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What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action
Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, World-Freezing, Super power
Chapter 35 : Plan
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[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 4 Days]
[Location: Undisclosed Illegal Arsenal / Capital Outskirts]
[Time: 06:30 AM]
The heavy steel doors of the underground bunker exploded inward. The metal hinges sheared off, sending the thick steel plates flying across the dimly lit loading bay. The doors crushed several armed guards, flattening them against the concrete floor before the echoes of the explosion even faded. Grey smoke billowed into the underground facility, masking the point of entry.
Richter stepped through the lingering smoke, his combat boots crunching over the shattered concrete. He wore a dark blue, high-collared tactical winter coat that absorbed the ambient light. His face was calm, focused entirely on the objective. He held a custom-modified heavy assault rifle in his right hand, tracking targets through the dust.
Behind him, twenty elite military operators poured into the facility in a synchronized tactical formation. They wore customized black tactical gear, their faces hidden behind thick ballistic masks. These men followed Richter with deep respect. When the global collapse tore their nation apart and their chain of command dissolved into chaos, Richter had provided clear direction, unmatched tactical skill, and a firm guarantee of survival. In a ruined, freezing world, they gladly pledged their loyalty to a commander who actually knew how to win. They moved with machine-like efficiency, driven by discipline and deep trust in their leader.
The underground bunker belonged to the largest illegal arms syndicate in the capital. Hundreds of armed gang members, smugglers, and mercenaries occupied the massive space, guarding mountains of illicit military hardware. Panic erupted across the facility. Men screamed, scrambling for cover behind wooden crates and overturned forklifts. The syndicate members raised their automatic weapons and unleashed a chaotic hail of bullets toward the entrance.
Richter walked straight into the crossfire.
His eyes tracked the muzzle flashes with the precision of a man who had already lived through a thousand firefights. He raised his rifle and fired. He kept his trigger pulls limited to highly controlled bursts. His bullets punched straight through the concrete pillars, shattered the glass of the elevated sniper nests, and tore directly into the syndicate guards. He moved through the rain of lead smoothly, sidestepping lethal trajectories through ingrained muscle memory from his past seven lives.
His twenty elite soldiers spread out across the loading bay, eliminating the syndicate members with high efficiency. They communicated through silent hand signals, tossing flashbangs over barricades and clearing the tight corridors with short bursts of gunfire. The facility rapidly turned into a slaughterhouse. The smell of burning sulfur, hot brass, and fresh blood saturated the cold air.
"Kill him! Concentrate fire on the guy in the blue coat!" a heavily tattooed syndicate boss screamed from a steel catwalk high above the main floor. He mounted a heavy machine gun on the railing and aimed directly at Richter.
Before the boss could pull the trigger, a high-pitched, sweet giggle echoed across the warehouse.
"Hiiii! You guys are being way too loud!"
A girl descended rapidly from the dark rafters near the ceiling. It was Liese. She wore an oversized, pastel-pink winter jacket and a short pleated skirt, looking entirely out of place in a warzone. Clean white bandages wrapped erratically around her pale thighs, her forearms, and her neck. She possessed the supernatural ability of flight, allowing her to manipulate her own gravitational pull with ease.
She plummeted directly toward the steel catwalk. The syndicate boss looked up, his eyes widening in confusion at the sight of the bandaged girl falling from the ceiling. Liese smiled brightly, her large eyes sparking with manic energy.
She increased her personal gravity right before impact. Her combat boots slammed into the syndicate boss's chest with the kinetic force of a speeding truck. The steel catwalk buckled under the pressure. The man's ribcage shattered, and he was driven straight through the metal grating, plummeting thirty feet down to the concrete floor below.
Liese bounced back up into the air lightly, twirling in a graceful circle. She pulled a long combat knife from a sheath strapped to her thigh.
"You are disturbing my Richter!" Liese yelled angrily, pointing the blood-stained knife at a cluster of mercenaries hiding behind a forklift. Her sweet voice dripped with violent rage. "He is busy! If you put even dirt in his blue coat, I will skin every single one of you alive!"
She darted horizontally across the room, flying mere inches above the ground. The mercenaries desperately tried to track her fast movements. She grabbed the heavy steel chassis of a broken forklift using her localized gravity manipulation and hurled the vehicle directly into the mercenaries. The impact crushed them against the wall.
Liese laughed hysterically, her eccentric energy dominating the upper levels of the facility. She flew through the sniper nests, giggling cheerfully while slicing the throats of the guards. She treated the massacre like a fun video game. Whenever a guard managed to aim a weapon at Richter on the ground floor, Liese would drop from the sky, crushing their skulls with a gravity stomp before they could even pull the trigger.
