Reborn Apex: The City Is My Cage

Chapter 9: Blood on the Armory Snow

Jagged, black teeth ripped through the thick Kevlar as a pale, horrifying creature lunged at the armored truck’s windshield, smearing dark blood across the reinforced glass.

Ethan slammed hard on the brakes, the heavy transport vehicle skidding violently across the sheet-ice courtyard before coming to a dead stop just meters away from the blasted-open gates of the central armory.

The air outside was thick with the copper stench of fresh blood and frozen viscera. Strewn across the blood-stained snow were dozens of elite military operatives from Sector Command Alpha, their tactical gear ripped to shreds, their bodies half-devoured by the horde of nightmarish mutations that had breached the subterranean compound. These weren't ordinary infected or slow-moving ghouls from traditional horror fiction; these were apex frost-predators, human mutations genetically warped by the flash-freezing atmospheric anomaly, possessing blinding speed, bone-crushing strength, and an insatiable hunger for warm flesh.

Inside the driver's cab, Ethan’s face remained an unyielding mask of stone. In his previous life, these creatures—known as the Sub-Zero Stalkers—had not surfaced until the second month of the apocalypse, when humanity was already weak, starving, and unorganized. They had hunted survivors through the frozen ruins of cities like packs of rabid wolves, tearing through reinforced shelters as if they were made of paper. Seeing them here, fully mutated and swarming the central armory on day one, confirmed the terrifying scale of the timeline acceleration.

Scratch! Scritch! Scritch!

Dozens of razor-sharp claws began hammering against the armored truck's steel doors and side panels, screeching like metal on slate as the creatures swarmed the vehicle, drawn instantly to the heat signature of a living human engine.

Ethan didn't panic. He glanced down at the dashboard terminal. His spatial storage capacity gauge flashed brightly: Current Utilization: 8,000 / 10,000 Cubic Meters. He still had two thousand cubic meters of absolute stasis space empty, waiting to be packed with the armory's subterranean caches of assault rifles, tactical armor, and heavy artillery ammunition.

If he abandoned the armory now, he would lose the greatest arsenal in the region. If he stayed trapped in the truck, the horde would eventually claw through the seals and rip him to shreds.

"Good thing I brought my own invitation," Ethan muttered coldly.

He reached into the passenger-side footwell, unlatching a heavy metal case containing an industrial-grade thermal flamethrower he had salvaged from a municipal disaster kit earlier that morning. He checked the fuel pressure gauge—full tank of pressurized napalm gel.

With a swift, calculated motion, Ethan unlatched the top escape hatch of the armored truck and pushed it open just enough to slide his upper body out into the howling, minus-fifty-degree blizzard.

The moment he emerged, the sub-zero wind hit him like a physical blow, but his adrenaline-fueled body ignored the frost. Below him, a sea of glowing red eyes snapped upward. A dozen pale, emaciated Stalkers shrieked in unison, their jaws unhinging unnaturally as they scrambled up the sides of the truck like spiders, lunging directly toward his position with claws outstretched.

Ethan didn't hesitate. He pulled the ignition trigger of the flamethrower.

Fwoosh!

A blinding river of white-hot liquid fire erupted from the nozzle, roaring into the freezing night with a deafening thermal shockwave. The sheet of liquid napalm engulfed the lead Stalkers instantly, turning the sub-zero air into a roaring inferno of burning flesh and shrieking agony. The creatures thrashed wildly, tumbling off the truck and burning into charred cinders against the frozen snow.

The rest of the horde recoiled in screeching terror from the searing heat, giving Ethan a momentary window of absolute clarity.

He didn't waste a single second. Kicking the truck door open, he dropped straight down into the bloody courtyard, swinging the blazing flamethrower in a wide, sweeping arc that incinerated every mutant blocking the path to the subterranean armory blast doors.

The massive steel blast doors of the armory hung off their hydraulic hinges, blown wide open from the inside by a heavy military explosive charge. Beyond the threshold lay pitch-black darkness, descending deep into the nuclear-hardened bowels of the mountain bunker where ten thousand small arms, rows of tactical body armor, and millions of rounds of heavy ammunition waited in pristine crates.

Ethan strode through the shattered blast doors, stepping over the half-eaten corpse of a senior commanding officer whose hand still clutched a dead tactical radio.

He stepped inside the cavernous central vault of the subterranean armory, his eyes sweeping across the endless rows of military crates stacked ceiling-high in the shadows. It was a goldmine of absolute power—enough firepower to arm a small private army for a decade of war.

He raised his right hand, ready to activate his spatial storage dimension and vacuum every single crate into absolute stasis before any other factions or mutant hordes could reach the underground bunker.

A sharp, metallic sound echoed softly from the darkest corner of the deep subterranean armory—a sound that did not belong to a mindless mutant beast.

Ethan froze, his hand hovering over his spatial interface as he slowly turned his head toward the pitch-black shadows at the back of the vault.

From the absolute darkness, a slow, deliberate pair of heavy combat boots stepped out onto the concrete floor, accompanied by the cold, metallic click of a customized sniper rifle bolt sliding home.

"You're a very difficult man to track down, Mr. Vance," a smooth, chillingly calm female voice echoed through the underground vault. "I was beginning to think your little transport truck wouldn't make it through the storm."

Ethan’s eyes narrowed into razor-thin slits as the stranger stepped under the flickering emergency lights. It was a woman clad in custom digital-camo tactical gear, her face half-hidden behind a tactical visor, holding a high-caliber anti-materiel rifle aimed squarely between his eyes—and on her shoulder gleamed the insignia of a private syndicate that shouldn't have existed anywhere near this sector for another six months.