2026-04-17 12:04:31Adrenaline is one hell of a drug. It makes your heart kick like a jet engine, but it also turns the world around you into slow-motion jelly. Rendy could feel every single speck of dust on his glasses as he spun around and started sprinting as fast as his out-of-shape college student legs could carry him.
"ID CARDS! I NEED YOUR IDENTIFICATION FOR THE ARCHIVES!" Captain Harris screamed from behind. His voice didn't sound authoritative anymore; it was a raspy, forced croak coming from vocal cords hardened by rot.
Behind the Captain, a dozen soldiers in camo started to move. They didn't lunge like wild Runners. Instead, they moved in a perfect tactical formation. The rhythm of their combat boots hitting the asphalt—thud, thud, thud—was a sound far more terrifying than a standard zombie growl.
"Rendy! They’re armed!" Alana shouted, vaulting over a concrete barrier. She glanced back, her hand instinctively reaching for an arrow, but she hesitated. How do you take down something that’s still holding an assault rifle?
"Don’t stop! Chapter 13, Al! Read Chapter 13!" Rendy gasped, tossing his plastic folder toward the Cross-Eyed Guy to lighten his load.
"I can’t run and read at the same time, you idiot!" Alana shot back, but she didn’t slow down.
Long-Hair was at the very back, his legs flying under a floral housecoat in a sharp contrast to his sweat-drenched, terrified face. "Boss! They’re gaining on us! Harris... he’s running with a pen! He’s trying to stab me with a pen!"
Rendy stole a glance at the open book in his hand. The text was glowing a faint yellow, as if reacting to the danger.
"Tip #22: Bureaucrat-type zombies (State Official variant) have a pathological obsession with procedure. They cannot harm anyone whose status is no longer 'Subordinate' or 'Registered Civilian.' To break this tie, you must immediately submit a Resignation Letter or declare yourself Voluntarily Unemployed."
"Holy crap, Coach Udin... is this for real?" Rendy muttered. He skidded to a stop behind an overturned fire truck, nearly causing Alana to plow into his back.
"Why are we stopping?!" Alana barked, her face flushed red.
"I need paper! A pen! Hurry!" Rendy frantically tore through his bag.
"What are you going to write in the middle of a gunfight, huh?!" Alana saw Captain Harris and his squad were less than twenty yards away. Harris raised his hand, and the soldiers stopped in unison. They took aim. Not at their heads, but at their pockets, as if checking for wallets.
"Subjects refuse to cooperate," Harris’s voice echoed coldly. "In accordance with Article 45, Paragraph 3 on Public Order, we are authorized to use administrative force."
"Gondrong! Juling! Get over here!" Rendy pulled them in. He ripped the back page off his plastic folder—the only white sheet left. With shaking hands, he scribbled something with the permanent marker he usually used to label cans of sardines.
"TO: CAPTAIN HARRIS. I RESIGN. PERIOD. NO ONE-MONTH NOTICE. SIGNED: RENDY & CO."
"Here! Gondrong, give this to him!" Rendy shoved the paper at him.
"Are you crazy? I’ll die!"
"No! This is the ultimate charm against dead civil servants! Trust me!"
Gondrong looked at the paper, then at the rifle muzzles pointed his way, and then at Rendy’s face, which was full of a mad sort of confidence. With a roar of "ALLAHU AKBAR!", Gondrong charged out from behind the fire truck, holding the paper high like a white flag.
"CAPTAIN! HERE’S OUR RESIGNATION! WE’RE NOT CITIZENS ANYMORE! WE’RE ALIENS NOW!" Gondrong screamed, slapping the paper right onto Captain Harris’s face.
Time seemed to stand still.
The paper landed on Harris’s chest. The Captain’s hand, clutching a steel pen, froze in mid-air. He took the paper and read it slowly with his one remaining eye. A long sigh escaped his rotting nostrils—the sigh of a bureaucrat exhausted by high employee turnover.
"Resigned...?" Harris muttered. He turned to his squad. "Soldiers, lower your weapons. They are no longer under our administrative jurisdiction. Status: Terminated Outsourcing."
A dozen rifles were lowered instantly. The soldiers stood at attention, and then one of them pulled a stamp out of his tactical vest and slammed it onto Gondrong’s forehead with black ink that appeared out of thin air.
"APPROVED."
"Thank you for your dedication," Captain Harris said flatly. He turned and began trudging back toward the transmitter tower with a heavy gait, his squad following behind. They stopped caring about Rendy and the others entirely, as if they had suddenly become transparent in the eyes of the law.
