Splash—!
The freezing, high-pressure stream from the industrial hose blasted against Saya Takagi's shivering body, violently snapping the young genius back to reality.
"Boo-hoo... Dad! Mom! —Boo-hoo—"
The pink-haired tsundere froze for a fraction of a second against the cold concrete before suddenly bursting into loud, hysterical sobs. Compared to the pragmatic Rei Miyamoto, Saya's emotional resilience was incredibly fragile. After all, she had lived her entire life as a pampered, untouchable aristocrat; when had she ever suffered such profound, agonizing degradation before?
"What the hell are you crying for?! Scrub the filth off yourself!"
Seeing the girl still squatting pathetically on the ground weeping, Manami Katsura instantly flew into a rage and roared furiously over the sound of the rushing water.
As the old saying goes, even a docile clay figure has a temper. Far too much trauma had occurred over the past twenty-four hours, and every captive in the fortress had accumulated a massive, suffocating pile of pent-up negative emotions.
In the terrifying presence of Adrian and Saeko, Manami and Kotonoha were forced to grovel, bark, and greet their abusers with desperate, eager smiles. Yet, stripped of her humanity, Manami was still a person with a breaking point. To fall from a high-and-mighty, elite corporate executive to a mere milk-producing cow—and to have personally held her own screaming daughter down while a man violently took her virginity—left Manami seething with a suppressed, venomous rage.
Unable to direct her hatred at her Master, she viciously projected it onto the only creature in the fortress ranked lower than herself.
"Boo-hoo... Dad! Mom! Save Saya! —Boo-hoo—"
However, Manami's furious shouting had absolutely no effect on the broken girl. Saya simply remained curled in a ball on the wet concrete, weeping bitterly for parents who could not hear her.
"You stubborn brat!"
Seeing that the filthy teenager was actually ignoring her commands, Manami completely lost her temper. She instantly cranked the heavy brass faucet to its absolute maximum setting.
"Ahhh—! Help me!—Stop it!"
As the brutal, stinging jet of water lashed directly against Saya's bruised skin, the pink-haired girl instantly stopped her idle crying and began thrashing desperately across the courtyard to escape the freezing spray.
"I'll give you something to cry about! Go ahead, cry all you want now!"
Watching the arrogant Takagi heiress scramble like a wet rat, Manami felt a dark, twisted surge of sadistic pleasure. Clutching the heavy hose, the beautiful corporate executive threw her head back and burst into delirious, unhinged laughter.
"That woman is truly deplorable," Saeko murmured.
Standing on the third-floor balcony of the central villa, the purple-haired swordswoman looked down at the courtyard, watching Manami ruthlessly torment the weeping teenager with the industrial hose.
"In an apocalypse like this, people are bound to change. If you do not adapt, you do not survive," Adrian replied smoothly, stepping out onto the balcony to stand close behind her.
"Besides, they can hardly be considered human anymore. They are livestock. There is no need for you to stoop to their level and concern yourself with their squabbles."
"Father..." Saeko turned around, tilting her head back to look up at the towering man—a figure both intimately familiar and yet dangerously alien to her. "Ever since you broke through the final mental barriers to reach the realm of the Sword Saint... from the very moment you glimpsed the apocalyptic future... have you... changed?"
While the System's physical and memory integration was undoubtedly flawless, a person's micro-expressions, breathing rhythms, and core aura could still strike a trained martial artist as peculiar. Gazing at the man before her—her father, whom she had trained side-by-side with for eighteen years—Saeko realized she had never once stopped to critically analyze his sudden shift in demeanor.
But now that she had finally quieted her chaotic mind and truly reflected on the matter, she saw with sudden, terrifying clarity: her father had indeed changed. He was darker, colder, and infinitely more predatory.
"Whether I have changed or not... does it really make any difference?"
Smoothly evading the young girl's perceptive question, Adrian took a confident step forward. He wrapped his strong arms around her slender waist, pulling her flush against him, and smiled down at her.
"You are right. Dwelling on the past now really is completely pointless," the purple-haired girl replied, a soft, wry smile touching her lips. What was the point of agonizing over such philosophical details anyway?
'No matter if his true nature has been drastically altered by a deviation in his martial cultivation, or if his personality became twisted after glimpsing the end of the world, one truth remains immutable,' Saeko reasoned silently. 'He is my father—the only person in this ruined world I can trust implicitly.'
Moreover, there was the terrifying, intoxicating reality that he would very soon become her lover.
