Chapter 608: Apocalypse Fantasies
A figure moved as fast as a lynx along the exterior of an abandoned building.
Yes, running along the facades of those high-rises, racing across the vertical surfaces!
The silhouette looked like it had shrugged off gravity’s rules, the whole body aligned at a ninety-degree angle to the wall.
Each long stride left a ghostly afterimage trailing through the air.
"Refreshing, too exhilarating, hahahaha..."
That sprinting figure kept leaping between buildings, the gleeful, wild laughter sounding like that of a madman.
Behind that figure, a viscous woman, as if covered head to toe in filthy oil and grime, crawled out of a window.
She laughed with perverse delight as well.
“Alive, heh heh… alive…”
The oil-smeared woman’s face was deathly pale, her black hair hanging in strands perpendicular to the ground.
Yet she moved the same way as the agile man racing on the building’s façade.
When the woman crawled up onto the wall, the oil on her body seemed to boil, fastening her firmly to the exterior.
She pressed hands and feet to the wall, scuttling rapidly in alternating motions, her speed nearly matching that of the man.
Every surface she touched was left smeared with a long streak of black oil, adding a new level of cruelty to this apocalypse.
The figure ahead seemed totally unconcerned about the woman chasing him. He treated the entire building façade as his playground.
Twisting and leaping, never stopping!
Sometimes he even used protruding balconies and other architectural features to spin midair a full seven hundred and twenty degrees.
The whole escape looked unutterably graceful and composed on him.
The oil-stained woman’s gaze was obsessed, fixed on that lithe man like a dog staring at a meaty bone in your hand.
“Hey, Xu Linhao, stop playing around.”
When the man shot out of the last guesthouse unit onto the street, a somewhat helpless voice called out.
A plain-faced girl full of youthful energy stood with her hands on her hips, looking exasperated.
“Coming!”
The moment those words left her mouth, Xu Linhao pushed off hard from the guesthouse facade, launching himself like an incredibly nimble kestrel.
After spinning through who-knows-how-many seven hundred and twenty-degree rotations in the air, he landed solidly on the ground, as if those earlier acrobatics had been performed by someone else.
He finished with a perfectly cheeky finale pose, practically begging to be punched.
“Alive, alive… heh heh heh…”
Behind him, the oil-covered woman lunged as well.
Under the glare of sunlight, she lunged through the air toward that delectable bone.
In that instant,
beside Xu Linhao’s perfect pose, a man in black—Ye—bent slightly at the waist.
He looked like a hunting cheetah ready to pounce, the toy-like knife in his hand emanating a fierce, abnormal chill.
The blade slid out an inch!
At the oil woman’s height in the sunlight,
a streak of blade-light flashed.
The blade left its sheath.
A cold glint sent a shockwave down the whole street.
Trash cans and scraps of paper on the ground fluttered into the air.
“No, no, don’t, ah…”
A scream!
The oil woman’s pupils widened; she watched the blade approach but could do nothing.
Under that blade, she was cleaved in two, turning into two clumps of dark, viscous oil that fell to the ground.
Those two globs tried to merge back together.
Each time they seemed about to recombine and re-form their mimicry, some strange energy pushed them apart.
Slowly, the two masses lost their power and finally dissolved into two black oil stains on the pavement.
Xu Linhao walked over and patted the man in black on the shoulder. “Tsk tsk… Knife Sharpener Sequence, still impressive!”
“Even if you haven’t reached Sequence 4 yet, you’re probably not weaker than Jiang Rou or Sun Xixi!”
“This blade gets more astounding by the day!”
“Knife Sharpener, Knife Sharpener, your sequence name really fits!”
The man in black was Ye.
After they left the Oasis, both their convoys suffered varying degrees of losses during migration.
Later, when the two groups met, they decided to merge into one convoy.
Convoy name: Apocalypse Rhapsodists Convoy, abbreviated as the Rhapsodists Convoy.
Rhapsodists—that longing to return to the old world, it sounded utterly mad.
