Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 156: Major Crisis, Am I Going to Die???

Wu Jianshan’s enraged shriek instantly drew every eye on the battlefield toward Chen Ye’s location.

At that exact moment, a sharp command cut through the darkness from a nearby corner. “Go!”

Several silhouettes burst from the shadows, sprinting desperately toward Chu Che’s modified off-road vehicle.

Xu Lina glanced back over her shoulder, her voice trembling. “Captain, what about Chen Ye…”

“Worry about yourself! He’ll outlive all of us! Run!” Chu Che barked, shoving her forward.

Hearing Wu Jianshan’s furious order to stop Chen Ye, Sun Qianqian hesitated. The pink-haired girl’s grip on her sword faltered, her movements sluggish with indecision.

Ding Dong, however, harbored no such reservations.

With an explosive push off her back leg, she shot forward like a bullet, crossing the courtyard in a blur of motion. She didn’t hesitate for a microsecond.

When she slid to a halt, she was standing dead center in the school’s main gate. She dropped into a rock-solid horse stance, her fists clenched tightly at her waist. Her face was a mask of utter tranquility—devoid of anger or fear—as she stared down the idling Doomsday Pickup.

But beneath that calm exterior, her aura was skyrocketing, the spiritual pressure radiating from her small frame distorting the falling snow.

She was perfectly positioned. The gates were narrow; bypassing her without crashing into the reinforced walls was practically impossible. And she wasn’t a static barricade—any attempt to swerve, and she would simply adjust to intercept.

Inside the cabin, Chen Ye calmly puffed on his cigarette, the smoke curling thickly against the windshield. He didn’t feel a shred of anger toward Ding Dong.

In fact, he completely understood her decision.

After all, what he was about to do to her was incredibly ruthless. They had the shallowest bond in the entire convoy. They had cooperated to kill a Demon Sequence Beyonder out in the wasteland, but that had been purely transactional. Since he joined the group, they rarely spoke more than two sentences a day to each other.

To her, Wu Jianshan clearly held some deep, twisted significance. To Chen Ye, she was just an obstacle.

It’s better this way, Chen Ye thought coldly. Now I don’t have to feel guilty.

He slammed his boot down on the accelerator. The massive engine of the Doomsday Pickup let out a deafening, guttural roar, and the heavy truck lunged forward, hurtling directly toward the woman.

A normal vehicle wouldn’t have the acceleration to build lethal momentum over such a short distance. But the Doomsday Pickup was not a normal vehicle. Just like Sequence Beyonders, every Artifact possessed logic-defying properties.

Chen Ye had zero intention of hitting the brakes. If turning Ding Dong into roadkill was the price of his freedom, he would pay it without a second thought.

No one was going to stop him from surviving.

“Sister Ding Dong! Chen Ye, don’t—!” Sun Qianqian screamed, her voice cracking in terror, entirely unsure of who she was even trying to save.

Near the off-road vehicle, Chu Che and Mad Lion watched the impending collision, their pupils contracting. Mad Lion had refused to help Chen Ye kill Wu Jianshan, but he was equally unwilling to help Wu Jianshan kill Chen Ye. Though the two personalities shared a body, their underlying emotions were linked. Neither side knew what to do, so the giant simply stood paralyzed.

At the gate, Ding Dong’s body was drawn tight as a bowstring. As the massive steel bull-bar of the truck barreled toward her face, thick white steam began to pour from her skin, rising in a column above her head.

“HA!”

She unleashed a deafening kiai, her eyes snapping wide. Driving off her back foot, she threw a devastating, steam-wreathed straight punch directly at the grill of the speeding multi-ton truck.

It was an unimaginably powerful strike.

But Chen Ye had the pedal buried in the floorboards. A faint, ominous red glow pulsed through the steel chassis of the Doomsday Pickup. In that moment, the truck was fully alive.

BOOM!

The impact sounded like an artillery shell detonating.

Ding Dong was launched backward like a broken ragdoll, sailing over the gates and crashing directly into the shrieking horde of Anomalies swarming the perimeter. The starving Crawlers didn’t waste the gift; they instantly dog-piled her, burying her beneath a writhing mountain of pale flesh and snapping teeth.

Inside the cabin, Chen Ye cursed violently. The sheer kinetic force of Ding Dong’s suicidal punch had stalled the engine. The Doomsday Pickup jerked to a violent halt, thick black smoke violently coughing from the hood.

“Chen Ye…”

Sun Qianqian’s eyes flooded with red. With a furious sweep of her blazing longsword, she charged past the truck, throwing herself into the horde to dig Ding Dong out. As she passed Chen Ye’s window, she shot him a look of absolute, heartbroken devastation.

The two girls had survived the apocalypse together. They slept in the same room. They were sisters.

And Chen Ye and Sun Qianqian? Everyone knew what they had been to each other.

Faced with this utter betrayal, Sun Qianqian’s mind fractured. She was only 18. In the old world, girls her age were stressing over college exams and dating.

Just yesterday, when Wu Jianshan had ordered her to execute Chen Ye, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Even now, looking at the man who had just tried to splatter her best friend across the pavement, she still couldn’t raise her sword against him.