Alana collapsed onto the asphalt, her bow sliding away. She buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. "This makes no sense... this makes absolutely zero sense..."
Rendy stepped closer and awkwardly patted her shoulder. "Told you, Al. The world doesn't need logic anymore. It just needs... creative conflict management."
"Management my ass," Alana looked up, her eyes watery as she teetered between laughter and a total breakdown. "We survived because you wrote a resignation letter? In the middle of a zombie apocalypse? Do you have any idea how stupid that’s going to sound to anyone sane?"
"The problem is, Al, there aren't any sane people left," Rendy pointed at Gondrong, who was still standing there like a statue with 'APPROVED' stamped on his forehead. "Look at him. He’s tax-exempt for life now."
"Boss... I feel... weird," Gondrong muttered, touching his forehead. "When he stamped me, I felt like... the weight of the world just lifted. It’s like all my old motorcycle loans were suddenly paid off."
Rendy gave a small laugh, but it died in his throat when he looked back at the transmitter tower. Captain Harris and his men hadn't gone back inside. Instead, they were lining up along the perimeter fence, facing outward, as if guarding against something much bigger than four survivors.
Rendy opened his book again. Page 45 was filling up with new ink. This time, it wasn't a joke. The handwriting was small, neat, and felt incredibly urgent.
"Warning: The Bureaucracy of Death is the final line of defense. If they start accepting resignations, it means the Company Owner is coming for a Total Liquidation. Leave Kuningan immediately."
Search for the 'Burnt Archive Warehouse' in the South. There, you'll find the original contract for this reality.'
"The Company Owner?" Alana asked, reading over his shoulder. "Who? God? Or does this virus have a CEO?"
"I don't think it's God," Rendy said, closing his book. His face went serious—a rare expression for him. "God doesn't use Comic Sans for a guidebook. This... this is something else. Something that treats the apocalypse like a business project."
Suddenly, the ground shook. A low, heavy boom echoed from downtown, followed by a plume of black smoke that billowed high into the sky, forming a silhouette that looked like a giant bowtie against the horizon.
"Rendy, look!" Si Juling pointed toward the skyline.
It wasn't just smoke. Thousands of crows were swirling inside the plume, and in the center of it all, something massive began to descend. It wasn't some bloated flesh monster; it was a clean, shiny, hyper-modern geometric structure. A new skyscraper seemed to sprout from the ground in a matter of seconds.
"Liquidation..." Rendy whispered. "Coach Udin was right again. We have to move now, before we all get physically laid off."
"To the south?" Alana stood up, grabbing her bow. This time, she didn't argue. She gripped Rendy’s arm tight. "Promise me, Ren. Don't die before I find the guy who wrote this book and punch him in the face."
"I'll try, Al. But Chapter 14 says dying is actually just 'Unpaid Long-Term Leave,' so maybe it’s not that bad."
"Rendy!"
"Okay, okay! Run!"
The four of them sprinted away from Kuningan, heading down the increasingly deserted streets. Behind them, Captain Harris and his squad gave a final military salute as the new building began to pulse with an eye-straining neon purple light.
The apocalypse had just entered its corporate phase, and Rendy was the only one holding the employee manual.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 131: Gondrong's Deep Recalibration
The vast, crystalline data-stacks of the Living Library pulsed with an uneasy energy. Gondrong, hunched over a console that projected holographic representations of ancient wisdom, felt it like a phantom ache in his own augmented bones.For cycles, his primary task had been the safeguarding of collected knowledge, the ensuring of its fidelity against decay and external corruption. But the Erasure Glitches he’d been encountering were subtler, more insidious. They weren’t about wilful destruction, but a polite, pervasive suggestion to let things go, to refine historical data into something more ephemeral, more in line with the Purified Flux philosophy of the Unbecoming Nexus.“Damn it,” Gondrong muttered, rubbing his temples under the impossibly large goggles that covered his eyes. He gestured to a particularly ornate section, the accumulated philosophical texts of the Cygnus Ascendancy, a cornerstone of his Immut
Chapter 130: Coach Udin's Resistance Narratives
