Apocalypse King: Recruiting S-Tier Beauties With My Ruler System
Chapter 139: Into the Nest

Chapter 139: Into the Nest

The third floor was too quiet.

Shen Yifei moved ahead of me, spear angled low, her steps careful and light. Jiang Roulan kept to the left, hugging the storefronts, her tonfa in hand. Tang Wei brought up the rear. She kept her pistol holstered, one hand on the machete strapped across her back. No one spoke.

The layout was worse than I remembered. Metal trash bins were overturned. Paper signs rotted off display windows. Shelves stripped clean. But nothing about it looked rushed. No panic. Just... emptied. Like someone had erased the life from the place, piece by piece.

"Don’t see any bodies," Tang Wei said, voice just above a breath.

I didn’t answer. Neither did the others.

It wasn’t a question. It was her version of a warning.

A children’s shoe sat at the entrance of a store called "Little Tails." The size was too small for anyone over five. No blood. Just placed there. Facing outward.

Shen Yifei froze at the corridor’s bend and held up one hand.

We stopped instantly.

I moved beside her, crouched low. She didn’t look at me — just nodded ahead.

A movement. Thin. Low. Behind the sagging edge of a tarp near the broken rail.

It didn’t shuffle.

It ducked.

Roulan’s hand inched toward her SMG.

I shook my head once.

Too loud.

We waited.

The tarp swayed for a moment, then stilled. Nothing came out.

Tang Wei stepped beside me, crouched low, eyes scanning the angles.

"They’re hiding," she murmured.

I nodded once. We moved again. Slower now.

Whatever was here hadn’t left.

It had gone quiet.

There was something wrong with this situation... I didn’t like it, and when I glanced over. I couldn’t see Qinglan’s group anymore.

"Let’s move."

We kept moving.

Tang Wei dropped back a little, letting Shen Yifei and Jiang Roulan stay ahead. I stayed close to the middle, keeping pace, trying not to think about how deep the silence had settled into my spine.

The air didn’t move.

Somewhere behind the walls, I swore I heard water dripping. But when we passed the next junction, there was no leak. Just a cracked floor tile. Some dirty trail curving into an old cafe with all its chairs missing.

We hadn’t seen a single corpse.

Not one.

No groaners. No crawlers. Not even the smell. Just mould. Damp wood. Rotted plastic from old signage that hadn’t been touched in weeks.

But someone had been here.

Something.

Jiang Roulan crouched beside a knocked-over display rack. Her fingers touched the edge of the broken plastic, then tapped the tile beside it. Dried fluid, not blood. Something thicker. Mucus-like. Black, but flaked at the edges like it had dried too fast.

She didn’t say anything. Just stood again and kept moving.

Shen Yifei glanced at me, her face set. Focused. She wasn’t scared. But her hand hadn’t left her spear since we entered.

We passed a toy store with shattered glass framing the entrance. The mannequins inside had been knocked down — all of them face down, arms bent inwards like they’d been rearranged.

A faint sound echoed from somewhere below us.

It wasn’t a scream.

Just a scrape.

The wet and sharp echo lasted two seconds. Maybe three.

Then gone.

We all stopped at once.

Tang Wei pressed her back to the wall beside a deactivated elevator, her hand hovering near her pistol.

Shen Yifei didn’t move, but her blue eyes were focused like torches.

I scanned the upper walkway, the shadows behind broken skylights.

The flicker of one failing light was all the movement I could see.

Nothing ahead.

No movement.

But my instincts didn’t care, and the tingling feeling of my danger sense, also the visual ripples from my Predator’s Sense, revealed something.

"Something’s above us," I said, voice low.

Jiang Roulan looked up, eyes scanning the decorative arch near the food court sign ahead.

Then she nodded, once.

I tilted my chin toward the corridor to the left — a blind corner, a stair access that might lead to the utility rooms. We moved again. Slowly. Tang Wei checked our rear, eyes sharp.

Just before we passed the corner, I looked back.

And something was there.

Not in full.

Just the edge of a shadow.

A pale hand pulling back into the vent shaft above the hallway we’d crossed twenty seconds ago.

No, my hunch wasn’t a mistake... "This bastard."

"What?" Tang Wei looked back at me, her skin dripping with sweat from the horribly humid heat.

"The fucker... it’s trying to trap us."

The hand...

Not a trick of the light.

It had waited for us to pass.

"Tsk... damn this is annoying."

I couldn’t agree more, but we could only continue, aiming to understand what they were.

The hallway turned left into a wider space. Half the ceiling had collapsed — beams and broken tiles scattered across the floor like someone had tried to bury whatever lived beneath.

We stepped over them one by one.

Shen Yifei led us in, her spear angled low and steady. Though she didn’t hesitate, Yifei’s speed decreased the closer we got to our goal. She tipped her head every few seconds as if listening to the distant sounds, or footsteps that didn’t exist.

Tang Wei swept the corners. Her blade stayed sheathed across her back, but her fingers curled around the handle.

Jiang Roulan glanced back at me. No words. Just a quick look. She didn’t like this either.

We passed the skeletal remains of an information kiosk. Someone had scrawled something in black marker across the wall behind it, but half the message had been scratched out. I could only read the last line:

"...they don’t make noise unless you do."

My fingers clenched unconsciously.

Shen Yifei suddenly stopped.

She raised her left hand slightly, palm facing down. A signal to freeze.

We halted behind her. I followed her eyes.

Down the corridor, something stood just out of the light.

A human shape. Slender. Still.

We didn’t breathe.

Shen Yifei took a single step forward.

It moved.

But not toward us.

The figure turned sharply and walked away — fast and quiet, vanishing around the next bend without a single groan, growl, or stagger.

"What the hell..." Jiang Roulan whispered.

"Was that—" Tang Wei started, but didn’t finish.

It hadn’t acted like a groaner. It didn’t lunge. It didn’t charge. It turned and left — like it knew we were too strong or too early.

Shen Yifei exhaled.

"They’re leading us."

We moved again, slower than before. We didn’t speak.

I kept thinking about the hand I’d seen earlier, pulling into the vent. Now this — a runner with no interest in attacking.

The mall didn’t feel dead anymore.

It felt aware.

As if we stepped into the belly of a beast, and it was trying to devour us with its stomach acid and enzymes.

The layout made less sense the deeper we moved. Shops weren’t ransacked — they were empty, with objects missing in patterns. Storage rooms cleared out. Shelves rearranged.

A stack of old mannequins leaned against a broken coffee stand, arms out like they’d been set there on purpose.

Shen Yifei pointed ahead.

Two staircases descended toward the second floor.

The air was colder near the rail. Something below us waited. Not moving. Not breathing.

Just... watching.

"We’re being pulled in," I said.

Tang Wei nodded grimly.

"Then pull back," Jiang Roulan muttered.

"No," I said. "Not yet."

I stared down into the dark.

"They want us to follow. So let’s follow and kill them all."

The whirring sound of my gauntlets spun to life, clicking softly as the charge built. Jiang Roulan looked over at me — her tense expression shifted. A half-smile crept up the side of her mouth, and the twitch in her fingers eased.

We descended the stairs in silence.

The lower floor felt worse. The shadows ran deeper between the storefronts. A few half-broken signs hung overhead — dangling, crooked, swaying slightly with no wind.

We didn’t hear breathing. No dragging footsteps. Just that pressure.

Like the mall itself was holding its breath.

A disgusting musky scent filled the air, it made my chest want to heave, and gag... like milk and raw fish left for months being placed beside a radiator.

We stepped past an abandoned shoe kiosk. A cracked mirror reflected our shapes at us, warped and too tall. Tang Wei raised one hand. Her voice came in a whisper.

"Something just ducked behind the elevator."

We kept moving.

Straight into it.