Chapter 130

Many problems only reveal themselves in practice.

Take the armor everyone uses now. Even the metal armor modeled after it by metal-type superpowered individuals was designed during the first zombie disaster.

It was a product of necessity.

Under the circumstances at the time, the priorities were speed and quantity.

The armor completely changed the course of humanity’s battles against the zombies. It greatly reduced human casualties in combat, as well as the rate at which second-generation zombies appeared.

The first zombie disaster broke out over a weekend. Except for the universities, all the schools—from kindergartens and elementary schools to middle schools—were empty. The children were all at home.

The armor had mainly been designed to deal with adult zombies.

It primarily protected the shoulders and neck, arms, thighs, and calves—the body’s key vulnerable areas.

But now that they were facing the little ones at the High-Tech School, the flaws had become obvious.

For zombies that height, raising their arms or leaping up put them at exactly the right height to attack the wide-open area around the waist and abdomen.

After all, during the first zombie disaster, there had never been a situation where large numbers of elementary-school-aged zombie children gathered together. The occasional child zombie had been scattered, so no one had frequently attacked that part of the body.

The corridor was also too narrow to move around in. Most ordinary people were forced to retreat, while the superpowered individuals took the lead.

Guo Jun, Gao Yuxuan, and Wu Jiancheng were all ranged attackers. They could throw fireballs or discharge electricity from a distance.

Guo Jun only grew fiercer as the battle went on. After nearly being attacked in the stomach several times by the little zombie children, he lost his temper. The electricity he released suddenly thickened, and with a deafening boom, one of the little zombies’ heads exploded.

Gao Yuxuan: “Holy crap!”

Everyone began to realize that ranged superpowered individuals were actually not very suitable for fighting in groups.

Although Wu Jiancheng threw his fireballs toward distant targets, the people beside him still found the waves of heat uncomfortable.

Fire-type superpowers were best suited to fighting alone.

When a group of little zombies rushed over, Aunt Pan’s eyes filled with pity. She slapped the ground, and several ridges rose from the concrete floor of the corridor.

The little zombie children tripped over them—or were even sent flying—and came rolling right up to the group.

Everyone charged forward, bringing down one shovel after another and chopping off their heads.

It was a nightmare.

This was the most horrifying battle they had faced since they began killing zombies.

It ranked alongside the baby zombies at Renxin Hospital—the ones that had leaped up and flailed around—as one of their worst nightmares.

Li Jiangbing sighed as he shoveled away the bodies.

When facing adult zombies, he had to raise the shovel to chest height and use it like a bayonet.

Against the little ones, he simply let his arm hang down and held the crescent-shaped shovel horizontally. Children’s necks were much thinner than adults’, so cutting through them required very little effort.

With his arm hanging at his side, Li Jiangbing swung the shovel again and again. Each strike took a little head.

Mo Li leaped into the second-floor corridor from outside the building.

He let out a sharp breath and shot forward.

He raced across the floor, kicked off the walls, and even paused for an instant on the ceiling, transforming into a black shadow. He streaked from one end of the corridor to the other, leaving behind nothing but bodies with their throats bitten through.

Zhou Wang, Little Huang, and Mo Li were all well suited to fighting alone.

Su Yu could act as everyone’s shield.

In short, the group and the superpowered individuals gradually learned to work together and found a suitable way to fight.

At last, the zombies throughout the school were more or less cleared out.

The remaining corners and hidden spots were left to Mo Li, Zhou Wang, and Little Huang. One relied on speed, while the other two relied on their senses. They were the perfect cleanup team.

But only a dozen or so children had been rescued.

In that enormous school, only a dozen or so elementary school students had survived.

Every one of them was desperately hungry. The first thing they asked was, “Uncle, do you have anything to eat?”

“Auntie, do you have any food?”

For the past few days, they had survived by rummaging through schoolbags and storage cabinets for snacks their classmates had brought to school in violation of the rules.

They all smelled terrible.

Their faces should have been young and innocent, yet exhaustion was written all over them.

Nervously, they asked, “Do you know where my mom and dad are?”

No one could answer.