"Oops! Smashed another one!" Liese cheered, hovering above a mangled corpse. She pouted down at the blood splattering the hem of her oversized pink jacket. "You ruined my outfit. Richter is going to think I look messy."
Down on the main floor, Richter continued his relentless advance. He emptied his magazine, ejected the hot metal, and slammed a fresh one into the receiver in less than a second. He fired blindly through a wooden partition, executing three men attempting to flank him. His elite soldiers pushed forward on his flanks, securing the warehouse aisle by aisle.
The intense firefight lasted exactly twelve minutes.
The final gunshot echoed through the bunker, followed by a heavy silence. Hundreds of syndicate members lay dead across the facility. The floor was slick with dark red blood and covered in spent brass casings. Richter's squad had sustained zero casualties. They formed a tight defensive perimeter around the central storage area, their weapons still raised, breathing heavily under their masks.
Richter lowered his smoking rifle. He calmly wiped a single drop of blood off his cheek using the back of his gloved hand. He surveyed the carnage with a flat, uncaring expression.
Liese descended slowly from the ceiling. The bloodthirsty girl who had just gleefully butchered dozens of men, reverted into a sweet, incredibly needy girl the exact second she entered Richter's personal space.
She floated toward him, wrapping her small arms tightly around his neck from behind. She rested her cheek affectionately against his shoulder, letting her legs dangle playfully in the air.
"Richter! Richter!" Liese chimed softly, nuzzling against his collar. She ignored the mountain of corpses surrounding them. "Did you see me? I was helpful today! I kept your coat perfectly clean. You have to praise me now. Please praise me."
Richter reached up and patted her head exactly twice, his face remaining stoic. He treated her like a highly dangerous, useful asset that required minimal positive reinforcement to maintain loyalty.
"Good work, Liese," Richter said cleanly. "Stay close and watch the upper vents."
Liese giggled happily, kicking her feet in the air. The tiny sliver of validation was enough to satisfy her obsession. She floated off his back, hovering just a few inches to his right, humming a cheerful melody while spinning her bloody combat knife around her fingers.
The captain of the elite squad jogged forward, carefully avoiding the puddles of blood. He stopped a few feet away from Richter, saluting sharply with deep respect.
"The entire facility is secured, sir," the captain reported, gesturing toward the rows of intact shipping crates stretching toward the back wall. "We have verified the inventory manifests. The syndicate was hoarding an incredible amount of firepower. We have located thousands of high-caliber assault rifles, heavy anti-tank munitions, crates of C4 explosives, and enough ammunition to supply a small army for a years. The haul is unprecedented."
Richter nodded slowly. He stepped forward, walking down the central aisle flanked by the stacks of wooden crates. In his previous seven lives, he had always struggled to find enough heavy ordnance to conquer the major mutant hives during the early months. This time, he was vacuuming the entire board dry before the other factions even realized the game had started.
He raised his right hand toward the nearest stack of crates.
The air in front of him warped and twisted. A circular distortion formed in the space, resembling a black void. Richter activated his Spatial Storage ability. An invisible pull grabbed the heavy wooden crates. They lifted off the ground smoothly and flowed directly into the black void, vanishing from reality.
Richter walked down the aisle, keeping his hand raised. He swallowed entire sections of the armory in mere seconds. Thousands of weapons, tons of explosives, and millions of rounds of ammunition disappeared into his boundless inventory. He cleared the underground warehouse with high efficiency.
"The primary objective is complete," Richter announced, closing the spatial rift with a sharp flick of his wrist. He turned to face his squad captain. "Have the men regroup at the transport vehicles. We are returning to the central bunker to fortify our position. We will spend the next two weeks reinforcing the perimeter against the incoming mutant migration waves."
Liese floated closer, wrapping her arms loosely around his bicep. She leaned her head heavily against his shoulder, bringing a digital tablet into his field of view. The tablet hovered in the air right in front of them, tethered to her unique gravitational field.
"Before we go hide in the boring bunker, you need to look at the pictures I took last night," Liese murmured sweetly, looking up at him with her large eyes. "You told me to fly high and scout the northern sector. I found something really pretty over Cikarang. You will love it."
Richter glanced at the glowing screen, expecting to see a massive mutant hive or a cluster of desperate survivor camps.
Instead, he saw a tear in the fabric of the sky.
