Lin Feng's scalp prickled for a split second before he snapped back to his senses. Flustered and furious, he kicked the walker on the ground and swore, "Fuck!"

What was there to panic about?! These things hadn't gained intelligence. They'd just retained some instinctive behaviors from before the apocalypse.

In the original show, Morgan Jones's spouse had known how to turn a doorknob — had even walked inside and killed Duane.

When Rick and the others were stuck in that building, walkers had battered the glass doors with rocks in hand.

During the Commonwealth era, walkers that assaulted the community gates could sometimes climb the walls.

The memories surfaced from deep in his mind, one after another, smoothing out every last wrinkle of alarm.

Rather than wasting energy panicking over this, he'd be better off figuring out what the hell had scared that group off in the first place.

Lin Feng exhaled and strode forward into the first room.

His flashlight swept across the walls. Empty racks. The long guns had been cleaned out, more or less.

The handgun side still had some left — a few Glocks, Berettas, 1911s, and.38s. Lin Feng wasn't picky. Free was free. He stowed them into his space one by one and moved on.

The second room was larger than the first and held far more, though none of it was weapons. Firearm components, maintenance consumables, and a serious quantity of both. Barrel blanks of varying sizes alone accounted for at least eighty-odd units across different models.

Deeper in the storeroom sat a row of sealed long boxes. He cracked one open: optics. He opened another. More optics.

That group hadn't touched any of it. No immediate combat value, so they'd passed right over it.

Lin Feng stashed the whole lot with a grin.

Useless to anyone else. To him, every piece was a brick in a much longer road.

What was the point of stacking up guns if you couldn't fix them when something went wrong? A gun you couldn't repair was just dead weight.

Lin Feng planted that flag firmly in his mind and used it to bury the mild irritation of not finding any long guns.

He pushed out the door and headed toward the third room, the one with blood on the doorknob.

It was a workshop. Four metal workbenches, one in each corner, with three single-station compound reloading presses lined up along the wall.

Four guns rested on the benches. Two AR-15s, intact, nothing visibly wrong. One Remington 700 with its barrel removed, a longer replacement barrel laid out beside it. One M1A fitted with a variable high-magnification scope, fully assembled, whether someone had just finished the build or never gotten around to stripping it was impossible to say.

The walls were lined with components and precision tools for disassembly and fitting. Before the collapse, this had clearly been a custom modification shop for high-end clients.

Lin Feng worked through it methodically: loose accessories first, then the precision tools, then the four guns.

He'd let Orion and the other trained members look those over before anyone touched them in the field. A barrel rupture, a jam, a misfire at the wrong moment, that wasn't bad luck. That was a scythe swinging at your own throat.

He confirmed the room was clear and headed for the rearmost storeroom.

The steel door was cold and solid under his palm. He pushed it open and the dry, sharp smell of gunpowder rolled out to meet him.

About a dozen large iron racks filled the space, each one scattered with loose rounds and a remaining fraction of neatly stacked cardboard boxes. Lin Feng did a rough sort and packed everything in.

Handgun rounds came to roughly seventeen thousand. Nine-millimeter made up the bulk, over nine thousand. The rest were solid too: around twenty-five or twenty-six hundred of.45 ACP, twenty-two or twenty-three hundred of.40.

Rifle rounds were just under twenty thousand. Over six thousand of those were.22 LR, that stuff moved fast in the States and cost almost nothing, so every shop kept it deep in stock. About four thousand rounds of 5.56, which was the standard for most civilian rifles. Finding this much left over was already a stroke of luck.

The 6.5 and 7.62 were thinner, only around two thousand each..308 ran a bit higher, somewhere over three thousand. The traditional deer-hunting calibers, your.270s and.243s, added up to maybe a thousand combined.

Twelve-gauge shotgun shells: roughly four thousand left across all types. Birdshot, buckshot, slugs, split at about 2-6-2.

There were a handful of other rounds Lin Feng didn't recognize off the top of his head. He took them anyway. The camp's gun people could sort it out later.

The left side of the room held reloading components — brass and projectiles, barely touched.

He didn't bother counting the casings in detail. Besides the fresh stock on the shelves, some of it had been range brass collected after firing, packed into buckets with nothing but a caliber label taped to the outside. He threw it all in regardless. He could pick through it when he had the time.

The projectiles were more straightforward. Handgun bullets came to a little over twenty thousand. Rifle bullets were fifteen thousand.

Not bad. Nowhere near the shooting club haul, but reloading supplies had probably just been a side income for a shop like this.

Last were the items stored furthest in and sealed the tightest: smokeless powder and primers. Warning signs plastered the door.

Lin Feng swept it clean. Sixty-five pounds of pistol powder. One hundred thirty pounds of rifle powder. Thirty thousand primers total, eighteen thousand for pistols, twelve thousand for rifles.

He walked back out into the sales floor and stretched.

One word: satisfying.

No long guns, but he'd solved the ammunition problem, factory rounds and reloading components both, and walked out with a pile of parts and three compound presses on top of it.

The future was looking up.

He was still turning that thought over when a faint tremor ran through the floor beneath him.

