Chapter 37: The Cost of Being Broke

The global channel was moving so fast that the text was an unreadable green blur of desperate panic:

— [AlpineTracker]: MY CAVE IS COMPROMISED! Terran is alive! He’s an undead freak! He broke through three feet of solid granite with one punch!

— [Swift]: They don’t stop! Normal zombies die from headshots, but these ones have candidate skills! A dead girl just threw a fireball at our sniper tower!

— [ShadowStep]: I have five percent mana left. Every time I teleport to another ridge, there’s another thousand of them crawling out of the mud! WHERE IS SAFE?! IS THERE ANYWHERE DRY?!

— [SandStorm]: The smell... God, the smell alone is making me vomit. They’re climbing over each other like insects! Hundreds of thousands!

Every few seconds, a gold-rimmed notification cut cleanly through the chat:

[Trial Alert: Candidate Elimination Confirmed.]

[Candidate #094 (IronFist) has been eliminated.]

[Candidate #167 (GaleRunner) has been eliminated.]

[Candidate #311 (FrostBite) has been eliminated.]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 158 / 500]

In less than three hours since Phase Two began, fourteen more players had been torn to pieces.

These were people who had survived four months of freezing rain, starvation, and mountain mudslides. They had thought the worst was over when the rain stopped. Now, exhausted, with their boots rotten and their stamina depleted, they were being hunted down by billions of fast, unyielding ghouls led by undead candidates who retained their mutated super-abilities.

Julius placed his fingertips on the keyboard and typed a calm, casual message into the channel:

[Julius (Rank 456)]: "The weather cleared up nicely today. How is everyone doing with the neighbors?"

For two seconds, the chat froze. Then, the flood of curses returned with unmatched venom:

— [Swift]: YOU SON OF A BITCH! You knew, didn’t you?! You knew the rain was dirty!

— [AlpineTracker]: Vance, please! Tell us where your island is! We can fly! I have a candidate who can glide! Send us coordinates!

— [ShadowStep]: Julius, I’ll swear an absolute soul contract! I’ll be your slave, your guard dog, anything! Just pull me out of this! They’re scratching at the iron door of my bunker!

Julius typed his reply without an ounce of pity:

[Julius (Rank 456)]: "I don’t need guard dogs. I have four small modular nuclear reactors, thirty automated CIWS turrets, and an entire ocean between me and the mainland. You all told me that Infinite Wealth was useless in an apocalypse. You laughed when I bought concrete and steel while you were busy practicing sword swings."

He paused, then added:

[Julius (Rank 456)]: "Concrete doesn’t get infected. Steel doesn’t get dysentery. Sleep tight, survivors."

Julius locked the phone and set it on the marble table. He had no interest in arguing with dead men walking.

He stood up, stretched his limbs, and decided it was time for lunch.

He walked down the long, carpeted corridor of his penthouse toward the central lift, riding it down to Level 2: The Residential and Culinary Sector.

The corridor opened into the main dining hall for the facility’s senior staff. The room was bright, warmly illuminated by chandeliers that cast a golden glow across polished mahogany tables and plush velvet chairs. The air was rich with the savory smell of roasted garlic, rosemary, and sizzling beef.

Around thirty off-duty security contractors, engineers, and agronomists were sitting in small groups, chatting comfortably while soft jazz played from the recessed wall speakers.

"Afternoon, Mr. Vance," Chef Marcus called out from behind the gleaming quartz serving counter.

Marcus was carving thick, tender slices from a massive standing rib roast that had been slow-roasting in the hearth ovens for six hours. The dark crust was seasoned with cracked black pepper and coarse sea salt, and the meat was a perfect, juicy medium-rare.

"Afternoon, Marcus," Julius smiled, taking a seat at his private corner booth by an indoor water feature. "How’s the roast looking?"

"Best one yet, sir," Marcus beamed. "Black Angus from our Level 5 deep-cold cryo-vaults. Thawed it forty-eight hours ago in the dry-ager. I paired it with creamed horseradish, roasted baby carrots from Clara’s greenhouse, and some garlic-mashed Yukon gold potatoes."

"Plate me up," Julius said.

A minute later, Marcus brought over a heavy white porcelain plate piled high with food, accompanied by a glass of ice-cold ginger beer.

Julius cut a piece of the prime rib. It practically melted under the fork. He dipped it into the rich, dark au jus pooling on the plate and brought it to his mouth.

The beef was incredibly tender, savory and buttery, balanced by the sharp kick of the horseradish and the sweet crunch of the fresh carrots.

He ate with unhurried leisure.

Through the thick walls, four hundred meters below the sea, the world could not touch him.

Above, on the continents, the surviving candidates were currently screaming in the dark, their ammunition running dry, their fingers slipping in bloody mud as legions of rotting horrors dragged them down into the depths.

In Raven Rock, Arthur Vance was frantically rerouting power to keep electric fences active around his mountain intakes, his mind-controlled troops dying by the hundreds to hold the ventilation shafts against hordes of undead.

Arthur had power. He had nineteen hundred nuclear missiles.

He had an army of four-star generals.

Yet he couldn’t enjoy a single hot meal without wondering if a horde of radioactive ghouls would dig through his water pipes before morning.

Julius, on the other hand, had simply spent money.

He had bought the ground. He had bought the air. He had bought the isolation.

He wiped his lips with a clean linen napkin, took a long drink of the crisp ginger beer, and looked at his phone sitting beside his plate.

A new message had appeared on his private channel:

[Malakor (Rank 2)]: "The dead are attacking Raven Rock. My surface guards are failing. Julius... I know you’re listening. If my base falls, I will fire every missile in the silos blindly across the Atlantic. I will boil the entire ocean before I let the zombies take me."

Julius looked at Arthur’s frantic threat on the screen, chewing the last tender bite of his roast beef.

"I will boil the entire ocean before I let the zombies take me."

A cold, amused smirk touched Julius’s lips. He didn’t even bother to type a reply.

Arthur was losing his mind. Launching an ICBM was impossible when hundreds of thousands of frenzied, mutated zombies were swarming the tops of your blast doors and silo hatches. The moment those hundred-ton concrete doors even cracked open, the dead would pour into the launch tubes like roaches into a drainpipe.

Julius set his fork down, wiped his fingers with a linen napkin, and tapped the intercom on the table.

"Colonel Mercer," Julius said smoothly.

"Sir?" Mercer’s voice responded over the secure line.

"Our guest in Pennsylvania is throwing a tantrum. He’s threatening to blind-fire his silos across the Atlantic."

Mercer gave a low, dry chuckle through the speaker. "Let him try, Mr. Vance. The island’s Aegis Ashore radar array on the upper peak is active on passive sweep. Our four hardened vertical launch cells have forty-eight SM-3 Block IIA interceptors fueled and slaved to the central targeting computer. If Raven Rock spits out a single warhead toward our quadrant, our kinetic kill vehicles will turn it to scrap in the upper stratosphere before it even re-enters."

"Good," Julius murmured, taking a sip of his crisp ginger beer. "Keep the interceptors primed. But let the dead do their work first. It costs us fewer missiles that way."

"Understood, sir."

Julius set the glass down, leaned back into the plush leather booth, and took a bite of a sweet, honey-glazed fig.

Outside, a continent was rotting alive.

Down here, lunch had been exquisite.