Apocalypse: King of Zombies

After wiping out the first batch of Void Realm creatures, Ethan didn’t slow down for even a second. He led the force straight toward the next cluster.

As for how they always knew exactly where to go?

Don’t ask. The answer was simple: he was cheating.

Atlas City’s Satellite Operations Control Center was basically running 24/7 just for them. Ethan didn’t need to say a word—Atlas would automatically push the nearest Void Realm gathering point to them, complete with an optimized route map like some kind of apocalypse GPS.

So they didn’t ”search.”

They just followed the navigation and showed up to kill.

Not long after, the second Void Realm group got hit.

Thousands more died.

Most of the Void Realm creatures who’d come through were still just vanguard forces—usually only a few thousand per race, with the bigger ones barely scraping past ten thousand. Against Fallen Star City’s current lineup, they didn’t even have the ability to resist.

Ethan held nothing back.

Every time he struck, he erased them completely.

He knew these Void Realm beings had powerful races behind them. He knew killing them would make enemies.

It didn’t matter.

They were enemies already. And when the dimensional rifts opened again, none of these creatures would show mercy to humanity.

So there was no point hesitating, no point trying to be clever about ”future diplomacy.”

First, clean out what was already inside the Atlas Federation.

Then worry about what came next.

For the rest of the operation, Ethan and the others swept through one Void Realm stronghold after another, ripping them out by the roots. Each arrival ended the same way—total annihilation.

When Fallen Star City marched, nothing was left standing.

Except for the Stage S captives Ethan wanted alive.

Everyone else?

No survivors.

Across the Federation, people in the other compounds watched the feed and shook with excitement.

Not long ago, they were the ones getting butchered.

Now the roles had flipped so hard it felt unreal.

Those Void Realm creatures probably couldn’t even imagine it—that in just a little over a month, the humans they’d looked down on would be stepping on their throats.

Of course, Ethan’s movement wasn’t subtle. It couldn’t be.

Before long, Void Realm camps all over the Atlas Federation started receiving the same message.

Some of them didn’t hesitate. They abandoned their positions and fled into the distance.

Others didn’t believe it.

They called it a rumor, a joke—because they’d seen humans with their own eyes. Weak, fragile, pathetic.

How could humans possibly ”sweep the races”?

And even if the rumor was true?

So what?

They were confident in their own power. If the humans dared come, they’d teach them a lesson.

Ethan loved that kind of arrogance.

When the Fallen Star army finally descended on those ”proud” camps, the Void Realm creatures didn’t even have time to process what they were seeing before their faces went slack.

Over a hundred thousand Stage A-and-above fighters.

Hundreds of Stage S.

And a Stage SS ferocious beast standing there like a walking natural disaster.

In that moment, the Void Realm creatures wanted to slap themselves.

Why didn’t we run?

But once Fallen Star City arrived, running was no longer an option. They moved immediately—surrounding the entire area, sealing every exit.

No negotiations.

No pleading.

They just attacked.

To be fair, the Void Realm camps that stayed behind really did have some bite. Most of them were at least as strong as the ones that had previously occupied human compounds.

But it didn’t matter.

Against Fallen Star City in its current state, they had no chance. They were slaughtered in minutes.

One Tier 35 elder even tried to jump out and make a show of it.

He almost got turned into paste.

The Glacial Bear—bored out of its mind from watching everyone else kill things—finally got its chance and swatted the old man so hard it nearly ended him on the spot.

Ethan moved fast and yanked the elder back from the brink.

Tier 35 bodies were rare.

And a Tier 35 body was perfect material for creating a soulless thrall.

No way Ethan was letting that go to waste.

The Glacial Bear immediately looked like it was about to explode.

It was basically saying: You promised I could vent.

And now that I finally found someone decent, you won’t even let me kill him?

For a second, it looked like the bear might actually turn on Ethan.

But after Ethan ”talked” to it—physically and painfully—the Glacial Bear calmed down. It had gotten a lot more cautious around him lately. If this had been the old days, it would’ve already gone berserk.

”Easy, big guy,” Ethan said, keeping his tone light even as the bear sulked. ”It’s just a Tier 35 fossil. Keeping him alive is useful. We’ll run into stronger ones later—plenty for you to let off steam on.”

That was the real reason Ethan had brought it along.

