The Apocalypse Solution Provider

Chapter 56: Second Evolution, Strength Leaps

Slipping into the house, Su Jin immediately rushed to the window and yanked the curtains shut.

Luckily, the heavy drapes in the adjacent rooms were already drawn.

As the thick fabric sealed off the living room, the interior plunged into near pitch-blackness.

In absolute darkness, his speed and agility peaked.

Logically, fighting a Zombie of this caliber meant he should rely on light to boost his raw physical strength for maximum damage.

But here, there was no way to artificially pump up the brightness. It made more tactical sense to dive fully into night mode, pushing his speed and evasion to the absolute limit.

Leaping toward the ceiling, Su Jin seized the heavy iron stem of the chandelier, holding his breath as he stalked his prey below.

The vaulted ceiling bought him height. Down below, the hulking, muscular Zombie had already spun away from the doorway, rotating like a radar dish as it hunted for a target.

Su Jin’s chest tightened. This behavior was terrifyingly abnormal!

A standard infected, deprived of visual and auditory stimuli, would just stagger aimlessly.

They never moved with such fluid intent. This freak possessed a hyper-aggressive, active hunter instinct!

His lungs burning for air, Su Jin flicked his wrist, hurling a lighter he’d swiped off the coffee table into the far corner of the room.

The monster lunged at the clatter, charging headlong toward the bedroom!

The instant it exposed its back, Su Jin raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger!

The bullet struck dead center over its heart, but the muffled thwack suggested it only bit into dense bone.

The beast whirled around, effortlessly ripping the wooden bedroom door off its hinges before hurling the severed doorknob straight at the chandelier like a fastball.

The heavy iron fixture shattered, plummeting toward the floor.

But the split-second the monster touched the door, Su Jin had already released his grip, plummeting into the void.

Masked by the deafening crash of the chandelier, he hit the floor in a silent roll and slid into the shadow of a leather sofa.

Crouched and steady, he peered over the edge—and what he saw nearly stopped his heart!

The beast was still sweeping the darkness for him… but its massive hand was clamped protectively over its heart.

Active hunting, tool usage, and tactical defense of a weak point… this was the highest tier of evolution he had encountered yet!

The hulking brute prowled the living room. Gritting his teeth, Su Jin leveled his barrel at its waistline.

A suppressed crack, and the bullet snapped the thick elastic band of the beast’s sweatpants.

He holstered the weapon and bolted, sprinting across the wall toward the exact opposite corner of the room.

Reaching the apex where the walls met, Su Jin wedged himself up high, bracing his boots against the adjacent plaster.

The monster obliterated the sofa in a blind pounce, swiping at empty air as it lost his scent once more.

Su Jin slowly slipped his hand into the tactical briefcase strapped to his chest, withdrew a small medicine box, and tossed it to the floor.

The brute charged the rattle, hammering its massive fist down onto the cardboard.

Then, a second box fell. Then a third.

The monster lunged left and right like an enraged guard dog, pulverizing the floorboards until the entire apartment shook!

By the time the fifteenth box bounced across the wood, the giant’s massive, pale butt crack was entirely exposed to the world.

Three more boxes rained down, and the sweatpants finally gathered momentum, sliding rapidly down its thick thighs.

As it lunged for the next target, the bunched-up fabric shackled its ankles. The hulking brute pitched forward in a bizarrely graceful arc, crashing hard onto its own arm!

A fatal opening. Su Jin didn’t hesitate!

Holding his breath, he kicked off the plaster and launched himself like a tactical missile.

He whipped a steel screwdriver from his belt, letting gravity turn his body into a pile driver as he buried the tool deep into the monster’s spine!

A perfect, lethal strike!

The colossal Zombie collapsed against the floorboards, completely motionless.

Su Jin’s face held zero triumph. Still kneeling atop the corpse’s back, he hacked up a thick mouthful of blood.

His balance failed him. He slid off the meat mountain, his chest heaving with wet, ragged coughs.

Crimson flecks splattered across his vision. He clamped a hand over his face, a crushing, cynical bitterness drowning out his fractured ribs.

This is a nightmare… a complete, unmanageable clusterfuck…

He actually thought his current specs were enough to survive.

But this freak had nearly caved in his chest with collateral damage alone. He wouldn’t have survived a direct second hit.

Perfect camouflage from the Disguised Infected, hyper-accelerated Zombie evolution, and oceans of rotting flesh burying the globe.

What kind of strategic roadmap actually led to victory here?

