[ENG] What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
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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 26 : Regressor
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[Time remaining until The Great Freeze: 6 Days]
[Status: TIMELINE DEVIATION / SEVERE ANOMALY]
[Location: Ruined Toll Road - West Jakarta]
[Time: Day 6 - 04:30 PM]
The merciless, sub-zero atmosphere clawed at their exposed skin, turning every drawn breath into a painful inhalation of razor-sharp frost that burned the back of the throat. The squad of twelve heavily armed men marched in a flawless, staggered tactical formation down the center of the buried toll road, their heavy military boots crushing the thick layer of black ice into fine, dark powder with every synchronized step.
At the very front of the vanguard, wearing a heavy dark blue tactical coat that absorbed the dim ambient light, walked Richter.
His face was a rigid, unmoving mask of absolute, clinical detachment. His pale blue eyes constantly scanned the jagged, frozen ruins of the collapsed skyscrapers towering over them, processing thousands of environmental variables with the terrifying, automated efficiency of a veteran who had walked through the exact same frozen hellscape countless times before. To his elite squad, Richter was an infallible, omniscient god of war, a leader who possessed an impossible, almost clairvoyant understanding of the apocalyptic world they had just been thrust into.
In reality, beneath that impenetrable facade of cold, mechanical perfection, Richter's mind was a boiling, violent tempest of sheer, unadulterated stress and mounting paranoia.
A sudden, high-pitched screech shattered the dead silence of the ruined street.
From the dark, jagged maw of a collapsed underground parking garage to their left, three massive, heavily mutated creatures lunged into the open. They were former zoo escapees, Sumatran tigers that had been violently warped by the concentrated cosmic radiation of the black snow. Their bodies had swelled to the size of small military jeeps, their muscles bulging grotesquely beneath thick, frozen fur, and their elongated, saber-like fangs dripped with highly corrosive, steaming saliva that melted the ice beneath their massive paws.
"Contact left. Echelon formation. Overlapping suppression fire on the flanks," Richter commanded.
His voice did not rise above a calm, conversational volume, yet the absolute authority embedded in his tone caused the eleven men behind him to execute the maneuver with flawless, robotic precision.
The squad instantly fanned out, their customized assault rifles snapping to their shoulders in perfect unison. Bright yellow muzzle flashes illuminated the gloomy, ash-choked air as a devastating torrent of high-caliber armor-piercing rounds tore through the freezing atmosphere.
The deafening roar of sustained automatic gunfire completely drowned out the terrifying screeches of the mutated felines.
Richter did not even break his walking stride. He simply raised his left hand, aiming the barrel of his suppressed submachine gun with a casual, almost bored flick of his wrist.
He understood the exact biological composition of these specific mutants. He knew precisely how their hyper-accelerated nervous systems operated, where the thickest plates of their newly evolved bone armor rested, and exactly the exact millisecond they would expose their vulnerable optical cavities during a lunging attack.
He pulled the trigger three times in rapid, measured succession.
The heavy, specialized tungsten rounds bypassed the thick muscle mass entirely, punching cleanly through the glowing yellow eyes of the lead tiger and detonating directly inside its mutating brain stem.
The massive beast collapsed instantly, its forward momentum carrying its lifeless, two-ton carcass sliding across the black ice until it crashed heavily into the guardrail just a few meters away from Richter's boots.
The squad systematically shredded the remaining two beasts into unrecognizable piles of bleeding, steaming meat in less than ten seconds, adhering strictly to the central nervous system destruction protocol Richter had ruthlessly drilled into their minds.
"Cease fire. Maintain perimeter," Richter ordered, his tone utterly devoid of adrenaline or excitement.
He stepped toward the massive, steaming carcass of the lead tiger. He raised his open palm, activating the spatial distortion ability he had spent years mastering. A perfect, circular black hole tore through the fabric of reality, expanding rapidly to swallow the colossal beast whole, storing the highly valuable mutated meat and the developing energy core securely within his dimensional void.
To any outside observer witnessing the brief, brutal massacre, Richter was the absolute pinnacle of human survival, a terrifyingly competent leader holding the absolute key to dominating the apocalypse.
They could not possibly hear the frantic, enraged screams echoing endlessly inside his own head.
"This is completely, fundamentally wrong," Richter thought, his teeth grinding together so hard his jaw ached beneath his tactical mask.
"This entire sequence is completely derailed. Those mutated tigers are absolutely not supposed to spawn in this specific sector of West Jakarta until the third month of the deep freeze. The evolutionary timeline is accelerating at a terrifying, incomprehensible speed."
Richter was a Regressor.
He had already lived through the agonizing, brutal destruction of the world and died seven separate times. Seven times he had starved, frozen, fought, bled, and been torn apart by the relentless horrors of the Long Night.
He still did not fully understand, his consciousness would always aggressively snap back to the exact same starting point when he failed to save the world, to exactly one month before the meteor impact initiated the global freeze.
Through sheer, bloody trial and error, he had memorized the exact spawn locations of every mutant hive, the precise coordinates of every hidden government supply cache, and the specific behavioral patterns of the weather anomalies.
He had painstakingly mapped the perfect, flawless route to absolute survival.
This eighth regression was supposed to be his masterpiece. It was supposed to be the flawless, omniscient speedrun where he claimed the absolute peak of human power without suffering a single setback.
