My Romance Game Updated – Chapter 8

Humanity in the Apocalypse

Ren Chenxi didn’t have the skills to start a car with just two wires and no key. Fortunately, she only had to try one car key dropped by a hotel zombie to start up a high-performance off-road vehicle.

After all, Ren Chenxi, who had so brazenly occupied her Gege’s¹ “property,” insisted on staying in a five-star hotel. As a result, the abandoned vehicles in the hotel parking lot were all quite decent. The car was in good shape, performance included, and even though a thick layer of dust covered its surface and it hadn’t been started in two years, it didn’t stop her from driving it smoothly out of the hotel. What made her appreciate it even more was its impressive amount of fuel. At the very least, it would get her all the way to that gas station with some to spare.

With the mini-map’s² guidance, Ren Chenxi accurately avoided a lot of unnecessary trouble on the road, even if it meant taking some detours.

Leaving the scenic area, now devoid of living people, the broken landscape along the way served as a constant reminder: the outside world was even more dangerous and terrifying.

And the danger wasn’t just zombies. It was also humans.

The first living person Ren Chenxi encountered after returning to this apocalyptic survival game was a woman who looked relatively young. By then, Ren Chenxi had been driving for an hour and had just passed a three-way intersection. The woman was standing on the side of the highway. The moment she saw Ren Chenxi’s vehicle, she started waving her hands and approaching the car.

But Ren Chenxi paid her no mind. Instead, she stomped on the gas, a ferocious viciousness in her eyes as if she intended to run the woman down. This scared the woman into retreating to the roadside, where she spat hatefully at the car’s rear.

On the mini-map, the woman was marked as a red dot³. And she wasn’t alone. Behind her, in the messy, overgrown weeds by the highway, were five more red dots. Red dots meant enemies. Even if they weren’t zombies, they were humans who held strong malicious intent toward her. If she recklessly stopped and opened the door, it was obvious those red dots in the weeds wouldn’t let her have any good fruit to eat⁴.

Who knows how many kind-hearted passersby without a mini-map have fallen to this group of evildoers’ vicious hands⁵?

Leaving the group far behind, Ren Chenxi sped up, continuing to race down the highway. This road was likely their main “hunting” ground, as many of the obstacles had been cleared to the side. She noticed many abandoned vehicles in the weeds along the way. She couldn’t tell if they belonged to victims from the start of the apocalypse or… to the car owners who had fallen to those people’s vicious hands.

With no extra energy to worry about the origins of the abandoned cars, Ren Chenxi pushed the vehicle faster, heading for the service area⁶.

The first living person she met upon her return to the game was an enemy full of malice. Ren Chenxi couldn’t dare to imagine how many more such sinister humans she would encounter on her journey. It was better to get to the service area as soon as possible, refuel the car, grab some spare fuel, and hurry to the survivor base in H City.

Humans are social animals. Although Ren Chenxi had seemed quite at ease living alone in the Y City scenic area, for the first few nights, she hadn’t dared to let herself sleep soundly. She was terrified that some monster would break through her window while she was deep in sleep. Even when exhaustion finally claimed her on subsequent nights, she would still be jolted awake by nightmares.

Finding a survivor base with a large population would greatly increase her sense of security, even if there were still evildoers harboring evil intentions⁷ within it. But in a crowd, those people would always have to hide their sinister thoughts, especially in a place like a survivor base, which needed a veneer of stability to survive in the apocalypse.

Ren Chenxi rushed, finally arriving at the service area before dark. She couldn’t help it. She had expected the drive to H City to take longer, but she never imagined that just the trip from the Y City scenic area to the gas station would waste so much time.

Aside from that first cleared stretch of highway, the road conditions afterward were terrible. In addition to the chaotically jammed cars, Ren Chenxi spotted a large number of red dots from a distance. Whether they were zombies or humans, she wisely chose to drive directly into the roadside weeds, navigating around them using the mini-map until she finally reached a relatively normal section of highway again, shaken but unharmed.

As she was about to reach the gas station, Ren Chenxi’s brow furrowed. She really had been too naive. She had just encountered a gang like that on the road, so how could she have been so full of wishful thinking⁸, believing this gas station would be perfectly fine, just waiting for her to refuel? According to the mini-map, there were already quite a few people or zombies inside. For all she knew, after two years, the gas station might have been completely emptied of its fuel!

But even with so many red dots in the gas station, Ren Chenxi decided to risk spending the night there. First, it was the only service area nearby. Second, it was still a long way from the city, and she really didn’t want to travel after dark. This service area was undoubtedly her best resting spot for the night.

