Chapter 3

This wasn't some mutual-aid sanctuary; it was a miniature slave camp that had quietly taken shape.

A suffocating miasma of sour sweat, stale urine, and pure despair hit us like a physical wall.

To the left, beneath a stack of compressed ration crates, a man in an engineer’s uniform was curled up into a fetal position. His nose and mouth were a mess of bruised, bleeding flesh.

A security guard in a tactical vest had his boot planted firmly on the man's head, cursing loudly while chewing on canned meat.

Deeper inside, in the center of this "safe zone," a makeshift throne had been constructed out of a row of riot shields.

Kneeling on the freezing steel floor at the edge of this barricade was a female cruise dealer. Stripped of her former uniform, she was now in rags, trembling uncontrollably as she desperately clutched her torn collar and wept under her breath.

Standing beside her was a man with a scarred, fleshy face. He was casually toying with her hair using a bloodstained tactical Kukri blade. His eyes gleamed with sickening, predatory cruelty.

It was Jack, the Deputy Chief of Ship Security.

It hadn't even been twenty-four hours since the monster outbreak began, yet relying on his cronies, riot batons, and confiscated blades, he had already established a primitive, totalitarian regime inside this isolated tin can.

When Elena and I stepped into his territory, drenched in blood, over thirty pairs of eyes darted toward us.

The exploited, ordinary passengers looked at us with nothing but numbness and terror. But the eyes of Jack and his thugs lit up like hyenas catching the scent of fresh blood.

Kicking the weeping dealer out of the way, Jack hefted the heavy Kukri and swaggered toward us, flanked by three goons armed with steel pipes and massive wrenches.

His gaze initially landed on the chipped blade of my fire axe. He paused for a fraction of a second, but then his eyes slid greedily past my shoulder and glued themselves to Elena.

Elena's multi-million-dollar haute couture gown had been torn down to the top of her thigh during our frantic escape.

Smudged with ash and flecks of blood, her snow-white skin radiated a tragic, devastating beauty under the emergency lights that was enough to drive any man insane.

"Well, well, if it isn't Miss Elena?" Jack sneered, scraping the flat of his blade against the stubble on his chin. His voice dripped with vindictive pleasure. "The rules of the world have changed out there. How long do you think a princess like you can survive relying on a bottom-feeding, outer-deck bodyguard? Come here. I guarantee you’ll have water to drink and meat to eat every day."

With that, he pointed the blood-tipped blade at Elena, motioning for her to walk over.

Elena glanced at the battered, half-naked dealer crying at Jack's feet. Absolute terror flashed in her eyes.

Without a second of hesitation, she reflexively shrank behind my back. Her freezing, trembling hands clamped onto the tactical straps of my vest in a death grip, treating me as her ultimate lifeline.

I inhaled a deep breath of the stale air, suppressing the lactic acid burning in my calves from the prolonged sprint. Silently, I took a half-step forward, completely shielding Elena behind me.

"Buddy, you seem a little blind to the situation, huh?" A bald, hulking goon beside Jack sneered, casually weighing a heavy steel pipe in his hand as he closed in. "Drop the axe, crawl over to the garbage pile over there, and mind your own business..."

As he spoke, he reached straight out to grab me by the collar.

I didn't lose my temper. I didn't even waste my breath. Having survived the underground fighting pits for years, I knew perfectly well that words meant nothing in the face of adrenaline.

The moment his hand reached out, my left foot firmly planted itself into the steel floor grate, and my upper body instantly dipped. Evading his grasp, I utilized the violent torque of my hips to snap my right elbow upward like a hydraulic press, slamming it directly into his jaw.

CRACK!

A sickening crunch of bone rang out. Without making a single sound, the bald brute sprayed a mouthful of blood and collapsed backward, cracking his skull against an iron shelf before instantly losing consciousness.

"FUCK!"

The faces of the remaining two thugs warped in rage. Raising their wrenches and pipes, they lunged forward.

CLANG—!!!

I kicked the unconscious bald man out of my way, swung my right arm, and viciously chopped the monster-brain-coated fire axe straight down into the stainless-steel supply table between the two goons!

The sheer force of the blow ripped a three-centimeter-deep gash into the thick metal table.

Amidst a shower of sparks, the two thugs were paralyzed in their tracks by the sheer, suicidal explosiveness of the action.

I pressed both hands heavily against the axe handle, my chest heaving violently like a broken bellows. Sweat mixed with gore dripped from my chin into my collar. With bloodshot eyes, I stared dead at Jack, who stood only a few paces away.

"I chopped through three monster skulls on my way down here. This axe might be a little dull now," I rasped, my voice laced with a hyper-compressed, psychotic energy. "And your knife is definitely sharp."

"But listen to me closely. The space here is too tight. If you make a move right now, I promise you, before your boys can beat me to death, this axe will cleave you cleanly in half from your collarbone straight down through your guts."

I locked eyes with him. "You want to trade your life for mine?"

A dead, suffocating silence fell over the room.

Nobody was willing to blow their ultimate trump cards on day one against a blood-soaked maniac who had just waded out of hell.

Jack was smart, but more than that, he was a bully who only preyed on the weak.

He weighed the Kukri in his hand, looked at my white-knuckled grip on the axe handle, and the muscles around his eyes twitched violently.

"We're all just trying to survive here. Let's not lose our tempers." Jack forced a chilling, unnatural smile, took a half-step back, and sheathed the blade at his waist. "You can have that empty corner. Watch over your boss carefully... be a real shame if you closed your eyes tonight and woke up to find her missing."

Snorting coldly, he waved his men off. They grabbed the unconscious bald man by the ankles and dragged him back to the central barricade.

I didn't pull the axe out of the table immediately. Wrenching it free with one hand, I grabbed Elena by the wrist and marched straight toward the furthest dead-end corner, where we could put our backs against the titanium wall.

The moment I sat down on the floor grate, I finally realized that my clothes were entirely soaked through with cold sweat.

The temperature was dropping rapidly.

Without the climate control systems, the freezing chill of the deep ocean was slowly bleeding through the steel hull.

I stripped off my half-shredded tactical jacket and threw it roughly over Elena.

This ultra-wealthy corporate CEO, who just hours ago stood at the very apex of the social pyramid, possessed zero pretense now. She wrapped the jacket tightly around her increasingly exposed thighs, her body shivering violently.

Driven by absolute terror and the biting cold, she slowly inched toward me, tucking her soft frame tightly against my chest.

Her freezing, trembling arms wrapped fiercely around my waist, burying her face into my chest.

It felt as though clinging to my body was the only way she could brace against the collapse of her entire world.

While feeling the warmth and softness of her body against mine, I kept my peripheral vision locked on Jack's camp.

I had just humiliated a scumbag like him in front of everyone. There was no way he was going to let this go.

I was right.

Deep into the night, when the majority of the survivors had passed out from despair and exhaustion, several figures quietly stood up from behind the central barricade.

My nerves instantly snapped taut.

Under the sickly, pulsating glow of the red emergency lights, I could clearly see Jack gripping his Kukri.

Four or five of his goons, armed with nylon garrote wires and sharpened screwdrivers, were stepping over the sleeping crowd. Like a pack of hyenas catching the scent of rotting meat, they were creeping toward our corner, step by step...