Chapter 137: Chapter 125: Joel Bloom in the Weather Station

The Juggernaut’s speed was nothing short of incredible. In just three minutes, it had brought them to the road across from the weather station.

The senses of high-level zombies were exceptionally keen. They had heard a roar from far away earlier. Now, after a violent tremor shook the ground, the zombies that had formed a human pyramid finally failed, tumbling down from their perch.

That Level 3 zombie spotted the colossal Juggernaut instantly, its eyes glinting as if making some shrewd calculation. A moment later, it directed a dozen or so Level 1 zombies to charge and attack the beast.

However, the Level 1 zombies barely reached the top of the Juggernaut’s foot. After a frenzy of tearing and biting, they discovered its hide was as tough as reinforced metal—if not tougher. Several zombies ground their jaws down to nothing, yet they couldn’t leave so much as a scratch on its skin.

Seeing its minions couldn’t harm the behemoth, the Level 3 zombie’s black-and-white eyes stared intently for a moment. Then, it crouched down and slipped into the largest part of the horde, vanishing from sight.

Evolved creatures had a suppressive effect on zombies of the same or lower level. Without the Level 3 zombie’s commands, the Juggernaut’s advance was like an army rolling through. Zombies either scattered and fled in a panic or were too slow to get out of the way and were crushed under its massive feet.

Flora Bloom saw the surrounding zombies giving them a wide berth. Looking at the corpses under the Juggernaut’s feet, she clicked her tongue. "So many dead zombies. Can’t let them go to waste."

And so, Monkey Two and Monkey Three appeared on the Juggernaut’s back. The giant alligator had never forgotten that these two were the ones who had stolen its eggs. It turned its head, fixing them with a vicious glare from its enormous, cold, sickly yellow eyes before turning away.

"You two, get down there and dig out all the Crystal Cores." Then, she added through her mental link with Vert, ’Vert, keep an eye on our surroundings. Report immediately if you sense anything.’

Watching the two giant monkeys clumsily digging for Crystal Cores, Flora Bloom couldn’t resist sliding down the Juggernaut’s foreleg to join the harvesting team herself.

............

The Morhaven Astronomical and Meteorological Station was the nation’s largest astronomical observation center and weather station. The entire complex originally spanned about 30,000 square meters, but after being besieged and ravaged by zombie hordes, only the main building was left standing.

The main building was three stories tall, with a floor area of roughly 2,300 square meters.

The first floor housed the Emergency and Disaster Mitigation Department, the second held the Technology and Forecasting Department, and the third was the Astronomical Data Collection Center. It was also topped with a specially designed launch roof for lightning mitigation.

Currently, on the first floor, every desk, chair, and piece of electronic equipment had been dismantled and piled behind the floor’s only door, barricading it shut.

The first-floor was covered in large patches of bloodstains, splattered zombie brains, and zombie corpses, along with a large area of scorch marks.

And there, twenty people—a group reeking of a sour stench, their clothes, faces, and hands covered in filthy slime—were surrounding three others.

The three consisted of one man and two women. One of the women, about fourteen or fifteen, had her hair in two ponytails. Despite the grime, she still had a cute air about her. The other woman had wavy, curled hair, delicate features, and was dressed in professional office attire, which gave her a mature, enchanting allure and an indescribable charm.

The man looked to be only eighteen or nineteen. He was half-reclined against the back of a sofa, the fibula in his lower leg shattered and twisted. One end of the fractured bone protruded from his flesh, exposing bloody sinew and bone fragments to the naked eye.

He was clutching his ribs in agony, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. His skin was so pale it was nearly translucent—a clear sign he had been losing blood for a very long time.

"I’m telling you, this pretty boy has been like this for three days. What if he just up and dies?" said a short man in a tattered, threadbare suit. As he spoke, his eyes kept darting toward the woman in the office attire. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"If he dies, he dies. The problem is what if he turns into a zombie? Didn’t Luke suddenly turn? If Mr. Warren hadn’t reacted so quickly, we’d all have been done for!" The speaker was a chubby woman, her blouse strained over the rolls of her stomach. The apocalypse was now over a month old, and this group had survived solely because of a small cafeteria on the second and third floors.

Normally, these people had been in the habit of storing their favorite snacks and treats in the cafeteria’s refrigerators.

The cafeteria’s procurement officer always kept a month’s supply of meat in the freezers, with fruits and vegetables restocked weekly.

Combined with the ample supply of rice and flour in the storerooms, these provisions had been enough to sustain the original twenty-eight survivors for a full month.

Now, however, their food supplies were all but gone.

The injured man had arrived with a woman in a hospital gown. The group had allowed them to stay because the woman had awakened a Water Ability, and the two were a couple.

However, one of the men in their group had suddenly turned into a zombie and attacked those nearby. After a chaotic internal struggle, the survivors managed to kill the newly turned zombie together.

However, four of the remaining survivors had been scratched in the fight. To everyone’s horror, Kyle Warren, who had awakened a Fire Element superpower, burned all four of them alive. One of the men he killed was the father of the fourteen-year-old girl.

She had only skipped school to sneak over and see where her dad worked; she never imagined she’d run straight into the apocalypse. Nor did she ever imagine she would have to watch him be burned alive.

She had charged at Kyle Warren to fight him, but he just grabbed her by the waist and leered at her. The young man was injured because he’d tried to save her.

In this new world, he hadn’t fallen to the zombies, but instead was beaten half to death by his fellow humans.

The enchanting woman in the office attire had awakened a healing superpower. Unable to bear watching the group bully a child and a young man barely out of his teens, she had spoken up, stopping them from beating him further.

Since the woman possessed a rare healing superpower they would inevitably need one day, the group let the two of them off for the time being. But Kyle Warren’s gaze never once strayed from the young girl.

"Joel, please wake up. I’m so scared!" Lisa whispered, endlessly wiping the sweat and blood from Joel Bloom’s face. Having just lost her father, she didn’t know who to trust. All she knew was that the injured young man before her was the only lifeline she had left.

"Shauna Wallace, please, you have to save Joel! He’s in so much pain." Lisa’s tears had long since run dry. She begged the kind woman to save Joel Bloom. She watched as Shauna Wallace cast another Initial Stage healing spell on Joel, but the caster herself nearly collapsed backward from the effort.

"Lisa, I’ll do everything I can." But after this last healing spell, a wave of dizziness washed over Shauna Wallace. She felt weak all over—the clear and debilitating result of exhausting her superpower.

"Shauna, thank you... Don’t use any more of your superpower on me." Joel Bloom’s eyes fluttered open hazily. He looked at the kind, beautiful woman beside him, then his gaze turned icy as he looked across the room at the group of twenty. Specifically, at the frail, lovely-looking girl in the hospital gown.

’They were both beautiful on the outside, so why wasn’t her heart as kind?’

’The woman he had loved for so long had thrown herself into another man’s arms the moment he was injured, casting him aside like trash. And yet, this total stranger was fighting to keep him alive, refusing to yield even under pressure and threats.’