Chapter 220
Memento: The Last Survivor
Macro timeline, unknown.
The girl looked into the mirror, and reflected in it was familiar red hair and crimson eyes.
Very good.
There is no perceptible free energy in the air, which means that you won't encounter any outlandish supernatural forces on this planet at the very beginning.
Very good.
Turning my head slightly, I saw an electronic calendar. The date on it was Anno Domini, 2013, 2:00 AM. Decorations next to the calendar indicated that I was in the suburbs of a small town called Austin Travis, Texas.
Very good.
Turning around, he surveyed the room that had been his just five seconds before—clearly, it was a country villa. And his identity was...
"His real name is Surtr, and his identity is a web novel writer, the Group Nine... Annihilation... Annihilation? The Annihilation of the Ninth Group?"
"Interesting, is there such a profession in this country? Let's see if I'm a slacker..." He reached out and unlocked the tablet computer, which knew the password without him even noticing. A newly uploaded announcement was displayed on it.
—An unlimited bounty begins today. Every 200 blades or 20,000 cat cookies counts as one update. The bounty will continue until noon next Monday.
Okay, it seems he's not a procrastinator. So how many chapters has he written in reserve...?
Surtr looked at his own folder labeled "Drafts" and opened it to find it completely empty.
Great, starting from scratch, all done from scratch, that's ruthless—but this guy doesn't seem to have much popularity, so it's probably just a matter of turning one lesson a day into two lessons a day, something that can be easily solved in half a month.
"Let's see if there's any danger in this world first. If there's no need for me to come and rescue this fierce woman, then I might as well experience the life of an online novelist until I leave... I just don't know if my stories will have a market here."
The girl muttered to herself, her nose twitching as she seemed to smell an unsettling scent in the air. The next moment, she heard the roar of sirens and the screeching of tires on the pavement. Then came an explosion in the distant city, clearly visible from here!
'BOOM—!!!'
Sparks flew, illuminating half the night sky, accompanied by a cacophony of noise—from which she clearly discerned terrified voices and death screams. Clearly, this was no ordinary accident; the explosion brought with it disaster and despair.
Great, I have something to do now.
The Flame-haired maiden tilted her head, carefully put away her tablet and charger, and then placed them in her backpack. Her gaze swept over a storage locker on the side, and she reached out, opened it, and unsurprisingly found a belt, a military knife, and a shotgun.
This is perfectly reasonable.
This is Texas, after all. A beautiful, single young woman living in a suburban villa—if her room isn't heavily armed, it can only mean there's a serious malfunction in how this world works. And since this world hasn't collapsed due to a bug, it's only natural that I should be able to get my hands on the most powerful gun available to citizens!
With a gun in hand, the rest was just simple matters—arm yourself, push open the door, and outside is the chilly air of two in the morning, somewhat noisy, with low howls in the air.
A... bloody, mangled thing lunged at her.
'Bang—!' A shot, and her head exploded. The headless monster, pinned in mid-air by the stopping force, fell to her feet, while something like fungus struggled to grow and spread from the severed neck.
"Resident Evil, Fungus... Great, the Last of Us is basically zero difficulty."
"But the Last of Us II is absolute garbage."
The girl nodded, easily confirming the true nature of this world and setting a goal for herself—obviously, this was the first prologue to the disaster, and as long as the problems were resolved within the prologue, there would be no need to consider the second part, which no longer held the possibility of being born.
Very good, cleaning up the trash is a sign of good civility.
Looking at the street sign, it indicated that this was the suburbs leading to Route 71 —and if her memory served her right, no more than five minutes after the explosion in the city, the original protagonist Joel, his cousin Tommy, and his real daughter Sarah would have been driving out of the city on Route 71, and then they would have found that there were many other people with the same plan driving by.
And their current location is...
The girl tilted her head and took long strides along the road, far exceeding what most people could run. She easily left several suburban cars behind, and soon she saw the station exit, which was jammed with traffic.
There are many intelligent people, but when intelligent people gather together, the result is that everyone becomes a fool. Many poor worms infected by fungal viruses growled and lunged at the crammed crowd, while a few lucky cars that arrived later quickly turned around and drove in another direction.