Everyone knew that the heads of the children’s mothers might well be rolling around on Preschool Street.

The group consisted mostly of young, unmarried men and women who had no idea how to comfort children.

All they could say was, “I don’t know.”

The children asked, “Can you take me home?”

Everyone found themselves at a loss again.

Little Huang returned after finishing his sweep. He walked over and said, “There are students at the middle school next door waiting for us to rescue them. That’s urgent, so we have to deal with it first.”

“Get in the vehicles with us.”

“Come over here and line up. Boys in one line, girls in the other.”

The children seemed to find a pillar of support all at once. They quickly formed two lines in front of Little Huang.

They even adjusted their own positions automatically. Whenever the person in front completely blocked their view with the back of their head, they knew they were shorter and moved forward in line.

Within seconds, the two lines had been arranged neatly from shortest to tallest.

Everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief, though their hearts ached at the same time.

When Mo Li appeared in his leopard form, none of the children showed the slightest fear.

“He’s so amazing!”

“One bite and a zombie is gone!”

“Is he a leopard?”

Jiang Cheng answered, “No. He’s my cat.”

She held out her hand. Mo Li shrank down, then leaped along her arm and perched on her shoulder.

The children were stunned.

“Wowww!”

Jiang Cheng explained to them, “Because of the zombie virus, many people developed superpowers—water, fire, electricity, earth, and so on. That auntie can make the floor bulge up. She has an earth-type superpower.”

“My little cat developed a superpower too. He can grow bigger and become incredibly powerful, helping us kill zombies and rescue people.”

The children all began speaking at once.

“I know! I know!”

“Teacher Zhang can shoot fire! He locked us in the classroom and burned the zombies!”

“Mingzhi Meng is in sixth grade. She can turn things into water, although she can only make a little. She left us some water to drink, then went out to find food for us, but she never came back.”

“Did you see her?”

Their voices were childish, their words innocent.

Su Yu felt as though she could hardly breathe.

“All right, no more talking,” Little Huang said. “Get ready to board the vehicles.”

The children obediently followed.

The vehicles continued toward the middle school.

Two streets and a stadium lay between the two schools. Schools and companies in the development zone held their events at this central stadium.

Fortunately, there had been no event there on the twenty-ninth. There were a few scattered zombies, but they ignored them for now and headed straight to the middle school.

The High-Tech Middle School currently had only a junior division. A senior division had originally been under construction, and at the beginning of the year, they had announced that it would be ready to accept students in September.

Then the zombie disaster happened. Afterward, there were too few students, and they could not gather enough teachers.

The construction of the senior division was therefore suspended.

After testing the method in actual combat, they had more or less developed a new way of fighting.

First, they sent Mo Li and the vehicles into the school to clear out the large groups of zombies in batches.

The blade vehicles were truly astonishingly efficient.

The junior-high students were already close to adult height.

The metal-type superpowered individuals were much more comfortable this time. They no longer had to press their faces against the windows and peer downward, searching for the height of little zombie children’s necks.

The “tongues”—or perhaps more accurately, the “guillotine blades”—that extended from the vehicles varied in length. The difference in strength between the metal-type superpowered individuals could be seen at a glance.

Overall, however, the metal-type superpowered individuals were improving extremely quickly.

This was mainly because they had been using their superpowers nonstop over the past few days. Making armor, crafting weapons, and producing all sorts of other things depended on them. Although their individual strengths varied, their overall progress was rapid.

Another reason was that Li Jiangbing’s superpower had actually improved at an astonishing rate.

That was because every night, he trained until his eardrums hurt, his vision blurred, and his eyeballs ached.

During the day, however, he used his powers for chores like cleaning and bathing the puppies, so no one else noticed how much he had improved.

But whenever Jiang Cheng saw him chasing a puppy with a water ball—or even several water balls chasing several dogs at once—she would smile knowingly.

Li Jiangbing was truly someone who listened to advice.

He might not have been especially clever himself, but as long as he followed the right friends and leaders, his willingness to take advice became one of his greatest strengths.

