The internet still wasn’t working.

I had checked three times since I left the guys outside to stare at a big tree.

Then five more.

Then another two just in case the apocalypse decided to stop being rude for five seconds and fix itself.

It did not.

Netflix continued buffering like it thought this was just a giant joke at my expense while my cellphone stubbornly remained stuck on one miserable little bar of signal that disappeared every few minutes like it was playing hide and seek.

Honestly?

At this point I was starting to take it personally.

Sure I had a crap ton of stuff downloaded for just this moment... but that didn’t mean it was acceptable to force me to go offline.

Meanwhile, outside, the world had apparently transformed into Jurassic Park with extra murder flowers and somehow that still wasn’t the worst part of my morning.

I sat on the couch glaring at the television like hatred alone might force civilization to reconnect itself while the guys continued arguing near the front windows.

"...the roots are underneath the driveway now," Chenghai was saying.

"And burning them makes it worse," Lingyun shot back.

"We still need visibility around the house."

"We need a fucking flamethrower."

I threw the remote onto the couch cushions with enough force that all four men immediately looked toward me.

"Okay," I announced flatly. "New priority. You need to fix this."

Zhenlan frowned slightly. "The plants? I thought you said that there was nothing we could really do about them? Did you think of something?"

"Fuck the plants. I need the internet back up and working."

Silence.

Then Lingyun sighed deeply like a man exhausted by life itself. "You know that’s not really how this all works right?"

I stood up immediately as I glared at the man. "I don’t care how it works. I want the internet. I am going to have the internet. Now, follow me."

The four men just grunted and nodded their heads.

I marched deeper into the mansion before stopping near the storage room beside the garage. Then I crouched, grabbed the handles of a massive military crate hidden beneath a tarp, and started dragging it across the floor.

Of course, all this stuff had been taken out of my space, but the guys didn’t need to know that.

The metal screeched loudly against the tile.

Yuche blinked once. "Rouxi..."

I ignored him and kept dragging.

The crate weighed enough that it was difficult to move, but having space powers made things wonderfully convenient when you wanted to steal government property without putting in physical effort.

By the time I shoved the crate into the middle of the living room, all four men were staring at me.

Then at the crate.

Then back at me.

Without explaining anything, I walked back toward the storage room.

And returned dragging another one.

Then another.

Then another.

By the fifth crate, Lingyun finally spoke.

"...Should I even ask?"

"Nope."

"Fair."

I kicked the nearest crate once with my foot. "Here is my treasure," I announced proudly. "You do with it what you want, but make sure in the end that I have new dramas to watch."

Nobody moved for several seconds.

Mostly because there were now enough military-grade electronics sitting in the middle of the living room to restart a small country.

Generators.

Solar panels.

Massive batteries.

Satellite dishes.

Waterproof cases full of cables and communication equipment.

Routers.

Signal boosters.

Several heavy black cases covered in warning labels that even I hadn’t opened because they looked expensive enough to explode.

Yuche crouched beside one of the crates slowly. "Where did all this come from?"

"The military probably forgot it."

Four identical looks met me immediately.

"We watched them pack," Chenghai said carefully. "They didn’t forget anything."

I shrugged. "What can I tell you? They left all this stuff behind. Finders keepers and all that jazz."

"Rouxi."

"What?"

Zhenlan slowly lifted one of the satellite components out of a crate before looking toward me again. "This equipment alone would have taken multiple people to move."

"I’m stronger than I look," I replied, my face blank.

"That’s not an answer, and you know it," Yuche replied, pushing back a bit more than normal.

"What can I say? You either accept that answer or that anime brought it into my house," I said, all joking gone from my face.

There was nothing but silence for a moment as the four men looked at each other. Yuche, who had apparently been chosen as the spokesman began speaking quietly. "At some point, we aren’t going to accept that answer."

The room went still.

And not one of the men disagreed with that statement.

I looked back at him evenly. "And the moment you don’t, it has nothing to do with me."

The boundary, my boundary, was out in the open, and not even Lingyun made a joke this time.

Good.

Some things belonged to me.

Mine.

Not for sharing.

Not for questioning.

After several long seconds, Zhenlan simply opened another crate.

And just like that, the moment passed.

Trust was an interesting concept in the apocalypse. It was there until it wasn’t. And the moment it was gone, that was the end of everything.

I pointed dramatically toward the pile of equipment. "Now stop standing around and make civilization work again."

Lingyun stared at the crates. "Rouxi... I set things on fire for a living now."

"And you’re very talented at it."

"That doesn’t mean I know how satellites work."

Chenghai crouched beside another crate, already opening containers and checking labels. "This is military equipment. There should be an instruction manual somewhere."

"Thank fuck," muttered Lingyun.

A few minutes later, Zhenlan finally located a thick black binder buried beneath several layers of packaging foam.

He opened it slowly.

Everyone gathered around him.

Silence filled the room.

Then Lingyun frowned. "...Why does it look like an Ikea manual for world domination?"

Honestly?

That was exactly what it looked like.

There were pages full of diagrams with arrows pointing everywhere, and even tiny warnings in bright red text.

Technical schematics that somehow became more confusing the longer you stared at them.

Yuche flipped one page. Then another. "...I think this one might be explaining how not to electrocute yourself."

Chenghai leaned closer. "No. I think that’s the startup sequence."

"Those should not look similar."

I grabbed a bag of chips off the coffee table before settling back onto the couch. "Just follow the pictures." 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Four men looked at me like they were reconsidering every life decision that brought them here.

"What?" I asked innocently.

Lingyun pointed at the binder. "None of us know how this works."

I opened my chips. "And yet I still believe in you."

"That feels sarcastic."

"It is."

For the next hour, the mansion descended into complete chaos.

Lingyun electrocuted himself twice.

Chenghai somehow connected three entirely unrelated cables together before Zhenlan physically removed them from his hands.

Yuche silently fixed problems nobody else even noticed while looking increasingly disappointed in all of them.

And through all of it, I sat comfortably on the couch supervising like a queen overseeing deeply incompetent peasants.

At one point, the lights flickered.

Everyone froze.

Then power surged through half the house hard enough that the television suddenly turned back on.

Netflix loaded for exactly three glorious seconds before buffering again.

I gasped softly.

"There!" I pointed immediately. "Do that again."