Instead, this eighth regression was rapidly turning into the absolute worst nightmare he had ever experienced.
Richter resumed his march down the ruined toll road, his eyes staring blankly at the frozen horizon while his mind aggressively cataloged the catastrophic failures that had plagued him over the past thirty days.
The deviations had begun the very moment he regressed back to the old world. Following his perfectly memorized sequence, he had immediately moved to secure the massive, underground military armory located in the eastern industrial sector, a cache containing enough high-grade weaponry, heavy artillery, and tactical winter gear to arm a small private army.
When he finally breached the heavily reinforced vault doors two weeks before the meteor struck, he found the massive armory completely empty.
Someone had systematically gutted the entire facility. There was no sign of a forced entry, no chaotic looting, and no leftover scraps. It was a terrifyingly efficient, highly coordinated extraction of military assets that required massive funding, inside knowledge, and an impossible level of logistical planning.
The absolute same horrific reality awaited him at the central food distribution silos, the pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, and the heavy machinery warehouses.
More than half of the critical, high-value resources he had entirely depended upon for his early-game dominance had vanished into thin air long before the first snowflake ever fell from the sky.
He had been forced to aggressively scramble for scraps, drastically altering his plans just to equip the small squad of eleven men currently walking behind him. The massive, heavily fortified underground empire he was supposed to be ruling right now was nothing more than a pipe dream.
And the sole reason for this catastrophic, timeline-shattering deviation boiled down to a single, infuriating title.
The Architect.
Richter gripped the handle of his submachine gun until his knuckles turned pure white under his tactical gloves, his chest burning with a violently intense hatred.
In his seven previous regressions, enduring decades of combined apocalyptic survival, he had never once heard that specific name.
The title simply did not exist in the original history of his world. There were warlords, there were cult leaders, and there were mutant tamers, but there was absolutely never an "Architect".
During his frantic, desperate search for his missing supplies in the final days before the impact, Richter had violently interrogated an underground black-market broker. The bleeding, terrified man had babbled incoherently about a massive, shadowy network of elite individuals actively hoarding the city's resources under the absolute, divine prophecies of a mysterious figure known only as The Architect.
The broker claimed this shadow organization possessed a perfect, flawless map of the impending apocalypse, predicting the exact date of the impact, the sudden drop in temperature, and the specific mutations of the feral animals.
Richter had executed the broker on the spot, his mind reeling from the impossible revelation.
"Another Regressor," Richter analyzed, his pale blue eyes narrowing into dangerous, predatory slits as he navigated a treacherous pile of frozen debris.
"There is absolutely no other logical explanation. Someone else has traveled back through the timeline. Someone with vastly superior resources, massive organizational influence, and an aggressive, preemptive strategy that completely eclipsed my own."
The realization was a heavy, suffocating weight pressing down on his chest.
Arlen, currently hiding in his dark, freezing apartment, believed that the Regressor possessed absolute, omniscient knowledge of the future. He believed Richter held all the cards and understood every rule of the broken world.
The reality was the exact opposite.
Richter felt entirely, terrifyingly blind.
The presence of this mysterious "Architect" had completely shattered the structural integrity of his perfectly memorized timeline.
The massive hoarding of resources had drastically altered the survival dynamics of the remaining human population. The accelerated evolution of the mutants, likely caused by the unpredictable actions of this new faction, completely ruined his meticulously planned hunting routes.
Richter had executed those desperate, begging survivors at the intersection earlier not merely out of cold-blooded cruelty, but out of an overwhelming, paranoid necessity to maintain absolute control over the few variables he could still dictate.
He could not afford to expend a single bullet, a single calorie, or a single drop of water on useless civilians when he was actively competing against an unknown, invisible enemy who had already stolen half the board before the game even started.
"We are approaching the designated fallback point," Richter announced to his squad, his voice remaining smooth and utterly devoid of the massive stress eating away at his sanity.
"Maintain absolute visual silence. Check your thermal baffles. We do not leave a single trace for the hive-minds to track."
"Understood, sir," the squad responded in flawless unison, their discipline a testament to Richter's brutal, uncompromising leadership.
As they approached the heavily fortified entrance of their temporary subterranean bunker, Richter paused, looking up at the oppressive, dark sky hidden behind the thick layer of volcanic ash.
He knew exactly what he had to do.
He could not passively follow his ruined itinerary and hope to survive the escalating horrors of this broken timeline. The endgame anomalies were already beginning to manifest in the very first week, dragging the difficulty of the apocalypse to an absolutely impossible level.
He had to actively hunt down the source of the deviation. He had to find the heavily guarded sanctuary of this mysterious shadow organization, breach their defenses, and completely eliminate the anomaly responsible for ruining his eighth life.
"You think you can completely rewrite my timeline and steal my absolute victory from under my nose, Architect? Richter vowed silently in the freezing darkness, his pale eyes burning with a cold, murderous resolve. You think you understand the depths of this hell better than a man who has died in it seven times? I will find your hidden throne, I will tear down your beloved Pillars."
He stepped into the dark, freezing bunker, entirely unaware that the grand, omniscient "Architect" he was plotting to brutally take off was currently sitting on the floor of a dilapidated apartment building just a few miles away, equally terrified, desperately carving wooden spikes with a hatchet, and entirely terrified of him.
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS