Chapter 371 - 263: Misfortune
The weather after the apocalypse had always been bad, but lately, it was clearly even worse.
Day and night, the sky was shrouded in fog.
Before the apocalypse, the fog was mostly white, or at least grayish-white. But now, it was a murky, dark color, making it even harder to see. A person approaching from a distance looked as if they were pulling back one curtain after another. You couldn’t truly make out their features until they were about a meter away.
This kind of weather made hunting very difficult, so many Hunting Parties decided to stay in the city. Living off their savings was better than losing their lives. Even some soldiers from The Power Corps got a rare few days of leave.
But with so many people staying in the city, it was impossible for them to just stay cooped up at home. Most of them were determined to go out and relax.
And that’s when the trouble started.
A murder occurred in a clubhouse in District Three.
The story was that two men had gotten into a fight over a waitress.
One man claimed that since she worked there, she was for sale, and he had every right to take her with him. The other man insisted she was his woman, only working there on a dare and not an escort.
So they faced off, and a fight broke out.
The vast majority of customers here were Superpower Users. Even if fights occasionally broke out, the security staff could always stop them before things got too serious.
But this time was different.
The waitress’s boyfriend was an ordinary person. He knew how to fight, but he was still just a normal man. His opponent, however, was a Third Rank Fire Ability User. The fight was over in a single move—the man was set ablaze, and by the time he reached the hospital, he was already dead...
The Fire Ability User who burned the man to death felt it was bad luck, but he didn’t think much of it. ’The other guy was just a normal person, after all,’ he thought. ’Who’s going to make trouble for a soldier of The Power Corps like me over some nobody? And even if they do, I can just toss them a few Credit Points to shut them up.’
But he was wrong.
Although the deceased was an ordinary person, he was a soldier under Commander Chandler’s command, and his older brother was a battle-hardened Senior Soldier in The Power Corps!
The Senior Soldier had joined The Power Corps for the sole purpose of better protecting his family—his only brother. And now, just as his brother was starting to make something of himself in the regular army, he was met with this devastating news. For the Senior Soldier, nothing could be more horrific.
So he made a swift decision and quickly carried it out.
He killed his enemy and avenged his brother!
Two people were dead. Would the matter end there?
Of course not!
This Senior Soldier knew enough to hide after the murder. If his victim had been just another soldier with no one to stand up for him, perhaps he could have waited for things to blow over and everything would have been fine.
But he never could have imagined that the man he killed was actually a member of the Dudley Family! A distant relative from a branch family, true, but a Dudley nonetheless!
The Dudleys were a powerful Noble House in Central City. When a clan member died and their immediate family came crying to the main house, there was no way the clan leaders could ignore it. If they let this go, wouldn’t the Dudley Family look like pushovers to the outside world?
With the Dudley Family’s resources, they quickly hunted down the killer.
The Senior Soldier was one of Jean Shields’ men. If the Dudley Family had approached Jean Shields first, laying out the facts and reasoning with him, he likely wouldn’t have shielded his subordinate. But the Dudley scions sent to make the arrest were used to throwing their weight around. Such formalities never even crossed their minds. Furious over the initial killing, they wasted no time upon finding their target and tortured the man to death.
And that wasn’t all. They didn’t even bother with the body, just left it where they found him and swaggered off.
The body was discovered the next day by a comrade-in-arms who had come to visit the Senior Soldier in secret.
No one could remain calm seeing a brother-in-arms—one with whom he’d faced death countless times—dead in such a gruesome state.
However, he kept his wits about him.
First, he investigated who was responsible. When he discovered it was the Dudley Family, he knew instantly that he couldn’t fight them on his own.
He couldn’t fight them, but someone else could!
He took the Senior Soldier’s body to his superior officer and explained the whole story from beginning to end.
He candidly admitted that the Senior Soldier had indeed committed murder, but—and he stressed this point—it was only after his own brother had been killed that he lost control. In this way, he delivered a heavily biased account of the events, demanding that his superior seek justice for Commander Shields’ men in The Power Corps.
His superior also became enraged upon seeing the gruesome state of the body and reported it up the chain of command, until it finally reached Jean Shields.
Jean Shields, on the whole, was a very upright man—a rarity in the apocalypse.
After reading the autopsy report detailing how the Senior Soldier had been tortured to death, he was beyond furious! And he became even angrier after investigating the truth of the matter!