Chapter 40: How Are Things Going

The snow on Mount Yamantau was neither white nor pure. It was a churning slurry of black bile, shattered slate, and half-frozen entrails.

Perched above an abandoned Russian missile base carved into the southern Ural peaks, three surviving high-tier candidates were making their final stand. The facility’s steel outer doors had buckled two days ago under hydraulic pressure from the flood, forcing them onto an open helipad ringed by jagged cliffs.

Candidate #019, a former mercenary known as [Ironclad], swung a five-foot tungsten breaker bar with a guttural roar.

His S-rank talent, [Liquid Steel Metamorphism], coated his arms in gleaming, mirror-polished alloy. Every blow carried the kinetic force of a high-speed train.

CLANG-CRUNCH!

The bar smashed horizontally across the skulls of four charging ghouls. The rotten bone shattered instantly, spraying gray brain matter and black frost across the concrete pad. The corpses flipped over the steel safety rail, tumbling three thousand feet into the mist-choked valley below.

"Reloading! Cover the southern stairs!" shouted Candidate #055, [Deadeye].

He dropped to one knee, frantically slamming a fresh twenty-round magazine of depleted-uranium rounds into his Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle. His hands were shaking uncontrollably, his fingers black with frostbite and caked with dried mud.

Behind them, Candidate #081, a Russian combat medic named [Katya], had her hands pressed against Ironclad’s lower back. A pale emerald luminescence flickered from her palms, desperately pumping vitality into his torn muscle tissue. Her breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, her mana bar flashing red at three percent.

"I can’t hold the output much longer, Viktor!" Katya cried, tears cutting tracks through the black soot on her cheeks. "My core is burning out! There’s no ambient mana left—the dead are eating it all!"

"Shut up and breathe!" Ironclad bellowed, swinging the tungsten bar again.

A flying ghoul—its back mutated into wide, bat-like flaps of stretched human skin—swooped from the freezing fog above. Ironclad caught it mid-air by the neck, slammed it into the concrete, and crushed its skull under his steel boot with a sickening wet pop.

"They’re coming over the blast wall!" Deadeye screamed.

Down in the access trench, thousands of bloated, gray-skinned corpses were climbing over one another like an army of ravenous ants. These were former Russian motorized infantry units that had drowned in the lower river basins during Phase 1.

Their uniforms were rotted rags, their tactical vests torn open, but their movements were twitching, inhuman, and terrifyingly fast. They bounded up the frozen stairs on all fours, black nails tearing into the icy concrete, jaws snapping with wet, metallic clicks.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Deadeye fired three consecutive shots. The massive .50-caliber rounds ripped through torso after torso, turning three zombies into spinning sprays of black slush.

It did nothing to halt the momentum. For every one that exploded, ten more climbed over the mangled remains.

Suddenly, the freezing mountain air turned thick and sulfurous.

A low, vibrating hum resonated through the stone under their boots.

From the center of the surging swarm, the sea of corpses parted. A figure stepped forward with slow, deliberate, terrifying weight.

Ironclad froze, his steel-coated fists trembling.

"No..." Deadeye whispered, his rifle barrel drooping. "Not him..."

It was Candidate #008, formerly registered as [Volcano]—an SSS-rank fire user who had perished during the early days of Phase 1 when his mountain redoubt was buried by a flash mudslide.

Now, Volcano was no longer human.

His corpse stood over eight feet tall, his flesh blackened to the texture of cooled volcanic rock. Through massive, jagged cracks in his chest and face, a sickening, necrotic green magma pulsed like a visible heartbeat. His eyes were twin pits of pale, milky-white fire, and thick black smoke poured continuously from his open, fanged jaw.

The mutated candidate raised a single, blackened arm toward the helipad.

"SCATTER!" Ironclad roared.

WHOOSH!

A beam of blinding, bile-green necrotic plasma erupted from Volcano’s palm. The blast crossed the fifty-yard gap in a microsecond, slamming directly into the heavy steel barricade beside Deadeye.

The military-grade armor plate didn’t just bend—it vaporized.

The superheated thermal wave washed over Deadeye, instantly igniting his tactical clothes and melting his flesh into the concrete. He didn’t even have time to scream before the sheer concussive pressure blew his upper torso into ash.

[Candidate #055 (Deadeye) has been eliminated.]

"DAMN YOU!"

Ironclad activated his final trump card. His entire body turned to solid, hardened steel. He sprinted forward, the concrete fracturing under his heavy boots, swinging the tungsten bar straight at Volcano’s skull with all the kinetic force his dying core could muster.

Volcano didn’t dodge.

The undead monster simply raised its left hand and caught the swinging tungsten rod bare-handed.

CLANG!

The shockwave blew away the surrounding fog in a ring of compressed air. Ironclad’s eyes widened in sheer horror. The tungsten bar didn’t budge an inch.

Volcano’s necrotic green magma surged along the metal rod. In less than two seconds, the four-hundred-pound bar of solid tungsten began to soften, glowing cherry-red, then liquid-white.

The heat traveled straight into Ironclad’s steel-coated arms.

"ARGHHH!" Ironclad shrieked as his own metal skin began to melt, fusing with his underlying bone and muscle in agonizing, liquid torment.

