Chapter 168: Strategic Response

Day turned to night, and night rose to a loud morning.

Kael didn’t feel the hours the way he used to back on Earth, no yawning hunger, no heavy eyelids from a drained body, but the Tower still had a rhythm, and it still ground time into you.

One moment he was hunched over leather and scale, palms blackened with soot and powdered shell, listening to distant shrieks fade into the city’s hollow silence. The next, the darkness outside thinned into that ugly early light again, and the world sounded wrong, too many feet, too many throats, too much movement for a place that had been quiet yesterday.

The circle of flames had finally covered the entirety of the train station. Kael could see it from his mini-map.

It sat there like a bruise on the map, a solid perimeter of red swallowing the familiar routes he’d abused for days. The station, once his safest “known” space, once the only place that felt predictable, was gone behind a wall of heat that didn’t care about concrete, metal, or memories.

Even staring at the minimap, he could feel what that meant: any path that depended on the metro was now either severed or turning into a slow oven.

He had thought about heading to Torrac for a bit and buying some materials with the newly acquired core.

The idea had been tempting in the dumbest way, like seeing a vending machine after a fight and thinking a drink would solve the fact you almost died. Torrac’s store meant tools, means options. A repair kit. A potion or two. Something that didn’t rely on Kael “inventing” his way out of physics again.

But soon decided against that when he saw what was going on in the map.

The first warning wasn’t even the undead. It was green.

At first, when he thought he could go, he noticed several green dots lying around the shop.

He didn’t need a system window to translate what that meant. People didn’t “lay around” near safe zones because they were bored. They did it because they were waiting, waiting for someone to stumble in wounded, or rich, or both. Waiting with that patient hunger, Kael had started recognizing as the Tower’s most common language.

’Obviously,’ he thought.

After all, they were pretty sure of one thing: the members of the Sun Clan all knew that Kael had obtained materials and loot, and he could go to the shop to sell them.

Word traveled fast when it involved profit. Kael didn’t even have to imagine the conversations. He’s got loot. He’s got cores. He’s got something under that tracksuit. The kind of talk that made desperate climbers forget caution and start pretending they were hunters again.

But that wasn’t the only reason he didn’t go.

The whole damn metro system was packed full of Zombies, and they were flooding the city as well.

The map was a mess of moving red, dense clusters crawling out of places that used to be “background.” Sewers. Access shafts. Collapsed stairwells. Service doors.

Every hidden throat in the city had started vomiting the dead onto the streets, and they weren’t doing it politely either.

The earlier sluggish shuffle was gone. These were active dots, shifting in ugly swarms, dragging their infection and hunger across every route that mattered.

They emerged from tunnels, from sewers, and from everywhere else.

And many of them were pouring out and from around the shop.

That part stung. Torrac’s store had been the one predictable thing on this floor, an island of rules, an island of “no stabbing inside.” Now it was surrounded by the kind of chaos rules didn’t matter to.

Kael could picture it without even looking: the neon sign glowing over bodies slamming into each other, the air thick with rot, climbers clustered just far enough away to not get bitten while still close enough to pounce on anyone who tried to enter.

It was a death trap for anyone.

He wasn’t doing that again. Not for a potion. Not for a few more scraps of metal. He’d already paid for one “tight corridor with a timer” experience, and he’d paid in internal energy, blood, and luck. A repeat would cost him his life, and he didn’t have the spare change for that.

He didn’t want a repeat of that.

After watching the map more, many of the climbers had decided to back away to their own territory and fend off the zombies for now.

The movement was visible even as dots. Groups pulled away from the shop’s radius. Small clusters retreated to wherever they’d been squatting, ruined buildings, barricaded rooms, half-collapsed complexes like the Sun Clan’s base.

Nobody wanted to be the first to get pinned between a zombie wave and a fire wall. Nobody wanted to admit it out loud, but everyone was thinking the same thing: Let the other idiots die first.

Kael wasn’t that far away from the shop either, but at the same time, he’ll have to go through many Zombies to even get there.

Even with Predator’s Sight sharpening his vision, even with [Presence] as an emergency button, the math was ugly. Too many bodies. Too many chances for one scratch, one bite, one stumble.

He could slip through a crowd once, maybe twice, but not while saving energy and not while trying to keep anything worth stealing on him.

It was better to just let the fire consume it. Torrac already mentioned that he’ll be leaving on this day, and it seems that he’ll probably exit this stage once the circle of fire, which was already at his shop, in the next few minutes.

Kael didn’t like trusting predictions, but that one aligned with what he was seeing. The red perimeter had crept close enough that the shop was basically on borrowed time. If Torrac was smart, and he was, in that smug “tower-born” way, then he’d already be gone before the flames fully swallowed the block.

Kael had more important matters to manage.

“Okay, this turned out all right,” he muttered as he picked up a helmet.

After all, he finally finished his gear set.

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