AI Apocalypse Resurgence: An Apocalyptic LitRPG Adventure (AI Apocalypse: Restart Book 3), page 23
I didn’t bother completing the dungeon before exiting; it wasn’t worth my effort. Besides, I had bigger fish to fry. I made it to Addison yesterday, and it contained three medium dungeons. That seemed like a lot for such a relatively small area, but I was even more curious about what lay beyond. West of there lay the I-35 corridor — a zone of warehouses, business parks, and industrial manufacturing that ran from downtown all the way up to the Bush Turnpike.
There was no way I wanted to go near downtown yet, but I was very curious to see how bad that area was. That level of urban-industrial density would fuel the System with a hell of a lot of mana for creating dungeons and mutating beasts. I could only hope the System was limiting how big it allowed dungeons to get this soon after the start of the apocalypse.
Either way, that wasn’t the destination I had in mind. I just wanted to scout the area and determine what I’d be up against later.
No — the real target for today was the DFW airport. I had a bad feeling about that place. It was a major hub surrounded and bisected by a bunch of highways, with tons of business parks and warehouses in the area. To be honest, I was almost as worried about what I might find there as I was downtown. The only good thing about it was that the airport itself wasn’t as densely packed as other areas. I prayed that meant it wouldn’t be some kind of massive high-level dungeon.
With a sigh, I stepped outside, prepared for fight or flight, whichever was needed. Thankfully, there were still no Champions.
I frowned almost as soon as the thought crossed my mind. As much as I didn’t want to be ambushed, I also hated the wait and the stress of never knowing when the hammer would fall. The longer it took them to arrive, the stronger they were likely to be.
Grumbling, I took to the skies. “I’d rather face them now than later! Hell, I wish I had a compass that would lead me to them the way theirs leads them to me.”
That gave me an idea, and I hovered a moment while I pulled out the Dark Elf’s compass and examined it. Unfortunately, there were no settings — no way of changing it to some other target besides myself.
Still, I wondered if an item upgrade token could be used to reverse polarity and make them point to the Champions instead… Now that was worth exploring. I just needed to acquire another token to test it out. That could be incredibly useful. I could chase them down or prepare an ambush of my own — catch one of them exiting a dungeon after they were tired and their skills were on cooldown!
Hell, yeah!
Even after the Defeat Five Champions quest was over, I could still use the compass to hunt down the invading species. Now that I thought about it just reaching my third upgrade would put me in a position to wipe out several invader groups in the time it would take their Champions to get them trained up enough to be a threat. With flight, I could probably clear an entire region of this continent of invaders. Humanity would still have to contend with dungeons and beasts, but at least they wouldn’t need to worry about intelligent species with deep System knowledge destroying us in our own backyards.
Putting the compass away, I turned west and climbed higher, letting the cold wind bite against my face as I rose until I had a wide view of the city under daylight. Fires still burned sporadically across the sprawl, causing thick plumes of smoke rising skyward. Some columns were so heavy that they turned whole swaths of land into black smears where even my vision couldn’t penetrate. What I could see was bad enough, and it only reinforced the opinion I’d formed yesterday during my first flight.
Past Addison, looking toward the I-35 corridor, I blinked in surprise. What had once been an endless stretch of warehouses, business parks, and factories was now transformed. The entire corridor had been warped into low, jagged hills of dark rock, a broken landscape that would have been hell to hike through on foot. Worse, mutated beasts already prowled there—dozens of them moving openly even in the small patch of land directly below me. It wasn’t just unfriendly terrain; it was hostile by design, a death-trap masquerading as wilderness.
That zone effectively cut the metroplex in half. To make matters worse, the east fork of the Trinity River bordered it to the west.. Any survivors trying to move from one side of the metroplex to the other would be forced to either swim across a river that almost certainly hosted monstrous mutated fish, frogs, turtles, snakes, and crawfish—or take their chances on one of the few bridges that spanned it. Bridges that were, of course, surrounded by the kind of industrial clutter that all but guaranteed small and medium dungeons lurking nearby.
