Chapter 162: The Destroyer

In the apocalyptic R3 tier, entities can be subdivided into five distinct evolutionary categories. For Xie Han, the one that left the deepest impression was the Controller. Their exceptional planning abilities often resulted in humans being unwittingly surrounded. Furthermore, their physical appearance differed very little from ordinary zombies; during combat, they would keep their distance from humans and evade danger. Due to these various factors, eliminating a Controller was an exceptionally difficult task unless special circumstances arose.

Compared to the other types like Breakers and Hunters, Xie Han was even less willing to face a Controller. Its mental-type attacks were silent and stealthy, easily ambushing and killing a person. Such mental attacks were extremely difficult to dodge, and unless someone possessed extraordinarily strong sensory perception, they typically had no way to evade this method of attack. Despite his great confidence in his own abilities, Xie Han was not certain he could dodge a Controller's attacks every single time.

Looking at the tens of thousands of zombies surrounding him like a tidal wave, the entire factory building stood like an isolated island. Although Xie Han felt tense, he was by no means terrified. More than half a year of combat with zombies had long since stripped away any fear of these creatures that initially seemed extremely repulsive. One could say his objective had indirectly been achieved, even though it involved a bit too much unexpected development.

Standing on the roof of the factory, Xie Han glanced around. Just over ten meters away stood another building close to his location. Estimating the distance, Xie Han knew that with a sprint, clearing this gap of more than ten meters would pose absolutely no problem. Having secured an escape route, Xie Han retrieved a beam sniper rifle from his spatial storage, intending to pick out the Controller from within the massive horde of zombies. However, this proved far too difficult. The endless, surging tide of zombies filling the entire perimeter forced Xie Han to put the beam sniper rifle away in frustration. "I'll let you off lucky this time." Xie Han had no desire to waste excessive amounts of time searching for the Controller.

During the time Xie Han spent searching for the Controller, the zombies finally surged to the base of the factory building.

Amidst their impacts, the entire structure began to shake. The factory's steel framework emitted creaking sounds, and it could be knocked down by them at any moment. Xie Han was startled; if this building were knocked down and he fell into the zombie horde, even if he wasn't torn apart and devoured, sustaining severe injuries all over his body would be inescapable.

"Haha, Grandpa isn't going to play with you monsters anymore." Xie Han took a few steps back and broke into a fierce sprint. He leaped across the air for over ten meters, landing steadily on the roof of a small three-story factory building. Accompanied by a loud crash, the previous factory building collapsed right after Xie Han left it, sending up a massive cloud of dust.

Before the rumbling sound of that factory's collapse had completely faded, another loud crash echoed from not far away. A landmark giant statue belonging to the Southern Steam Turbine Factory came crashing down, smashing into the concrete ground and shattering into pieces.

Xie Han turned his head to look. He caught sight of a statue fragment weighing well over a ton being hoisted high into the air and then hurled fiercely forward. Whistling through the air, it was thrown over a hundred meters, smashing ruthlessly toward his position. It wasn't until the statue fragment was hurled that Xie Han noticed a massive shadow standing right beside the fallen statue, its two green eyes locked firmly onto him.

"Boom..." Xie Han felt a sudden explosion inside his head, as if something had just clicked. Seeing the giant statue fragment about to crash down upon him, he quickly used his fastest speed to swerve to the right, sprinting toward the other end of the three-story factory building. Just as Xie Han moved away, the statue fragment slammed down. Following a violent crash, half the roof of the building was destroyed, and the impact even punched through the floors below, stirring up billowing clouds of dust and smoke.

Despite dodging quickly, this attack still left Xie Han in a wretched state. The oncoming dust covered his head and face completely, and a thick layer of it splattered across his clothes as well.

At that moment, Xie Han experienced an extremely ominous feeling. It was the first time since his arrival in the apocalyptic world that he had felt a crisis of such oppressive magnitude, akin to death lingering right above his head. When dealing with two Hunters, Xie Han had only felt fear, yet without this palpable sense of impending death. But this time, that feeling was so close—so close it made Xie Han breathless. Even though that towering figure was over a hundred meters away, Xie Han could clearly sense the dangerous aura radiating from it.

"Damn it. Things have gotten majorly out of hand this time." The way events had unfolded completely exceeded Xie Han's expectations. The reason was simple: he had initially thought a Controller was manipulating everything. But who could have predicted the sudden appearance of the towering shadow, which made his heart nearly freeze over.

Near the shattered statue, a massive zombie standing three and a half meters tall was glaring with a pair of mixed green and red eyes. Its entire body was stark naked, revealing grey, scale-like skin. Its two giant hands, in Xie Han's view, could easily tear anything to shreds. Yet this was not what sent a chill through Xie Han's entire body. Perched upon the shoulder of this massive Destroyer was a petite Controller, its eyes rolling around as they locked their gaze entirely upon Xie Han.

This petite Controller was dressed in a tattered little dress. From its slightly distorted face and the sparse strands of yellowish hair hanging from its head, everything indicated that this Controller had, in life, been a cute little girl.

