma Yi approach the battlefield. Of over a million zombies, fewer than fifty thousand survived the battle and explosion, able to stand at all. The original city wall was completely gone. In the distance, even the walls of a smaller inner base bore cracks from the blast, sections teetering on the brink of collapse.

At the explosion’s center yawned a pit thirty meters deep, still radiating intense heat, its sides sloping outward. Everything within the pit’s reach had been vaporized—nothing remained, not even soil, only a scorched blackness.

At the edge of the crater, zombies had been obliterated. Within five hundred meters, depending on the distance, zombies were charred to varying degrees. The closer to the pit, the more thoroughly they’d been reduced to ash, leaving less and less behind. Further out, one could barely make out traces of what had once been living beings, now completely carbonized. The destruction stretched for five or six li in every direction.

Walking across the still-searing earth, Ma Yi quietly surveyed the lifeless zombies and humans. Charred human remains were frozen in postures of desperate flight, their agony and terror forever etched in that final moment.

The blast’s range had been well controlled; within two hundred meters of the southern base’s inner city, many people had survived. Yet even those spared were battered by flying debris, their bodies battered and broken. They wailed in terror, but compared to the vaporized or instantly incinerated, even the scorched were luckier. One could imagine that, if they survived at all, their future as cripples in this apocalypse would be short and harsh—perhaps a quick death would have been kinder.

From the inner city’s walls, all the evolvers gazed outward. If they hadn’t run fast enough, the tragedy below would have befallen them as well. In this world, the strong preyed on the weak—there was no right or wrong. To escape with as few casualties as possible was already the best outcome, but this strategy of destroying the enemy at such cost to oneself was truly tragic.

“There’s something alive out there.” Even standing atop the inner city’s walls, the evolvers could feel the waves of heat still rolling off the blast zone below. The air shimmered with heat, and one evolver spotted a humanoid figure moving across the scorched earth, indistinct in the wavering air.

“It’s a person.” With this reminder, others looked as well, using the burning corpses as illumination. The commander raised his binoculars; the firelight allowed him to distinguish human from zombie by their clothing—astonishingly, the figure was human.

Gradually, dawn broke.

Ma Yi stood before a massive, charred sphere with a look of regret, gently tapping it with his hand. Cracks spread from where he struck, and the brittle, crystalline charred exterior broke away like glass.

In the center, a powerful zombie lay curled up; the outer side of its flesh was half-charred. Standing beside it, Ma Yi gazed at the Zombie Queen in its arms—a single exposed leg, like the charred remains of a J4 zombie, shattered at a touch. Half the flesh of her arm was gone, torn away with the charred shell, revealing silvery bone beneath.

“She’s still alive.” Ma Yi pried open the D5 zombie’s body. Without its protection, the Zombie Queen—no matter how many D4s surrounded her—would have been cooked alive in an instant. Fortunately, the heat had not fully penetrated the D5’s shield, sparing her life.

He looked at the unconscious Zombie Queen—her leg and arm severed. Still, it was a miracle she had survived at all; as long as she lived, Ma Yi could restore her.

At last, the sun rose, and the earth began to cool after the explosion. The cries of the wounded faded; many had not lived to see the sunrise, though the injured survivors still numbered many.

Some powerful evolvers emerged from the inner city, perhaps out of sympathy or obeying orders, to tend the wounded. The lightly injured were hastily bandaged; the gravely wounded were given a merciful end. In total, over a hundred thousand ordinary people had perished—eighty percent within the blast zone. The southern base lost a fifth of its civilian population in an instant.

Ma Yi sat alone on a pitch-black stone, watching over the unconscious Zombie Queen. The sun was up, and the heat had abated. Though still hot, it was now bearable. Several evolvers approached him.

He tilted his head slightly—two seventh-level evolvers, five of the sixth. Ma Yi considered them, then ignored their presence, turning his attention back to the slowly recovering Zombie Queen.

“Who are you?” At last, the evolvers saw Ma Yi’s face clearly and secretly breathed a sigh of relief. He was human; that made things easier. If he had been a zombie able to walk unharmed through such heat, he would surely have been a formidable foe.

“I’m a debt collector,” Ma Yi replied coolly, glancing at the lead evolver.

“What sort of debt?” The evolvers, who had just relaxed, tensed immediately at Ma Yi’s words. His calm tone belied a certain murderous intent, which the higher-level evolvers sensed keenly.

“Send someone in authority who can actually speak for you. I won’t trouble you,” Ma Yi said, never bothering to lift his head, clearly disdaining to so much as look at them.

“What do we do? The one in front of him is the Zombie Queen—should we attack together?” a sixth-level evolver murmured to his superior. This was an elite squad assigned by the base, led by their seventh-level captain.

“Attack? I’m not confident. How? He may look ordinary, but we’re only now acclimating to the heat here—he’s been here since the explosion. Do you think he’s ordinary? Captain, I think we ought to contact the base,” another soldier said, glancing at the captain for a decision.

They conferred quietly among themselves. Ma Yi was unconcerned—they posed no threat. If he couldn’t handle the base’s top fighters, he had no right to demand anything from them.

“So report in. Let the base decide.” The captain nodded, withdrew his team fifty meters, and radioed the inner city command.