"All clear! Mutant is dead!"
After hearing the two units' captain yelling back the answer, everyone in the army let out a sigh of relief.
However, their short celebration was quickly interrupted as a group of hunchback zombies suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
As they jumped down from the nearby container, they quickly landed right on top of the soldier's head near the mutant's corpses as it started grappling its neck.
"Everyone, hold your fire! All units with K89K fire!"
Some of the soldier hesitated for a second, but they eventually opened fire when they heard their comrade screaming in pain.
Within a few taps from the soldiers, all the hunchback mutants fell from their heads and dropped dead.
"What the fuck was that... Units forty and eighty, go help administer aid to them."
The two medic units quickly ran up to help the two units that looked severely bruised on the face, with no visible wounds on their neck, surprisingly.
"Everyone, follow me and drive the vehicle to the containers."
As Yezi gave orders, everyone quickly hopped back into the buses as he himself entered the passenger seat of the semi-truck in the front.
After driving for a bit, they finally arrived at the container area where the deceased soldier had been assigned previously.
Yezi and several units quickly hopped off the truck, walking over to the container before opening the lock counterclockwise.
It was a bunch of boxes seemingly to be filled to the brim. Yezi quickly walked up closer and opened one of the boxes.
"Thanks god the dock worker didn't lie... It really is copper." Yezi murmured, tapped the solid sheet of copper inside.
Yezi opened another box nearby, only to find the inside to be full of milled steel that looked brand-new.
"Everyone! Start hauling these to the truck inside! Form an assembly line! Last ten units stay outside and be alert!"
Yezi yelled out loud as soldiers quickly got into formation, carrying boxes and crates from the container to the semi-truck.
Soon, the container was emptied as it filled up an entire truck with raw materials.
"Hm... this is only one truck full. Everyone goes through the container and sees if there's anything valuable. In a group of four units! Sixteen per group."
Yezi commanded, changing the grouping into a much bigger group after what had happened earlier.
After searching for thirty minutes, the third group finally found something interesting.
"What is this?" Yezi asked.
"This is a bunch of chemicals. I'm not sure either. But I remember my friend told me the factory needs these chemicals." The soldier replied.
"Well then... All units come to container 513, with the truck and bus, over." Yezi spoke through the walkie-talkie.
After loading it all onto another truck for thirty whole minutes, the second truck was now full.
"Everyone keep searching!"
As Yezi dismissed all the units to check through the other containers, they soon encountered other useful material.
From fertilizers to more unknown chemicals, they just loaded everything that looked interesting before calling it a day.
---
By the time Yezi got back to the town, it was already five in the afternoon. As the soldiers exited the bus, militias quickly came up to carry out goods in the trucks.
"How's the trip?" Xiaoyun curiously asked as he walked up to an exhausted Yezi, whose face looked a little disappointed.
"Eight of them died... I should have been more careful."
"At least their death isn't in vain..."
Xiaoyun didn't have anything else to say as he didn't expect him to look so depressed. He didn't know how to comfort him at all.
"I'm fine, Xiaoyun, I'm just a little disappointed in myself."
As Yezi's face seemed to have returned to normal, he finally looked back over towards the militia carrying out the boxes of raw materials.
"They know what they sign up for... Anyway, how did they die?"
Yiming curiously asked. His face didn't seem to be too bothered by the death as he walked up to the two of them.
"A mutant zombie. It is three meters tall with an inhuman amount of muscle in its arms. It walks with both its hands and legs. Almost like a tank." Yezi replied.
"I remember seeing that inside the city... We had to use a rocket launcher to kill it." Yiming murmured, looking a little zoned out.
"That's exactly what we had to do after all of our bullets couldn't penetrate through its arm. The makeshift grenade was extremely useful."
"A tank mutant... We have experience against it now, at least. Anything else that was different in this trip?" Xiaoyun asked.
"There was some sort of hunchback mutant, almost shaped like someone riding a horse, all bent down.
They can climb and jump from very high buildings and attack two of our units... Fortunately, they didn't kill any of our soldiers."
"That's good... Where are they at now?" Yiming curiously asked.
"They are already mostly healed back and back to duty... It's only bruises around their faces and their neck." Yezi answered.
"So a jocky mutant, and the other mutant is a tank," Yiming murmured as he labeled the mutants based on their shapes.
"Yezi, you should go take a break. I don't want you to go outside tomorrow." Xiaoyun ordered.
"Fine... I'm going back home now."
As Yezi turned around and headed towards the storage unit's exit, both Xiaoyun and Yiming watched the militia continue to unload the truck.
"Hey, Yiming... Do you think we need to expand our soldier number?" Xiaoyun suddenly asked.
