Chapter 28: That Person
Zhang Zhiyin did not expect this sort of situation—
The flying flag would send the user to a designated location. It directly flew over thousands of zombies and landed on a high building of the base. By chance, this location happened to be next to the leader.
The leader suddenly felt his pressure getting lighter. Turning his head slightly to the side, he saw Zhang Zhiyin standing beside him forming an ice wall.
He gasped for breath as if he had unloaded something, and all of a sudden his movements slowed down.
At this critical moment, he did not probe into just how exactly did Zhang Zhiyin survive. Instead, he took a big breath and said, “Xiao Zhang, as soon as I saw you, I knew you were a good comrade.”
Under any normal situation, it was almost an unwritten rule on the game, that an ordinary player could never solo a boss. It would still be very difficult for players to win even if they were at Level 80 and the boss was at Level 20, unless that boss was designed to be dealt with by a single player. This rule was applicable at this moment.
At this time, the opposite two bosses seemed to be at least Level 4 in terms of their appearance, they did not seem manageable even if there were several people fighting. Before, the leader and the rest were risking their lives to resist this siege, especially when the head leader was attacking as the main force, this was an arrow at the end of its flight.
“I’m not as great as all of you think. What defending the base for the sake of all of you? I just have nowhere else to go. Yulin Base was the former Yulin City, I was born there, raised, worked, married, and had children… Then suddenly came the end of the world. My wife and daughters were all gone. I can’t keep them safe. I don’t want to leave this place at all. I just want to stay here, accompany them and protect anyone as long as I can…”
At this time, more and more people discovered Zhang Zhiyin. Most of the fighters in the front line were members of the battle group. They rushed back and shouted, “Captain—” with surprise, incredulity, and excitement.
Zhang Zhiyin turned around and waved at them.
The leader laughed. “Look, they all trust you, and I believe you can take everyone away safely…”
“So, little brother, don’t let me down.” The leader patted Zhang Zhiyin on the shoulder the way he did when he first met him. He pushed him back and took two steps forward.
All the TV drama he had accompanied his grandmother to watch was not in vain! The leader was clearly setting up a death flag for himself!
Zhang Zhiyin shouted in a hurry: “Whatever you want to do, don’t do it! I still have a way!”
The leader was stunned.
Zhang Zhiyin quickly opened the Item Store and bought items.
The function of “Help the shoots grow by pulling them miracle fruit” was just like its name. The item’s description was “it can quickly stimulate innate potential but at the cost of losing the consumer’s strength for three days after usage”. In the game, the cost manifested in the form of three hours of weakness and 30 minutes of inability to use any skills, which was usually bought by the team members at critical moments when the opponent the team was fighting were the bosses. But in the real world of <Tomorrow>, Zhang Zhiyin guessed that he would really lose his strength for three days. But at this time, he could not care that much.
Before coming, Zhang Zhiyin anticipated that the situation was critical and had quickly changed into his redemption suit. At this time, with the addition of the suit, he had nearly reached the strength of the middle and later stages of Level 5. He tucked the magic fruit into his mouth and swallowed it. He went to the front and sent two ice spheres to the zombies below.
One ice sphere hit the left shoulder of the body on the left, and the other hit the arm of the body on the right. However, from the place where they were hit, the freezing effect spread rapidly. Soon, both bosses were frozen in place. With the freezing effect was still spreading over their bodies, the zombies on both sides were soon frozen and unable to move.
It was just two ice spheres, but the effect was comparable to the extreme ice elemental power “Thousand Miles of Frost”.
At the same time, Zhang Zhiyin was unable to support himself and collapsed.
He raised his head and tried vainly to lift his limp arm. Finally, he could only laugh bitterly and said to the leader, “Brother Long, you have to take me away now.”
The leader had a name. He was called Wang Long.
The leader nodded and began to organize the final withdrawal of the remaining troops with the assistant group’s leader. Although they did not know exactly what method Zhang Zhiyin used, it could be judged from their experience that he would not be able to persist in this state for long.
Dadao and Ah Mu, the wooden ability users in the team, took Zhang Zhiyin and left together.
As soon as Zhang Zhiyin was lifted, he felt a soft mass rubbing against his chest, it then jumped into his trousers pocket.
