Doomsday Wonderland

Although the landmass of Sector 9 wasn’t big, Lin Sanjiu was amazed that it could hold so many posthumans.

There were four stone cyan staircases that acted as bridges between the inner city and outer city. Sirens went off madly in quick succession across the entire city. One after another, human figures hopped down the staircases frenziedly, gathering around the main gate.

By the time Lin Sanjiu and the goateed man’s group arrived at the main gate, there was more than hundreds of posthumans gathered there. The number may not sound that significant, but upon turning the figure into numbers of humans, it was enough to cause a huge congestion at the main gate.

The siren continued to scream out, getting more intense each time. Through the speaker, the fear of the announcer was evident. His voice trembled, “Condition Red, Condition Red! Currently, an unknown number of Vindice is coming fast from the northwest of the gate. Eyewitness suspect more than three… wait, what!? There are more than four Vindice coming this way! All posthumans, please gather in front of the main gate! I repeat! All posthumans, please gather in front of the main gate! All emergency facilities in the inner city please stand-by for any consequences!”

Lin Sanjiu clearly heard the goateed man next to her gulp. His countenance was grim.

Not only the goatee, everyone in the crowd had taken on an ugly expression. Cold sweat trickled down their foreheads, and their cheeks blanched with fear.

On their side, there was more than hundreds of posthumans while their opponent had only four members. However, the atmosphere at the party with the massive crowd was thick with apprehension, and everybody was seemingly breathing in fear.

But the silver lining was this group of posthumans wasn’t a herd of sheep waiting to be slaughtered. It seemed that this wasn’t the first time they faced this kind of situation. Their responses and job division was fast, accurate, and well-organized. A few teams made up of a few posthumans went out the gate and set up some traps before the Vindice arrived. There was another group that climbed up the outer wall through a nonfunctional elevator and laid in ambush. The major crowd of posthumans waited inside the gate, using the wall as cover, making their final check for the coming confrontation.

Lin Sanjiu followed the goateed man and crouched beside him. She peered at the deep and dark gate. The massive overhead metal gate covered in moss remained suspended in midair.

“Why don’t you all close the gate to stop the Vindice from entering the city?” Lin Sanjiu asked in a low voice.

“This is the most ignorant and hilarious question I have ever heard.” The goatee smiled bitterly. The sound of the siren grew louder as he answered in a raspy voice, “…We have had peace for years; for that reason, the defense system of Mistral has been in a dormant state. To activate the defense system, we’ll need an activation code. The code is in the hands of our Mistral’s president. He is the only one who has the code. But after the fall of Sector 1, our president went missing. Nobody knows where he is now. We don’t even know if he is still alive or already dead.”

It seemed like the apocalypse came too suddenly and paralyzed this city-state nation before the government could react. Lin Sanjiu wondered, what was the cause of the apocalypse in Puppeteer’s homeland?

As Lin Sanjiu thought, she swept her gaze across the crowd. But she still did not see Puppeteer around.

She wasn’t afraid of the so-called “Vindice”. It was just that the tension in the air was so dense and thick that it gave her the collywobbles. Her heartbeat slowly picked up its pace as she stared nervously into the distance.

Nobody spoke; every single person remained utterly silent. The pressure mounted with every passing second. After what seemed like an eternity, several faint black dots popped up from the horizon in the distance. The black spots were marching towards Sector 9, getting closer and closer with every confident step they took. With the help of the sunlight, the posthumans finally saw how many of them there were.

Lin Sanjiu heard a harsh sibilant inhalation of breath. Then, a murmur quickly spread across the crowd after the initial shock had abated. They became extremely restless, which befuddled Lin Sanjiu. After a few seconds, somebody amongst the group shouted in a sob-filled voice, “Six! There are six of them!”

The siren that had been going on the entire time suddenly ceased away.

The next time Lin Sanjiu heard the announcer’s voice, he had already thrown away the speaker. A much weaker voice rang out from the top of the inner city. The announcer sounded terrified, but he remained steadfast, yelling with all his might and giving the final morale boost to the fighters that were protecting their homeland with their own lives. “May the prayers of God be with you, my fellow fearless brothers and sisters! All of the surviving civilians in the inner city will fight alongside with you! Here is our home; this is where we live and die! Protect our homeland! Let’s show them what we’ve got!”

The moment the words spread out, all of the posthumans in the outer city yelled back in chorus, “Protect our homeland!”

As if aroused by the fiery reaction, an enthusiastic roar ensued at the inner wall. Unbeknownst to Lin Sanjiu, countless people were standing on top of the wall. Some of them were yelling and shouting while others were crying and sobbing. But if there was a similarity between them, that would be the words that they chanted, “May the prayers of God be ever with our children!”