“Lovely,” I spat, voice dripping sarcasm.
Then the realization hit harder. The people in Irving and Valley Ranch were essentially trapped. On the east, they had the river and the newly formed hills. On the west lay DFW airport itself. They could run north or south, sure, but they were boxed in between two industrial corridors, one freshly twisted into a dungeon zone, and the other about to show me just how bad things could get.
Soaring further west, my fears solidified. The signs were everywhere. People moved in small groups, ducking from shadow to shadow, scurrying like prey animals. They weren’t traveling—they were hiding. And it didn’t take me long to see why.
Where the airport should have been… was something else.
The ground was blackened, scorched, as if fire and ash had seeped into every stone. It looked like someone had paved over Mordor with cracked and blackened concrete. The airport had been swallowed and reshaped into a colossal Stronghold dungeon. Its walls rose fifty feet high, built of matte-black stone that seemed to drink in the sunlight instead of reflecting it. Smoke clung to the place, a permanent haze that refused to dissipate even as the wind screamed across the open plain.
From one end to the other, the dungeon shapes wheeled through the haze above it—winged things I couldn’t make out clearly—and their high-pitched cries echoed across the ruined landscape. The sound crawled down my spine, sharp and grating, like talons scraping glass.
I didn’t need to get any closer to know the System would shove its intrusive messaging into my mind the moment I touched that wall or tried to cross it. But I could still Analyze it from here.
Name: DFW Necropolis
Grade: Mythic – Stronghold (Necrotic Bastion)
Level Range: 10–95
Environment:
Black stone walls fifty feet high ring the entire complex, their surfaces absorbing light like a void. A perpetual haze of smoke and ash clings to the grounds, shrouding skeletal watchtowers and bone-carved battlements.
Warning:
Commanded by a Dungeon Lord of extreme power: The Necromancer. Environment favors endless waves of undead, aerial ambushes from the ash-cloud, and attrition through poison, disease, and exhaustion.
Solo attempt flagged: Certain Death.
Recommended: Multiple raid-parties, siege weaponry, or equivalent force.
My wings nearly froze in horror as I took in the sight.
This was a single roughly diamond-shaped Stronghold dungeon six miles long from north to south, and five miles across at its widest point. A dungeon that size could grow to hold thousands of monsters. And worse, what if the dungeon was capable of turning humans into undead? The Orc stronghold had captured humans and used them for slave labor and amusement, pitting them against each other in an arena. The Stonefang hobgoblins had been torturing victims. What would a necromancer boss do?
If not for the dragon blood burning in my veins, I might have turned tail and fled right then and there. I had never even heard of anything above Epic grade, and that was already far beyond anything I could have imagined surviving in my first life. Now here I was staring at something ranked Mythic. I wasn’t even sure if that was the ceiling—was there something above it? If so, this place had to be close. A boss at Level 95.
Even with all my advantages, there was no way I was throwing myself at that fight until I was at least like-level with the boss. Maybe not even then.
What baffled me almost as much as the grade was the spread of monster levels inside. From as low as 10 to as high as 95. That was insane.
The System clearly hadn’t designed this as something a single group could clear—it was built for an army. A raid with hundreds of people battering at the gates at once. But there weren’t hundreds of adventurers on Earth, not yet. Maybe a handful could even take on the level 10 trash mobs here, and Morgan, Viki, and I had trained all of them ourselves. And none of them could be spared for this nightmare. Everyone had their own fronts to fight on.
But that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Those people I’d seen, moving like shadows through the streets—they weren’t travelers. They were terrified survivors being hunted and trying to stay alive in the shadow of this fortress. The more I looked, the clearer the picture became. They weren’t running from each other or from chaos. They were running from the dungeon. Whatever stalked inside those black walls had spilled out, and now it was preying on the helpless, one block at a time.
