Harem Apocalypse: My Seed is the Cure?!

Christopher moved first through the fifth floor, with Rachel, Cindy, and Ivy following close behind.

They were not rushing blindly, but they were not crawling either. It was that careful middle pace people used when every second mattered and every corner might still get them killed. Each room got checked fast. Door opened, quick sweep, windows, corners, under the weak light, then out again and on to the next before they wasted time standing around.

Christopher stayed at the front with his rifle raised the whole time.

He was the only one fully aiming as they moved. Rachel and Cindy both carried weapons too, but neither kept them up in firing position. They had other roles, and right now those mattered more. Cindy’s attention kept splitting between the corridor ahead and the pulse of her mind radar, trying to catch shapes before they came into sight. Rachel stayed tense in a different way, hands ready, eyes alert, every muscle in her body set on one job alone.

If bullets came down one of these hallways, she needed to react before anyone else even understood what was happening.

That pressure sat on her the whole time.

These corridors were long, narrow, and clean enough that there was nowhere good to dive if someone opened fire from the far end. A bad angle here would tear through all of them before Christopher even got a proper line back. Rachel knew that. It made her focus sharpen harder with every door they passed.

Behind them, Ivy walked with a handgun in hand and the same unhurried air she always seemed to have, which only made her feel stranger in a place like this.

"By the way, Miss Ivy," Christopher said without turning around, his voice low while he checked the next doorway, "you said you came to watch over Ryan, right? But you didn’t offer to follow him."

"That’s true," Cindy said, glancing back at Ivy.

Even Rachel looked over her shoulder for a second.

She and Cindy had both been curious for a while now. Not in the loud, dramatic way Sydney handled these things, but in the quieter way that sat in the back of the mind and kept returning whenever Ivy was around Ryan. What exactly was going on there? Did Ivy really like him?

As Ryan’s girlfriends both were obviously curious about it.

Rachel honestly could not tell.

If she did, she hid it badly by hiding almost everything else too.

That was part of what made Ivy so difficult to read. Most of the time she barely showed anything at all. The last clear reaction Rachel remembered from her had been when she found out Mei had been kidnapped. Ivy had actually looked shaken then, properly shaken, enough that it stood out. But even that had faded quickly. Within a day she had gone back to being herself again, quiet, composed, detached enough to make people wonder if she was holding herself together or simply built different from the rest of them.

And since they had taken over the Whitesun Hotel, she had been spending less and less time around them too.

No one had pushed the issue.

Forcing Ivy into a conversation never worked. She was the kind of person who could let a silence sit there forever if she didn’t feel like answering. So when Christopher asked his question and she said nothing at first, none of them were surprised.

Then she answered anyway.

"I would have been a burden if I followed them."

Christopher snorted softly as he checked another room and stepped back into the corridor.

"And you don’t feel like a burden right now, Miss Ivy?"

"Christopher," Cindy said, shooting him an exasperated look.

He only shrugged and kept moving.

That was the thing with him. Even when he sounded rude, half the time he was just saying what he actually thought without dressing it up first. And right now, he genuinely did think Ivy had no business being there. She looked out of place in the group. Too calm. Too detached. Even now, with gunfire hammering somewhere outside the hotel and armed men moving through the building, she still carried herself like she was on an evening walk through a place she happened not to like very much.

As far as Christopher remembered, she had always been like that.

Back in Lexington Charter, before the world collapsed, Ivy had already had that same composed way about her. She never startled much. Never reacted as strongly as everyone else. After the outbreak, while most people had gone through panic, shock, denial, or some ugly mix of all three, Ivy had taken it in stride in a way that still felt abnormal when he thought about it too long.

Being older didn’t explain it.

It just made it stranger.

She had the kind of calm that looked almost royal sometimes, like nothing around her had earned the right to shake her. But there was recklessness buried inside that calm too. Christopher had noticed that a while ago. People who never looked afraid had their own way of being dangerous.

"Just stay behind, Miss Ivy," he said again, more firmly this time.

Ivy did not argue.

They cleared the rest of the fifth floor and made for the stairs.

The stairwell smelled like dust, cold cement, and old damp air trapped too long behind concrete. Christopher took the lead up to the sixth, rifle first, the others close behind. Their footsteps stayed quick but careful, never heavy enough to echo more than they had to.