“Courting death!”

Wu Jianshan spat the words, his eyes locked onto Chen Ye as the driver desperately cranked the ignition.

“Death God Descent!” Wu Jianshan roared, his voice echoing with unnatural, dark resonance.

The moment the four syllables left his lips, the atmosphere on the battlefield violently inverted.

The Death God, who had been passively defending Wu Jianshan, suddenly froze. A torrential flood of crimson mist violently erupted from her pores, churning like a bloody typhoon before snapping back onto her frame. The ragged red silk she wore transformed, weaving itself into a breathtaking, suffocatingly opulent crimson evening gown.

The long train of the dress pooled across the snow like liquid fire.

The massive blood-red scythe in her grip ignited, wreathed in roaring, ghostly flames. The agonizing wails and shrieks of thousands of trapped souls echoed from the burning blade.

Holy shit… Chen Ye thought, his heart skipping a beat as he desperately turned the key. It looked like a final boss cutscene from a video game, but seeing it in reality was paralyzing.

The Death God moved.

She didn’t run; she simply vanished, leaving a trail of burning afterimages. She reappeared in front of the Eight-Limbed Human Face—which was still floating dazedly, trying to regenerate—and swung her burning scythe.

In a single, fluid arc, the apex Anomaly was diced into a dozen neat segments.

The grotesque faces didn’t even have time to register the pain. The floating chunks of flesh instantly incinerated into falling ash. All that remained was a single, violently twitching tentacle that dropped into the snow.

It was a high-tier Artifact material!

But on this battlefield, nobody had the courage to claim it.

Witnessing the effortless execution, the Snow Woman abandoned all pretense of fighting and turned to flee.

She made it less than three feet. Suddenly, her perspective violently shifted, the world spinning wildly as she looked down at her own headless, dissolving body.

The Snow Woman’s severed head thumped into the snow. Her body rapidly dissolved into white ash, leaving behind a single, flawless, diamond-like core.

Another Artifact material.

The Wolf-Headed Anomaly let out a whimper of pure terror. It detonated its remaining energy, blurring into an afterimage to escape. It took one step before its massive body collapsed, sliding across the bloody ice while its severed head rolled in the opposite direction.

A single, blood-red wolf fang fell into the snow, pulsing with raw power.

A priceless Artifact material.

An overwhelming, suffocating Pressure descended over the entire school. It was the absolute suppression of an apex predator. Whether it was the mindless Crawlers or the indescribable, lurking shadows, every surviving Anomaly broke and scattered into the night like roaches fleeing a light.

Inside the stalled truck, every single cell in Chen Ye’s body was screaming in primal terror.

DANGER!

RUN!

The Doomsday Pickup seemed to feel its master’s panic. The engine violently shuddered, grinding and screaming as it forcibly ignored its own mechanical overload.

Come on! Start! The engine roared to life. Chen Ye slammed the gas, the tires screaming against the concrete, vomiting white smoke and the stench of burnt rubber.

He glanced at the rearview mirror and his blood ran cold.

That hauntingly beautiful, crimson-clad figure was already standing directly behind the tailgate. The burning scythe was raised high above her head.

Too fast! In the next microsecond, his head was going to be separated from his shoulders. He needed time. Just one single second. But a second was an eternity for the Death God; it was enough time for her to behead him ten times over.

Suddenly, the thick white smoke billowing from the truck’s burning tires began to violently churn. From the dense fog, an equally tall, slender, and breathtaking silhouette materialized.

It was the smoke clone: Shadow Drag.

Chen Ye had spent days obsessively analyzing the combat footage he had recorded of the Death God. He had poured all his focus into mimicking her exact form and presence.

The real Death God paused, her perpetually closed eyes seemingly sensing the anomaly. Instead of striking the truck, she smoothly redirected her swing, bringing the burning scythe down toward her smoky doppelganger.

The smoke-clone Death God mirrored the exact same motion, swinging a scythe forged of compressed fog.

CLANG!

A deafening shockwave of metallic friction echoed through the air. The smoke clone was violently blasted backward by the sheer force of the real Death God’s strike. It struggled for two seconds before completely destabilizing and dissipating back into harmless mist.

Managing to block a single strike from the fully powered Death God was proof that Chen Ye had finally mastered the basics of his clone ability.

But Chen Ye wasn’t celebrating.

The truck lurched forward, finally gaining traction. But in the same instant, the reinforced steel roof above his head groaned loudly.

SHNK.

A massive, blood-red blade punched directly through the roof of the cab. Before Chen Ye could even twitch, the burning tip of the scythe plunged through his shoulder and buried itself deep into the driver’s seat, physically pinning him to the chair.

Chen Ye stared blankly at the steaming red metal protruding from his collarbone, his brain struggling to process the agonizing reality.

Sensing its master’s mortal peril, the Doomsday Pickup violently bucked like an enraged, mechanical bull. A heavy steel towing chain whipped up from the truck bed, striking like a viper toward the figure standing on the roof.

A pale, delicate hand lazily reached out and caught the heavy chain mid-strike. With a gentle, effortless tug, the reinforced steel links shattered into pieces.