Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 177: The Consequence of Being a Good Person Once

Chen Ye never expected to find Iron Lion in such a pathetic state.

The giant was acting as a living shield for a woman, facing down a dense throng of blurry, twisted silhouettes. Every single one of those figures radiated a predatory chill that made the fine hairs on the back of Chen Ye’s hands stand straight up.

These had to be the Mist Thralls the cannibal girl had mentioned.

A Rule-Based Anomaly.

God damn it… Chen Ye cursed internally. Despite every precaution, he had driven straight into the one thing he wanted to avoid.

Iron Lion was a wreck. He was missing an entire arm, and the right side of his secondary Mad Lion head was sheared off, the persona currently forced into a deep, defensive slumber. His massive body was a roadmap of trauma—some wounds were scarred over, while others were raw, fresh meat.

Chen Ye’s first instinct was simple: Run.

His second instinct was that he’d been played by Chu Che. As a Pathfinder, there was no way the “Old Fox” hadn’t sensed this cluster of high-tier auras. Yet he’d led them here anyway.

Chen Ye’s blood boiled. This was the second time in as many days that the captain had leveraged him into a death trap.

Fine. We’ll settle this debt later, Chen Ye thought, narrowing his eyes. Their partnership was a constant tug-of-war—either the east wind suppressed the west, or the west suppressed the east. Right now, he was taking the loss.

But wait. Why wasn’t his body reacting to the spiritual pressure? Was it because they were Rule-Based, or was it a specific trait of the Mist Thralls?

“You big moron! Have you lost your damn mind?!” Chen Ye roared, leaning out the truck window. “Move! Run!”

He saw the woman huddled behind Iron Lion, but he didn’t care about her. In his world, no life carried more weight than his own.

“Yezi… you… you’re still breathing!”

Iron Lion didn’t even need to turn his heads to recognize the voice. A look of profound, childlike relief washed over his battered face, as if he’d just found his oldest protector.

If Chu Che could hear the giant’s thoughts, he’d have called him a fool.

Hearing such an inauspicious greeting, Chen Ye felt a surge of irritation. “Shut up with the reunions! Move your ass, now!”

But Iron Lion didn’t budge. He planted his remaining feet like pillars, shielding the woman. “I… I can’t. She… she’s pregnant!”

The giant’s voice was absolute. Unbreakable.

“Pregnant?”

Chen Ye stared at the woman’s protruding belly. His brain felt like it was short-circuiting. This was the end of the world—a rotting, decaying graveyard—and someone was actually foolish enough to try and bring a new life into it? It felt less like a miracle and more like a cruel joke.

Pregnant?

Chen Ye didn’t particularly like children—Brats were a localized plague as far as he was concerned—but that didn’t mean he was the type of person who wouldn’t give up his seat for a pregnant woman on a bus.

He hated the loud, destructive ones. But he remembered the quiet ones, the kids who would look at him and shyly mutter, “Hello, big brother.” Those smiles could occasionally dredge up memories of a world that wasn’t covered in blood.

To save or not to save?

For the first time in his life, Chen Ye’s internal compass spun wildly.

A black, cynical devil in his mind screamed: You can barely keep your own head on your shoulders, and you want to play hero? Are you mentally deficient?!

A white, quiet voice countered: There’s nothing left of us, Yezi. That child is a new life. A clean slate.

“The hell with both of you!” Chu Che’s voice cut through the fog. Before Chen Ye could decide, the captain had already skidded his SUV to a halt, shoved the woman into the passenger seat, and floored the gas.

“Iron Lion, with me! Yezi, cover the rear!”

Iron Lion instinctively obeyed, leaping onto the roof of Chu Che’s SUV and clinging to the luggage rack like a colossal, one-armed spider.

Chen Ye didn’t have time to complain. He took a deep drag of his cigarette and exhaled a massive, rolling bank of smoke.

Three minutes.

That was the rule. The girl had said the Mist Thralls only manifested for three minutes before they were forced back into the fog. He just had to survive 180 seconds.

The Absolute Aura Shielding expanded at a violent pace, swallowing the nearest blurry figures. Deprived of their senses, the Mist Thralls began to wander aimlessly within the gray soup, their “prey” having vanished from their perception.

But there were too many of them. Chen Ye’s smoke needed time to fully saturate the area.

He had no intention of a fair fight.

Suddenly, a slender, hauntingly familiar silhouette broke free from the mist. It was his Shadow Drag clone. Standing at a normal human height of six feet rather than the Death God’s original ten, the clone was denser, faster, and far more lethal.

The twisted, blurry silhouettes closed in.

The smoke-clone Reaper swung its scythe in a brutal arc. Just as the blade was about to cleave the lead Thrall, a jagged, tooth-filled maw erupted from the creature’s chest, biting down on the smoky blade with a sickening, spectral crunch.

The others swarmed.

The clone surged with power, the scythe passing through the incorporeal bodies and manifesting a localized storm of blades.

Chen Ye’s left eye flared. The crimson pupil rotated, and the jagged runes flared with heat.

Spontaneous Combustion.

Tiny orange sparks materialized on the nearest Thrall.

“SCREEEEEE!—”

An ear-splitting shriek ripped through the air as the Mist Thrall ignited. The others seemed to possess a primal fear of the flames, scattering momentarily.

Chen Ye felt a spark of hope, but his feet were already moving in the opposite direction. He bolted for the Doomsday Pickup, parked barely ten feet away.

In the apocalypse, fighting an Anomaly was the last resort of a dead man. His goal was delay, not victory.

The entire exchange had taken less than ten seconds. His mist hadn’t even reached its full radius.

He reached for the door handle—then froze.

A wave of ice-cold dread washed over him. Several blurry figures were already standing right in front of him, mere inches from the truck door.

When did they…?

He hadn’t sensed them at all. This was the second time a Rule-Based Anomaly had bypassed his awareness.

Cold sweat soaked his shirt.

Two pairs of freezing, misty hands clamped onto his forearms. He felt himself being yanked backward, his heels dragging in the dirt as the Mist Thralls prepared to haul him into the heart of the fog.

Xiao Hua’s warning echoed in his mind: If they pull you in, you don’t come back. You just become one of them.

Chen Ye looked at the faces of the entities holding him. One looked hauntingly like Uncle Bao. The other bore a distorted resemblance to the girl he’d just abandoned on the bridge.

God damn it. This is what I get for being a good person, Chen Ye spat mentally. The second I try to help, the universe tries to kill me.

He should have just run. He shouldn’t have cared about Iron Lion.

If Sun Qianqian were here, she would have slapped him for the thought, but she wasn’t.

Despite the terror, Chen Ye didn’t panic. He still had two aces left in his hand.

Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away.

Iron Lion was crouched on the roof of the fleeing SUV, watching the thick wall of Chen Ye’s mist swallow the pickup and the horde. An unbearable weight of guilt and worry pressed down on his simple heart.

Suddenly, Chu Che felt the SUV lurch upward as the massive weight on the roof vanished.

“You idiot! What are you doing?!” Chu Che screamed, looking in his side mirror.

“I… I’m going back for him! Captain, keep going! We’ll catch up!”

Iron Lion hit the asphalt and broke into a thunderous sprint, his massive silhouette disappearing back into the lethal fog.

Chu Che slammed his fist against the steering wheel, his face red with fury. “Idiot! Absolute moron! The whole world could burn to ash and that bastard would still find a way to survive! You’re going to get yourself killed for nothing, you brainless fool!”