Besides, if she was already encountering so many red dots in a suburban area with relatively low foot traffic, she couldn’t be sure what the situation would be like in the city. After all, Y City didn’t have a single survivor base.

There was one more thing that bothered her: mixed in with all the red dots were several yellow dots⁹.

If my experience from other games holds true, these yellow dots should represent neutral¹⁰ entities, right? As long as you don’t attack them, they won’t turn into hostile¹¹ red dots. In that case, I can be sure that most of these red dots are probably human.

To deal with humans, she probably didn’t need extremely powerful cards like the Explosion Card¹², right? A fist-sized rock would be enough to injure or knock someone out; it could even kill. She’d had a week to adapt, and she’d already killed over thirty zombies. The timidity she felt when she first arrived in the apocalypse was long gone. She even felt no guilt at the murderous thought that flashed through her mind.

After all, this is a game world, isn’t it?

Having made up her mind to confront this group of humans, Ren Chenxi quietly parked the off-road vehicle in a patch of wild grass. After gathering a large pile of rocks and bricks, all bigger than her fist, and storing them in her backpack¹³, she began crouching her body¹⁴, approaching the service area with light hands and light feet¹⁵.

The service area was small—just a gas station and, behind it, a two-story building with two sections side-by-side. That was it. A supermarket sign hung over the first floor of one section, and a double-decker bus was parked at the entrance. Using the cover of the surrounding weeds, Ren Chenxi slowly approached the bus.

Just as she was getting close, a woman’s terrified screams and cries erupted from the supermarket. They were immediately followed by an impatient man’s angry roar. Before Ren Chenxi could even make out what he was yelling, the woman’s screams came to an abrupt end.

After a moment of silence, several men’s strange, cackling laughter broke out. At the same time, Ren Chenxi noticed that one of the six yellow dots on her mini-map had vanished.

She didn’t even need to look to guess what had happened in the supermarket.

In this apocalypse, is the most terrifying thing really humanity itself?

She checked the cards in her backpack again. Before leaving the hotel, she had saved up five Flash Cards¹⁶. After a moment’s thought, she took one out, clutching it tightly in her left hand. At the same time, half a brick with sharp, jagged edges appeared in her right.

A Flash Card could blind targets for twenty seconds. Since the red dots were all clustered so close together, one card should be enough. As long as she could knock out all dozen or so of them within those twenty seconds.

The supermarket had windows, so Ren Chenxi didn’t dare leave the cover of the wild grass. After two years, the grass had grown tall enough to completely hide her figure. Not wanting to expose herself by accident, she continued to follow the line of grass, moving inch by inch toward the windowless side wall of the supermarket.

However, before she could reach the wall, a man emerged from the supermarket. He was viciously yanking a girl’s hair, dragging her toward the double-decker bus at the entrance. In a strange, taunting voice, he warned, “Behave yourself. You saw what happened to that stinking whore¹⁷ just now, didn’t you? If you don’t want to die, and then become our rations¹⁸ after you’re dead, you’d better cooperate with me…”

The girl in his grip had red-rimmed eyes and said nothing, but her gaze was filled with defiance, fury, and hatred.

The man’s few words told Ren Chenxi exactly what kind of group she had run into. No, not a group—a bunch of human scum, mere beasts¹⁹!

Faced with beasts who would violate women and even eat people, Ren Chenxi could definitely be ruthless! In her eyes, beasts like these didn’t even count as human!

She continued to inch forward carefully, adjusting her position. Then, just a second before the man could drag the girl onto the bus, Ren Chenxi hurled the brick in her right hand, its sharp edge aimed straight at him. Even though her original strength wouldn’t have been enough to throw it that far, the brick still hit the man squarely on his temple²⁰. And from the looks of it, the impact was anything but light.

The man didn’t even have time to make a sound before he fell sideways, sent sprawling by the force of the brick. On the mini-map, the red dot representing him vanished.

The man’s death didn’t alert the other red dots inside the supermarket. He had pushed the door when he left, leaving it ajar, so even the sound of the brick hitting the ground went unnoticed. Only the girl he had been dragging, now free from his grasp, froze for a moment before looking warily in the direction the brick had come from.

Ren Chenxi chose that moment to reveal herself briefly in the grass. She put a finger to her lips in a shushing gesture before ducking back down. The girl understood instantly. She didn’t run, nor did she return to the supermarket. Instead, she dragged the man’s body onto the double-decker bus.

Ren Chenxi noticed that on the mini-map, the yellow dot representing the girl had turned into a green dot²¹.

Green… that means she holds no malice toward me, and maybe even a little bit of goodwill²², right?

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