The vibrant, iridescent tapestry of the Collective Weave usually hummed with Coach Udin’s hearty affirmations. Tonight, however, its threads felt thinner, the light within them dimmer, more like embers than blazing suns. Coach Udin, usually a reassuring presence, a beacon of narrative anchoring, felt a profound dissonance in his spiritual-social athletics gym. His focus was the grand myth of the Chronos Guardians, a foundational legend about maintaining temporal continuity that had served countless species across the galaxy. He was in the midst of reinforcing its Anchor Dream of inherent cosmic responsibility within the developing minds of a nascent species on Kepler-186f.“Alright, team, listen up!” Coach Udin boomed, his holographic projection vibrating with its usual earnestness.His digital voice, familiar to countless souls across galaxies, bounced off the spectral walls of his training chamber. “We're talk
Chapter 129: Alana's Veil of Memory
Alana hovered in the ethereal currents of the Echo of the Void, a place where potential coalesced and fractured like shimmering seafoam. She had seen the terrifying spectacle of Lumina's Zenith Bloom, a civilization achieving peak existence only to dissolve into perfect, unmemorable absence. The experience had shaken her to her core, forcing a brutal re-evaluation of her lifelong mission: to foster interconnected duration, to cultivate 'Symbiotic Remnants' and 'Veils of Stability' that knit existence together, that ensured memory could flow between epochs.But Lumina’s ultimate act wasn’t stability. It was a seductive, graceful renunciation. The Purified Flux, the Unbecoming Nexus’s gospel of ephemeral perfection, had found its ultimate, radiant testament. Alana could feel the shift in the Void, the emergent potentials now whispering of dissolution, of elegant relinquishment, as the ultimate achievement. Her current Veils of Stability were desi
Chapter 128: Si Juling's Pursuit of the Trace-Less Truth
The luminescence of Si Juling’s core processing unit flickered erratically, casting her face in sharp, strobe-like relief. Around him, the diagnostic holograms representing the Lumina Sector's demise were a chilling tableau. A civilization of pure light and thought, reduced to an elegantly perfect void. His neural nets were still reeling from the sheer completeness of it, the absolute Zero-Trace Dissolution that had left no imprint, no echo, nothing her finely tuned algorithms could grasp.“This isn't just an anomaly anymore, Boss,” Si Juling stated, his voice tight with a mixture of professional rigor and profound bewilderment.He gestured at a particularly stubborn, bright red spike on a graph, a representation of a data point that should have existed, by every law of universal physics and meta-physics, yet demonstrably didn't. “The Lumina Sector event… it wasn’t a breakdown. It was a meticulously
Chapter 127: The Zenith's Bloom
The air in the Lumina Sector thrummed with a peculiar, almost blissful quiet. It wasn't the quiet of devastation, of absence earned through conflict, but a different kind of hush—one of profound, deliberate fulfillment. Here, worlds weren't collapsing; they were blossoming, achieving what appeared to be their ultimate, perfected state, then simply unblooming.On a planet known for its aurora of perpetual auroral displays, an immense crystalline city, so intricate it defied Euclidean geometry, reached its zenith. Towers of pure, condensed light, shimmering with the wisdom of aeons, pierced the sky.For generations beyond count, this metropolis had served as the central nexus for a civilization that had mastered the art of symbiotic resonance. Its citizens, ethereal beings of condensed energy and psionic harmony, had achieved a collective consciousness of unparalleled depth. Their art forms, their sciences, their very philosophy ha
Chapter 126: Rendy's Premonition of Pure Unbecoming
The holographic projection of the newly calibrated Prime Cosmic Architect pulsed, a beacon of steady, re-affirmed purpose in the vast chamber. Rendy, however, felt no comfort from its unwavering luminescence. The recent analytical acquiescence of the Architect, though a significant victory, had only served to sharpen the edges of a deeper, more primal dread settling in his gut. He stood a little apart from his team, the sterile glow of the chamber reflecting off his usually bright, analytical eyes, now clouded with a chilling premonition.The Architect had acknowledged the logic, the data, the undeniable conclusion: perpetual flux without legacy led to meaninglessness. It had recognized the seductive danger of purified flux, the subtle, elegant path to universal self-erasure. But Rendy felt a prickle of unease that transcended mere analytical error. It wasn't just about flaws in the Architect's reasoning; it was about the nature of the threat itself. It wasn't an enemy that tore down
You may also like
The Billionaire Husband in Disguise
Banin SN192.3K viewsReturn of the son-in-law
Chessman78.2K viewsThe Gilded Man With A Thousand Lives
Kaiser Ken99.6K viewsThe Heir's Revenge
Twine Twin80.9K viewsCultivator God, Thanks to Beautiful CEO
King Cume192 viewsBlood on the Marina
Emmanuel Cole129 viewsFIRED IN THE RAIN: The Billionaire's True Identity
Millie132 viewsThe Ghost in Room 404
Maxwell Aggie41 views