High-caliber ballistics still worked, beautifully so, but could surviving pockets of humanity ever reboot global industry?

A single modern microchip required an entire planetary supply chain.

The apocalypse hadn’t just broken the supply chain; it had fed it to the horde.

Even if military holdouts reclaimed automated ammo plants, who was mining the lead?

Industrial reset was a pipe dream, meaning human evolution relied solely on suicidally hunting apex predators…

Su Jin didn’t know how long he sat there drowning in macro-logistics. He finally picked up the Silver Gun, staring blankly at the barrel as he muttered aloud.

“Hey, corporate… I’m out here putting in the hours for you. How about a little administrative support? No probationary period is this brutal…”

[DO NOT ASK WHAT THE COMPANY CAN DO FOR YOU. ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR THE COMPANY.]

“You’ve gotta be shitting me!”

The massive font burned across his retinas and vanished. Ignoring his cracked ribs, Su Jin bolted upright!

His existential dread instantly evaporated, replaced by the boiling, unhinged fury of an abused middle manager!

Spinning wildly, Su Jin roared at the ceiling, “You corporate fucks have been streaming this the whole time, haven’t you?! Do you watch me take a shit too?! Say something!”

Dead silence greeted him. Su Jin blinked, his manic rage faltering.

Wait, that wasn’t right… System notifications vanished, sure, but they never just glitched in and out.

And the System never engaged in petty banter. He complained about management all the time during his downtime with zero response.

In his most lethal, desperate bottlenecks, the “company” had remained totally radio silent.

More importantly, the tone was wrong. The interface was strictly cold, robotic data—never HR-level gaslighting!

Did the blood loss actually make me hallucinate a hostile HR memo?

Conjuring toxic workplace propaganda during a near-death experience… his brain was truly damaged.

Vertigo spiked hard. Su Jin gripped his forehead, swaying dizzily before forcing air into his ragged lungs.

A hallucination. It had to be. His bio-metrics were completely in the red.

But the bizarre interruption cleanly severed his panic. His mind cold and pragmatic once more, he stared down at the meat mountain on the floor.

Retrieving a hunting knife from his tactical bag, he squatted and methodically began to carve into the brute’s spine.

He was terrifyingly proficient now. Squelch of the blade, snap of the tendons, crunch of the ribs.

Peeling back the ruined chest cavity, he plunged his hand into the gore and yanked out two Fleshy Orbs.

Rolling the slick, bloody spheres between his fingers, Su Jin let out a quiet sigh of awe.

No wonder the bastard hit like a freight train. It was running on dual cores!

The structural density of both Orbs was nearly identical…

Slicing away the connective fascia, Su Jin held one up, plunging into an immediate internal cost-benefit analysis.

His physical state was critical. Injecting another Fleshy Orb now would violently alter his system.

The projected ROI was a massive spike in raw power.

But the risk of catastrophic mutation was non-zero… he could warp into something that wasn’t human.

A system reboot coma was also highly probable.

But holding off meant trying to extract back to the safe zone with fractured ribs and zero stamina. A death sentence.

The executive decision was made.

Stashing one Fleshy Orb in his rig, Su Jin carried the other to the window.

He shoved the glass open. The dying sun bled across the ruined skyline like liquid fire.

Had he really been fighting that long?

Su Jin dropped his gaze to the fleshy mass in his palm, and crushed it!

The Orb ruptured. A wave of molten, scorching energy immediately injected itself into his veins.

Su Jin’s pupils dilated violently. He dropped to his knees, the whites of his eyes instantly spiderwebbing with ruptured capillaries!

A guttural, tearing gasp ripped from his throat. Beneath his skin, his muscle fibers writhed and multiplied, twisting over each other like thousands of boiling serpents.

His cellular structure felt like it was bathing in white phosphorus. Gripping the collar of his ruined shirt, Su Jin tore it away, baring his newly forged, lethally dense musculature.

“Ah…!”

This second evolution was entirely different—sharper, fiercer, but perfectly lucid. His consciousness didn’t waver for a millisecond.

As a cold shock gripped him, the muscles along his spine violently bulged outward!

The bleeding sunlight caught the grotesquely dense knots of his back, casting a horrific, jagged shadow on the wall… it looked exactly like the roaring visage of a demon forged from pure muscle.

“Ugh!!”

A feral grunt escaping him, Su Jin whipped his fist to the side, burying it into the apartment wall.

The ceramic tiles spiderwebbed and crumbled to dust… leaving a deep, cratered imprint of his knuckles punched straight into the concrete.