Once they reached the sixth floor, they started the same process all over again.

Door.

Sweep.

Move.

Another door.

Sweep.

Move.

The gunfire outside had not stopped. If anything, it sounded more layered now, the bursts longer, the pauses shorter. The noise drifted through the open windows in the rooms they checked, carrying up from the front of the hotel in broken waves.

Cindy listened to it for a second while they crossed one of the rooms toward the next hall.

"Are they still going at it?" she asked.

"It hasn’t been that long," Christopher said.

It really hadn’t.

The way it sounded, though, it felt like the whole front of the hotel had been shooting forever. Every burst seemed to drag the next one after it. No clean ending. Just people trading angles, positions, and patience.

"Well, they didn’t just run at each other and start blasting nonstop," Rachel said as they moved back into the corridor. "They still care about staying alive. So it’s probably a lot of taking cover, waiting, firing when there’s an opening, then falling back again."

Cindy glanced at her, giggling.

"Have you become an expert in warfare, Rachel?"

Rachel let out a quiet chuckle.

"No. I just overheard Marlon earlier. He kept telling them to stay patient, not get reckless, and not throw their lives away for no reason."

That sounded exactly like him, Christopher had to admit.

For all his roughness and the way he acted like everyone around him was incompetent until proven otherwise, Marlon did not strike Christopher as the kind of man who wasted fighters casually. Especially not in a hit like this. He would push hard, yeah, but only where he thought it was worth the cost, especially since he wasn’t seeing them only as soldiers but companions.

Cindy nodded a little, then her expression shifted.

She stopped mid-step.

Christopher noticed it instantly and raised his rifle higher.

"What?"

Cindy closed her eyes tighter for a second, feeling for the range.

"Movement," she said. "Not in this room. Further down the floor. I think... two? No. Three. One is moving slower than the others."

Rachel’s hands lifted at once, the faint red shimmer already beginning to gather around her palms.

Christopher stepped in front of the others and turned toward the far end of the hall.

"Do we wait for them to move and let them deal with whoever’s down there?" Rachel asked.

Christopher kept his rifle angled toward the far stretch of corridor for another second, listening.

From where they stood, the sixth floor looked empty enough. Long hallway, closed doors, weak light, old carpet, dust in the corners where no one bothered cleaning properly. But empty meant nothing in a place like this. Not when Cindy had just felt movement ahead and gunfire was still breaking across the hotel from outside in uneven bursts.

"No," Christopher said at last. "We keep going. We already lost enough time here. We get upstairs and link back up with Ryan as soon as possible."

Rachel looked like she wanted to argue for maybe half a second, not because she thought he was wrong, but because leaving unknown movement behind them felt bad in exactly the way all bad tactical choices did. Still, she trusted his read enough not to push it.

"Right," Cindy said. "I really don’t like being separated like this."

Christopher glanced back at her smirking.

"Not even fifteen minutes apart and you already miss Ryan?"

Cindy’s whole face flushed.

"Oh, shut up."

That got a short laugh out of him, the kind that came more from relief than amusement.

It helped a little, honestly.

Only a little.

Because the second the laugh faded, the sixth floor felt tense again. Too open. Too quiet except for the muffled fight outside and the distant groan of the building now and then when something heavy shifted somewhere it should not have.

Christopher jerked his head toward the stairwell. "Let’s move."

They started forward again, keeping the same order as before. Christopher in front with the rifle up. Rachel and Cindy behind him, each watching a slightly different angle. Ivy at the rear.

Or at least that was how it lasted for the first few steps.

Rachel noticed first.

She stopped and turned slightly. "Ivy?"

Christopher and Cindy both looked back.

Ivy had stopped in the corridor without saying a word. She was standing in the middle of the weak overhead light with the handgun lowered near her thigh, her head tilted just a little upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling like she could somehow see through the concrete and the floors above it.

No fear on her face.

No confusion either.

She just stood there, listening to something none of them could hear.

For a second nobody spoke.

Christopher frowned.

"What now?"

Ivy blinked once, still looking up.

Then, slowly, her gaze lowered again.

She did not explain herself and just resumed walking.

Christopher then shifted position slightly, giving himself a better angle on the corridor ahead, and spoke without turning around. "Cindy, watch our back from now on. Just in case."

"Yeah," Cindy nodded.