Chapter 46: The Feral Highway

The world beyond the massive iron gates of Camp Alpha was a sprawling, silent graveyard of rusted steel and shattered asphalt.

Interstate 95 stretched endlessly toward the hazy, ash-choked horizon, completely buried beneath a miles-long, gridlocked graveyard of abandoned Old World vehicles. Sedans, heavy transport trucks, and overturned military convoys sat exactly where they had died on the first day of the global System mutation. Over the past eight months, the aggressive, mutated vegetation had begun to reclaim the blacktop. Thick, thorny vines as thick as a man’s arm wrapped around rusted axles and shattered windshields, actively crushing the metal frames under the slow, suffocating weight of raw nature.

The harsh February sky bruised a deep, bruised purple, heavy with the threat of freezing sleet. The wind howled through the hollowed-out cabins of the dead cars, carrying the sharp, bitter scent of wet asphalt, ancient gasoline, and the faint, coppery tang of rotting meat from deep within the overgrown tree line bordering the highway.

Ren walked directly down the center of the cracked pavement.

His heavy combat boots crunched loudly against the scattered safety glass littering the road. Out here, completely free from the suffocating, artificial lavender of the military bunker, his mutated senses expanded massively. The ambient mana in the open wasteland was entirely different from the stagnant energy pooling in Sub-Level 5. It was wild, erratic, and violently untamed. It brushed against his hardened Iron Skin like static electricity, a constant, buzzing reminder that the entire planet was currently breathing, evolving, and starving.

The Warlord’s blood and the Abyssal Glutton’s highly corrosive green acid had dried into a thick, flaking crust across his ruined grey hoodie and his pale face. The sapphire veins bulging along his massive forearms pulsed with a steady, predatory rhythm, casting a faint blue glow against the rusted side panels of the dead cars he passed.

Chloe walked three paces behind him, completely terrified by the sheer scale of the open sky.

The sky is too big, Chloe thought, her eyes darting frantically from the dark, overgrown woods on the left to the towering, rusted husk of an overturned semi-truck on the right. There are no walls here. Just miles of dead cars and grey clouds. My hands are so cold I can barely feel the trigger.

The freezing wind ripped violently through the open highway, biting right through the wet cotton of her oversized bathrobe hidden beneath her dark green Level III-A plate carrier. She was shivering so hard her teeth clicked together, the heavy ballistic nylon doing absolutely nothing to insulate her from the dropping temperature. She kept the compact FN P90 submachine gun raised, the nylon sling cutting sharply into her neck. Every single shadow shifting inside the abandoned cars looked like a set of jaws waiting to snap her in half.

Ren stopped.

He didn’t raise his hand. He didn’t issue a verbal command. He simply planted his heavy boots on the cracked asphalt and let his broad shoulders drop into a loose, relaxed posture.

His glowing violet eyes locked onto a massive, rusted passenger bus sitting horizontally across the lanes exactly forty yards ahead.

“Check your safety,” Ren said. His voice was a low, rough rasp that barely carried over the howling wind. “We are being tracked.”

Chloe’s breath hitched. She didn’t look back at him. She stared at the rusted bus, her thumb numbly confirming the selector switch on the P90 was pushed all the way down to fully automatic.

I don’t hear anything, she panicked, swallowing hard against the dry, raw ache in her throat. Just the wind. Where are they?

Ren didn’t need to hear them. His Level 17 Perception felt the heavy, rhythmic thuds of padded paws hitting the asphalt. He smelled the putrid, rank odor of wet, rotting fur and hungry saliva cutting cleanly through the scent of old gasoline.

They were creeping through the maze of dead cars, using the rusted metal husks to mask their approach.

Four massive, mutated forms slinked out from beneath the overturned semi-truck on the right flank. Two more crawled through the shattered windows of the passenger bus ahead of them.

The System overlay flared instantly across Ren’s retinas, identifying the feral pack with harsh red text.

[Mutated Wasteland Hound (Lvl 6)]

[Mutated Wasteland Hound (Lvl 7)]

[Status: Starving / Hostile]

They used to be wolves or large stray dogs, but the System had violently twisted their biology. They stood nearly four feet tall at the shoulder, their bodies completely devoid of fat, resembling tight, heavily corded muscle stretched over thick, protruding ribs. Their fur was falling out in mangy, bloody clumps, exposing thick patches of hardened, grey, scab-like armor. Their jaws were entirely dislocated, hanging open to reveal triple rows of jagged, yellowing teeth dripping with thick, black saliva.

The pack leader, a massive Level 7 hound missing half its face from an old burn wound, let out a low, rattling growl that vibrated against the rusted car doors.

They didn’t charge immediately. They fanned out, their heavy claws clicking against the asphalt, entirely focused on surrounding the two humans.

They smell the blood on my clothes, Ren thought, a dark, terrible grin pulling his lips back to expose his teeth to the freezing wind. The Gluttony skill in his chest stirred lazily. Level 7 meat was barely a snack compared to the core he had just consumed, but his muscles demanded violent, kinetic release. These starving dogs think they are hunting. I will let them get close just to feel their spines snap.

“Do not shoot unless they break my line,” Ren ordered.

He didn’t reach for the Crimson vibro-sword hanging in the magnetic scabbard at his right hip. Drawing the high-frequency blade on a pack of starving dogs was a complete waste of the core’s energy. He wanted to use his hands.

The pack leader lunged.