That sardonic convoy name suited this apocalypse perfectly.
Ye opened his mouth but didn’t say anything after all.
Xu Linhao nodded. “Yeah, yeah, the Extinction Blade, huh—eradicate all life, whether human or Anomalies.”
“The Knife Sharpener Sequence is fine in itself, but that rule about never speaking is really uncomfortable!”
The youthful girl who had spoken earlier nodded. “Indeed. Being forced to never speak for life—this side effect is just sick!”
“Say one word and your strength drops a notch—if it were me, I couldn’t hold out!”
This person beside them was also a Superhuman, another member of the Apocalypse Rhapsodists Convoy, and a participant in the Return to the City Plan.
Her name was Ge Ling. She was ordinary-looking but young and spirited.
She had joined the convoy later on.
Ge Ling’s youthful energy brought some vitality to the convoy.
“But then again, without that side effect, our Ye would probably be even noisier than Dantai Bie… hahahaha…”
“Hic hic hic…”
The three of them laughed uproariously.
“You wouldn’t know, Ge Ling. Back at the Oasis, Chen Ye had Ye mouth off and got so mad, tsk tsk…”
“Later Ye took a long time to regain his strength, hahaha…”
“Ah… Ye could talk back then…”
Ge Ling was stunned to hear that Ye had spoken before.
Since she’d joined the convoy, she had never heard Ye utter a single word.
The girl laughed so hard she bent over. In her mind, she couldn’t imagine this guy—who had never said even a hum or grunt—being made to speak.
Someone actually got him to open his mouth.
The three chatted as they walked, planning to look for other teammates.
As they rounded a corner, Ye seemed to sense something and turned to scan the surroundings.
Besides the uneven, potholed protruding pavement by the side of the road, nothing else stood out.
There was also none of that terrifying dread that usually heralds Anomaly appearances in Ye’s heart.
These potholed, raised surfaces were likely scars left by human counterattacks when Anomalies had erupted.
Such marks were common in many cities.
They were still on Xi City’s outskirts; their area wasn’t the busiest street, only the fringes.
Here there were only some low-level Anomalies, the hard-to-handle ones hadn’t shown up yet.
Having fought Anomalies for so long, the three of them had adapted to this life, so they felt no particular pressure.
Although Ye and Xu Linhao hadn’t reached Sequence 4, they were still strong; those peripheral low-level Anomalies were no match for them.
All three wore relaxed expressions.
Only Ye glared at the other two with fury.
Since he couldn’t speak, all he could do was glare.
“You wouldn’t know—”
As Xu Linhao went on loudly about how Ye had been humiliated by Chen Ye and Chu Che back at the Oasis,
Ge Ling suddenly froze.
“Ge Ling, you—”
Xu Linhao was half through his surprised question when a hair-raising sensation hit him.
Ge Ling lowered her head slightly and saw a pink, slimy tongue protruding from her chest.
Ye reacted instantly, drawing his blade…
But it was already too late.
The pink, slippery tongue retracted a bit, and Ge Ling was pulled inward with it.
In Ge Ling’s bewildered, horrified, helpless gaze,
the girl was swallowed by an enormous mouth.
As if someone had swallowed a mosquito.
The giant tongue’s origin was the raised, potholed patch of road they had just passed.
That protrusion was actually a massive toad.
Its warty, sticky skin and a body like a small mountain sent chills down the spine.
Something inside the toad’s mouth still writhed crazily, making the toad’s lips bulge in lumps.
The three of them had just walked past that spot,
but hadn’t noticed anything.
Who could have imagined such a monster lurked there…
One moment the lively, spirited girl was joking and chatting with them, the next moment she was gone.
It was like the laughter had been a dream.
Xu Linhao’s eyes instantly reddened; he went mad trying to grab Ge Ling.
Before he could move, Ye’s anger erupted: “Return Ge Ling…!”
Blade-light flashed…
The Apocalypse Rhapsodists Convoy lost one.