Into the woods

Xia's jaw dropped. Ellin's hands froze on the steering wheel, making him almost drive the car into a pothole. For several seconds, nobody spoke a word, as Eve waited for everyone to gather their composure again.

"Wow, Eve, you are even more unbelievable than I thought! But if you can do something like this, why won't you give yourself a superpower to just… defeat everyone?" Ellin said with agitation in his voice. At Eve's side, Xia looked at her with the same question written in her eyes.

Eve scowled at their stupidity. "How do you think this world works? I told you already, this isn't some magic! I need time to come up with such things."

"Of course, of course, Sister Eve!" Xia nodded with so much zeal that it looked that her thin neck was going to break like a twig.

Eve closed her eyes and let her head fall on the back of her seat. Waves of dizziness were washing over her brain'; her anger pulled out a lot of energy from her. With the last bit of strength she mumbled, "Tell me when we are there…" Then, she fell into the darkness of unconsciousness and dull pain again.

When Eve opened her eyes next time, the first thing she noticed was that their car stopped. The lack of movement felt like a real blessing on her wound—or maybe it was the effect of painkillers. Either way, Eve felt much better than before. She lifted her head and looked around. "Why did we stop?"

Ellin stood on his knees in his seat so that his head would be above the backrest and yawned so hard that Eve could see all his teeth. "The car wants to sleep… and so do I! Batteries are empty, we must stop and charge. Which may take some time, with the weather like this…"

Xia frowned as she glanced outside, where glum, grey clouds covered the entire sky. It wasn't a good time to charge a solar-powered car indeed. "I hope we had escaped far enough. Lin-Lin, you worked hard—rest for now. Sister Eve, I'm going to change your bandages."

The white gauze at Eve's side turned red with blood. She checked on her health status report—the only good thing it said was that the wound wasn't infected. The night drive wasn't at all helpful to her healing. And even with painkillers, when Xia cut the bandages from Eve's skin, it still hurt so much that tears rose to her eyes.

"Xia… what level you are?" Eve said to distract herself.

"I'm level two, thanks to Lin-Lin. I got so used to hiding my presence that I still keep doing it even now, he-he." Xia smiled bashfully. She released her full aura, letting Eve feel it for herself.

Eve glanced towards the front seat where Ellin was chewing on six years old granola bars. 'It's actually higher than his was before we dealt with that acid zombie…'

After Xia finished changing Eve's bandages, she went outside to look out for their chasers and other dangers. By that time, Ellin was already softly snoring in his seat. Eve was alone in the car. The whole backseat was for her to lie on and stain with more of her blood. She felt weak, but unable to sleep; instead, she dived into DreamscapeEdit. After her upgrade to level three, she didn't have nearly enough opportunities to improve her core.

In the nights during Eve and Ellin's return to Chainsaws Base, she was thinking about a possibility of adding the superpower of the acid zombie to her own. To her dismay, it wasn't something so easily achievable in practice. Her level three core could only control this many nanites at once, which limited the amount of enhancements it could give to Eve; and her own superpower already took most of its computing power.

It was a most peculiar one. The closer Eve looked at it, the more she marvelled at it. Straightforward abilities, like Ellin's, were all about simple matter manipulation. Their strength scaled in linear progression with how many nanites a person's core could control at once.

Contrary to those, Eve's superpower used her core, first of all, for complex calculations. It interpreted signals from other cores and the brain activity of Eve herself. She couldn't for her life tell how it could develop in the future. This sort of communication between a brain and a core wasn't something that Eve herself could do without a help of an experienced neurologist. And yet, here it was.

"Lin-Lin, wake up! There are four cars moving towards us. They are too far away to notice us, but we must hurry!" Xia's voice pulled Eve out of DreamscapeEdit, but she didn't rise from her lying position—it was too comfortable. "Get up, I will take the wheel."

"Ah! So quickly?"

"It was actually quite slow." Xia's voice rang with whining undertones. "It has been almost five hours, and you call it quickly?"

Ellin yawned and smacked his lips. "Way too quickly."

Some hustling followed as Xia and Ellin exchanged seats. Then, Xia said in a grim voice, "The battery had only charged to fourteen percent? This isn't enough. Cole is definitely charging their cars with his lightning power."

"What if we try to turn into this forest? Do you think he will dare to follow?" Ellin said.

"This… This may just work, Lin-Lin! I'd better get eaten by mutant beasts than return to his hands."

Eve lifted her head up in surprise to look at them through the rear-view mirror. "What mutant beasts you are talking about?"

There was a certain ominous premonition growing in her soul. She had never paid much attention to it before, but the pigeons, sparrows and crows she had seen around were looking kind of strange… But she always concentrated on the zombies and other survivors too much to pay attention to random birds. 'Could it possibly be…'

"Oh, sorry that we woke you up, Eve. You should keep resting and stay calm to heal quicker. As for these animals… they are nothing serious, really. It's just that the animals also got superpowers, and many of them became zombies… They aren't that dangerous as long as you don't go to their natural habitats, honestly!" Ellin let out a nervous chuckle.

"Isn't that exactly what are you planning to do?" Eve's voice turned sour. "Fine, I trust you. We are all in this together."

"Exactly, Sister Eve! Just stay calm and don't pull on your side. And be careful, because the road will turn bumpy…" Xia said. A soft rumble signified the start of the car's engine and a couple seconds later their car moved from its spot.

Eve really wished they didn't need to run right now. She'd give a small fortune right now to be put into a proper hospital with gentle nurses (not that Xia wasn't gentle, but her technique of first aid was definitely made for tough soldiers who weren't afraid of pain), warm food and Internet access.

Soon, Xia made a turn from the driveway onto a dirt road. It was ten times more uneven, and Xia was forced to drop their speed. From the windows Eve saw the wilted, dry trees hanging over the both sides of the road. They didn't have enough leaves on them to block the sky, but their crooked trunks made Eve think about a Purgatory for the lost souls.

"Everything is too quiet… I don't feel any powerful presences around either," Xia said in a tense tone. "This forest must be a hunting ground of some high-level predator."

She turned to her side, only to see Ellin sitting there with his eyes closed. His head bobbed up and down listlessly on each of the many road bumps. At this adorable sight, Xia couldn't help but smile despite their grim situation. She said nothing more after that and kept driving in silence.

The deeper she drove into the forest, the stranger she felt. There was no one attacking them. She knew it wasn't normal, even if she didn't venture outside of Chainsaws Base for a long time. After the apocalypse animals became much more aggressive and forgot to fear marks of human presence. There should've been at least some coming out to check out the noise coming from their car.

Xia checked the battery indicator on the car's dashboard. It showed five percent of the charge left and forty percent of solar panels' effectivity. She steeled her car and kept driving on the road. The weight of a gun in her pocket made her feel a bit better—at least now she had something to protect herself with.

Then, Xia spotted something even more out of place—a house. It was far away yet, too far to be seen without her enhanced eyesight, but it was there. It was a medium-sized one-storey building. After thinking about it for a couple more seconds, Xia guessed it might've been someone's vacation house. She glanced at Eve, who was lying down with her eyes closed, through the rear-view mirror.

'The car's battery won't last for much longer. I might as well bring her to a normal bed.'