Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 189: Citywide Fog Slaves

Captain Chu Che hadn’t slept a wink.

He had spent the entire night standing rigidly by his window, staring out into the suffocating fog until dawn finally broke.

When he had greeted Chen Ye earlier, his relaxed, cynical demeanor was entirely fabricated. Beneath his calm exterior, his nerves were strung so tight they were ready to snap. He was terrified that he had just made a catastrophically wrong tactical decision.

But he was the captain.

Chu Che understood the burden of command perfectly. No matter how soul-crushing the pressure, he couldn’t let a single crack show on his face. Even if the sky shattered and the earth ripped open, he had to smile and assure his people that everything was under control.

The nightmare had begun yesterday afternoon.

Chu Che had felt a subtle, creeping wrongness infecting Fog City. The faint, supernatural resonance of Anomalies had begun to multiply, growing denser with every passing hour.

Through his Pathfinder perception, he realized that the entire old city district they had driven through was saturated with that specific, chilling aura. Just brushing against it was enough to make Chu Che’s scalp go numb.

It felt as though the entire city—millions of long-dead souls—had collectively awoken from a deep slumber.

Chu Che knew that elusive aura intimately.

Mist thralls.

This was the real reason he had forced the convoy to halt last night. They hadn’t stopped just to rest; they had stopped because it was physically impossible to advance.

The bitter irony was that the convoy had parked agonizingly close to Sun Qianqian and Ding Dong. They were literally two streets away. But Chu Che couldn’t risk pushing through the sudden, massive spike in Anomaly density in the dark.

He had prayed that the mist thralls would disperse with the morning light.

Instead, the situation had deteriorated exponentially.

According to Chu Che’s current sensory sweep, the infestation wasn’t localized.

The entire metropolis of Fog City was drowning in mist thralls. Millions of them.

Just around the sliced fish restaurant, Chu Che detected at least five distinct hordes, completely sealing off every single escape route. No matter which direction they drove, they would collide with the swarm.

The First Law of his personal Anomaly notebook read: “Anomalies cannot be defined. They defy logic, categorization, and predictability.”

The corollary to that law was even more morbid: “The moment you believe you understand an Anomaly, you are already dead.”

Even when dealing with the weakest, most documented Anomalies, Chu Che’s policy was absolute avoidance. He had spent the night running countless tactical simulations in his head, mapping out escape routes. Every single scenario ended the exact same way: the convoy engages a localized horde, the noise draws in the surrounding thralls, and they are eventually crushed beneath the weight of the entire city.

In a metropolis overrun by an active Anomaly swarm, fighting was suicide. Even a three-minute engagement would be fatal.

There were times to fight, and times to run.

But Chu Che had made his choice. He was going to gamble the convoy to punch through the horde. He was not leaving Sun Qianqian and Ding Dong behind.

Following Chu Che’s tense radio commands, the convoy began to slowly circle the block, probing for weak points.

When they found themselves idling in front of the sliced fish restaurant for the fifth consecutive time, Chen Ye finally keyed his radio. “Captain Chu. Are we trapped in a ghost wall?”

Static hissed over the comms for several agonizing seconds before Chu Che replied. “Yezi. Prepare for combat.”

Chen Ye’s blood ran cold.

Hatred cleared its fleshy scabbard with a sickening shhhk.

Chen Ye drove with one hand, his right fist clamped in a white-knuckle grip around the heavy, sentient blade. He clamped down on a Huazi Cigarette, letting thick streams of blue smoke pour from his lips to rapidly summon his phantom Crawlers. The spectral hounds materialized, loping aggressively alongside the Doomsday Pickup.

As the heavily modified truck smashed through a dense wall of fog, Chen Ye slammed on the brakes, his Blood Eye constricting to a pinpoint.

Mist thralls.

The street ahead was completely choked with them. And that was only what he could see through the gloom; he didn’t even want to guess how many thousands more were packed into the unseen darkness beyond.

The sheer volume of the horde made the swarm they had fought yesterday look like a mild inconvenience.

A cold, creeping dread slithered down Chen Ye’s spine.

Wait. Something’s wrong. Chen Ye raised Hatred, ready to carve a path through the front line, but immediately checked his swing.

