009: Crisis Strikes—a Zombie Tide Appears.
The ice dragon tornado had a stunning effect. After suffering superpower backlash from her own ability, Lu Qingxue fell straight off the car roof.
Just then, Shen Wuqiao’s water had finished boiling. She ran out carrying the kettle, glanced at Lu Qingxue wrapped in thick ice, and helpfully suggested:
“Isn’t she going to suffocate? How about I pour this kettle of boiling water on her to melt the ice? Two Junior Crystal Cores will do.”
“Are you looking to die?!” Zhang Hu’s brutish nature showed in full as he swung his fist straight at Shen Wuqiao’s face.
With a “clang—” immediately followed by a “crack—”
His fist struck the personal protective shield around Shen Wuqiao. The massive recoil instantly broke several bones in his hand, visibly deforming his fist.
“Ah! Kill her—” Zhang Hu roared, clutching his fist.
The other Ability Users immediately unleashed their powers, ready to gang up on Shen Wuqiao.
“Captain Zhang, ganging up on a girl in broad daylight—you really aren’t afraid of being laughed at?” Sister Lan, with her short purple hair, arrived with her pioneering squad.
“Butch of Pioneering Squad Seven, I’d advise you to mind your own business. It’s your lot secretly promoting this lousy shop lately that’s caused unrest in Zones E and F of the base.”
“Believe me, we’ll deal with you too?!”
“Zhang Hu, how dare you threaten us—I’ll kill you!” Tie Niu flexed his bulging, taut muscles, and with a raging bull charge, faced off against Zhang Hu in a standoff ready to explode at any moment.
“What, you want a fight? You bunch of low-level pioneers—can’t you recognize your own place?!” One-eyed Zhang Long tried to intimidate them with his status as deputy captain of the City Defense Force.
Keke flipped her dreadlocks. “You City Defense troops are just cowardly turtles hiding in the base waiting to be fed. What are you acting so high and mighty for? A fight? You think I’m scared?”
The conflict between the two groups was on the verge of erupting into a chaotic battle of powers, when suddenly someone shouted in panic:
“Zombie Tide! A Zombie Tide is coming from the west, with mid-tier Mutant Beasts! Run!”
The Zombie Tide had arrived—a so-called Zombie Tide was a large-scale invasion formed by the convergence of Zombies and Mutant Beasts.
Shen Wuqiao had no powers, yet she could still feel the Wasteland ground trembling.
She couldn’t fight, but she could run just fine. Without hesitation, she darted back inside the shop’s protective shield.
The twenty-some people queuing to buy supplies instinctively followed her inside.
The two groups who had been facing off outside also retracted their aggression at the arrival of the Zombie Tide.
Sister Lan activated her Psychic Perception Ability and discovered it was a small-to-medium Zombie Tide, but mixed within were at least four mid-tier Mutant Beasts.
And this spot was still two kilometers from the base. Even Ability Users couldn’t outrun mid-tier Mutant Beasts.
“Move—” she led her squad, decisively running toward Shen Wuqiao’s shop.
Zhang Long and his brother’s team also dragged Lu Qingxue’s ice sculpture toward the shop, but they were blocked by the protective shield four meters from the store, smashing their faces bloody.
[Warning! Personnel who pose a physical threat to the shop are prohibited from entering for twenty-four hours!]
The System’s voice sounded like a death sentence to them. Their faces turned ghost-white!
A safe zone might be right in front of them, but they couldn’t get in, and behind them was the Zombie Tide about to arrive—truly the childhood nightmare of countless children.
“Damn it! They’re just a few mid-level beasts! Hold them off and cover us while we get to the vehicles!”
At this point, their only hope was to go all in—only by getting back to the armored vehicles would they have a chance to survive.
The Earth-type Ability User pressed his palms to the ground, churning up the earth beneath the Zombie Tide ahead to make their advance difficult, then raised earthen walls to buy time.