The massive hound covered the twenty feet of open asphalt in a terrifying blur of grey muscle, its massive jaws snapping wide open, aiming directly for Ren’s exposed throat.

Ren didn’t dodge. He didn’t flinch.

He met the charge head-on. He drove his left arm straight forward, completely ignoring the triple rows of jagged teeth. The hound clamped its massive jaws down hard on his forearm.

The beast expected to tear through soft human flesh and snap the radius bone in half. Instead, its yellow teeth violently collided with the dull, cast-iron density of Ren’s Iron Skin, supported flawlessly by the thick bone plating of his Chitin Shell. The hound’s teeth literally shattered on impact, jagged shards of yellow enamel exploding out of its mouth with a sickening crunch.

The beast whimpered, its momentum completely halting against Ren’s immovable, towering frame.

Before the hound could pull its ruined mouth away, Ren brought his right hand down like a massive, falling anvil.

He didn’t bother extending his Rending Claws. He just used his bare, calloused fist, driving it squarely into the center of the hound’s skull with the absolute, raw, crushing force of his Level 17 Strength.

CRACK.

The sound of the thick skull completely caving in echoed sharply across the empty highway. The hound’s brain instantly liquefied under the massive blunt-force trauma. The beast went entirely limp, its heavy, mangy body dropping to the cracked asphalt like a sack of wet cement.

[Target Dead: Mutated Wasteland Hound (Lvl 7)]

[Experience Gained: 150]

The remaining five hounds froze. Their primitive, hungry brains couldn’t process how their alpha had just been instantly, casually flattened by a creature that smelled like human meat.

Ren didn’t give them time to rethink their ambush.

He exploded forward. His heavy combat boots tore chunks of asphalt out of the road as he launched himself at the two hounds on the left flank. He grabbed the first beast by its thick, scab-covered throat, lifting its two-hundred-pound body entirely off the ground with one hand. He squeezed his broad fingers together. The thick cartilage of the hound’s windpipe simply crushed into paste under his grip. He threw the suffocating, dying animal directly into the rusted side panel of a dead sedan, the impact denting the heavy metal inward.

The second hound tried to bite his thigh. Ren brought his heavy rubber boot down in a brutal, stamping kick, shattering the beast’s spine exactly in the center of its back. The animal shrieked, its back legs instantly paralyzing, dragging itself desperately across the safety glass with its front paws.

The final three hounds broke.

Their hunger was entirely overridden by sheer, unadulterated terror. They tucked their mangy tails between their legs and scrambled desperately toward the dark, overgrown tree line, slipping on the wet blacktop in their haste to escape the blood-soaked monster.

Ren didn’t chase them. The meager experience points weren’t worth the calories required to run them down through the thick brush.

He stood in the center of the highway, surrounded by the three twitching, broken carcasses. The freezing wind whipped the ruined shreds of his hoodie around his waist. He knelt beside the massive pack leader with the crushed skull.

He extended his right index finger, the pitch-black, ten-inch talon of his Rending Claws sliding out with a soft snick. He drove the blade into the beast’s chest cavity, easily slicing through the ribs, and dug around in the hot, steaming blood until he found the core.

It was a small, dull grey crystal, barely the size of a marble, completely lacking the intense, blinding bioluminescence of the Abyssal Glutton.

Ren tossed it into his mouth and crushed it between his molars.

[Gluttony Activated.]

[Consumed: Wasteland Hound Core (Lvl 7)]

[Agility +1]

The rush of mana was pathetic. It barely generated a flicker of warmth in his chest, instantly swallowed by the massive, roaring furnace of his Level 17 biology. Regular monsters were no longer a source of rapid evolution. They were just loose change.

“They’re dead,” Ren said, standing up and wiping the hot, thick blood off his hands onto his ruined cargo pants.

Chloe lowered the P90, her chest heaving as she let out a long, ragged breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She stared at the crushed skull of the massive hound, her mind struggling to reconcile the horrific violence she had just witnessed with the casual, completely bored expression on Ren’s pale, blood-stained face.

A sharp, freezing drop of water struck her pale cheek. Then another.

The heavy, bruised purple clouds finally broke. The freezing sleet began to fall, hitting the rusted roofs of the dead cars with a loud, chaotic, metallic pinging sound. Within seconds, the wind picked up, driving the tiny, agonizing shards of ice sideways across the open highway.

“We need cover,” Chloe shivered, her teeth chattering so violently she could barely form the words. The sleet was instantly soaking the heavy ballistic nylon of her vest, completely draining the last fragile reserves of her body heat. “If we stay out here, I’m going to freeze to death before it gets dark.”

Ren tilted his head back, letting the freezing sleet hit his face, washing away the dried layers of the Warlord’s blood. His Iron Skin completely ignored the biting cold, but he understood the fragile limits of his companion’s unmutated anatomy.

His violet eyes swept the horizon, piercing through the rapidly thickening grey veil of the freezing storm.

About half a mile down the ruined interstate, a massive, reinforced concrete structure loomed over the blacktop. It was an Old World toll plaza, heavily fortified with thick steel pillars and a massive, overhanging canopy designed to shield the toll booths from severe weather. Several heavily armored, military-grade transport trucks were parked haphazardly beneath the concrete roof, completely untouched by the creeping vines.

It was an ideal, highly defensible temporary stronghold.

Ren turns his broad shoulders into the howling, freezing wind, his heavy boots crunching steadily against the sleet-covered asphalt as he begins the march toward the concrete toll plaza, leading the shivering girl out of the lethal, open exposure of the feral highway.

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