Had that group come back?

Lin Feng didn't wait to find out. He burst out of the gun shop at a dead sprint, long legs chewing up the ground as he cut hard into an alleyway. He kicked one walker clean off its feet, sent it crashing into the one behind it, then hit the fire escape in two strides and went up hand over hand.

He crossed the rooftop at a jog and stopped at the front edge to look down.

His pupils snapped tight.

For a moment, he just stood there.

"Holy... shit."

At the far end of the street stood an ashen-skinned giant.

At least three meters tall. Muscles packed and straining across every inch of its frame. Its arms were enormous, grotesquely long, hanging straight down until they nearly brushed the ground. Like a silverback gorilla, only bigger.

➤ Next: And Who the Hell Are You, Dude?

Chapter 116 - And Who the Hell Are You, Dude?

Lin Feng had been wondering about it before, how could a hulking Tyrant, of all things, break through Harran's perimeter walls?

Now he knew.

In that thing's hands, a full-sized sedan was a toy. It grabbed the car and hurled it clean, ten-plus meters through the air.

Like it weighed nothing.

Like it was fun.

Was this thing even still a walker?

Volatiles were terrifying enough on their own, so who the hell was this supposed to be?

Did someone overdose on hormone injections during the outbreak?

Incomprehensible. Still somehow acceptable.

The immediate question was whether his shotgun shells could punch through it. If not, he needed to push the camp to get the M2 fixed sooner and get ammunition produced.

Because if this thing decided to start chucking cars like a catapult, the thought alone was enough to make his skin crawl.

Down below, the giant walker hoisted the sedan overhead and hurled it with everything it had. A cluster of walkers exploded under the impact. Then it stepped forward, raised both arms, and started hammering, like it was pounding beef, over and over, blow after savage blow, brutal and fast.

Lin Feng watched the massive chunks of limbs sailing in every direction and went quiet.

This thing... didn't have a friend-or-foe mechanism, did it?

It was killing ordinary walkers too. So what drove it, pure rage, or territorial instinct?

Either way, if this thing showed up inside a horde before it hit the walls, it would technically be working for their side.

The giant finished its rampage, twisted its massive frame, and lumbered down the street until it disappeared from view.

Lin Feng stood on the rooftop and let out a long breath. He looked at the wreckage below. The corner of his mouth twitched.

Calm on the outside. Completely out of ideas on the inside.

He pulled up the system panel and stared at the experience bar.

[301/500]

Nothing for it. Time to grind.

A fresh batch of ammo had arrived today, and Atlanta never ran short on walkers. What else was there to say?

Time to farm.

He made his way toward the second gun shop, clearing walkers as he went. As long as it wasn't a massive horde, he kept it simple, M4, single shots, one bullet per skull. No waste.

Scorching rounds split the air and punched through bone.

[Killed Ordinary Walker ×1 — 1 EXP gained]

[Killed Ordinary Walker ×1 — 1 EXP gained]

[Killed Ordinary Walker ×1 — 1 EXP gained]

The notifications stacked. Before he was even halfway there, the bar was full. His pool reset to zero and left him one attribute point.

He didn't allocate it. He kept moving.

The second gun shop had looked like a 45-minute trip on the map. It took him 70.

He entered, cleared the few walkers inside, and watched his attribute points tick from 1 to 2 as his experience pool wiped clean again.

Same routine as always: lock the door, then deal with whatever's inside.

The latch clicked. Lin Feng stowed the rifle and drew his Remington 870, sweeping the muzzle across the room as he moved toward the back.

The shop wasn't much, upper-medium scale at best. No way to tell yet if it had an attached warehouse or workshop.

If it didn't, he'd be digging through junk for whatever scraps were left.

He moved toward the back rooms, quiet but not slow, and caught it at the doorway, an abnormal low snarl from the other side. Not the mindless moan of something standing still. Something that had heard him.

He stowed the Remington into his storage, drew the Bowie knife, and tapped the blade against the door.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The walker responded immediately. Shuffling footsteps, then a louder snarl.

One. He could tell from the sound.

Lin Feng put his hand on the knob, turned it, and let the latch pop. A thin crack of darkness appeared.

Then he shoved hard.

The door slammed into the walker and drove it to the floor. The Bowie knife dropped in a single motion, tip driving through the skull and into the brain.

The walker stopped moving. It didn't try to get up.

Lin Feng clicked on his high-intensity flashlight. Employee break room. Sparse furnishings, unmistakably vintage, and that small wooden bed, its frame reinforced with nailed-on planks and rough stitching, looked like it had been pulled straight out of two or three decades ago.

He locked the door behind him, stepped over the body, and lowered himself onto the dust-covered bed.

He brought up the system panel. No hesitation.

One point into Agility.

[Agility: 9 → 10]

The blue light flared, and the pain hit like nothing he'd felt before. Every nerve in his body lit up at once, as if a hundred and eight thousand needles had driven into him simultaneously and started twisting. His vision went black.

He was out before he hit the mattress.

➤ Next: At the Very Least, an Undead Overlord Tier