Fortress

This was the first time Xia Leng had watched himself "eat" a person in such excruciating detail.

A body even larger than his own had been right before his eyes. In just three seconds, it melted into a mass of blood surrounded by tentacles, then was completely absorbed by his own blood...

He had never gone out of his way to hunt people before, let alone eat them. As long as nobody provoked him, he naturally seemed harmless.

Even when he was "forced" to kill someone, he never ate them or disposed of their body.

The only exception had been a former companion who had betrayed him. He had removed the traitor's leg bones and made them into weapons, keeping them with him as a warning.

Perhaps Xia Leng had believed that not eating his own kind was the only thing that proved he still had the reason of a human being...

But now, whether he wanted to or not, he had watched that biker get devoured right before his eyes until not even his clothes were left.

Yet he felt no discomfort at all. Instead, after devouring him, he felt a pleasurable rush!

It was as if the other man had never been human at all, but had been born as his prey!

Where the lucky bastard's head had rolled, a pale blue crystal lay quietly on the ground. A faint energy surrounding it kept the dust floating in the air at bay.

That biker really had been a Baptized One—and a Mystic Scholar with a useless ability that only worked when luck was on his side...

But after what had just happened, Xia Leng no longer thought the ability was useless at all.

Over the course of their fight, the other man had survived several times through sheer coincidence, and had nearly killed Xia Leng.

And they called that ability useless?!

The only problem was that its trigger rate and duration were so unpredictable. Otherwise, Xia Leng wouldn't have managed to kill him at the last moment.

He picked up the pale blue crystal and held it in his palm, feeling the warmth it had left behind.

Three seconds later, the warmth disappeared, and Xia Leng knew the crystal had been absorbed by him too.

But unlike the first blue crystal he had devoured, which had brought an obvious change to his leg and enhanced his agility as an Apocalypse Hunter, this one did nothing of the sort.

He had devoured this Mystic Scholar, but he had no idea whether he would gain that same elusive luck...

Xia Leng stood up. The shotgun pellets embedded in his body rolled off him and bounced across the ground. His skin had already healed, without a trace of injury.

When he passed the biker gang leader's corpse—the one whose throat he had cut with a shard of glass—he had no desire to devour him as well.

Perhaps the Blacklight Virus inside him was full, and his body had finished repairing its wounds.

Or perhaps the virus was only interested in Baptized Ones strengthened and infected by Black Rain. Ordinary people like this, bland and tasteless, simply didn't whet its appetite.

After all, in the Blacklight Virus's subconscious, these so-called Baptized Ones were invaders. They had to be wiped from the face of the earth—or eaten by him!

When Xia Leng left the general store, he had two shotguns in hand and had also retrieved the pistol he'd thrown away. All of them could be traded for precious supplies—they were "money," and he had always been frugal.

Besides, he spotted the three modified motorcycles the bikers had parked a few hundred meters away. Those guys really were treasure troves, he thought. They brought him exactly what he needed...

With a vehicle, he could save a lot of strength and energy on the remaining half of his journey.

After pouring the fuel from all three motorcycles into one tank, Xia Leng swung onto the wild-looking bike and rode off toward his next destination with his spoils.

Back in the abandoned general store, the blood spilling from the biker's corpse filled the shop with a thick, pungent stench.

Gurgle~ Gurgle~

About five minutes after he had left, several shriveled figures made a bizarre sound that raised goosebumps, then crawled out of the dark storeroom nearby...

Lai City had once been one of the most developed cities in the country.

Steel skyscrapers towered into the clouds like a primeval forest, while a dense web of elevated roads ensured that traffic in the city never got congested.

Green City, Civilized City, Model City—this megacity had been bestowed with all kinds of titles celebrated around the world.

But that was all before the Black Rain began five years ago.

The skyscrapers that once stood tall had gone unmaintained for years, and the extreme weather kept changing. Their once gleaming silver glass facades had almost entirely fallen away, leaving only a few scattered panes clinging like patches of diseased skin to lifeless steel frames.

The network of elevated roads once hailed as highways in the sky had become hopelessly jammed with wrecked vehicles. Some had even crashed through the guardrails and dangled precariously above the ground, liable to fall at any moment and crush some lucky passerby...

In short, by this point, every megacity in the world had turned into a primeval forest. Only the towering trees and dense undergrowth had been replaced by abandoned high-rises and clusters of low buildings harboring monsters.

By day, beneath the scorching sun, the city lay deathly still. Smoke rose without pause from different parts of the city, proof that yet another fire had started.

At night, the city came alive—but it was a scene of demons and ghosts on the prowl. All kinds of terrifying, grotesque mutant creatures crawled out of the buildings where they had hidden from the sun and began their savage hunts, their chilling roars echoing across the city.

But there was one place whose character stood in stark contrast to all the other dangerous wastelands.

It was the enormous shopping mall occupied by the Komodo Mercenary Company and converted into a sturdy Fortress.

Located in the city's prime central district, the supermall covered an area of several dozen hectares. Its towering buildings formed an encircling wall, like a massive iron Fortress so tightly sealed that not even a fly could get inside!

The Komodo Mercenary Company had stationed a branch there not only because of its natural defenses, but also because of the various resources left inside the mall.

However, during the initial stage of clearing it out, they had to deal with the many mutant monsters and living corpses hiding from ultraviolet light inside the mall.

The Komodo Corporation had also sacrificed a great many people and soldiers, paying a terrible price before finally wresting the enormous Fortress from the monsters.

After a series of renovations, the mall had become indistinguishable from a real Fortress—a steel prison.

High walls had been built around it, layer upon layer. Electric fences carrying high-voltage currents were fixed atop the walls, putting an end to any mutant creatures' attempts to sneak inside for food.

The only entrance into the Fortress was also covered with guards armed to the teeth. There was even a heavy machine gun mounted at the gate, ready to tear any monsters or enemies attempting to break in to pieces in a storm of bullets!

At that moment, two soldiers on watch stood atop the high wall, idly chatting. The heavy sniper rifles in their hands, built for one purpose only, could blast any living thing in sight to pieces.

Suddenly, the roar of a motorcycle engine approached the Fortress, immediately putting both of them on alert.

One of the sentries raised his high-powered binoculars and looked toward the sound. It was Xia Leng, carrying several conspicuous shotguns on his back and riding an ostentatious motorcycle that roared loudly as it kicked up clouds of dust and smoke on its way toward them...