“What?!”
Rong Le’an was startled and immediately stood up. “Where is Liu Yingyao?”
“He was patrolling the zombie tide in another direction at the time. He wasn’t over there.”
The messenger quickly explained the situation. “The zombie king disappeared together with everything in the surrounding area. Based on visual estimates, that includes about one hundred thousand zombie corpses, as well as the ability users and their relatives. Our fighter jets were positioned relatively high, so for now, there are no losses among our people or weapons.”
Rong Le’an said, “Contact Liu Yingyao immediately and have him head in that direction!”
“Yes!”
Fu Erdie, Sang Wenhao, and the others stood up. “We’ll go take a look too.”
A zombie king, and fourth-rank at that. It had not appeared during the battle, but instead came out after the battle had ended to do something like this. No matter how they looked at it, it was strange.
They flew out of the base and soon arrived above the place where the zombie king had disappeared.
Han Zhi used his psychic ability to sense carefully. “The zombie king didn’t go far. It only moved five hundred metres outward. Now it’s stopped five hundred metres away. I don’t know what it’s doing.”
However, on the open ground with no obstacles, there was no sign of the zombie king, nor of the large number of zombie corpses, ability users, or humans.
Fu Erdie guessed, “A space-type zombie king?”
Han Zhi said, “Most likely.”
Fu Erdie asked, “Does it have its own separate space and hid everyone inside, or is it more like invisibility, where they’re still there but we just can’t see them?”
Han Zhi focused and sensed for a while longer. “Both. It can probably compress things into a certain range. From the outside, the compressed space looks like an energy field of about one cubic metre. It hides under its control and moves outward. Right now, it’s stopped five hundred metres away.”
“Please turn on shared vision.”
This time was different from before, where giving one target was enough for Fu Erdie to lock on.
Fu Erdie could only vaguely sense the general direction of the zombie king’s space, but did not know the exact location. She still needed Han Zhi to activate shared vision in order to hit the target.
After locking onto the direction, Sang Wenhao turned the sniper rifle on his back toward the target point and fired eight shots in a row. Every shot hit.
But through Han Zhi’s vision, they could see that the lump of energy field rippled a few times like jelly, without any real damage.
Sang Wenhao rushed over, and metal blades slashed toward that piece of space, cutting the jelly-like energy field in half.
But very quickly, the jelly mended itself.
Fu Erdie was not slow either and followed closely behind.
She had reached fifth rank. Although she did not have a non-support-type ability that she could truly use herself like Sang Wenhao, her physical strength and power far surpassed ordinary ability users. At this moment, her travelling speed was about the same as a first-rank speed ability user. She turned into a blur in an instant and arrived near the spatial energy field two seconds later. Without using any tool, she pressed her bare hand onto the top of the energy mass.
Her ability circulated and transformed into a sharp spike, stabbing into this space.
Clearly, physical attacks were ineffective, but energy attacks directly acted on the zombie’s ability, instantly causing its ability to go out of control.
The next moment, a foul stench spread out. The entire space shook, and the one hundred thousand zombies, along with the ability users and their relatives who had already become corpses, were spat out.
The zombie king was covered in corpse spots. Its eyes bulged, and on its dead-white face was a mouth almost half the size of its head.
In its huge mouth, it was chewing a human leg. The sight was horrifying.
Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao reacted extremely quickly. Seeing that they had forced the zombie king out, they immediately followed up with attacks.
However, in the next moment, the zombie king disappeared again.
Fu Erdie and the others were fast, but the zombie king was also fast.
After disappearing with the one hundred thousand zombie corpses, it moved rapidly. Every time Fu Erdie was about to catch up to it, it would brake sharply, suddenly appear, arrive at a location several hundred metres away, then disappear again.
After this repeated several times, Fu Erdie finally understood. Its spatial domain had a very large range. Conservatively estimated, it was around five hundred metres.
When it came out of the space, it could appear anywhere within five hundred metres.
It was not good at fighting, but it had a natural advantage in dodging and hiding.
This could not continue.
As Fu Erdie thought of a solution, the walkie-talkie the base had given her rang in her pocket. “Principal, we’ve detected that the zombie king’s aura is getting stronger! Did something happen?”
Fu Erdie paused.
The zombie king had not participated in the zombie tide’s battle. Instead, it had waited until the end to kill a group of people and hide so many zombies. When they had forced it out just now, it had been eating a zombie again.
Connecting the clues, Fu Erdie frowned and reached a conclusion — this zombie king, like the plant babies, could improve its strength by “eating zombies.”
So now, while dragging Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao around, it was also levelling itself up?
Fu Erdie laughed in anger and pressed the walkie-talkie. “Bring the base’s scrap iron out. At least one hundred jin.”
After speaking, she stopped chasing. Seeing that she was no longer chasing, the zombie king continued speeding up its eating while moving farther away.
But although Fu Erdie stopped chasing, Sang Wenhao’s metal shields remained.
The metal shields could not damage the zombie king’s space, but they could block the movement of the spatial jelly.
Especially when Fu Erdie held Sang Wenhao’s hand and strengthened his ability, his metal shields condensed faster than the zombie king could move. They directly blocked it from all four sides, trapping the zombie king in the centre.
This period of time was enough to organise people to transport scrap iron.
Fifteen minutes later, a large truck arrived nearby carrying five hundred jin of rusty, messy scrap iron. Sang Wenhao controlled the metal and changed the scrap iron’s form.
The rust turned into flakes and fell away one by one. The clean, new-looking iron turned into thin but hard iron plates, blocking every route the spatial body tried to charge through.