Admittedly, the deeply ingrained societal barrier imposed by their blood relationship still caused her a flicker of deep-seated unease; yet, Saeko knew her willpower was crumbling. She wouldn't be able to resist his gravity for much longer. This man was powerful, enigmatic, and exuded an overwhelming, dominant allure. His ruthless, no-holds-barred approach to surviving this new world made him—in her dark mind—the quintessential, perfect partner.
Adrian pulled Saeko fully into his embrace and immediately lowered his head to capture her lips.
"Mmph—this isn't right—Father—whimper..."
Saeko attempted to press her hands against his chest in a token struggle, but the moment his tongue confidently slipped past her lips, her defenses evaporated. She surrendered completely, her hands gripping his shoulders as she met his kiss with unreserved, desperate passion.
"What exactly isn't right?" Adrian murmured a long moment later, their lips finally parting. He slid his hands up her ribcage, slowly beginning to toy with her beautiful breasts through the fabric of her torn blouse.
In terms of sheer, monstrous volume, Saeko's athletic D-cup bust was actually on the smaller side compared to the other captives in the fortress; however, the absolute perfection of their shape—a flawless, firm teardrop form—made them a treasure of the highest caliber. Besides, the psychological thrill of fondling his proud, lethal "daughter" simply couldn't compare to the hollow sensation of using broken breeding stock.
"I'm not—ngh—quite ready for this yet—uh..."
The young swordswoman gasped, her face flushed a brilliant crimson. Although she knew she was currently sliding headlong into an inescapable abyss of depravity, the sensation of his calloused hands on her skin was simply too sublime—too utterly intoxicating to deny.
"Just look outside. Look at what the world has become."
Still rhythmically kneading the young woman's sensitive, swelling peaks, Adrian turned her slightly, gesturing out over the balcony railing toward the sprawling valley below.
Thanks to the Yokogawa Mountain Base's extreme vantage point, they could look down and survey nearly half of Tokonosu City. What they saw was a sprawling, burning canvas of utter hell on earth. Plumes of thick black smoke choked the skyline. The streets were choked with gridlocked cars, and countless undead wandered aimlessly through the bloody intersections. Whenever a desperate survivor made the slightest sound or broke cover, they were instantly swarmed and devoured by the ravenous, rotting horde.
"Humanity has no future left. The old laws are dead. In a chaotic apocalypse like this, why not simply follow your heart's true, darkest desires?" Adrian whispered, feeling her nipples peak and harden against his palms.
"Mmm... but the government is still... Ah! Gently! I think... Ngh! ...there is still a chance... Ahhh! ...for a military counterattack..."
The girl struggled to maintain her tactical logic, desperately trying to suppress the heavy waves of pleasure coursing through her body as she spoke in broken, breathless sentences.
"Do you really think the government is coming to save us?" Adrian shook his head in cynical amusement.
The government in this apocalyptic timeline was utterly incompetent. What should have been a manageable biological outbreak—a crisis easily contained with swift military quarantine protocols—they had somehow managed to bungle into a global, terminal extinction event.
"As long as... Mmph! ...global communications and transportation infrastructure are still functioning... Stop playing with my nipples!"
The girl let out a soft, petulant moan, her hips involuntarily grinding back against him. Damn this man! How was she supposed to carry on a coherent, strategic conversation when he was doing that to her body?
"Communications and transportation... they are about to be cut off entirely. Very, very soon," Adrian murmured. He paused his movements, his dark eyes gazing out at the azure sky over the distant ocean horizon.
Suddenly, a single, terrifying point of light flashed in the high atmosphere—a brilliance so absolute and intense that, even in the broad light of day, it was blinding to behold.
"Is that... a nuclear warhead?" Saeko gasped, her breath catching in her throat as the unnatural light washed over the balcony.
Whether it was Saeko, currently trembling in the throes of heavy arousal; Manami, who had frozen mid-laugh while teasing Saya with the hose; the surviving students toiling in the dirt under the terrifying crack of the Takahashi brothers' leather whips; or the scattered, desperate survivors hiding in the burning ruins of Tokonosu City—every single living person froze.
Their eyes fixed in stunned, absolute silence upon that distant, blinding flash in the sky.
As the only nation in human history to have ever endured the apocalyptic horror of an atomic bombing, the Japanese harbored a deep-seated, visceral, and paralyzing dread of that unmistakable light.
The EMP strike had arrived.
.....
.....
.....
Support me and read advance chapters on patreon.com/ImmortalDaoWriter