Ah... I found it.
She saw a car with two strong middle-aged men and a pretty little girl inside. She saw the driver get hit by a pickup truck that had run into the road while trying to cross a roadblock. Then—
'Boom--!!'
The girl shrugged—if you don't watch where you're going, you're bound to get hit. It's your own fault, what can you do?
Thinking to herself, she casually shot down the infected who tried to attack her one by one, then walked briskly to the overturned car of the main characters. Looking at the little girl who was the first to awaken, she pressed her finger against the car door panel.
It's normal and natural for a seventeen-year-old girl to be able to easily tear off a car door, isn't it?
Before today, if someone had told Joel that there was a seventeen-year-old girl in the world who could punch a person through with one punch, kick a wall in half with one kick, and shoot a moving target in the head with a pistol from 300 meters away, he would have thought that the guy was drunk and taking movies for reality.
If the younger brother Tommy had said this, he would have thought it was a rather unfunny joke.
If the person who said this were his daughter Sarah, he would praise the little girl's imagination and then carefully reduce Sarah's interest in watching Eastern kung fu films over the next few years, so that his daughter wouldn't suddenly decide to cross the Pacific Ocean for a dream when she grows up.
He used to think that way, but now he was less sure. Just ten minutes earlier, a beautiful woman, whose categorization as human was questionable, had pulled him, his brother, and his daughter from their overturned car. Then she led the three of them out of town.
None of those infected lunatics could harm her. When she still had her gun, she took them down one by one with a single shot. After she ran out of shotgun ammo, she could take down at least three at a time with a single punch and kick. Sometimes he even suspected that her slender, white fist was actually an ancient weapon called a battering ram, because even the mechanical arm in a science fiction movie couldn't create a bowl-shaped inflating arc of air with a single punch and then crush at least thirty lunatics into evenly distributed fragments plastered against the wall.
Tommy initially tried to speak, but now he's become a mute, only able to watch the young lady's performance.
Sarah was initially a little uneasy, but now her eyes are filled with nothing but adoration as she looks at this lady who calls herself Surtr.
—Dad was wrong, Sarah. Kung Fu movies are real, and it's not just Asians who can learn kung fu!
Joel, who looked much older than his age but was actually only in his early twenties, watched the scarlet-eyed woman Divine Might in the night, his mind a jumble of emotions. Just half a minute earlier, they had encountered a squad of heavily armed soldiers, and before the soldiers could even fire, these poor guys had been sliced to pieces by Ms. Surtr's whip kick, leaving not a single one alive.
Not even half, because ten seconds earlier, this red-haired woman casually grabbed an old-fashioned pistol from her hand, and with one shot, she took down a sniper hiding in cover from 300 meters away. Her second and third shots then blew up the fuel tank of a transport truck next to the sniper, causing an explosion. And the final result was—
"You are safe now. This vehicle has enough fuel to transport you to a safe gathering place, where you can start a new life."
A girl with long, fiery hair fluttering in the hot wind tapped on the body of Humvee that had broken down on the side of the road. This simple and crude repair method immediately made the Humvee neigh energetically. She glanced sideways and nodded to Joel and his two companions.
"Let's part ways here. I have other things to do... Don't worry, there are no surveillance cameras or survivors around here. No one will know that you are connected to the destruction of this interception team."
The girl's tone was calm, yet filled with an undeniable air. Her face was flawless, without a single wrinkle, yet she possessed the imposing presence of an ancient king.
If this weren't America, then surely someone would kneel down.
But even so...
"Sister Surtr, what are you going to do all by yourself?"—The youngest girl asked the boldest question that even adults wouldn't dare to ask.
"I'm going to save the world." The girl, however, didn't seem to care about the criticism. She simply smiled, reached out and ruffled Sarah's beautiful blonde hair. "It would take at least twenty years for nature to produce antibodies, and after that, there simply won't be any reliable medical institutions capable of creating a cure. So, I'm going to manually speed up this process and bring this all to an end within two months."
Her words defied common medical knowledge, but no one here would question her.