Dead silence.
The entire convoy was dead silent.
After shaking off the Anomalies, and after Captain Hui calculated that no Anomalies would bother them for five hours, the convoy came to a stop.
The pickup, unable to bear the strain of maintaining Wild Boar Charge any longer, finally fell apart when they stopped.
Chu Sheng sat in silence on the wreckage of the pickup, now reduced to four tires and a chassis.
Captain Hui was no different. Beside the two of them, An Xi, Zhu Qing, and Old Man Li each found a piece of the pickup's wreckage to sit on.
A single encirclement by the Anomalies had plunged them into an unprecedented crisis.
Their convoy had numbered over two hundred. When they fled the service area together, at least a hundred and sixty or seventy had followed them.
But now, only a few vehicles stood a short distance away.
At a glance, just seventy or eighty survivors remained.
Although another person or two occasionally caught up from behind, everyone knew that even with those stragglers, the convoy would never reach a hundred people.
"Don't be like this. We were lucky just to escape."
Seeing their expressions, Captain Hui forced a smile, even though he felt awful himself.
Although none of their Sequence Adepts had suffered any losses, this was their first time losing dozens of people at once, and their first encounter with an Anomalies as powerful as the Golden Armored Zombie.
From the survivors, they learned that another very powerful Anomalies had apparently followed the Golden Armored Zombie. The news left them feeling both fortunate and dispirited.
They had awakened their sequences and gained supernatural powers, yet they still seemed utterly helpless against the Anomalies.
Chu Sheng sighed and leaned back against one of the pickup's tires, his spirits heavy.
He was not grieving for the dead. After all, those people had nothing to do with him.
Ever since awakening his sequence and that ability resembling an upgrade system, everything had gone smoothly for him.
With the struggling survivors around him as a constant comparison, he had grown overconfident. Now, reality had knocked him straight back down.
Compared with those Anomalies, they were still far too green.
Simply hearing the survivors describe how the Golden Armored Zombie had overturned vehicles traveling at high speed without suffering any harm sent an indescribable shudder through him.
Like a god, like a demon.
That was probably the best way to describe that thing.
If their convoy had not had a rear guard, and if he had not upgraded the pickup's tires on the spot, all of them Sequence Adepts would undoubtedly have died.
Without the Ramming Pickup's ability, even the first Eyeball Anomalies they encountered would have been more than they could handle.
The Eyeball Anomalies would not even have needed to kill them. It only had to hold them up until the Golden Armored Zombie, the Catlike Anomalies they had never seen, and the other weaker Anomalies caught up.
Their entire convoy would have died.
Having worked all that out, Chu Sheng let out a long breath and looked at Captain Hui. "No wonder you said we were doomed if we didn't change vehicles."
"I didn't expect this either. I can't divine specific events. I can only make decisions based on the divination signs. If the signs tell me to change vehicles, then that's what we have to do. I don't know the exact reason." Captain Hui shook his head and sighed.
"Maybe once my sequence level rises, I'll be able to divine specific events instead of just predicting good or bad fortune like I do now."
"This time, I overlooked something. When I performed the divination earlier, I focused entirely on the Anomalies around us and the convoys we would encounter. I forgot that other convoys might have Anomalies chasing them too."
The Golden Armored Zombie and the Catlike Anomalies had definitely been drawn there by Li Feifei's convoy.
An Xi still sat silently on the ground, her eyes unfocused as she stared at the Black Jade Bone Spear lying before her.
She was grieving for those who had died during their escape.
But with her abilities, there was nothing she could do except clear a path at the front of the convoy. With Chu Sheng there, she could no longer even do that herself. She could only assist him as he cleared the way.
She was different from Chu Sheng. Although she would not demand that others be like her, she still held a great deal of goodwill toward humanity and the survivors.
She could not control what others did, but she herself would grieve for the dead.
Hugging her legs, An Xi sat on the ground, her mind awash with thoughts.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, another story was unfolding.
Li Feifei's convoy was still being harried by the Anomalies.
Seven or eight Anomalies were chasing the convoy. Thanks to the wind whisper sequence, they had driven straight off the expressway and avoided many more.
Wei Haoran lay on the roof of a car, his entire body covered in azure light. Seeing an Anomalies with a human head and a horse's body catching up behind them, he thrust out a hand. A translucent Light Shield appeared behind the car, cutting it off.
"Uncle Zhou! Hurry! They're coming again!"
Sitting in the front passenger seat, Zhou Qi heard Wei Haoran and immediately leaned halfway out of the window. His hands instantly transformed into a cannon barrel with a sixteen-centimeter bore-a Hand Cannon.
The Horse-headed Man was frantically ramming the Light Shield Wei Haoran had formed. With every impact, Wei Haoran felt his mental energy draining rapidly.
"Watch this! Die, you freak!" Zhou Qi aimed at the Horse-headed Man, and a shell shot from the barrel, passing through the Light Shield without resistance.
The instant it struck the Horse-headed Man, the shell erupted in an orange-red burst of flame.
Boom!
With the explosion, the Horse-headed Man that had been hot on their heels collapsed to the ground, black vapor rising from its entire body. Though it had not yet vanished from the world, it could no longer pursue them.
Lying on the roof, Wei Haoran shouted excitedly at the sight. "We got it!"
"Uncle Zhou, your mechanical sequence really is powerful! You crippled an Anomalies with one shot!"
Zhou Qi weakly withdrew into the car, panting hard.
"Wei, be careful. That took too much out of me. I can only fire twice more at most!"
As he spoke, he picked up the walkie-talkie he had been sitting on. "Feifei, hurry. Wei and I can't hold out much longer."
"Bzzzt... Roger. We're already out of the encirclement. We just need to shake off the Anomalies behind us. There's a straight stretch several hundred meters long ahead. Get ready to speed up and lose them!"
As their guide, Li Feifei led from the front. With her wind whisper sequence, she was not afraid of running into any Anomalies.
Wei Haoran and Zhou Qi, the Sequence Adepts capable of fighting, had someone else drive their car while they brought up the rear.
One attacked and the other defended, holding off the Anomalies behind them.
The other survivors rode in the vehicles in the middle.
As a criminal police officer before the apocalypse, Zhou Qi had a strong sense of justice. Li Feifei and Wei Haoran were still high school kids who had never even attended university, and retained some of their youthful innocence.
In their convoy, apart from the three Sequence Adepts, all the other survivors were equals. Everyone had a place in a vehicle while they traveled, and supplies were distributed centrally.
The convoy was unwieldy, but if An Xi had known about it, she would probably have called it a sanctuary amid the apocalypse.
The two convoys fled the Anomalies encirclement in completely different directions.
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