Apocalypse: King of Zombies

On the way to Atlas City, five huge birds knifed through the sky at blistering speed.

Their oppressive aura alone was enough to make countless ”kings of the air” tuck their heads and keep their distance.

Each bird had one or two riders on its back.

Ethan rode solo on the peregrine falcon, Flint, out in front. Everyone else doubled up—two people per bird.

From Fallen Star City in Redwood County to Atlas City was over twelve hundred miles. They’d already been flying for more than three hours when they finally crossed into Atlas City’s territory.

With Nugget the golden eagle, Pebble the dire eagle, and Flint all at Tier 10, they didn’t run into any truly vicious mutant raptors bold enough to block their path. Still, it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing.

The big predators stayed away… but plenty of small, flocking mutant birds took their shot.

Sparrows, crows—stuff like that. They won with numbers. They didn’t care how strong you were. Once they locked on, it was a black, screaming cloud of attacks.

Luckily, the Fallen Star Squad weren’t pushovers. They blasted their way through, forcing Nugget and the others to punch out of the encirclement.

It happened more than once along the route. Every time, they muscled through the swarm, then accelerated hard and shook the birds off.

When Atlas City finally spread out beneath them, the sight left everyone a little quiet.

A once-thriving metropolis was now wrecked into a sprawling scar field.

But almost immediately, they realized something even more shocking—

There were barely any zombies in sight.

Atlas City had had over twenty million people. That meant the zombie count shouldn’t have been lower than eighteen million. For that many to be almost completely gone…

All Ethan could say was: Atlas City was seriously insane.

Burn marks and cratered streets were everywhere. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened—Atlas City must’ve used heavy weapons early on and hit the zombies with a straight-up annihilation campaign.

If that was the case, their low-Tier crystal cores had to be beyond imagining… but high-Tier cores probably weren’t that plentiful. No wonder they’d poured resources into crystal-core fusion tech.

Even with major breakthroughs, they still needed ten to twenty crystal cores from the tier below to fuse a single core one tier higher.

Without a supply of high-Tier crystal cores to begin with, mass-producing high-Tier Enhanced was still brutally difficult.

Even at the lowest standard—ten-to-one—using low-Tier cores to climb to high tiers was a nightmare.

To fuse a single Tier 9 crystal core, you needed ten Tier 8 cores. If you only had Tier 7 cores, you’d need a hundred. Tier 6 would take a thousand. Tier 5 would take ten thousand.

If you relied on nothing but low-Tier cores, even ten million Tier 5 crystal cores would only get you a thousand Tier 9 cores.

And there was no way they actually had ten million Tier 5 cores. If anything, they probably had far more Tier 2 and Tier 3 cores—because with heavy weapons, zombies at that stage were the easiest to mow down.

So if you wanted to create truly high-Tier Enhanced in bulk, you still needed high-Tier crystal cores. Low-Tier cores were only good for raising overall baseline strength.

They didn’t spend long circling above Atlas City before, in the distance, they spotted a gigantic compound planted right in what used to be the city’s core.

Just eyeballing it, the place had to cover hundreds of square miles. They couldn’t see how many people were inside, but a compound that massive couldn’t possibly have fewer than three million.

But right as Nugget and the others angled toward it, a series of thunderous booms rolled across the air.

A heartbeat later, rockets—each one dragging a tail of flame—shot up toward them.

”Atlas City, huh.” Ethan’s brows pulled together. ”They spotted us from that far away.”

He immediately had Flint and the others dodge the incoming fire, then look for a spot to land.

These anti-air rockets might’ve worked fine on Tier 6 or Tier 7 mutant beasts, but against Flint and the other Tier 10s? Not even close.

A couple hard accelerations and they left the rockets behind.

Then Flint and the others found a low hill and dropped down to land.

Ethan and the rest hopped off and started walking toward the compound.

They’d come here mainly to check out the Void Realm on this side, but they didn’t even know where it was yet. They needed to get inside and find out what the situation was. Besides, Ethan was genuinely curious about Atlas City’s compound.

It didn’t take long before they reached the front gate.

The entrance was way more imposing than Fallen Star City’s or even Clearford City’s. Just the guards alone numbered close to thirty.

Ethan and his group walked straight up.

Like Clearford City, you had to show an ID card to enter.

But the screening here wasn’t nearly as strict. Once Ethan explained they’d come from elsewhere, the guards only asked a few basic questions, recorded their info, and then had a staff member responsible for intake escort them inside.

Clearly, this kind of thing happened all the time.

After all, this was Atlas City—the capital of the Atlas Federation. People coming to seek shelter wasn’t exactly rare.

The staff led Ethan’s group to the Registration Center to get their ID cards. After that, they were assigned a few houses in a residential area.

One nice thing about the apocalypse: housing was free.

Before, trying to buy a place in Atlas City on a normal salary? Not even a fantasy. Now you could just move in.

But inside Atlas City’s compound, everything cost money. Aside from the elderly and children, the compound didn’t hand out supplies to adults.

If you wanted to earn, you worked.

Production, manufacturing, all kinds of industries had already restarted. They were short on labor everywhere. So as long as you weren’t unbelievably lazy, you weren’t going to starve.

And since there was no rent, the pressure of living was actually a lot lower than it had been before the apocalypse.

After the Collapse, people only cared about survival. Luxury meant nothing anymore—sports cars, mansions, designer watches, all of it had lost its value.

But there was one massive expense now:

Crystal cores.

Ordinary people wanted to become Enhanced. Enhanced wanted to climb to higher and higher Tiers.

Crystal cores had become the universal obsession.

In Atlas City’s compound, as long as you had money, you could buy crystal cores of different tiers—the higher the Tier, the more expensive it was.

Of course, there was also the free option: go out and kill zombies for cores yourself.

But inside Atlas City, you barely saw zombies anymore. If you wanted to hunt them, you had to go outside Atlas City’s territory—dangerous enough that plenty of people went out and never came back.

So a lot of folks chose the safer route: work, make money, buy cores. At least that way you weren’t gambling your life.

Ethan and the others walked along the compound’s roads, taking in the lively bustle, and Ethan couldn’t help thinking: Atlas City really was Atlas City.

Just like they’d guessed, the population here was close to three million, minimum.

A lot of pre-apocalypse industries had come back to life—factories, supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals—everything you’d expect.

Being here almost made it feel like the world had rolled back.

The only difference was that the roads weren’t filled with cars.

They were filled with people.

Once you became Enhanced, running was nothing. Nobody really needed cars as transportation anymore.

And in this compound, most people were Enhanced.

Atlas City’s compound had harvested an absurd number of low-Tier crystal cores early on. Here, low-Tier cores weren’t expensive. For an ordinary person, ten days to half a month of wages was enough to buy a Tier 1 crystal core.

And Tier 1 and Tier 2 crystal cores obviously weren’t worth using for high-Tier fusion, so selling them to regular people made the most sense. If ordinary people got stronger, they could produce more value.

”Our Fallen Star City feels like a backwater compared to this place,” Big Mike said, annoyed.

”There was never going to be a fair comparison.” Ethan laughed softly. ”This is Atlas City—the capital of the Atlas Federation. There’s no way our development speed can match theirs.”

He glanced around, then added, ”But if it came down to a fight, Fallen Star City might not be scared of Atlas City at all. Our twenty thousand Tier 9 Enhanced aren’t for show.”

”Yeah,” the others said, nodding.

In terms of raw combat power… they really weren’t afraid of anybody.

”Let’s go,” Ethan said. ”We’ll ask around and see what the Void Realm situation is here.”

”Mm.”