My chest clenched tight, my heart breaking as I watched them scatter like mice before hawks. Every instinct screamed at me to dive down, to gather them up, to fight tooth and claw until they were safe. But the hard truth pressed back just as strongly. If I wanted to make it to Level Cap and Ascend—if I wanted to save everyone—I couldn’t afford to stop here. Not for a day. Not for even a single hour.
Even just evacuating all those people would take days. Days I didn’t have. Still… I couldn’t just fly past without knowing what hunted them.
With a growl low in my throat, I angled my wings and glided lower, skimming a hundred feet above the streets. My eyes raked the broken houses, the collapsed storefronts, the smoke-stained pavement. At first, there was nothing—just silence and the faint shuffle of desperate humans hiding where they could. Then movement caught my eye.
A monster.
It shambled across an open street, its steps dragging and uneven, shoulders hunched like a broken puppet. Its skin hung gray and slack, split in places where bone jutted through. In its slow, staggering path, it veered toward the wreckage of a house. And there—barely audible even with my heightened senses—I caught the ragged, desperate crying of a child.
Name: Zombie
Level: 10
Type: Undead – Common
For fuck’s sake, it’s a damned real-life Zombie apocalypse in the streets!
Chapter 23
Saving a Child
Growling, I knew there was no way I could leave a child to be eaten by a zombie, so I dove and exploded its head with Shadow Bolt from forty feet away. Its rotten body collapsed and was still. I wasn’t about to get close enough to smell it.
Instead, I hovered in place and peered toward the mound of rubble that used to be a house.
This part of the area was older homes built in the ’60s or early ’70s, so it was still somewhat recognizable as a house and hadn’t completely collapsed yet. They might be small compared to modern houses, but you had to give them credit for using better lumber and nails instead of glued-up scrap wood that people called boards these days.
I landed and tried to make my way inside, calling out, “Hello, my name is Liam — who’s inside the house?”
The crying stopped, and a snuffling reply came back. “Help me! I’m trapped and mommy hasn’t come back!”
My stomach dropped. This was bad. If the child’s mother had left and hadn’t come back, that was a terrible sign.
“Okay, I’ll get you out. Just stay where you are. But first — can you tell me how long ago your mother left? And why did she leave?”
The kid sounded on the verge of tears. “T… two days. She… she went to get us food.”
I sighed. I didn’t have a choice. I’d need to get this kid to safety — he was surely an orphan by now. No one would have left their child alone this long.
“I’m going to come in. Don’t be afraid. I’m going to use magic to get you out, okay?”
“Oh… okay.”
Casting Shadow Walk, I merged with the shadows and phased through the half-collapsed house. The child was in a bathroom, huddled in the old cast-iron claw-foot tub; half the ceiling had already fallen in, leaving me with barely enough room to emerge from the shadows.
Crap.
The only way I was going to get the kid out was if I could pull him into the shadows with me and phase him through the debris.
And it was a boy — maybe six or seven years old, brown hair gray with dust like everything else. He was curled down in the tub, shoulders shaking, face hidden.
This was going to be a risk. If my weight suddenly caused everything to cave in and bury us, I’d be stuck for at least thirty seconds. With my stats, I’d be fine, but the kid wouldn’t survive. There was a beam above him; if it dropped, it could seriously injure or kill him.
There was another problem. I’d never done this before. I didn’t know what the shadow realm would do to an ordinary human: would he survive? Would it scramble his head?
No choice. It could have consequences that would haunt me, or it could work. I wouldn’t know until I tried.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped out of the shadows and crouched beside the tub. The house settled with a sick creak; dust drifted down from the broken ceiling. Still, it held, and I let out a quiet breath.
“Hi. I’m right next to you. Don’t move, and don’t be frightened. I have a way to get you out, but first — what’s your name?”
“I’m Mike. Like my dad. But everyone calls me Little Mike.”