The high-resolution photograph displayed the dark, storm-filled sky over the Cikarang industrial zone. The heavy black clouds had split wide open. A jagged fracture stretched across the stratosphere. Pouring out from within that massive tear was a pure white light. The light completely illuminated the dark wasteland below. The subsequent photos showed the freezing black snow vaporizing instantly upon contact with the light, creating a swirling ring of white steam around the factories.
Richter stopped breathing.
His body froze. His calculating eyes widened in shock. The background noise of his soldiers shuffling their gear faded away. A deep, cold dread spiked through his chest, paralyzing his muscles for a brief second.
He reached out and snatched the tablet from the air, his leather gloves gripping the device tightly. He swiped rapidly through the gallery, examining every single angle of the cosmic anomaly.
He knew exactly what that white light was. He recognized the specific atmospheric tear Liese had photographed.
It was the Torn Sky event.
Richter's mind, refined and hardened by the memories of seven previous lives, felt as if it had hit a solid brick wall. His internal logic short-circuited. He had witnessed the Torn Sky event seven times. In every single one of his previous timelines, this specific cosmic phenomenon only occurred in the third year of the apocalypse. It was an endgame sequence. It was the climax of the initial survival phase.
And now, in this eighth timeline, the sequence was happening on early days.
"Three years," Richter whispered, his voice trembling slightly with a mixture of rage and disbelief. He stared at the glowing screen, his knuckles turning white. "This was supposed to happen in three years."
Liese tilted her head, confused by his reaction. "Is the pretty light a bad thing, Richter? Do you want me to go break it?"
Richter did not hear her. His mind was racing through millions of tactical calculations, desperately trying to understand the catastrophic shift in the timeline.
The Torn Sky was not a divine miracle, nor was it a gateway to another dimension. Richter knew the truth. The Torn Sky functioned as a cosmic delivery system. When the white light reached its peak, the crack in the sky would eject a singular, incredibly small object down to the earth.
Everyone called it the Stellar Fragment. It was a piece of raw, condensed cosmic energy. Whoever possessed that single fragment gained access to a massive biological evolution, transcending human limitations entirely. In his previous lives, wars had been fought that burned entire continents to ash just to claim that single item.
Someone had accelerated the timeline. Someone had triggered the endgame event far ahead of schedule.
There was only one entity capable of this level of manipulation.
The Architect.
Ever since Richter had regressed into this eighth life, this mysterious entity had been haunting his progress. The Architect had systematically seized control of critical logistical chokepoints, hoarded vital medical supplies, and mobilized a secret society entirely out of view. Richter had spent the last month feeling as if a rival speedrunner was intentionally stealing his resources.
But this was different. The Architect was not just stealing supplies. The Architect possessed the power to manipulate the cosmic schedule of the apocalypse itself.
Richter gritted his teeth, his expression twisting into a mask of pure fury. He viewed the Architect as a highly dangerous rival. The Architect was deliberately accelerating the timeline, dropping the ultimate endgame loot right into his own lap in Cikarang before anyone else was prepared to fight for it.
"He thinks he can monopolize the Stellar Fragment," Richter hissed quietly, his eyes burning with intense hatred. "He forced the spawn early to ensure his Pillars secure the drop while the rest of the world is busy freezing to death."
The dramatic irony of the situation was perfectly lost on the Regressor.
Richter fully believed he was locked in a desperate, high-stakes race against a brilliant mastermind to claim an endgame item. He believed the Pillars were rushing to Cikarang to secure the loot drop for their leader.
In reality, the Pillars had no idea that any item was dropping from the sky. They were fanatical cultists rushing to Cikarang purely to worship the light, fully believing it was a holy gateway opening for them.
And simultaneously, the Architect himself was just a desperate writer hiding in a freezing apartment, completely unaware of the Stellar Fragment, completely unaware of the Regressor. Both the Regressor and the Pillars were fighting a phantom war.
Richter crushed the tablet in his grip. The glass shattered loudly across the quiet warehouse.
He turned around sharply, facing his elite squad. The calm, methodical looter vanished entirely, replaced by a desperate warlord preparing for the ultimate battle.
"Cancel the bunker fortification protocols!" Richter ordered, his voice echoing through the underground facility. His squad flinched slightly, immediately standing at strict attention. "We are not hiding. The entire strategic board has forced to change. We are mobilizing all heavy assault vehicles, all munitions, and all personnel immediately."
The squad captain swallowed hard. "What is our new target location, sir?"
Richter stared toward the dark, destroyed entrance of the warehouse. His eyes were filled with unyielding determination to break the false god who had ruined his perfect run.
"Set coordinates for the Cikarang industrial zone," Richter commanded coldly. "We march north. We are not gonna lose this race."
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS