Commander Li knew something had gone wrong the second the tunnel went quiet.

Not silent.

This place had never been silent since the first time he stepped foot in the basement of hell. The entire underground level still groaned around them every few seconds while distant screams echoed faintly through the swampy basement corridors. Dirt continued raining steadily from the ceiling overhead, and every tremor that shook through the hotel sounded worse than the one before it.

No, his issue was with the fact that Shen Rouxi had stopped talking.

Until now, every sound coming out of that tunnel had carried her voice somewhere underneath it. They could all hear her particular brand of sarcasm, insults, and complaints about horror movie logic and ugly monsters and people making bad decisions.

But now, there was nothing.

Commander Li stared toward the dark tunnel entrance while another tremor rolled through the underground parking level hard enough to crack concrete somewhere overhead.

Beside him, Luo Xin tightened his grip on the emergency medical bag strapped across his chest. The medic had gone pale several minutes ago and somehow looked worse every time the building shook.

Not to mention, the civilians stumbling out of the lower tunnel weren’t helping the situation at all.

Most of them could barely walk. Several were covered in black slime while others cried openly as soldiers dragged them toward the stairwells leading out of the hotel basement. One older man kept repeating the same sentence over and over again under his breath while staring blankly at the floor.

"It’s eating people... it’s eating people..."

Colonel Wei Guang grabbed the man’s shoulder and shoved him toward two nearby soldiers. "Move him upstairs before the next collapse."

Another roar echoed somewhere deep underground... wet and wrong. The sound would echo in this nightmares for years to come.

The civilians who had fled out the tunnel flinched immediately, their bodies locking up in terror until his men had to physically pick them up and bring them upstairs to safety.

Commander Li’s jaw tightened as his hands flexed. Shen Rouxi was never supposed to be in that tunnel, and now there was a chance that she had been eaten.

That was on him. He wasn’t strong enough to protect her like she had been willing to protect him and his men.

And now it might have cost her her life.

Colonel Wei Guang noticed the tension and his face turned dark. "Commander Li," he snapped, drawing Li out of his thoughts.

Commander Li turned away from the entrance of the tunnel to looked at him.

"We need to evacuate now," Wei continued sharply. "The infected have retreated. This place isn’t stable anymore."

Retreated?

No.

Commander Li didn’t believe that for a second.

He had seen Shen Rouxi fight before. He had watched her stand in front of things that should have killed entire groups of people and somehow turn the situation around through sheer violence, stubbornness, and what honestly felt like personal disrespect toward death itself.

If she was still down there? If she was eaten?

Then the thing underground was strong enough to stop her... to kill her when hundreds of zombies couldn’t.

That thought settled heavily in his chest.

Him... his men... everyone he knew didn’t have the powers that Shen Rouxi did. If she couldn’t kill whatever monster was hidden in the darkness, then no one else stood a chance. This situation would happen over and over again until there wasn’t a single human left on Earth.

Another violent tremor rolled through the basement and several civilians screamed while concrete dust burst from a crack running along the ceiling overhead.

"We are out of time," Wei snapped, but Commander Li kept staring toward the tunnel.

"No," he replied quietly. "She is."

The surrounding soldiers went silent.

Wei looked at him like he had lost his mind. "You cannot seriously be thinking about going back down there."

Commander Li didn’t answer immediately because the truth felt painfully obvious to him.

Shen Rouxi was the only reason any of them were still alive.

Without her, Rongdu would have collapsed weeks ago. Without her, Colonel Wei’s convoy would have been overrun outside the city. Without her, the scientists living in her backyard would already be dead. Without her, the civilians stumbling out of the tunnel right now never would have escaped at all.

She had walked into that hole alone because everyone else standing here would have died trying to follow her.

And now Wei wanted to leave her there.

"She is the only reason we are alive," Commander Li said finally.

Wei’s expression hardened immediately. "And if we go down there after her, then we lose more people for no reason."

That was military logic for you. Cold, practical, and so reasonable that it made you want to grind your teeth in frustration.

Commander Li hated every word of it.

"The civilians come first," Wei continued while another tremor shook the underground level hard enough that several generators shifted slightly across the wet concrete floor. "The zombies are gone. We have an opportunity to get survivors out while we still can."

"And Rouxi?" Chenghai asked quietly.

Wei looked at him with open frustration. "What about her? She is probably dead and we need to take advantage of the situation while we can. We don’t know what will happen next, and our responsibilities are to the civilians that can’t protect themselves."

Nobody answered him. Not because Wei was right, but because nobody wanted to think about the possibility that Shen Rouxi might actually be dead.

Wei exhaled sharply through his nose. "At least this was, her death meant something. I’m sure she would take consolation in the idea that she managed to save helpless, innocent people."

The temperature in the underground level changed immediately and Commander Li felt it before he fully understood why.

Jian Yuche stopped smiling, cocking his head to the side as he studied the other man like a cockroach under a microscope. "You didn’t know Rouxi at all, did you?" he purred, his voice coming out like ice. "Saving helpless innocent people who didn’t do jack shit to save themselves? That idea would have her rolling over in her grave with anger."

The metal floating lazily around him went completely still in the air while his expression emptied so thoroughly that Commander Li suddenly understood why even Xu Zhenlan occasionally looked uncomfortable around him.

Beside him, Lingyun sighed softly and rubbed the back of his neck like Wei had become a particularly exhausting conversation.

"Wei," Chenghai warned quietly, but it was too late.

"We cannot waste more lives chasing after one woman," Wei snapped like he truly didn’t understand that he was just digging his own grave.

"One woman?" Yuche looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. "One woman?"

The metal pipes running across the basement ceiling ripped free so suddenly that several soldiers reached for their weapons on instinct.

But they never got the chance to raise them.

Rust-covered steel punched through two soldiers standing closest to Lingyun before anyone fully processed what was happening. One pipe tore through a throat while another punched directly through a man’s chest hard enough to pin him against the concrete wall behind him.

Both bodies hit the ground almost simultaneously.

Lingyun stepped over one of the corpses with an expression that suggested mild disappointment more than anything else. Flames rolled lazily across his fingers while he glanced toward the remaining soldiers.

"You really should’ve stopped talking earlier," he said lightly.

Every weapon in the room came up immediately. But these weren’t the guns that the military were used to using. These weapons were pipes, wooden beams, rocks the size of fists, knives that might have been intimidating at one point in time but had been used so much that their edges were blunt and dull.

Fire screamed through the underground parking level before collapsing uselessly onto the flooded concrete floor in broken pieces. Every weapon either burst into flames or bent inward like it had suddenly decided existing was optional, and it wasn’t worth pissing off the man on fire. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

Nobody moved after that.

Nobody dared.

Commander Li stared at Rouxi’s men silently while another tremor rolled through the collapsing hotel overhead.

He had fought beside them before. He had seen what they could do, but none of that had prepared him properly for this.

Yuche finally turned toward the tunnel entrance leading back underground.

His voice stayed quiet when he spoke.

That somehow made it worse.

"You do what you want," he said.

Then he looked toward the darkness where Shen Rouxi had disappeared alone.

"We’re going to get our woman back."