In the ruins of a Yamato Empire compound…
Ethan looked at the storage ring on his finger—at the crystal cores piled inside until they were practically overflowing—and smiled.
Turns out, raiding pays better than honest work.
After wiping out a few compounds, his storage ring was almost packed solid with cores.
Sure, most of them were low-tier, but back ho they could fuse them into higher-tier cores.
Atlas City's fusion tech had already reached the point where they could synthesize Tier 11 crystal cores. As long as they had enough raw cores, they could crank out a whole batch of Tier 11 Enhanced.
Yamato probably didn't have fusion technology yet. Otherwise these compounds wouldn't be sitting on mountains of cores like this. Worked out nicely for him.
And even though Yamato's population was "only" a bit over a hundred million, the land area was tiny. The population density was way higher than the Atlas Federation's.
In Yamato, small compounds didn't really survive. The ones still standing were almost all large-scale compounds—each one built on top of piles of zombie corpses.
Which ant one thing:
They had cores. A lot of them.
On top of that, Ethan had spotted a few Awakened with genuinely useful abilities. Those he didn't kill—he had the team break their limbs and lock them up.
They were high-tier Awakened. They wouldn't die anyti soon.
When they headed back to Fallen Star City, they'd bring them along.
A single flying mount could grab two people with its talons. Five mounts ant ten prisoners. And if that still wasn't enough, Skinny Pete could always control a few extra birds.
Awakened weren't just loot. They were the kind of resource you couldn't replace. One dead ant one less forever.
So whenever Ethan saw an Awakened, he usually kept them alive.
Bring them back, and Fallen Star City's second line of combat power could beco an all-Awakened force. Any extras could be handed out as rewards to people who'd been loyal and contributed the most.
A prize like that?
It would buy devotion down to the bone. The kind where soone would die for you without hesitating.
Awakened were in a completely different league from normal Enhanced. Becoming one ant you'd actually made it—really stood up in this world. Who wouldn't want that?
Other compounds would be lucky to have three or four Awakened.
anwhile, Fallen Star City could have a hundred-plus.
Just imagining it made Ethan feel great.
These past few days, they'd been rampaging across Yamato—burning, killing, looting. The body count was already over a million.
To Yamato, they were demons.
To the Atlas Federation, they were heroes.
Ethan didn't care how outsiders labeled him. All he'd done was mirror what Yamato had done to the Atlas Federation back then.
No—what they were doing still didn't even co close.
At least Fallen Star Squad were "only" killing and robbing. They weren't experinting on living people. They weren't raping children or the elderly. They weren't doing the truly filthy things.
He could be a bandit.
He wouldn't be an animal.
"Mount up. Next compound," Ethan said, swinging onto Flint's back again.
The others climbed onto their flying mounts as well.
Ethan's goal in Yamato was simple: wipe every compound off the map and force them to et the zombies face-to-face.
But when they reached the next compound, they got a surprise.
It was empty.
"Oh?" Ethan stared into the hollow compound, genuinely caught off guard. "They ran ahead of ti?"
Honestly… he almost respected the nerve.
Evacuating an entire city in the apocalypse wasn't so easy decision. If your luck was bad, you were basically gift-wrapping yourself for the zombie hordes.
They landed and searched the place anyway.
Anything valuable had already been taken.
"Looks like they left yesterday," soone said after checking the traces. "But this compound was big—at least four hundred thousand people. They can't have gotten far."
Ethan's eyes narrowed.
"Then we chase."
They climbed back onto their flying mounts and followed the trail.
Half a million people on the move didn't exactly cover their tracks. The route was obvious—trampled ground, abandoned carts, scattered supplies, the kind of ss a mass evacuation always left behind.
Maybe they were running to a bigger compound to beg for protection.
Maybe they were trying to hide sowhere remote.
Either way, it made no difference to Ethan. They were all targets.
And with flying mounts? Even if the evac started yesterday, they weren't getting away.
Yamato's territory wasn't that big to begin with, and it was ocean on all sides. There was nowhere to disappear to—unless they slipped into the Void Realm.
Honestly, Ethan almost hoped they had. If the trail led them to a Void Realm entrance, that'd be killing two birds with one stone.
They flew on. Along the way they passed a few more compounds.
All empty.
Like people were evacuating in groups, domino-style.
Which… yeah. Against Fallen Star Squad, what else could you do besides run?
After more than half an hour in the air, they finally saw it.
At the foot of a massive mountain, a crowd spread out like a dark carpet—packed so tightly it seed to swallow the whole base of the slope.
Conservatively?
Over five hundred thousand people.
Big Mike squinted. "Uh… are these people stupid? Why'd they all co here? There's nowhere to hide."
"Who knows," soone said. "Maybe they finally realized they can't outrun us."
Sean tilted his head. "That mountain… isn't that Mount Fuji? I heard Yamato treats it like a holy mountain. Maybe they ran here to pray for blessings. Like the mountain's gonna protect them."
"…Honestly?" Big Mike said. "That sounds dumb enough to be true."
Garrick stared for a second, then blurted, "Wait—this thing's… erupting?"
"Huh?" Big Mike frowned. "What's erupting?"
"Fuji," Garrick said, sounding almost offended nobody else noticed. "It's an active volcano. Supposedly it hasn't erupted in like three hundred years. Looks like it's going now—and it's not a little one either."
"…."
Chris shot him a look. "You'd better be talking about a volcano eruption."
Garrick blinked. "What else would I—never mind."
Ethan didn't even bother reacting. He kept his eyes on the crowd below. "Doesn't matter if it's erupting or not. If they picked a nice spot for their own mass grave…"
His voice went flat.
"Then we'll do them the favor."
"Yes!"
Killing had already beco routine for them.
And killing Yamato?
That ca even easier.
Ethan lifted his hand. "Kill."
They dove.
Down below, the people at Fuji's base saw the squad coming and pure panic rippled through the mass of bodies.
"Didn't the Pri Minister say if we ca here, they'd send rescue?" soone shouted, voice cracking. "So why is nobody here?!"
"I don't know!" another scread back. "They told us to wait—that they had a way to deal with them!"
"Well what the hell is this, then? They're already here! Where's the rescue?!"
"…!"
A few people's faces twisted as the truth sank in.
"Bastards… we got abandoned!"
"Then fight!" soone roared, forcing courage into his lungs. "We've got numbers! What are we afraid of?!"
"Kill them!"
No one just stood there and waited to die. A storm of skills erupted upward—fire, lightning, blades of wind, all of it thrown at the incoming mounts.
Big Mike snorted. "Like ants trying to stop a storm."
He swept his hand.
Rain of Flas poured from the sky, slamming into the crowd below.
Anyone it touched didn't even have ti to scream. They burned down to ash instantly.
Skinny Pete wasn't about to be outdone. He flicked his wrist, and a massive tornado ford right in the middle of the crowd, sucking people in by the dozens—then shredding them into bloody confetti.
Garrick moved at the sa ti.
teors rained down in a brutal barrage, smashing craters into the earth. Anyone caught under one was flattened into at paste.
Those three were Fallen Star Squad's nastiest crowd-clearers. In a battle like this, their value shot through the roof—more destructive than anyone else on the team.
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