Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 176: The Big Fool

When the convoy scattered at Rong City No. 2 Primary School, Iron Lion’s vehicle ended up the most crowded.

Every survivor in the camp knew the score: this hulking behemoth had a heart as soft as his fists were hard. To the common folk, he was the only Sequence Beyonder who treated them like actual human beings. Following Iron Lion meant a fighting chance; following Chen Ye meant being used as a disposable gecko’s tail.

The choice was a no-brainer.

True to his nature, Iron Lion didn’t disappoint. After the breakout, the “Big Fool” didn’t even try to get inside the bus. It was so packed with panicked survivors that there simply wasn’t a square inch of room left for his massive frame.

Without a word of complaint, Iron Lion stayed on foot. With his supernatural physical constitution, he could sprint alongside a moving vehicle for ten days and ten nights without breaking a sweat.

The initial escape was a bloodbath. The bus was a magnet for every predator in the district. Iron Lion carved a path through the sea of Crawlers with nothing but his bare knuckles. By the time they cleared the city limits, only two survivors had been dragged through the windows—a survival rate that would have made Chen Ye scoff in disbelief.

Iron Lion’s two heads weren’t just a mutation; they were a tactical masterclass. With two sets of eyes, he maintained a 360-degree perimeter around the bus, pulverizing any Anomaly that dared to lunge from the shadows.

Of course, he paid for it in flesh.

Deep lacerations crisscrossed his arms, legs, and back. A jagged gouge ran across his left brow. Because of the sub-zero temperature, his blood froze into crimson icicles before it could even hit the pavement. To an ordinary man, these were life-threatening injuries; to Iron Lion, they were minor annoyances he barely noticed.

The Titan Sequence 2: Two-Headed Giant was the epitome of brute force. It lacked the versatile, flashy abilities of other pathways, focusing instead on absolute physical dominance. Aside from a rudimentary Flesh Armament, Iron Lion had no “magic.” He just had raw, unadulterated power.

His skin had hardened into something resembling organic steel. When Crawlers pounced and sank their fangs into his forearms, they found no purchase, leaving only shallow, white indents on his hide. This was why he had emerged unscathed after being buried under a mountain of monsters earlier.

The only wounds that actually drew blood were those inflicted by the high-tier Anomalies hidden within the horde.

The only stroke of luck was that Rong City’s apex predators had been too busy fighting the Death God to bother with a yellow school bus.

But once they cleared the city, the “luck” ran out. Without a Pathfinder like Chu Che, navigating the post-apocalyptic wilderness was a descent into madness.

The school bus groaned and swayed as it fled through the frozen wastes. Iron Lion ran ahead of the bumper, his hands morphing into massive, biological snow-plows using Flesh Armament. He spent hours sprinting through two-foot-deep drifts, throwing tonnes of snow aside to keep the road clear for the tires. He was a machine that didn’t know the meaning of exhaustion.

Slowly, the supernatural blizzard of Rong City began to thin. The temperature rose, and the snowpack vanished. The survivors inside the bus wept with joy, relieved to be out of the lethal chill.

Iron Lion eventually found an abandoned farmhouse resort and called for a rest stop. While the survivors recovered, he pulled out one of the glowing stones Chu Che had given him and dropped it in the dirt as a Marking.

Staring at the glowing holographic letters, the big fellow felt a pang of loneliness. He missed Chen Ye’s cold pragmatism, Chu Che’s quiet leadership, and the fiery bickering of Sun Qianqian and Ding Dong.

More than anything, he wanted to apologize to Chen Ye. When Wu Jianshan had targeted Chen Ye back at the school, Iron Lion’s brain had short-circuited. He had truly believed the cult leader was his uncle, and that split-second hesitation—the failure to stand by his teammate—haunted him.

He never doubted they would find him. They were teammates. He would never abandon them, and he knew they would never abandon him.

If Chen Ye had known what Iron Lion was thinking, he would have laughed in his face for being a sentimental idiot.

The peace didn’t last. During a headcount, Old Li—one of the more capable survivors—realized a girl was missing.

Against Old Li’s strict orders to stay in the group, a twenty-year-old survivor had spotted a small hot spring pool and sneaked away for a soak. When Iron Lion led a search party to the pool thirty minutes later, the girl was still there, giggling to herself.

But she wasn’t a girl anymore. She had aged half a century in minutes, transformed into a withered, seventy-year-old crone. She beckoned to Iron Lion with a skeletal hand, her smile a mask of senile horror. “Come in, dear. The water is wonderful…”

“Old Li! Get everyone on the bus! Now!” Iron Lion roared.

He stayed behind to finish the crone. No one knew what she was or how she had stolen the girl’s youth. Iron Lion had been forced to fully unleash his Titan form, leveling the entire farmhouse resort to the ground.

When he finally caught up to the bus two hours later, both of his arms hung limp at his sides, the bones shattered.

But a Titan’s regenerative factor was legendary. By sunset, his bones had knit back together.

It was then that Old Li pulled him aside with a report that made Iron Lion’s heart sink. One of the survivors was pregnant.

In this dying, decaying world, a new life was a miracle, but for Iron Lion, it was a tragedy. He knew the child had been born into a graveyard, and the chances of it ever taking its first breath were slim to none.

The nightmare intensified.

A formless, shifting Anomaly ambushed the convoy, claiming three more lives and tearing off Iron Lion’s entire left arm.

Then, a man standing under a solitary, flickering streetlamp on a country road lured away three more people with a hypnotic whistle. Mad Lion had been forced to wake up to deal with that one, losing half of his secondary head in the process of breaking the entity’s hold.

With half a face missing and raw brain matter exposed to the air, Mad Lion looked like a demon from the pit. The sight of him sent several survivors into fits of screaming hysterics.

By the time the bus rolled into the Great Fog, they had lost over a dozen people.

When the coughing started, a survivor named Doctor Luo—the same man who had performed Chen Ye’s eye transplant—ordered everyone to don masks. He knew Iron Lion was a man of honor; he hadn’t forgotten how the giant had treated his wife with respect even when holding her hostage. Because of that trust, the doctor and his wife had remained by Iron Lion’s side through every horror.

But now, they had reached the end of the line.

Iron Lion stared into the thick, toxic soup, realizing he was facing a threat beyond his comprehension.

A horde of silhouettes swayed in the fog. They were humanoid but lacked any solid definition, their bodies composed of the same grayish-white mist that surrounded them. Their boundaries blurred and merged with the atmosphere, making them look like living ghosts.

Their faces were featureless voids of dark smoke, occasionally splitting open to reveal a mouth locked in a silent, eternal scream. Hollow “eyes” flickered with malevolent green and red light.

These were the Mist Thralls.

Iron Lion stood his ground. He was missing an arm and half a head. His secondary persona, Mad Lion, had fallen into a trauma-induced coma, leaving the simple-minded Iron Lion to face the end alone.

He had ordered Old Li to drive the bus away. But as the engine roared and the vehicle disappeared into the fog, Iron Lion realized the pregnant woman hadn’t made it on board.

He stood alone in the street, a broken, one-armed titan shielding a terrified woman as the ghosts of the fog closed in.

Then, a familiar, sharp voice cut through the silence.

“Good god, you big moron! Have you finally lost your damn mind?!”