Chapter 41.2: Grain Depot
Dana let out a slow breath, her eyes fixed on the enormous city that had suddenly appeared in the distance.
She had been chosen by Mingri Base as its representative for negotiations.
The party they were negotiating with was, naturally, the government of that city.
Just yesterday afternoon, dozens of fighter jets and helicopters had suddenly appeared over Mingri Base.
An officer who stepped off one of the fighters, accompanied by a local Yunbula interpreter, got straight to the point.
The nation known as Blue Sea needed to requisition the vast stretch of open land next to Mingri Base.
Simply put, they intended to conduct a large-scale cleanup of the surrounding area. They had come in advance to inform their “neighbors” so that Mingri Base wouldn’t misunderstand their intentions.
As if Mingri Base would dare misunderstand anything.
It was merely a medium-sized survivor settlement, barely clinging to existence.
They owned only a dozen or so pickup trucks.
Fighter jets were completely out of the question.
As for firearms, nearly all of them had been exhausted during more than half a year of fighting for survival.
With a squadron of fighter jets carrying bombs flying circles over their base, it hardly mattered what Blue Sea wanted.
Forget merely clearing the area around Mingri Base.
Even if they’d announced they were taking over the entire base, wouldn’t everyone still have had to obediently move out and make room for them?
The leadership of Mingri Base unanimously agreed to the request.
They even thoughtfully offered,
“Do you need any help? We’re actually pretty good at hard labor.”
The offer was politely declined.
Blue Sea seemed to be in a tremendous hurry.
As soon as they finished explaining the situation, the survivors watched in stunned silence as an overwhelming bombardment began.
The fighter jets scattered bombs as though ammunition were free, carpet-bombing the area and wiping out the surrounding zombie hordes in the shortest possible time.
Then came ranks of neatly uniformed soldiers descending in perfect formation.
They systematically finished off any surviving zombies with follow-up shots.
At the same time, transport aircraft cooperated by lowering huge rolls of barbed wire fencing, enclosing the newly secured area.
It was at that moment that everyone at Mingri Base truly believed Blue Sea was an actual nation.
Only the power of a sovereign state could accomplish something on this scale in such a short amount of time.
While Blue Sea busied itself clearing out space, every survivor at Mingri Base ended up staying awake through the night as well, anxiously and excitedly speculating about why this mysterious new power had appeared.
“It’s because of the grain depot. They have to be here for that huge grain depot!”
The base’s second-in-command spoke with absolute certainty.
“There’s nothing else around here worth mobilizing a force this large.”
No one objected.
Everyone agreed with his assessment.
The location of the massive grain depot wasn’t exactly a secret.
After the apocalypse began, plenty of people had dreamed of claiming it.
Not a single one had succeeded.
The zombie population surrounding it alone was enough to discourage anyone from trying.
Mingri Base had once risked sending a reconnaissance team to investigate.
They discovered that the grain depot was still operational and had already switched into wartime lockdown mode.
Given the base’s capabilities, there was simply no way they could breach it from the outside.
Fortunately, after everything the base had endured to survive, no one felt particularly bitter about it.
To put it bluntly, even if the people inside the grain depot opened its doors, Mingri Base still had no way to transport the grain home safely through all the dangers along the route.
The second-in-command spoke excitedly.
“That country—Blue Sea—they’re going to build a base right next to ours and bring in even more troops. Before they’ve finished deploying all their forces, we’ll still have plenty of time to decide what kind of attitude we should take toward them.”
Less than an hour after he said those words—
An entire city descended from the sky.
Everyone was dumbfounded.
No one could even begin to imagine how such a thing was possible.
But now that it had happened, they had no choice but to grit their teeth and send someone to negotiate.
Dana was the representative chosen after several rounds of careful selection.
The only thing Mingri Base really possessed that could be exchanged for peaceful relations was the intelligence they had gathered about the grain depot.
As Dana reviewed every piece of information about the depot in her mind, she took a deep breath and prepared to leave the base.
Then she saw that the newly arrived Safe City didn’t pause for even a moment.
Without the slightest delay, fighter jets took off one after another, flying straight toward the grain depot.
At the same time, gunfire and explosions erupted next door.
Soldiers.
Self-propelled artillery.
And even civilians.
Right before the eyes of everyone at Mingri Base, wave after wave of them surged out of the city.
There were no flanking maneuvers.
No cautious diplomacy.
No preliminary scouting.
The people of this city embodied a single philosophy through their actions:
Forget everything else—just get the job done!
Like a roaring tidal wave, they swept across the landscape, charging fearlessly into battle.
Wearing the expensive communication headset he had rented at considerable cost—and with the matching headset on his captain’s ears so they could communicate even during combat—Ming Hao followed the Belt Squad.
He darted beneath trees, slipped through tall grass, leaped over obstacles, climbed trees, and struck down zombies alongside the rest of the team.
His body was operating entirely on instinct.
The rifle in his hands never stopped firing, while his brain struggled to catch up with what was happening.
“Captain! What’s the plan?! You haven’t told us the plan yet!”
The moment the city gates opened, the captain had led them straight into the battlefield.
Which direction were they attacking?
What was the tactical objective?
Were they supposed to flank the enemy?
Was there an ambush plan?
No one had said a word.
Like every other crystal hunter squad, the Belt Squad simply charged headlong into the fight, raised their rifles, and started shooting.
They were even running faster than the military.
Ming Hao’s mind went completely blank.
He relied entirely on muscle memory to take down the zombies approaching him. Whenever one slipped past his attention, one of his teammates would immediately kill it for him.
Listening to the translation through his headset, the captain sounded even more confused than Ming Hao.
“A plan?”
“There are so many of us attacking together. Why would we need a plan?!”
Ming Hao: “???”
