98. The Final Project

The Final Project

It had been this way from the beginning. Even though they had slaughtered tens of thousands, the monsters had never been individually threatening.

Looking back, they had never coordinated. They had never shown aggression. They had never used any of the tactics I now knew they could have used.

If those monsters had fought properly from the start, all of us would have died dozens of times over.

Only now, seeing the blood-red rain and feeling it seep into my battle suit, warping emotions that had already grown far too accustomed to violence, did I finally understand the enemy’s full intent.

By now, every person who had survived the monster attacks had spent weeks fighting them.

We had been forced to accept violence in order to survive, because killing monsters was the only way to gain enough strength.

So what happened when teenagers who had grown used to violence—and used to drawing power from violence—were dosed through the air with something that made more killing feel exciting and irresistible, while the ground sprouted endless targets to attack?

I blasted into the sky with a sonic boom and ignored the monsters completely.

More than ten kilometers to the north, Mort’s overpowered replacement body was moving farther and farther away, but that was not what worried me most at that moment.

The only reason I had snapped out of the bloodlust was my high Perception and Constant Force, which gave me resistance against this influence.

Even then, it had not been easy.

Could the others do the same?

I searched the area frantically for signs of other survivors.

The crimson rain made everything difficult. As far as my normal vision and enhanced senses could reach, I saw only ruins, glowing green slime pools, and constantly growing plant monsters.

With enhanced Perception, Agility, and Reason, I combed through the chaos around me, slowly matching this new hellscape against the city in my memory.

Once the two maps in my mind aligned, I finally found the right direction to fly.

At the same time, my inner ears finished regenerating, and a wall of noise I could not even begin to understand crashed into my eardrums.

There! That light!

On the western horizon, a silver glow pierced the red curtain of rain in a way natural light never could. It refused to be stained blood-red or poison-green, and the closer I came, the more it seemed to drain those colors from the surrounding area.

The living plants trying to grow in the same direction first withered and yellowed as if beneath brutal summer sunlight. Then they began to sizzle, until the portions stubborn enough to keep spreading suddenly caught fire and crumbled into ash.

The rain weakened into a drizzle, then stopped entirely, until the quarter-kilometer ring of ruins around the source of that safe light was dry. The silver glow shone in the middle of it all.

A huge crowd had gathered inside the area—not in twos and threes, not even by the dozen, but hundreds of survivors packed together among the ruins.

As I flew over them, flashes of light marked more and more people being teleported in from every corner of the city.

The tendrils of malicious growth wrapped around them turned to dust. Madness and rage drained from their eyes as quickly as the red slime dried and flaked from their clothes and skin. Bleeding wounds scabbed over and slowly began to heal.

Near the center of this miracle stood two familiar faces.

“Hey, stranger,” one brown-haired supermodel called brightly, waving at me.

“Long time no see,” said the other identical brown-haired girl, and then both of them went straight back to work.

They were duplicating school cafeteria trays, each one piled with enough hamburgers, fries, and soda to feed an entire football team.

Every so often, a nearby soldier would gather as many trays as they could carry and run off to distribute them among the starving survivors.

“Xia Xinglan… or should I call you Double Trouble now?” What were you supposed to…