Chapter 192: Walking Natural Disaster
The apocalypse was only eleven months old. The world already felt like a rotted corpse. On this stretch of highway leading toward the Southern Highlands, the morning air was thick with a mist that didn’t belong to nature. It was a necrotic fog. Designed to hide the two General-class zombies and their horde of two hundred.
Victor stood at the apex of the caravan. He had only been Level 100 for a matter of hours, and the power was a violent, churning ocean inside his chest. He watched the Generals—monsters who had been human less than a year ago—dragging their heavy, rusted chains. He heard them call Felicity "Golden." He saw them look at his mate as if she were a prize to be harvested.
The air around the caravan didn’t just vibrate; it went absolutely, terrifyingly silent.
It was a vacuum of sound. The wind died in the trees. The moans of the two hundred undead were cut off mid-throat. Even the heavy clink-clink of the Generals’ chains vanished. It was as if the universe had held its breath in the presence of something it feared.
"Selective Annihilation."
Victor didn’t scream the words. He whispered them, a soft verdict delivered by a god.
A pulse of white light, as thin as a razor’s edge but brighter than a collapsing star, erupted from his chest. To those on the "white list"—the beast husbands, the teams, the trembling teenagers, and Alice’s group, the world simply flickered into a brilliant, high-definition clarity. They could see every leaf, every grain of dust, every drop of dew.
But outside that invisible boundary, the light was an eraser.
There was no fire. No explosion. No gore. The two Generals and their two hundred followers didn’t even have time to disintegrate. One moment, they were lunging forward, their decayed faces twisted in hunger; the next, they were gone. They were reduced to molecular dust so fine it didn’t even have the weight to settle on the bitumen. The mist was vaporised instantly, leaving the highway under a clear, cold morning sky.
When the light faded, the only thing left of the horde were faint, scorched shadows burned into the road, dark silhouettes of monsters that no longer existed.
The silence remained for a heartbeat longer before the sound of the world rushed back in. Victor’s hand, which had been raised to deliver the strike, began to tremble violently. The glow in his eyes didn’t just fade; it flickered like a dying candle.
He swayed. The Level 100 ultimate had drained every reserve of his spirit, leaving him looking like a man who hadn’t slept since the world ended eleven months ago. Deep hollows appeared under his eyes, and his skin took on a ghostly, ashen pallor.
Exile, who had been so mesmerised by the divine display that his grip on the blonde had momentarily loosened, hissed in surprise as she suddenly twisted in his arms and tore free.
"Victor!" Felicity screamed.
She darted across the scorched circle of road before anyone else could move, her fluffy bunny ears flopping with each hurried step. Just as Victor’s knees buckled, she caught him, her small frame straining under his larger weight. In that instant, the air shimmered.
She pulled him into her space.
The transition was instantaneous. They were no longer on a blood-stained highway; they were in the lush, sun-drenched forest of her sanctuary. She guided him to the grass beneath a massive willow tree, her hands already glowing with a frantic, golden light.
"Heal... heal... please, just stay awake," she whimpered, spamming her Radiant Heal over and over. Waves of soft, warm energy washed over Victor, knitting back the frayed edges of his nerves.
Victor looked up at her, his gold eyes heavy and bloodshot. He looked utterly spent, his usual predatory sharpness dulled by the sheer tax of the annihilation. "I’m... fine, little fox," he rasped, though his head lolled back against the trunk. "Just... tired."
"You’re not fine! You look like death!" Felicity snapped, her wit returning through her tears. She sat between his legs, pulling his head into her lap and continuing to channel her light into him. "You deleted a zip code, Victor! You can’t just do that and then act like you just tripped over a rock!"
Outside the space, the highway was a scene of stunned trauma.
The lead teenager sat flat on the bitumen, staring at the shadows of the zombies burned into the road. He began to cry, a quiet, hopeless sound. The youngest boy was still paralysed, staring at Dimitri. The Leaf Team leader hadn’t moved, his arms still crossed, looking at the spot where the Generals had vanished as if he were calculating the exact energy yield of Victor’s strike.
Exile stood at the centre of the road, his hands empty, his face twisted in a mask of pure, unhinged jealousy. He hated that she had run to Victor. He hated that Victor’s exhaustion had earned her touch. He hissed at the empty air, his tail twitching beneath his clothes. My queen... she should be healing me. She should be in my coils.
Alice, the Ragdoll cat woman, peeked out from behind her koala beast husband. She looked at the scorched road, then at the spot where Felicity and Victor had vanished. She shuddered, her ears flattening.
"Ew," she whispered to her otter husband. "He’s like a walking natural disaster. So... so loud. Just the memory of that light makes my whiskers ache. I think I need a nap just from being in his general vicinity."
"He saved us, Alice," the otter whispered back, clutching a loaf of bread Felicity had given them.
"He saved his girl," Alice corrected, her eyes narrowing as she watched the other beast husbands—Voss, Damien, Lucan, and Exile—converge on the spot where the space gate had closed. "We’re just the debris he forgot to sweep away. I don’t care how many sandwiches she gives us; that man is a monster."