Zhang Zhiyin looked down powerlessly at the one with “I was left out by a stupid Zhiyin for several days. He wanted to run away without thinking about taking me along with him. I hate him, I’m going to ignore him… If you comb my hair smooth, then I’ll let you go this time” written all over its little expression and smiled gently.
The little thing was so smart, and to think that he was worrying about how to find it and take it away, it had already found him by itself. It was a pity that he was weak all over. He could only wait for himself to recover before he could comb its hair.
Zhang Zhiyin’s two ice spheres stopped the zombies for five minutes, and it was enough time for them to evacuate. As the car drove out of the North Gate, they could also hear the roar of the defense wall being knocked down by the zombies.
Li Jun, the precision ability of the assistant team, leaned out to look in the direction of the base, murmured, “They rushed in.”
“But we have already left.” The group leader continued.
Looking at it, the expression of all the people in the car reflected “Life after surviving a disaster”.
The first and second batch of evacuees from the base had long been gone, but soon they caught up with the seventy-eighty evacuations from the third group. Most of the people from the third batch were relatives of the left-behind ability users, they were unwilling to leave in advance and originally wanted to stay until the end. As they were unwilling to leave, their speed of travel was also not fast. At this time, when the relatives of both sides met, they could hardly hide their excitement, some people even cried while hugging each other.
After joining up, they became a team of 100 people, about 30 of whom were ability users and the rest were ordinary people. But after the test of life and death, almost all the remaining ability users here were fighters who supported each other.
Zhang Zhiyin, who was totally exhausted, was sent to the special carriage intended for the protection of the elderly, the weak, the sick, and the young, however, every day the rest of the team would come to chat with him. Their most curious question was: How did you survive, Captain? They all saw you dead.
This was the advantage of being a player! How would you, the NPCs understand that!
With this in mind, Zhang Zhiyin had to compile and weaved out a story: “There used to be a person who gave me a space talisman to protect my life, so in fact, I did not die, but in the moment of getting strike by the thunder, I used the space talisman to move myself to other places.”
Everyone suddenly understood, and then other questions followed—
“Space talisman is a high-level space item. The person who can make space talisman must be very good, right? Was the person a high-leveled space ability user?”
“Where is that person now? Why didn’t that person accompany you, captain?”
“Did that person give you the same fruit you ate before that gave you an instant boost in your abilities but then made you lost your strength?”
“Who is that person? Captain, how did you know each other? Why does that person matter to you?”
“Ah? Captain, did that person give you the ring?”
“…”
Although the team members did not ask so frankly, in these three days later, they took an indirect approach and asked all these questions.
Zhang Zhiyin finally understood why a lie required a hundred lies to be rounded up. At this time, he could only do what the internet said, “Just giving a sight smile will do.”
However, since he had been following the route of imitating the expressionless boss, Zhang Zhiyin also chose to remain silent with his head slightly lowered and remained expressionless in the face of these questions. But that was good too, as those people who didn’t understand would just say that he was like that because of “the unspoken person”. Zhang Zhiyin relaxed a lot due to not having to continue lying.
But people’s brainpower was great and infinite. It seemed to everyone that his action had become—
“Seeing how our captain said nothing but looked at the ring in his hand with a lonely face, it was as if he were looking at it silently in reminiscence.”
So with the efforts of all the people, they finally put together the “truth” of that year.
Captain Zhang used to have a lover who was a high-level space ability, who was probably more powerful than Captain Zhang. They should have been married, or at least engaged, as evidenced by the ring. Then something unspeakable happened, and they separated again. One of the possible reasons for the separation was the death of the captain’s lover while they were trying to save the captain—of course, that would be an irreversible BE, but because of their love for their captain, they didn’t want to believe that this reason was true. Another reason was that the captain and his lover did not share the same ideology so they went separate ways. This was better than being separated from each other by heaven and earth.
However, it was clear to all of them, that in this eschatological environment, there was a good chance that the person whom the captain couldn’t bear to mention was really gone forever. But no one spoke and no one asked Zhang Zhiyin again. They silently congratulated the captain and his lover. They hoped that the captain’s lover would still be there. They hoped that they would meet again soon.
Zhang Zhiyin, who had no knowledge of this, felt that there were fewer people who came to him recently to ask questions about “that person”.
He tried to lift his arm that was slightly gaining back its strength and sighed in his heart. Yin Nian’s expressionless trump-card was very useful. There wasn’t really that many people that could put on a cold expression on their face every day.
