Apocalypse: My Golden Vision Sees Every Drop

Chapter 6: Tyrant

Infected could evolve too. Whether it was an Anomaly or a Licker, both were just evolved branches off the same root, different paths, same origin.

If ordinary infected were the slow, shambling type everyone pictured from old zombie movies, the high-tier ones belonged in a different category entirely, fast, vicious, nothing shambling about them.

The one saving grace: the brain stayed their weak point, no matter how far they evolved.

Right now, that blue card hovered above the thing's head, glowing bright in the dim room.

Jake gripped his crossbow, staying low as he crept toward the courtyard gate, angling for a clean shot. His focus narrowed down to a single point.

Now.

Fwip.

The bolt flew true.

It punched straight through the thing's skull. Its massive frame swayed for a beat before crashing to the floor.

A second later, the blue card dissolved into light and drifted into Jake's open palm, solidifying into a playing-card-sized rectangle.

The card showed a syringe, with two words printed beside it, Constitution.

"A Constitution card? Not bad. Better than an Intelligence card, at least."

Enhancement cards came in five flavors, tied to five core stats: Strength, Agility, Constitution, Perception, and Intelligence.

All five mattered in their own way, but for most survivors just trying to stay alive, the priority list wasn't close to even.

Given the choice, Jake would've picked Strength, Agility, or Perception over Constitution every time, those three did more heavy lifting for someone in his position day to day.

Constitution boosted disease and radiation resistance and sped up healing, genuinely useful, just leaning more defensive and passive. That made it the least glamorous of the bunch.

Intelligence sat dead last in popularity, mostly because nobody liked admitting they might need it.

That reputation wasn't entirely fair. A few dedicated card theorists in the Caravan had worked out that raising Intelligence sped up how fast a person picked up new skills.

Not just book smarts, anything technical. Driving, hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, archery, all of it.

It wasn't magic, though. It couldn't hand you a skill from thin air. You still had to actually learn something before Intelligence sped up the process, it just cut down on the fumbling in between.

Constitution +1

Jake activated the card the moment he had it. The boost was permanent either way, so there was no reason to sit on it and holding onto a visible card too long just invited trouble from anyone watching.

For a baseline adult, the average value across all five stats sat around 5. Each card bumped a stat by roughly 20 percent, about 1 point.

Where that number came from, nobody really knew for sure. Rumor had it a bunch of gym regulars had tested their max lifts before and after a Strength card and landed on that rough estimate, and it stuck.

Between bad sleep, worse food, and a lifestyle that hadn't involved much exercise even before the world ended, Jake figured his Constitution had probably capped out around 4 at best, the weakest of his five stats by a clear margin.

He hadn't been sitting idle these past three months, though. He'd already put a point into each of the other four attributes, meaning Constitution had fallen two points behind the rest.

That first point landed hard. The constant low-grade exhaustion, the sluggishness, the general sense of running on empty, all of it lifted almost immediately.

Even small nagging issues seemed to clear up. His eyesight, for one, he'd been mildly nearsighted before, bad enough that he needed glasses just to function, couldn't read small text on a phone screen from more than arm's length away.

After the point landed, everything sharpened noticeably.

"Okay. This Constitution thing is actually pretty solid."

One point completely flipped his opinion on the card type.

It was only once his vision cleared up that he noticed something in the far corner of the room, a body, half-buried under a pile of debris. Judging by the clothes, this wasn't a pre-collapse victim. The gear looked distinctly post-apocalypse.

Probably another scavenger who'd come through Millbrook looking for supplies and never made it out. Strange that he hadn't turned, though.

Jake crouched beside the body for a closer look. "Dead less than three days. Still fresh."

He found two grenades on the corpse, along with two pistol magazines and a mix of ammo, pistol rounds and rifle rounds both.

"This guy was carrying real firepower. So how'd he end up dead in here?" Jake frowned, uneasy.

Millbrook hadn't struck him as particularly dangerous. Infected numbers were low. A survivor packing this much gear should've had no trouble holding his own.

He grabbed the corpse by the leg and dragged it free of the rubble and that's when he saw it had no head. That explained why it hadn't turned.

Worse, the chest had caved in, a crater the size of a dinner plate punched clean through, deep enough that the spine underneath was almost certainly shattered.

And jammed into that crater, twisted and fused into the ruined flesh, sat the mangled remains of an assault rifle.

"That's... a rifle?" Jake's stomach dropped.

There was a gaping hole in the wall beside the body. Looking through it, he spotted a badly mangled head lying several feet away outside.

Piecing the wreckage together, the picture came together fast, and it wasn't pretty.

This guy had been ambushed by something with monstrous strength, no time to dodge, just enough time to instinctively raise the rifle sideways across his chest as a last-ditch shield.

It hadn't helped.

The impact had sent him flying clean through the wall, hard enough to separate his head from his body on the way.

What in the hell hit this hard?

Jake's pulse spiked, and one word surfaced in his mind before he could stop it.

"...A Tyrant?"

The second the thought landed, a full-body chill ran through him.

"No. Absolutely not staying in this place."

He grabbed his loot and bolted for the door at a dead sprint.

A Tyrant wasn't as physically massive as an Anomaly, but the sheer dread it put out was on a different level entirely.

High attack, high defense, fast on its feet, and worst of all, enough intelligence to actually think. That made it far more dangerous than an Anomaly, which mostly just ate and smashed whatever was in front of it.

Compared to a Tyrant, calling a Licker "dangerous" almost felt generous.

If something like that really was loose in Millbrook, the Caravan was about to take a beating it wouldn't easily recover from.