The sight of him curled into the claw-foot tub twisted something hard in my chest, and I clenched my jaw until my teeth ached. Damn, he’d lost everything.
“Hey, Little Mike. I’m Liam. I got magic powers when the System came. I can do stuff, but I don’t want you to be scared, okay? One thing I can do is turn partway into a dragon. I’ve got wings and a tail and everything. But it’s okay — that helps me fly and beat up monsters.”
The kid sounded scared, but something in his voice flickered like excitement. “Really? Can I see?” He started to sit up; I put a hand on his back.
“Hang on, kiddo. Don’t move — the ceiling might collapse. I’ll let you look once I get you outside. One of my other abilities is moving through shadows, and that’s how I’ll get you out, okay?” I tried to sound sure, even though I had no idea if I could pull him into the shadows or how it would affect him.
“Uh… okay. If you’re sure.”
So, with as confident a voice as I could muster, I said, “Yeah, of course. It might be a little scary, so cover your eyes with your hands and don’t peek, alright? Once we enter the shadows, I’ll hold on tight and we’ll be outside in just a few seconds. Ready?”
“Okay,” he whispered.
I smiled, the kind that meant everything was under control even if my insides were a mess, and mouthed, “Here we go,” before I reached down and took him gently in both arms.
He asked worriedly, “Can Teddy come with us?”
It took me a second to realize what he meant, but then I saw what he was clutching in his lap — a teddy bear, so caked in dust it had blended into the rubble.
“Sure. Hold onto him, and I’ll pull you both in and, we’ll go. On three. One… two…”
“Three!”
Grasping Little Mike’s arm and willing him to come with me, I activated Shadow Walk again.
I exhaled in relief as the tension in my shoulder released when he entered the shadows, but it was a strain. There was resistance, like the System itself didn’t like what I was doing. Mana drained from me in a rush as if compensating for dragging something unnatural along. Mr. Teddy was no issue, but Little Mike’s small form strained my ability in a way I’d never felt before. Still, I managed to pull him through the tub and into my arms. I pressed his head against my chest, shielding him from the shifting unreality around us.
To me, this place felt right. Like home. But for a normal child…? I could only imagine the terror. His little teddy bear dangled from his hand as I moved quickly, forcing us out through the debris and back into the real world.
The instant we broke through, the shadows spat him out — almost ejecting him back into reality.
We reappeared on the street, a safe distance from the bloodstains where I’d blasted the zombie. I set him down gently.
He wobbled, pale and shaky, but he stayed on his feet. I pulled a water bottle from my inventory and handed it to him. “Here, drink this slowly. Don’t gulp it down or you’ll make yourself sick. After that, I’ll take you somewhere with food. Sound good?”
His wide eyes darted to the wreckage, his little voice trembling. “But Mommy. She’ll be coming back with food soon.”
My chest tightened. I didn’t want to crush what hope he had left, so I forced a lie through my teeth. “Tell you what — I’ll carve a message into the sidewalk, so when she comes back, she’ll know where to find you. How’s that sound?”
His face lit up with a fragile hope, and he nodded. But I could see it in his eyes — deep down, he already knew the truth—or feared it.
Every bit of this made me hate the damned System more.
He was dressed in a wrinkled linen dress shirt and cotton gym shorts, probably the only natural fiber clothes his parents had scrounged together that hadn’t disintegrated like the synthetics. And here he was, looking to me for hope I didn’t have to give, forcing me to lie to keep him from breaking.
I cast Stone Shape and etched the words into the pavement: “Little Mike taken to the Colony camp. Safe there.”
After that, I placed the empty plastic bottle back into storage and cast Cleanse on him. He had clearly wet himself more than once during those two days trapped in the tub, but in seconds, he was clean.
With the grime gone, he looked even younger than I’d first thought. Maybe five at the most.
“Okay, Little Mike,” I said softly. “We’re going to fly now. Isn’t that exciting?”
His eyes grew even wider, and though he didn’t say a word, fear was written all over his face.