By the time the four vehicles restarted, Lu Qingxue had finally freed herself from the ice sculpture that had trapped her. If she’d stayed frozen any longer, unable to fit through the car door, she might have been left behind.
They got lucky. The very second the doors closed, the Zombie Tide surged forward. Rather than fighting back, they used the armored vehicles’ powerful engines to punch a path through and speed away.
But the Zombie Tide didn’t give chase—because they smelled living humans, closer by.
A Zombie Tide made up of zombies, Mutant Rats, mutant cats and dogs, and even mutant snakes was charging straight toward Shen Wuqiao’s little shop.
The shop was packed with people, and those nearest the door felt their hair stand on end and their scalps go numb.
“Boss Shen, can your shop hold off the Zombie Tide?” It was Keke who asked.
But how would Shen Wuqiao know? This was her first time encountering something like this.
“System? Is it going to hold? I’m scared~”
[Rest assured, Host. The Protective Shield’s Energy Core will be concentrated on the frontal impact zone. According to the System’s calculations, this Zombie Tide cannot breach the Protective Shield.]
Sure enough, before the zombies and Mutant Beasts could even reach the shop door, they slammed hard into the Protective Shield four meters out.
The savage roars and the grotesquely contorted faces of the zombies and Mutant Beasts being crushed together sent chills down most people’s spines.
Shen Wuqiao’s teeth ached and her scalp tingled in waves.
Those living dead—human and beast alike—some with body parts already rotting and hanging off, yet still driven by their bloodthirsty instincts.
Lin Feng, standing at the outermost edge by the door, saw that the things truly couldn’t get in, so he simply pushed the door open and stepped outside.
“Lin Feng, what are you doing?!” Keke cried out.
Lin Feng ignored her. He condensed a wind blade in his palm, stopped in front of the Protective Shield, and stabbed it into the head of a Mutant Rat.
The Mutant Beast, shoved against the shield by the Beast Tide, collapsed.
He immediately turned his attention to a zombie beside it with half its face rotted away.
Blade up, blade down—swift and ruthless. With the Protective Shield protecting him, he didn’t even have to worry about being splashed by the virus.
His actions stunned everyone in the shop, but they also snapped the other members of his team to their senses. If the shield was unaffected from the inside, weren’t all those zombies and beasts out there just Crystal Cores delivered to their doorstep?
“Haha… count me in too.” Tie Niu was the second to rush out, with Sister Lan and Keke right behind him.
Seeing them slaughter Mutant Beasts and zombies as easily as killing chicks, the others in the shop were tempted as well.
“For the Crystal Cores—charge!”
Shen Wuqiao stood behind the checkout counter, watching those people rush out in a swarm for the Crystal Cores, forming a slaughter line within the Protective Shield.
Meanwhile, she took out some eggs and heated oil in a pan.
Fried eggs with ham, instant noodles… all those Crystal Cores out there had to be hers, hehe…
Inside the core zone of Radiance Base—
In the past, if a Zombie Tide had formed within two kilometers of the base perimeter, the City Defense Army would have long since dispatched ability squads to wipe it out.
But today, they didn’t move.
“What’s the rush? We can use the Zombie Tide to destroy that damn shop for us—saves us the trouble of doing it ourselves. It’s just a shame about the supplies.”
“Exactly because of that damned shop, morale at the base’s outskirts is falling apart. Captain Lu, do you know that woman’s identity?”
The base’s logistics director turned his gaze toward Lu Qingxue, who had been silent all this time.
Ever since the little shop appeared, they had been investigating the shopkeeper’s background, but came up with nothing—until today, when Zhang Hu mentioned that Lu Qingxue seemed to be an old acquaintance of hers.
Lu Qingxue’s eyes were ice-cold, and her words were even colder: “I don’t know her. Once the Zombie Tide crushes that wretched place, whoever’s inside will be reduced to unrecognizable walking corpses…”