Volcano pulled the mercenary forward with effortless, monstrous strength. With his right hand, the magma-veined abomination drove its stone-hard fist straight through Ironclad’s molten steel chestplate.

SQUELCH.

The necrotic fire erupted inside Ironclad’s chest cavity, incinerating his heart and lungs to black cinder from the inside out.

Ironclad’s jaw slackened. The metallic luster faded from his skin, turning into dull, lifeless gray.

Volcano ripped his arm free, letting the corpse collapse into the bloody slush.

Across the helipad, Katya was crawling backward on her hands and knees, staring in catatonic horror at the monster towering over her comrades. Her back hit the cold iron safety rail of the cliff.

Behind her lay a three-thousand-foot drop into the freezing, mist-choked abyss. Before her stood Volcano, flanked by hundreds of hissing, snapping ghouls whose milky eyes fixed hungrily on her trembling throat.

She looked down at the cracked screen of her phone, where the global chat was pulsing with the latest red death alerts:

[Trial Alert: Candidate Elimination Confirmed.]

[Candidate #019 (Ironclad) has been eliminated.]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 81 / 500.]

Katya let out a soft, broken laugh.

She didn’t beg. She didn’t scream.

As Volcano lunged forward with jaws wide, she pushed herself backward off the edge of the helipad, plunging into the silent, white abyss below.

[Candidate #081 (Katya) has been eliminated.]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 80 / 500.]

Chapter 41: An Evening in the Deep

Four hundred meters beneath the cold, abyssal stillness of the North Atlantic Ocean, the silence inside St. Jude’s Spire was interrupted only by the clinking of a solid silver spoon against a porcelain bowl.

Julius Vance sat at the polished obsidian desk inside his private study.

He had changed into a lightweight black silk robe, tied loosely at the waist, and a pair of dark velvet slippers. On the brass tray beside him sat a bowl of rich, creamy lobster bisque, topped with a dollop of crème fraîche and a sprinkle of freshly chopped chives from Level 4’s indoor hydroponics. Beside the bowl was a basket of warm, garlic-rubbed brioche points, their golden crusts glistening with butter.

Across the panoramic main display, the global tactical map showed the Yamantau node flicker from amber to pitch black.

"Yamantau outpost is silent, Mr. Vance," Colonel Mercer’s voice came through the desk intercom, smooth and completely indifferent. "Seismic monitoring indicates a high-yield thermal burst followed by zero biological signatures. The Russian continental sector is now officially clear of living candidates."

"How many candidates left in Eurasia?" Julius asked, dipping a brioche point into the thick, aromatic bisque.

"Excluding the puppet master Arthur in Raven Rock, our satellite telemetry tracks only four living signals across the entire European landmass. All four are holed up in high-altitude caves in the Pyrenees with zero food reserves and depleted mana signatures. Projected survival window: less than forty-eight hours."

"Natural selection at its finest," Julius murmured, taking a bite of the soaked bread.

The rich, sweet lobster meat paired with the buttery crunch of the brioche was exquisite.

"They trained their bodies to withstand blades and bullets," Julius continued, chewing slowly. "They awakened fire, lightning, and steel. Yet they never understood that against an unyielding, non-sentient bio-hazard, human stamina is an arithmetic curve that always ends at zero."

He picked up his smartphone from the leather desk blotter.

The [World Chat] had officially ceased to function as a public forum. It was merely a digital obituary ledger:

— [GaleRunner]: I cut my leg off. It didn’t stop it. The veins in my thigh are black. My heart is beating so slow...

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

— [Hermit]: The sun is gone. The sky is green. There are no gods. Only teeth.

[Candidate #233 (Hermit) has been eliminated.]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 78 / 500.]

Julius swiped away the chat interface and opened his island’s primary logistics ledger.

The contrast was comical.

[ST. JUDE’S SPIRE: LOGISTICS REPORT - DAY 125] ============================================== FRESHWATER CAPACITY : 100% (REDUNDANT DESAL ONLINE) GEOTHERMAL POWER GRID : 99.8% EFFICIENCY HYDROPONIC PRODUCTION : +6.2% OVER PROJECTION FROZEN PROTEIN RESERVES : 28.4 YEARS REMAINING INTERNAL AIR PURITY : 99.999% (ZERO CONTAMINANTS) ATMOSPHERIC TEMP (L1-L6) : 20.5°C UNIFORM ==============================================

Julius took another spoonful of the bisque, savoring the velvety cream.

He didn’t have to dodge mutated behemoths. He didn’t have to watch his comrades get torn to shreds or bleed out in the snow while his mana burned down to embers.

He had spent his billions buying reinforced concrete, four-stage nuclear filtration systems, and top-tier culinary supplies.

He tapped his phone, opening the direct message channel with Arthur Vance.

Arthur’s status icon was flashing a dim, unstable red. His location marker in Raven Rock was surrounded by an estimated two million undead signatures, with the facility’s outer power grid completely severed.

Julius placed his fingers on the screen and sent one final, tranquil message to Candidate #002:

[Julius (Rank 456)]: "The bisque is very good tonight, Arthur. How are things on your mountain?"

No reply came.

Only the faint, distant hum of the Spire’s closed-loop cooling fans broke the peaceful silence of the room.

Julius locked the phone, set it aside, and reached for a glass of crisp, chilled Chablis, ready to enjoy the rest of his dinner in uninterrupted peace.