Shen Cong hadn't expected Zhang Kehao to die before he could get to him.

Armored vehicle 028, Zhang Kehao's assigned carrier, had been overrun by Giant Digging Beetles before Shen Cong arrived. All thirty-odd jin people inside, Zhang Kehao included, were dead.

Unexpected.

"First creature I saw in the Apocalypse was a Digging Beetle. Now Giant Digging Beetles come through and do me a massive favor. You're all cockroach descendants." He muttered the observation to no one in particular. "I had a classmate named Zhang Xiaoqiang in primary school. Another one named Li Xiaoqiang in middle school. I've always had a special relationship with the mighty cockroach."

He stopped muttering and started attacking.

Where the sheltering vehicles could only fire blindly through their shooting ports, direction sense gone, Shen Cong moved through the mass with the Third Eye fully open — one stroke, one beetle, no wasted effort. In practice, the fog zone's adapted fauna turned out to be weak at the individual level. Large spiders first, now Giant Digging Beetles: both had adapted to the environment, but neither was a meaningful threat to him in direct combat.

When he opened his pressure aura, the Giant Digging Beetles retreated immediately.

Several hundred of them, dissolving in seconds. Gone.

The battlefield that had been noise and gunfire moments before went completely silent. He walked to the damaged vehicles and began his inspection — primarily the 028 armored vehicle. Alive or dead, the person had to be accounted for. It was Zhang Kehao's assigned carrier, but that didn't guarantee Zhang Kehao had been inside it.

The interior was blood-soaked. What caught Shen Cong's attention was that the vehicle hadn't lost its Activity signature.

He turned his perception toward the cab. The passenger seat: heavily bloodstained. The driver's seat: relatively clean.

"Come out," he said toward the driver's side.

A woman's head emerged from below the driver's seat, trembling, squinting through the fog that had seeped in — she couldn't make out his face clearly. "Who are you?"

"Was Zhang Kehao in this vehicle?"

"Yes — yes he was."

"You're his driver? Where…