“Shouldn’t we at least find cover? Assess the situation? There are so many zombies here! Wouldn’t setting traps clear them out faster? And what about a retreat route?”
He was practically roaring.
“Damn it, where’s our fallback position?! Why does it feel like we’ve charged straight into the middle of a zombie encirclement?!”
Unfortunately, the automatic translator conveyed only his words—not the panic in his voice.
So the captain heard a perfectly calm translation.
He answered just as calmly,
“Why would we need a retreat route?”
“Can’t we just kill all the zombies?”
Ming Hao: “￥##@%#￥%!!!”
The captain looked puzzled.
He sidestepped a zombie lunging for his calf, casually fired a shot that blew its head apart, and asked curiously,
“Huh. I think your translator glitched. It didn’t translate that last sentence.”
Ming Hao: “I #￥ your E#@$!!”
The captain burst into laughter.
“That one I understood! Hahahaha!”
“I told you from the start—you joined the battlefield too early.”
“You still don’t understand Blue Sea.”
The rest of the squad joined in, laughing uproariously as well.
The battlefield was swarming with zombies.
Danger came from every direction, and everyone had to deal with threats on all sides.
And these people were still laughing!
Ming Hao didn’t even have time to curse anymore.
He wasn’t nearly as agile as his teammates. His dodges were clumsier, and he couldn’t clear the zombies around him as quickly as they could.
Before long, a crowd of zombies had piled up around him.
Three zombies lunged at him at once.
He threw himself aside with all his strength and managed to kill only two of them.
Just as the third zombie was about to sink its teeth into his arm—
A long blade flashed through the air, cleanly severing its head.
The vice-captain slipped gracefully past Ming Hao. As she went by, she casually ruffled his hair.
Grinning, she said, “Welcome to Blue Sea.”
As the vice-captain moved on, Ming Hao noticed that the teammates who had been laughing at him were all gradually drifting closer to his position.
With them joining him, the pressure he was under eased dramatically.
“Relax.”
The captain pulled away a zombie that had been charging straight at Ming Hao.
“Go with the flow. Don’t panic, don’t lose your rhythm.”
“We’ll cover your back.”
Then he offered what could only be described as Blue Sea-style reassurance:
“You’re actually not that weak. If you die, we’ll probably die too.”
Ming Hao had to admit—
In the middle of such frantic chaos, surrounded by danger at every moment, with zombies ready to bite him from any direction…
Looking at the teammates fighting beside him, he really did feel a measure of security.
He calmed himself.
Drawing on the mindset he’d once had as a mercenary, he devoted every ounce of his attention to the battle before him.
Maybe he couldn’t deal with every zombie charging toward them.
But all he had to do was kill as many as he possibly could.
The rest…
His teammates would take care of without even being asked.
One shot.
Then another.
And another.
Reload.
Keep firing.
Gradually, Ming Hao slipped into a strange state of concentration.
He even had the distinct feeling that he and every member of the Belt Squad were connected by an invisible thread, fighting as a single unit.
They advanced and retreated together.
They fought side by side.
He could entrust his back to his teammates without hesitation.
All he had to do was keep killing.
Kill.
Kill.
Kill.
All distracting thoughts gradually drifted away.
The only things he could hear were his teammates’ exhilarated shouts as they lost themselves in the battle.
“Our God be praised!!!”
“Long live Blue Sea!!”
Someone shouted those words.
The first time Ming Hao heard them, he barely registered what was being said.
Then came a second shout.
And a third.
By the end of the battle, he had to pause every so often just to wipe the blood splattered across his goggles before mechanically raising his rifle and firing again.
Soon, even the rifle began to feel too slow.
He drew the combat knife at his waist and, copying the captain and the others, swung it down with all his strength at the zombies’ heads.
“Woohoo!!!”
The captain spun past him, cutting down zombies as he moved.
“Nice work.”
“May our God bless you.”
“Today, you’ll finally stop being a rookie.”
Everything before Ming Hao’s eyes had turned crimson.
He hacked downward again.
And again.
And once more.
Then he heard it again.
“Our God be praised!!!”
His teammates were cheering.
Celebrating.
Shouting triumphantly amid the piles of zombie corpses.
By this point, Ming Hao had killed so many that he’d become numb.
He was exhausted.
Confused.
Unable to stop.
His mind was completely blank.
Without even thinking, he instinctively shouted along with everyone else:
“Long live Blue Sea!!”
The instant those words left his mouth—
The statue of the Creator God appeared in his empty mind.
Then—
A wave of warmth washed over him.
Ming Hao found himself standing upon that invisible chain.
— —
The grain depot had surveillance cameras.
It always had.
Even now, more than half a year into the apocalypse, personnel inside the depot maintained constant watch over the outside world.
They had never stopped hoping.
Hoping that someone would appear beyond the walls.
A military force.
A nation.
A large survivor base.
Anything.
Anyone who could rescue the grain depot’s staff from this cursed prison.
But no one ever came.
The outside world seemed to have become nothing more than a kingdom of zombies.
Once, a small group of survivors had risked approaching the depot.
In the end, only one of them managed to escape alive.
That was why monitoring the surveillance cameras had gradually become one of the most leisurely jobs in the grain depot.
Although, to be fair, there wasn’t much real work left for anyone these days.
The staff member on duty today was doodling.
He wasn’t an artist.
He was simply so bored that he needed something to occupy his hands.
As he absentmindedly sketched, he happened to glance up at one of the monitors.
People.
A huge number of living people.
Wait…
Were they… actually chasing the zombies down and killing them?
The operator rubbed his eyes.
He opened them.
Closed them again.
Then rubbed them once more.
He stood there in stunned disbelief for a long moment.
Suddenly, he shot to his feet.
The grain depot’s emergency alarm began blaring throughout the entire facility.