The goateed man gasped loudly, pulling Lin Sanjiu back from her thoughts. Lin Sanjiu looked at him. She saw that the eyes and nose tip of this middle-aged bloke were reddened, and his jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. He was about to lose control of the raging emotions that welled beneath his heart, but somehow, he held back at last. He wasn’t the only one.

Sensing Lin Sanjiu’s gaze, the goateed man sniffled and offered her a grin. “I’m Musan. Mayhap you can survive this fight since you’re far more powerful than any of us. It doesn’t feel right not to tell you my name since this is probably the last time we will talk to each other.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic, dude! I’m certain you can get through this!”

Musan shook his head. “You have misunderstood me. I’m not afraid of dying,” he said bluntly. Then he turned his head and looked at the inner city with a searing stare filled with so much determination that Lin Sanjiu was shaken to the core. Then, he continued to speak softly, “If I can take down a Vindice, I’ll have no regrets in doing so even if it costs me my life.”

Lin Sanjiu was stunned. Then, at this moment, a commotion spread across the crowd. Somebody yelled, “They are here!”

She quickly turned her gaze towards the outside of the gate, and she froze the moment she saw the few incoming figures.

“Puppeteers?”

Of the six Vindice, the one walking at the forefront was the first one to be seen clearly by her. The Vindice was wrapped in a black leather jacket. There was an indigo feather ornament on one side of his shoulder pads. It glittered brightly even though the sky was overcast.

The wind had tousled his black hair, covering up half of his ashen face. He seemed to be unaware of the fact that there were more than hundreds of posthumans waiting in the dark to take his life. He continued to walk forward with confident steps. The click and clack of his boots hitting the ground were clear in the air.

‘Hold on a second. Puppeteer walked into the city. I saw it with my own eyes. So when did he go out of the city?’ Lin Sanjiu wondered. Just when she was pondering about the possibility of the Veda having done something to this world, the rest of the Vindice also appeared in her sight. Much to her surprise, all of them had the same outfit.

The only way to distinguish them from one another was probably the leather jackets they wore. Each of them donned different jackets that were garnished with various adornments. From a glance, it seemed like there were six Puppeteers walking from outside the city.

“They are the Vindice?”

“Yeah,” Musan summoned a sickly smile on his face, “We initially thought you were one of them since you looked so lost here… But we did suspect that you are a human.”

“Attack!”

Before Lin Sanjiu could snap out of her daze, somebody in the crowd shouted, giving a command. A row of beams shot out from the inner wall. Lin Sanjiu instantly recognized these beams as the attacks that the goateed man used to ambush her earlier on.

The concentration and firepower of these beams could not be compared with what she had experienced just now. Everything the rays touched would evaporate instantly, leaving nothing but a crater behind.

The beams soon engulfed the six Vindice in their blinding luminance.

The inner city increased the power output, attempting to obliterate the Vindice with the most potent hits they had. For a moment, they couldn’t see anything but blinding white light. The crowd waited and watched with bated breath.

The six Vindice clad in black leather jackets emerged from the blinding white light as it slowly dissipated due to the exhaustion of power. The beams failed to stop them. The Vindice continued to walk with steady steps, now even closer to the city.

What made the situation worse was that all the defensive measurements and traps the posthumans had fixed in advance were proved to be futile in stopping the advancement. They did nothing but slow them down for merely a few seconds or cause them some trivial problems that they could easily disentangle with a wave of their hands. After the traps exploded one after another, yet the Vindice did not show any sign of stopping, the posthumans could not sit still anymore.

“We have to stop them here! Our families are behind us!”

As a mighty bellow barked out of the mass, the posthumans charged out of the gate like a tidal wave, launching a wide-area attack as they roared at the Vindice. This time the Vindice finally stopped moving. Like a reef in the sea, they wouldn’t budge no matter how many times they got hit.

Since she was already here, Lin Sanjiu wasn’t going to stay behind and watch the posthumans die. She bolted out of the gate with the other posthumans. After deciding on her path, she moved dexterously like an eagle towards a Vindice. As she got closer and closer to the Vindice, she finally saw his face.

He wasn’t Puppeteer.

‘Then, where is Puppeteer?’

The moment the thought came into her mind, in the corner of her eye, she saw a figure dart past her and pounce on the Vindice as if he wasn’t afraid of death. Her heart skipped a beat as she stared fixedly at the figure that moved with an animatronic stiffness.

Standing stock-still, the Vindice did not move even a finger, yet the figure burst into countless pieces. But thanks to that, Lin Sanjiu knew that that figure wasn’t a “human”.

It was a mannequin.

Lin Sanjiu stopped and turned her head around as she looked past the pandemonium. Roars of rage and groans of pain filled the air. A plethora of attacks in the forms of bullets, beams, and bloodstreams flew through the sky. In the fortification where death was decided by luck, Lin Sanjiu saw a familiar fair-skinned teenager, dancing in blood amongst the crowd.