Rick returned from the forest at dusk. Two guards opened the new gate to Pineview Base as soon as they saw him, and he greeted them, while they both looked scared at the gray wolf in his arms. Rick then quickly went to his house, leaving Fulmen in the garage. But not without giving his mother and sister a long explanation about the new resident...
Afterward, he met up with Joe and Ethan and went to dinner at Maya's new clinic. After a simple dinner with few exaggerations, they had a long conversation, and everyone concluded that Maya should be the one to get the first level 3 crystal.
"Are you sure?" The doctor asked, a little worried, looking at the crystal that would allow her to enter a new realm of power... She had barely had time to digest the level 2 crystal that Rick gave her and Ethan after returning.
"We don't know what power Ethan and Joe will have. Additionally, as a doctor, you can conduct all the necessary tests and gather more detailed information about the Universal Force, which will ultimately benefit everyone. Not to mention that your power was something related to healing, this will be more useful in the early stages of the apocalypse…"
"Ethan and I will follow Rick when he sets up a new base in the city, we will become level 3 when we are there." Joe comforted.
After hesitating, Maya finally swallowed the crystal and remained silent as a wave of new sensations invaded her senses, now several times more acute…
As dinner was already over, Rick and Joe went to the place where Ethan was working to see his progress with the energy that the houses needed…
"I can already turn everything back on by connecting the space power core to the old power source that came from the old hydroelectric plant. But that would turn on all the power, including the houses that we are not using. Although our power source is inexhaustible, the lights in the houses and public lighting would be a problem, just as you warned us before…"
"There is no need to cut off the power to the houses outside the wall… We will soon create a second wall, and the entire Village will be part of the base. Have you thought of a way to create a new, simpler type of heating?" Rick asked.
"We can install a water heating system. Using a single boiler on the Base that heats water for all the houses, if the pipes are installed in the right places, we will not only provide hot water for everyone but also keep them warm, two birds with one stone. However, we will need a substantial amount of materials to complete this task within two weeks. I will need a lot of labor too."
"Your brother was an engineering student, right? Starting tomorrow, put him to work with you, and give Joe a list of all the materials you need and how much labor you will need. Although we have 120 people on the Base, most of them are children and elderly… So I don't know if I will be able to supply all the labor you will need."
"To make the roofs, we will need all the carpenters and builders we have," Joe said worriedly.
"Let's give up on the roofs of the houses, it's too unfeasible and we don't have time… Let's build an elevated covered walkway that passes through all the houses, preventing the citizens of the base from walking in the open when they leave their houses. That way, we only need to reinforce the roofs and windows of their houses and put some insulating material on the glass to keep the lights from the houses hidden." Rick said after thinking of the best solution.
"Did you say we need to deal with 1-2 meters of snow?" Joe said as he thought about the methods of building the walkway and reinforcing the houses…
"No, I said 1-2 stories of snow…"
"Gulp!"
"That's bad, not all houses have two stories… That's just how much lumber we'll need… And without tools like excavators, how are we going to carry it all… Can your bracelet be transferred to other people?"
"That's not possible, it only works on me, and you, my friend, are still thinking about things on a human scale…" Rick smiled and threw Joe a small fanny pack. When Joe opened it, he saw that it was full of level 1 crystals and even had some level 2 ones…
Apart from the 2 level 2 crystals that Rick gave to Maya and Ethan, he had killed quite a few animals of that level in the forest today. The level 1 ones were already the majority, and there were no longer any level 0 mutants after almost 10 days since everything started… Well, there were, but only the zombie humans, and they would be survivors who were bitten recently…
"Well… With this, I think even the elderly will be able to contribute…" Joe said with a smile.
"Let's start tomorrow then."
And with that final statement from Rick, time advanced quickly at Pineview Base… If one stopped to observe the place from afar, they would see several men and women digging trenches with inexhaustible vigor, cutting down trees extremely quickly, and carrying several huge items on their backs as if they were weightless…
***
Kaelor - Coastal City of Jyera, located one thousand eight hundred kilometers away from SC12.
Inside the city's sewer system, a man named Marco was constantly running through the darkness... His breathing was labored, and he pressed his left hand to a wound in his chest.
The wound had gone through one of Jyera's best bulletproof vests and seriously injured him. The only reason he was still alive was because of the strange, incomplete memories he had started having 7 days before this whole hell began...
At first, he thought the memories were a type of psychosis and that he was perhaps beginning to develop some kind of schizophrenia... But he soon realized that all of this was too real to be just an illness...
Still fearful, he took his instincts into account and deduced that he was seeing some kind of future apocalypse.
Acting like someone paranoid, Marco began to spend part of his financial funds creating various precautions and countermeasures... Although most of them were simple things like preparing hideouts and stocking supplies in strategic locations throughout the city of Kaelor. He still left things more difficult for the day when it all began…
When the chaos finally began, he broke into the house of an acquaintance who was a federal agent and stole the valuable vest he was wearing. He then used the old vehicle he had prepared and went to a gun store, ready to arm himself and equip himself for what was to come. But he never expected to be the target of some kind of drone…
Being the target of something so terrifying, Marco, who had now been seriously injured, fled to the sewers in a desperate attempt to escape the drone's sight. But little did he know that another hell awaited him inside that place. At every corner he turned inside the dark place, he was chased and attacked by several rats. What kept him safe from the rodents was that everything he wore had extra protection against their bites. But even his protections were getting worn out.
In the middle of the long and torturous escape, he also managed to kill a rat with red eyes and collected something familiar thanks to his memories of the future... After consuming the mysterious crystal, Marco finally felt his wound improve and gained renewed strength to finally escape the terrible sewers.
But Marco's luck had failed him, as soon as he left the sewers, he was surrounded by a small horde of zombies and ended up being bitten...
[FUCK! SONS OF BITCHES!]
Marco roared with rage and entered a frenzied state of killing, while killing several zombies, he was bitten a couple more times. Little by little, he also felt the fever take over his body, leaving him weaker and weaker... He knew he didn't have much time left before becoming one of those abominations, using the only firearm he had in his possession and his hunting knife. He continued the massacre until he had eliminated dozens of zombies, before finally losing his strength and falling to his knees on the ground.
The fever was making him start to hallucinate, because he saw something unbelievable before losing consciousness…
A woman wearing a worn-out spacesuit walked among the zombies without being attacked, as if she were one of them… She was 1.67 meters tall, white, had red eyes, and blond hair.
When the woman reached where the man had fallen to the ground unconscious, she stretched one of her hands close to his mouth, and made the nail of one of her fingers elongate, making a cut in the palm of her hand and letting her blood run into the unconscious Marco's mouth…
Reflected in the woman's red eyes was a blue system screen:
Jyera Apocalypse System
Type: Symbiosis