He didn’t expect to run into Stage SS enemies, but he wasn’t stupid either. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Having the Glacial Bear on hand made everything safer.

Besides, the thing didn’t do any actual work in Fallen Star City anyway.

Might as well take it out for a walk.

After crushing that batch, the main force kept moving toward the next target.

Because so many Void Realm creatures were running now, Atlas City kept updating the destination markers in real time. The ”next camp” changed constantly—some would scatter the moment they heard Fallen Star City was on the way, others would suddenly converge with another group, trying to survive by forming a bigger cluster.

Ethan and his people didn’t care.

They just kept knocking on doors, one after another, and cleaning house.

At this point, the ones still staying put were mostly the tougher races—the ones confident in their strength.

But that confidence usually died the moment they actually laid eyes on Fallen Star City’s formation.

Fallen Star City didn’t bother with fancy tactics. They didn’t need them.

They only had two settings: not moving, and dropping a nuke.

This sweep was clearly meant to wipe the Void Realm presence off the map.

And the other compounds didn’t just watch from behind their screens either. Once they saw the tide turning, they dispatched their own elites to hunt down fleeing stragglers.

Sure, none of them could compare to Fallen Star City head-on—but with soulless thralls backing them, every compound had been farming Outland Beasts, stockpiling higher-Tier crystal cores, and pushing their own people upward.

By now, most compounds could field at least a handful of Stage A fighters plus thralls. With a few Stage S thralls in the mix, they could handle the average Void Realm group as long as they chose targets carefully.

Under that kind of coordinated purge, seven days was enough.

By the end of the week, there wasn’t a single organized Void Realm gathering left inside the Atlas Federation.

The ones that had been here either fled overseas, got slaughtered, or—if they were lone survivors—went to ground and hid like rats.

From start to finish, they never ran into a single Stage SS powerhouse.

They did run into a few races with Tier 35 elders, but those were basically free kills.

At the very least, they kept the Glacial Bear entertained.

By this point, satellite sweeps over the Atlas Federation could barely detect any organized presence of intelligent Void Realm races at all.

Most of the zombies had already been wiped out during the Void Realm invasion. Now, apart from Outland Beasts lurking deep in the mountains and wilderness, the surface of the Atlas Federation almost looked… peaceful.

Once the intelligent Void Realm races were dealt with, Ethan led everyone straight back to Fallen Star City.

They’d dragged back hundreds of Stage S Void Realm captives, and every one of them needed to be turned into soulless thralls.

To avoid wasting time shuttling back and forth, they’d kept those captives barely alive during the sweep. Henry—and a few others with healing abilities—had been ”maintaining” them the whole way.

Honestly, that was worse than death.

It was like living in a loop: get beaten to the brink, get patched up, get beaten again. Day after day, hovering on the edge until their minds started to crack.

At least now they were back.

Now they could finally ”be relieved.”

This haul included:

Six Tier 35

Nine Tier 34

More than ten Tier 33

Ethan planned to have Fallen Star Squad personally create soulless thralls out of the best ones. The rest would be handed off to the second echelon.

At this point, they already had seven Tier 35 thralls:

Dopey (Ethan)

Elder Corvin (Chris)

Tharok (Henry)

Isolde (Mia)

Elder Kael (Sean)

a Luminari elder (Garrick)

Elder Viren (Skinny Pete)

On top of that, they also had two Tier 34 thralls and three Tier 33 thralls.

The lineup was already terrifying.

But Ethan wasn’t stopping there.

Next, he planned to have Miles create three Tier 35 soulless thralls immediately.

Once this was done, Ethan intended to test the idea he’d been carrying around in his head for a while. And if it worked… they might be leaving for a stretch.

Which meant Fallen Star City—and the entire Atlas Federation—would be on Miles’s shoulders.

So Miles needed the strongest possible backbone.

With three Tier 35 thralls, plus Fallen Star City’s current overall strength, this side should be rock-solid.

That still left three more Tier 35 bodies.

Ethan already had the allocation in mind: one for Emily, one for Big Mike—and as for his own slot…

He was going to replace Aerisara.

Aerisara simply couldn’t keep up with him anymore. Being pretty wasn’t enough when the fights kept getting bigger.

As for the Tier 34s and Tier 33s, Ethan didn’t care much. He’d let Miles distribute them however he saw fit—spread them out, reinforce the city, reward merit. Whatever worked.