Chapter 16: Preparations
What does it feel like to look down at the earth from the sky?
For , whose daily life before the catastrophe had rarely taken him above the tenth floor, this was a very hard question to answer.
But for him at this moment, it was just a matter of sending a drone for a spin.
With two Type 1s and one Type 2 in hand, he could calmly grasp most of the situation around the power station from the air.
In fact, if it weren’t for the limits of electricity, he would have sent a drone flying outward without stopping, using it to gather more intelligence.
Earlier, when and had gone out carrying his , had already confirmed it.
His control range over the machines he had connected to at the power station was at least thirty kilometers.
Even farther.
It was as if, as long as he was at the power station, he could attempt a connection—and once the connection was established,
unless the target machine was severely damaged or had run out of energy, he could keep controlling it.
Of course, this only applied to machines with a certain capacity for movement, such as the power station’s self-maintaining robots and semi-automatic mechanical arms, as well as the rewards he had obtained from the system.
As for stones, blades, spears, and the like—he couldn’t control them.
Then... could he control a wind-up mechanical duck?
cut off that train of thought just in time. After all, the power station didn’t have any wind-up toys for him to test with, and he had more important things to focus on right now.
That was the horde advancing toward the power station.
Through the Type 2’s excellent surveillance module, could clearly see what the once-prosperous city looked like now.
High-rises were like gnawed skeletons; tombstones of reinforced concrete stood in clusters; pitch-black windows gaped like countless hollow eye sockets.
On torn-up asphalt roads, overturned cars were stacked into a metal graveyard.
A faint white mist that seemed as if it would never disperse shrouded the city’s distant ruins.
Deep inside that mist, the silhouette of some colossal creature would occasionally flash past.
It might have been an illusion, or it might have been a giant beast from ancient myth walking among men.
The most pressing threat to at the moment, however, was the gray-black carpet advancing along the national highway—a tide made of thousands upon thousands of zombies.
They pressed together, creeping forward slowly but unstoppably.
Behind this flood, three behemoths were especially striking.
[ ].
They stood a full six or seven meters tall, like small buildings on the move.
Below, eight pale, barb-covered jointed limbs supported their enormous bodies, and with every step, the ground trembled slightly.
Above those limbs was a huge fleshy sphere more than three meters in diameter, its surface covered with a layer of wrinkled, ghastly pale skin.
The most sanity-destroying part was the surface of that sphere: densely packed, layer upon layer, crammed with countless human eyeballs.
Those eyeballs varied in size and eye color. Some still spun wildly, as if chasing any stir of movement around them.
Others were murky and clouded, as if they had long since died.
watched all this calmly. Based on the horde’s speed, he predicted that it would reach the power station in less than twelve hours.
But he wasn’t panicking.
Relying on the twenty-one people in the power station to fight over a thousand zombies head-on was naturally impossible.
Even adding his and these three drones would be nothing more than a mantis trying to stop a chariot.
His equipment might be fully loaded the moment it was assembled, but once the ammunition was spent, it was spent—he had no ammunition production line right now.
The ammunition and had brought along was equally limited; it couldn’t possibly sustain a war of attrition of this scale.
The survivors were even less worth counting on. If they could keep them from collapsing in the face of the horde, that would already be a blessing.
So ’s plan had never been to fight a positional battle against them.
His goal was—to divert the flood.
He always remembered that this had appeared only because the system had detected the threat before issuing it.
This meant the horde had formed naturally and was not a “trial” deliberately sent by the system.
That being the case, as long as they could divert this flood and make it “pass by” the power station, that should also count as a successful defense.
A ’s perception was limited. As long as the people in the shelter hid well enough and made little enough noise, they wouldn’t easily attract the horde’s attention.
To that end, and the others had drawn up three countermeasures.
First, fill every gap in the perimeter wall and add a simple wire fence around the outer perimeter.