Chương 17: Night Falls

[The Second Night has Arrived.] The system announcement was followed by guttural wails of zombies and the howls of a new type of zombies, the zombie wolves. The mix of the two shook the very earth, as screams and gunshots tore through the plains. Green Ghost Fleet's banner swayed with the wind. The captain stood atop his tank, overlooking the boundless expanse before him.

"They're fast." He remarked to the beautiful girl beside him. His woman.

"The difficulty really is climbing each night, huh." He tentatively picked up the speaker and gave his orders.

"Everyone, enough chit chat, get behind your designated locations with your guns. And don't stop firing. There are backups for those of you who'll take care of any zombies that get too close from any odd angle." He'd made sure to erect a barrier of sandbags around the perimeter of their base. It had cost a pretty penny to haul them out from the Eastern desert. And since that area still had no forces controlling it, it had been extra rough on his crew, since they'd had to pack the bags and haul them over themselves.

Naturally, just because he was their leader didn't mean he could make them work without pay. I mean, it's possible, but the resentment buildup isn't worth it. Sure, he had a tank, a main battle tank. His vice captain had a machine gun with infinite bullets. But he was still very much human, in a place where everyone had guns on hand. If anyone was pushed too far, they could very well just go, fuck it all, and shoot him down before offing themselves too.

Plus, his subordinates were all modern people, highly educated. Making them work like slaves without pay was a fast track to rebellion. He closed his eyes and looked within himself with Mind's Eye. In his lower abdomen, the place just behind his navel sat a ball of orange that hummed with the energy of pure fire. He'd also opened his meridians, and had spent a good hour establishing the energy pathways. Once I form that mana core, I'll be a step above everyone!

After the discovery of these stones, as someone who'd been an avid reader of xianxia novels and Daoist scriptures, he'd quickly made the connections. But the people around him were no slouches either—a bunch of them were like him too. Back on Earth, cultivation novels had been pretty popular. They knew this whole shtick. Which was exactly why he'd put them up to guard the base—while also arranging for assassins to quietly have them killed.

It was a necessity; he'd already restricted unprompted access to the regional chats within his own group. Clara possessed the unique skill of mind reading. It required her to first place a mark on the target through physical touch. But that wasn't something he had a problem providing. He'd had her touch each of his subordinates, and had outwardly warned them not to open the regional chats unless told to, and to remain within the bounds of the customized version of it.

With that, he'd isolated the xianxia-knowers to guard the stock of spirit stones from the rest of the crew, giving them the incentive to keep their mouths shut in exchange for first dibs on the stones. He'd also cut off the fleet's access to the wider regional chats. And according to his plan, the assassins he'd hired would strike at high noon, when most of his fleet tended to nap in their cars—quickly killing off all the guards before leaving. He'd already transferred them their first deposits in advance.

Except everything had gone south thanks to that Demon! The accursed Heavenly Demon had burst into his fleet's storage facility, slaughtered his crew instead, and run off with nearly 90% of the supplies! That was also why he hadn't been able to gather enough spirit stones to form his core yet! The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Was she a serial killer back on Earth or something? Shaking his head, Julius refocused on the battle at hand.

Most zombies usually came from the central plains. And tonight, there wasn't merely the light white mist there had been the last time. No, it was heavy with thick, bloody red mist. Mist so dense it rendered binoculars useless. And the zombie wolves, while not nearly as fast as the sprinters, were surprisingly nimble and hard to shoot. They ran in zigzags, their fur dirty and bloody, faces rotten and dead. They rapidly closed the distance to the fleet.

Julius held back from issuing the order to open fire, waiting for them to get a little closer. His crew had expanded to nearly fifty people from an initial thirty. Of them, thirty held the triggers of machine guns behind the line of sandbags, while the rest stayed back with assault rifles of their own, ready to shoot down any zombies that got too close to the frontline gunmen. And just as the wolves came within a comfortable range of their guns, Julius raised his hand and brought it down in a wide arc.

"Fire!" Crackling gunshots tore through the wailing and howling of the zombies. Bullets rained down over the horde like hail, punching through fur and bone alike, lodging in eyes, hearts, legs. The barrage collided with the nimble wolves, tearing legs from torsos, piercing necks with such force it ripped the flesh apart. Minutes passed as Julius enjoyed the view of carnage with Clara on his arm.

And when the horde began to thin out, Julius noticed something fast rapidly advancing toward them from the distance, kicking up debris and cutting through the grass at terrifying speed.

"Sprinters incoming! Everyone get back!" his vice captain shouted, quickly climbing into his newly designated monster truck and up onto the roof where his Gatling gun was mounted.

"Let's get inside too, darling." Clara beckoned. Julius watched until much of his men had retreated beside his tank before climbing in himself. Once inside, he loaded a shell into his battle tank's cannon. With a crackling sound, the barrel swung to aim at the sprinter closest to reaching them. Julius pulled the trigger after locking onto the zombie. KRAAA-BOOOOOOM! An ear-splitting sound resounded as the missile-like zombie burst asunder into a mist of flesh and blood.

"Yaaa, show 'em, boss man!"

"Serves it right, bastard zombies!"

"Did you see the leader's aim? One shot, one kill!" Overshadowing his crew's cheers came the crackle of fireworks as his vice captain's Gatling gun reached full heat, firing nearly two hundred shots per second. The terror-inducing creatures—the biological missiles that were the sprinter zombies—were soon reduced to mere targets for practice, as both Julius and his vice captain Irfan lit up the night with their weapons of death. After nearly an hour, the sprinters finally stopped emerging from the bloody mist.

The crew repositioned to their posts, ready for whatever came next. Julius climbed out of his tank and shared a drink with Irfan.

"That went better than expected, huh." He said.

"Did you expect anything less, my vice captain." Julius winked. The crew at the front were also happily firing away at the walkers and wolves, their morale sky-high after watching their leader turn the so-called biological missiles into mere instruments for sport.

"You know, maybe this night won't be so har—!" Several explosions rang out from behind them. They all came from the black stone mountain.

"Wait, aren't those coming from the mining area?" he asked.

"Shit, those are the sounds of dynamites going off. Someone's mining there!"

"Quickly deploy some men to that location, who dares mine in our territory right under our noses!" Howl!!! Julius's head snapped back toward the plains ahead of him as wolf howls erupted from directly behind the blood mist. It was unlike anything he'd ever heard. The howl nearly drowned out all their gunshots and even the dynamite explosions.

And as everyone was torn between obeying his order to check the mine or facing the new threat, out of the blood mist walked a thirty-foot-tall hulking beast, a giant horn on its head, its bloody eyes matching the color of the mist it emerged from.

"Shit." Was all Julius could say, as he redeployed his men to deal with the new threat.

"Bastard got lucky—I'll find you later!" …. [Black Stone Mining Area] Nyx laughed as the dynamite explosions unearthed spirit stones in front of him. They came in all sorts of colors—orange, blue, and even cyan, which he took to represent a wind element. Ignoring the huge howl of the wolf that had him shivering for a moment, he focused on bagging the items one after another, stashing them in his inventory before bagging more.

Of the hundred dynamite packs he'd bought with fifty gold, half had already gone off, and the rest were still going. But as the dynamite cleared more and more of the mountain's outer crust where the others had already mined, Nero finally spotted a small handful of healing spirit stones tumbling loose after an explosion went off to his far right. His eyes lit up at what was revealed behind those chunks of spirit stones!

"Today's my lucky day, or what!"