Arriving at this conclusion, Xie Han was completely dumbfounded. Child-type zombies were exceedingly rare, primarily because they were originally a vulnerable group; during the infection, many could not endure the XR virus and died directly. Only a very small number of children with relatively high physical fitness might evolve into zombies. Given that the probability of even becoming a zombie was extremely low, the sudden appearance of a Controller evolved from a child was something Xie Han could not have anticipated under any circumstances.

The massive Destroyer was actually paired with the Controller. Given the Controller's diminutive size, even when seated on the shoulder of the three-and-a-half-meter-tall Destroyer, it only reached the height of the Destroyer's ear. This Controller was treated like an infant pampered by its parents, placed to sit upon the shoulder and carried along wherever the Destroyer walked.

Seeing that its initial attack missed, the Destroyer once again utilized its terrifying strength to hoist an even larger statue fragment. After taking a few fierce steps forward, it hurled the object with tremendous force. The entire statue fragment, weighing well over a ton and a half, whistled through the air accompanied by a massive shadow, smashing down toward him.

If a Hunter's strength could already be considered immense, then seeing the Destroyer's power now made it clear that a Hunter's strength was merely dwarfed by comparison. This statue fragment weighing over a ton and a half was far beyond what Xie Han could block or resist. Almost the moment the Destroyer hoisted the fragment and made its move, Xie Han realized things were going south. Without a second thought, he utilized the tiny remnant of the factory roof to execute a brief, explosive sprint. Pushing himself to the limit, he leaped over twenty meters away, crashing fiercely toward a dormitory building.

Giving Xie Han no time to react, his entire body smashed directly into a fourth-floor room window of the dormitory building. With a loud clatter, the anti-theft security grille on the window was deformed by Xie Han's impact, sending a wave of soreness surging through his entire body that nearly made him cry out. Quick-witted and agile, he grabbed the deformed security grille on momentum and gave it a violent yank, tearing the warped metal completely apart before diving headfirst inside.

Outside, the roof of the factory where Xie Han had just been standing—already half-destroyed—was teetering on the edge of collapse. Hit squarely by the ton-and-a-half statue fragment from above, the entire structure gave way with a crash. The steel pillars supporting the building snapped, and the whole edifice collapsed with a thunderous roar.

The moment Xie Han lunged onto the balcony of this dormitory room, he felt a dazzling array of bright colors fluttering before his eyes, rushing straight to cover his head and face. Yanking these items away from his head, he looked closely and discovered they were bras and underwear of various colors and styles. These undergarments emitted a thick, musty odor; having hung there for nearly four years with the windows closed, they had surprisingly escaped corrosion.

"Spit, spit, spit..." Xie Han threw all the undergarments in his hand onto the floor and bolted swiftly into the room. Evidently, this dormitory building belonged to female employees. In modern times, Xie Han would have been thrilled, but right now he couldn't muster even an ounce of interest. After kicking open the room door, he rushed out and sprinted wildly down the corridor toward the opposite end.

Unsurprisingly, another massive statue fragment smashed fiercely into the room Xie Han had just leaped through, shattering the balcony and leaving the interior of the room broken and in utter ruins.

Xie Han licked his lips to calm his tense state of mind, then used brute force to snap the lock of another room, gently pushed the door open, and slipped inside in a crouch. The beam sniper rifle silently materialized in Xie Han's hands. Cautiously approaching the balcony, he mounted the beam sniper rifle and, peering through the open window, locked the Destroyer's head into the scope's reticle. Just as he was about to press the trigger, he paused, shifting the crosshairs slightly upward to target the head of the Controller perched on the Destroyer's shoulder.

"May Buddha bless you to be reincarnated into peace soon, and may you be a happy, good child in your next life," Xie Han muttered silently to himself. Yet, the moment he pressed the firing button, the Destroyer abruptly raised its hand to block in front of the Controller ahead of time. The beam shot out from the balcony window, striking the Destroyer's palm with absolute precision.

There was no expected piercing effect; the impact of this beam left nothing more than a faint trace on the back of the Destroyer's gigantic hand.

Failing to score a hit on the first try, Xie Han immediately retracted the rifle back into his spatial storage, sprung to his feet, and bolted out the door once again. "Damn it, why is this Destroyer's sense of danger so sharp?" Xie Han cursed himself with regret. If he had managed to eliminate that Controller, the zombies across the entire heavy industrial park would have been nothing more than a scattered tray of sand, and once the New City military forces moved in, resolving the battle would have been an absolute breeze. Who could have anticipated that his sniper shot would actually be blocked by the Destroyer?

Although Xie Han was filled with vigilance toward this first-ever appearance of a Destroyer, and the creature gave him a deathly sense of crisis, the prior appearance of two R3s seemed to have dulled his judgment, leading him to believe that the feeling of dread had been caused by the simultaneous presence of two R3s. Having previously culled R3s, Xie Han's understanding of a Destroyer was essentially that its physical strength exceeded other R3s and its defense was slightly higher. However, its speed was extremely sluggish, with a running speed of only twenty kilometers per hour. In Xie Han's eyes, it was merely slightly faster than a running human, completely incomparable to his own speed. It practically epitomized a sluggish R3 with delayed reflexes.