The Second Law of Chu Che’s notebook was absolute: “Anomalies and humans cannot coexist.” This law was unbreakable. The instant an Anomaly detected a living human, its primal instinct was to attack and consume.

But the mist thralls weren’t attacking.

They were just standing there. Thousands of them. As the Doomsday Pickup idled, the featureless, swirling fog-heads of the horde slowly turned, tracking the vehicle with eerie, silent synchronicity.

No shrieking. No charging. No violence.

“Captain Chu, hold up!” Chen Ye barked into the radio. “These mist thralls… they aren’t—!”

“Chen Ye, do not engage!” Chu Che’s voice snapped back instantly.

Both men had recognized the terrifying anomaly within the Anomaly.

Behind Chen Ye, the survivors packed into the school bus were paralyzed with horror.

“Listen to me very carefully,” Old Li hissed, his voice trembling as he paced the center aisle, locking eyes with every passenger. “Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. Nobody breathes too loudly. Do not provoke them!”

He didn’t need to issue the warning. The survivors were already scared entirely out of their minds.

They were trapped in a metal tube, completely surrounded by a sea of nightmare logic.

Every so often, a face would briefly materialize within the swirling fog-heads of the thralls—a pair of venomous, hate-filled eyes, or a mouth stretched open in a silent, agonizing scream—before dissolving back into mist. The sheer psychological terror of the sight was suffocating.

As the school bus slowly rolled forward, thousands of featureless heads tracked its movement. The survivors weren’t fighting a war; they were animals in a cage, being casually observed by a dead city.

Xu Lina, despite wearing a heavy surgical mask, clamped both hands over her mouth, terrified that a single whimper would trigger a massacre.

In the lead vehicle, Chen Ye tightened his grip on Hatred. The sentient Artifact pulsed with dark, violent malice. Any mist thrall that drifted too close to the Doomsday Pickup visibly recoiled, repulsed by the overwhelming aura of the cursed blade.

Chen Ye felt a sickening realization settle in his gut.

The thralls lining the streets weren’t an ambush. They were an escort.

It felt exactly like driving through a massive, silent funeral procession. And the convoy was the corpse.

The Doomsday Pickup inched forward.

Occasionally, a mist thrall would simply refuse to move out of the path. Chen Ye didn’t stop. The heavy, armored tires of the pickup would roll directly over the entity, crushing it into a burst of harmless gray vapor, only for the thrall to silently reform a few yards away.

“Captain Chu,” Chen Ye whispered into the radio. “Distance?”

Chu Che snapped out of his morbid trance. He didn’t understand why the city’s immune system had suddenly gone dormant, but it drastically shifted their tactical reality. If the horde wasn’t attacking, they could punch through faster.

“Next intersection. Take a hard left, then punch it straight,” Chu Che commanded. “They are right there.”

Chen Ye pressed down on the accelerator.

As the truck picked up speed, the synchronized turning of the fog-heads accelerated to match. Though the thralls possessed no physical eyes, Chen Ye could physically feel the weight of a million unseen gazes tracking his every move. Some felt dead and indifferent, others were freezing cold, and many burned with a bottomless, ancient malice.

He didn’t care. He just wanted out of this nightmare.

The Doomsday Pickup tore around the corner.

Through the parting mist, Chen Ye spotted two vehicles idling in the center of the crossroad: a battered panel van and a heavily modified off-road SUV.

Seeing that familiar, ridiculous SUV brought a massive, genuine wave of relief crashing over him.

…

Sun Qianqian was sitting in the driver’s seat of the SUV, utterly traumatized.

She had woken up to find every rooftop, balcony, and street corner completely saturated with mist thralls. They had simply stood there for hours, “staring” at her, refusing to attack. The psychological torture had kept her on the absolute brink of a panic attack all morning.

When the unmistakable, roaring engine of Chen Ye’s hideously modified pickup truck finally broke through the fog, tears of profound relief flooded her eyes.

But as the truck pulled alongside her window, the young girl froze.

She stared in horror at the weeping, empty black hole where Chen Ye’s right eye used to be, and the terrifying, glowing crimson orb in his left socket.

Chen Ye didn’t stop. He rolled his window down just enough to shout over the engine.

“Stupid girl! What are you staring at? Drive!”

The Doomsday Pickup blew past her, its engine roaring as Chen Ye floored the accelerator, making a desperate, high-speed break for the city limits.