Finally, when every direction had been sealed off, the iron plates merged together and became an iron cover, enclosing a large piece of empty ground along with the spatial energy mass inside.
By this time, Han Zhi had finally exhausted his ability. Pale-faced, he stopped the shared vision.
“You worked hard.” Fu Erdie input her ability into Han Zhi’s body.
As always, she could only barely restore about half of Han Zhi’s ability. She could not fully restore it, nor could she perform push-and-pull.
“Lock it up for now.” Fu Erdie already had a plan. Speaking into the walkie-talkie, she said, “I agree to your trade. First, I’ll collect the deposit from this battlefield.”
In every direction around the base, there were still one and a half million zombie corpses.
Because the zombie king’s location had already been exposed, the ability users in the other directions jumped out one after another and began searching corpses for crystal cores.
The base could no longer tolerate these people. After the fight with the zombies ended, they did not bring the relatives hanging beneath the helicopters back. Instead, they kept them suspended and demanded that the ability users stop searching corpses and leave now.
But aside from the battlefield where the fourth-rank ability user Liu Yingyao was, the other battlefields ignored the shouts from the fighter jets.
They did not need the base to act. They took the initiative to cut the bundle of ropes holding the relatives, locked onto their own relatives, and caught them.
Of course, those who acted were either fast, had strong airborne abilities, or only had one relative, making it more than enough to save them.
The others who did not act watched helplessly as their family members were knocked down by others. Unable to rush over in time, they saw them fall from twenty or thirty metres up — equivalent to a twenty-storey building — and die on the spot, all joints and bones twisted into tragic shapes.
Roars, screams, and curses rose one after another.
Then, the ability users began fighting each other crazily.
When Fu Erdie arrived at the battlefield, what she saw was this chaotic scene.
At first, she thought these people were fighting over crystal cores. After the D City people explained the whole story, Fu Erdie fell silent.
Fu Erdie was too lazy to judge right and wrong. She only wanted her crystal cores and the zombie corpses on the ground.
When the zombie king created this zombie tide, its goal from the beginning had not been D City Base, but these zombies.
Like the plant babies, before absorbing zombies, it had to kill them first, then use corrosive liquid to corrode and digest them bit by bit.
The zombie king probably felt that the “killing” step was too tiring. Rather than killing them itself, it was better to let humans kill them.
This way, not only could it add quite a few human corpses as snacks, it could also enjoy so many zombies as a buffet. How delightful.
Without Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao, this zombie king’s goal would already have been achieved.
After all, Liu Yingyao, as a fourth-rank ice-type ability user, could neither see nor harm the spatial energy mass, nor trap the zombie king inside. He could only watch helplessly as the zombie corpses disappeared and as the energy fluctuation belonging to the zombie king on the instrument panel grew stronger and stronger, unable to do anything.
Now, with Fu Erdie and the others, the zombie king was trapped.
Fu Erdie was not in a hurry to fight it head-on, chasing the elusive zombie king until she killed it. If there was an easier way to force the zombie king to come out of its space on its own, why chase it?
Fu Erdie smiled and had the base people avoid the crazed ability users while moving the zombie corpses to the side of the zombie king’s metal cover.
There were too many corpses — one and a half million. It was impossible to move them all over, so they used trailers to move as many as they could.
As for Fu Erdie, she began walking while absorbing the zombies’ crystal cores.
Whenever she encountered a metal-type crystal core, she gave it to Sang Wenhao. Whenever she encountered a psychic-type crystal core, she gave it to Han Zhi.
Cen Xiyang’s ability was to turn a target point into a vacuum. Strictly speaking, it belonged to the space type. But space-type ability crystal cores were too rare, even rarer than Han Zhi’s psychic type.
So Fu Erdie directly said, “After we kill that fourth-rank zombie king, its space crystal core is yours.”
Cen Xiyang was extremely happy. She hugged Fu Erdie with a “mua,” excitedly throwing her a flirtatious look. “You’re too good to me! I’m definitely the first person in this world to absorb a fourth-rank crystal core!”
Fu Erdie’s brows unconsciously relaxed, and even her tense forehead loosened for a brief moment.
“If we encounter a fifth-rank space-type in the future, then you’ll definitely still be the first, or at least one of the first few, to eat a fifth-rank crystal core.”
The two of them laughed and joked, while the D City base people helping nearby felt their pupils quake.
Wait. A fourth-rank crystal core… that was fourth-rank, not third-rank!!! Maybe a third-rank ability user could directly rise to fourth-rank after eating it! And they were just casually giving it away now?
And Butterfly Principal, you’re an attribute-less ability user. You can absorb any crystal core one hundred percent. Even as a fifth-rank ability user, eating a fourth-rank crystal core would be much more useful than other crystal cores!
Also, the person receiving the crystal core did not bow and scrape in gratitude. She was just purely happy. This?
After the base people were shocked, an indescribable envy followed.
To still have such relaxed and light-hearted interactions after the apocalypse… how nice.
Fu Erdie’s group absorbed crystal cores. At first, it went smoothly, but before long, they still attracted the attention of the battling ability users.
The ability users were furious.
So while they were fighting here, there was actually a group nearby fishing in troubled waters and stealing the spoils?
They did not think they were the ones stealing spoils at all. Instead, they felt that Fu Erdie’s group were thieves.
They had no ability detection device, so in their extreme anger, they all charged toward Fu Erdie’s group.
The D City base attendants silently stepped back.
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