Mo Li had grown even larger. He had not reached his maximum size, which would have been truly astonishing, but he was already much bigger than he had been in elementary school.

His back rose as high as a person’s shoulders, and adults had to tilt their heads back to look at him.

Everyone quickly understood the significance of that height: one bite, and a skull was crushed.

He charged through the zombies without a care.

After watching for a while, everyone realized that the zombies could not even break through his fur.

When there were too many of them, a few zombies would occasionally grab hold of his fur. Mo Li would instantly puff up, sending the zombies flying.

Su Yu suddenly thought that if this continued, even the faces would be smashed to pieces, and the families would not be able to identify the bodies.

Then she felt foolish for thinking that.

The family members might not even still be alive. With so many deaths, there was no proper process for identifying bodies anyway. They were handled in batches—last time they had been burned, and this time they were being buried.

Su Yu sighed.

Zhou Wang returned. “We found them.”

When everyone entered the school, they had already seen several zombie corpses. The traces of battle recorded the middle school students’ resistance and attempts to save themselves.

The surviving students had fought while retreating, eventually falling back into the cafeteria and barricading the doors.

A few parents were among them, and two cafeteria workers had survived as well.

The adults cooked food for the children.

After holding out until today, everyone felt they could no longer simply wait for death. But without armor, charging outside was far too dangerous.

Only four parents had come wearing armor to search for their children. One of them was Wang Changhe’s wife.

“We have to call for help,” she said.

Everyone was pessimistic. “Who can we call for help?”

Some of the parents had brought their phones, but the emergency number was useless. They had also tried calling the temporary emergency command center’s hotline from the previous zombie disaster, but the number was no longer in service.

Wang Changhe’s wife, however, refused to give up. Her name was Xiao Dan, and her daughter was Wang Yunya.

As the saying went, people from the same family shared certain traits. Families tended to have things in common.

Wang Changhe was a courageous man, and Xiao Dan was no different. Otherwise, she would never have come alone to rescue her daughter.

Wang Yunya had awakened a fire-based superpower. She had been repeatedly training herself in the cafeteria over the past two days. If the number of zombies was not too great, she could at least hold her own.

Several other people in the cafeteria had awakened superpowers as well.

“I want to try contacting our neighborhood’s interim committee,” Xiao Dan said.

During the first zombie disaster, the people of Jixiang Jiayuan had organized themselves almost as effectively as those in Youth Apartments.

If no one at Jixiang Jiayuan could be reached, Xiao Dan was considering trying to contact Youth Apartments for help.

She and her husband had fought zombies alongside the people from Youth Apartments before, so they knew very well how strong they were.

She did not have a phone and did not know Zhou Wang’s number. But she knew that during the disaster, both Jixiang Jiayuan and Youth Apartments had posted the contact lists of their interim committee members on the residents’ forums.

A few people wearing armor organized themselves and decided to make a run for the laboratory building. Only the laboratory building had computers that could connect to the internet.

Wang Yunya was one of the stronger superpowered individuals among them, so she definitely had to go. Ordinary people would be in even greater danger.

The mother and daughter argued back and forth over who should wear the armor.

In the end, another parent gave up his suit of armor. It was better to have someone with a superpower wear it; their chances of survival were higher than those of an ordinary person.

Thus, Xiao Dan and another parent led several superpowered students out of the cafeteria. After enduring numerous dangers, they successfully reached the laboratory building, found a computer with internet access, looked up Zhou Wang’s phone number, and called him for help.

They waited in an office. Every so often, zombies would pound on the door outside, making everyone tremble with fear.

Finally, after noon had passed, the sound of a car horn rang out across the campus. The noise attracted the zombies, and they rushed toward it.

Everyone looked out through the glass windows.

The car seemed to be alive. “Blades” kept growing from its body, slicing through the zombies’ heads.

There was also a monster as large as an elephant, biting through one zombie after another.

Everyone stared in stunned disbelief.

After observing for a long while, Wang Yunya said uncertainly, “That looks like a cat.”

Everyone pressed up against the glass to get a better look. In the end, they confirmed it.

“Yes, it’s a cat!”