It was precisely this seemingly dismissive mindset that kept him from fleeing immediately; instead, after evacuating that room, he simply transitioned to another room to lie in wait.

Through the scope, Xie Han discovered that the Controller, which had previously been sitting on the Destroyer's shoulder, had vanished without a trace, leaving the shoulder completely empty. Meanwhile, Xie Han's previous attack seemed to have enraged the Destroyer. As if venting its frustration, it frantically began hurling the remaining statue fragments of the fallen monument toward the dormitory building where Xie Han was hiding. Smaller statue fragments were manageable, merely smashing individual rooms to smithereens. But the larger statue fragments directly carved massive chunks out of the dormitory building.

By the time the Destroyer had exhausted all the surrounding statue fragments, the entire dormitory building looked as though it had undergone a fierce aerial bombardment; " riddled with bullet holes" was nowhere near sufficient to describe its current state. Whether it was due to Xie Han's good luck or something else, amidst this frenzied barrage, the room he was in was only grazed slightly. After breaking out in a cold sweat, Xie Han found an opening. "Heh, looks like there are no more fragments left for you to throw, right?"

A smug Xie Han lined up his crosshairs with the Destroyer's eyes. For zombies of the R3 tier and above, the eyes were likely their most vulnerable spot. However, the evolutionary process also reinforced the eyes, meaning ordinary bullets still could not inflict any real damage upon them. The firepower of the beam sniper rifle, on the other hand, was beyond question; when dealing with entities like Hunters, simply hitting the eyes could still inflict a certain degree of damage.

Hunters and Breakers possessed extremely high agility; they would either conceal themselves or run wildly like ghosts, making it exceptionally rare to get an opportunity to hit their eyes. Such R3 types spent very little time stationary, and even with a direct hit, the damage inflicted upon them was quite limited unless three or four consecutive shots struck the exact same eye to potentially cause massive trauma.

The Destroyer's seemingly clumsy movements, however, gave Xie Han an opportunity. Seemingly bewildered, the Destroyer stood foolishly in place. Given such an ideal opening, the beam sniper rifle—possessing virtually zero recoil—allowed Xie Han to precisely deliver a beam of light straight into the Destroyer's massive eye.

"Ha..." The visual light effects generated upon impact caused Xie Han a brief surge of smugness.

Yet Xie Han's triumph lasted less than a second. When he once again locked the crosshairs in his scope onto the Destroyer's head, he discovered with horror that the damage inflicted on the Destroyer by his previous attack was negligible. It was as if he had merely given the Destroyer an itch; it failed to produce even a hint of a painful expression on the creature's face.

If Xie Han had wanted to attract this Destroyer's attention, his attack had certainly achieved that much. Without warning, the Destroyer broke into a run, its gigantic frame stomping onto the concrete surface and leaving faint impressions behind. Its speed was not fast, yet it charged toward the crumbling dormitory building like a slow-moving bulldozer possessing unstoppable momentum.

Facing the Destroyer charging in a straight line toward his hiding spot, Xie Han gritted his teeth. "I want to see just how many beam attacks your eyes can withstand." Instead of retreating, Xie Han kept the Destroyer's eyes locked in his riflescope, firing beam after beam of light with precise hits to the creature's eyes.

Reality seemed somewhat at odds with expectation: after suffering four or five consecutive beam attacks, the Destroyer showed not the slightest trace of injury. Like a ramming bulldozer, it slammed fiercely into the dilapidated, tottering dormitory building.

Xie Han felt the entire building tremble as waves of concrete debris rained down from above.

Acting as though it had gone berserk, the Destroyer successfully smashed through the wall of the first floor before winding up its massive fist and slamming it viciously into a concrete support pillar. With its immense strength, a mere one or two punches were all it took to snap a concrete pillar as thick as a man's waist. Operating like a cutting machine, the Destroyer used its gigantic fists to pulverize any obstacle in its path. Amidst a chorus of muffled crashes, the dormitory building began to list to one side.

Still stranded on the fourth floor, Xie Han felt the dormitory building on the verge of falling apart. The sounds of demolition echoing from below made the building's ultimate fate painfully clear, prompting him to bolt from the room toward the exit. At that moment, half of the dormitory building's ground floor was finally smashed to pieces by the Destroyer. Bereft of half its concrete pillars, the structure could no longer bear the immense weight from above, collapsing downward with a deafening roar.

"Do or die!" Xie Han roared at the top of his lungs. Amidst the collapsing structure, he hurled himself off the fourth-floor corridor straight down toward the concrete path below.

The moment he made contact with the ground, a wave of numbness surged through his legs, followed instantly by searing pain. Rolling several times, Xie Han ignored the pain in his legs and bolted away in a wild sprint, putting ample distance between himself and the collapse zone of the dormitory building.

Confirming he was safely out of the blast radius, Xie Han looked back. Through the glass windows of a lower floor, he caught sight of the Destroyer, which was still frantically pummeling the remaining concrete pillars. As the entire dormitory building collapsed downward, the Destroyer—caught deep within the ground floor—was swallowed up without warning by the cascading mass of debris, vanishing amidst the thunderous crashing and billowing billows of dust.