"Not yet, we need to give it some time for the factory to ramp up production first... There are not enough weapons and ammo for the soldiers we have currently.
Besides, doesn't Mrs.Yuqi want to lower the number of soldiers? You sure you want to raise the number?" Yiming questioned back.
"She always wants to lower the number so the civilian side can have more people working in the fields and in the factories.
It's not going to happen under my watch... She tends to forget sometimes we are still in an apocalypse." Xiaoyun argued.
"You aren't wrong... A lot of people seem to have forgotten they're still in the outside world."
Yiming paused for a second, then continued.
"Maybe we should start allowing soldiers and militia to join in Yezi's rescue team as a part of their training," Yiming suggested.
"Actually, it doesn't sound that bad. They do need more combat experience." Xiaoyun murmured, accepting his suggestion.
---
The next day.
Xiaoyun quickly gave the new army plan to Yuqi to review. A plan to make it mandatory for all soldiers to join the rescue team every week at least once.
It was no longer a volunteer or an opt-in choice, except for the militia, who still maintain the choice to join on its own.
"Seems like a good plan, having them be able to gather more resources outside and rescue more people rather than just sitting at the wall in base."
Yuqi handed the paper back, her face seemingly satisfied with the order Xiaoyun had made, as it didn't affect the current number of soldiers in the army.
"Then I'm going to sign this and give it to Yezi tomorrow."
As Xiaoyun signed the paper with his signature, Yuqi was a little confused by the wording in his answer.
"Why tomorrow?"
"Because he's on break today... Anyway, how are the factories and the commercial sector going?"
Xiaoyun curiously asked, as he had been in the storage unit for most of the time, to make up for the food deficits from the population growth.
"The commercial sector is rapidly expanding... To avoid having too many people working there, I raised the raw material cost and restricted the number of licenses."
Yuqi paused to take a sip of coffee from his mug, but Xiaoyun quickly snapped it off her hand.
"Hey, no more coffee. You can't drink too much of it." Xiaoyun murmured as he sipped the entire mug by himself.
"Whatever... And for the factory, there have been three people who opened their own factories for business.
Two of them are textile, and one of them is focusing on tools and woodworking for the farms and for other factories."
Yuqi once again instinctively reached for the coffee cup, but it was already all empty, forcing her to take a sip of water from her mug.
"How about the firearm's factory?"
"Well, they had split into two independent factories from each other... You didn't instruct them to do that, right?"
Xiaoyun quickly shook his head, as he had never told them to separate. He could vividly remember telling them to work together.
"They had been ramping up production with the higher wages to incentivize people to work extra hours for now."
"I see.... Anything else I need to know?" Xiaoyun asked.
"Oh, the Russians are making a prototype of some heavy machine gun after Yiming requested it to be built for the walls.
Meanwhile, Yezi has requested the German one for a submachine gun for close-combat usage a few days ago." Yuqi answered.
"Make sense... how's the New Year celebration plan?"
"Going pretty well. Yueyue has been setting up the stage and most of the stuff needed. I hope you have written a script because you are going to be the host."
As Yuqi smirked, Xiaoyun let out a small sigh inside his head as he felt the pressure building up on his shoulder.
"Shit, I completely forgot about that."
Xiaoyun murmured as he quickly shifted his attention back to the blank sheet of paper in front of him.
---
After writing from morning to noon, Xiaoyun was still unsatisfied with it.
"Babe, you want to go eat?" Yuqi asked as it was now lunch break.
"No, you can go, I'm going to finish this first..."
Seeing Xiaoyun still busy writing with several crumpled papers thrown onto the floor, she picked them up before throwing them into the bin.
"You better not forget to eat, okay?" Yuqi reminded him before leaving.
When Yuqi came back from lunch, Xiaoyun was still writing the script, his hand profusely writing on a completely different sheet.
"Is it that hard to write it? Let me see what you had written."
As Yuqi grabs the paper to have a look, she is a little surprised by how well-written the speech is in the paper.
"Hm... this looks pretty good to me," Yuqi murmured as she handed it back down to his desk.
"But there is still room for improvement. I have to make this perfect for the first New Year's celebration of the town."
Xiaoyun took out another piece of paper as he started writing another one, crumbling the one that Yuqi had just finished reading.
"Well, you still have three days. Good luck writing it."
As Yuqi went back to his seat and started working, three hours quickly flew by as Xiaoyun finally finished writing.
"Yes, this is perfect!"
Xiaoyun celebrated with a raised fist as he finally put down his pen, his hand feeling exhausted from writing so much.
"Really? Let me see."
Yuqi quickly moved her seat over, taking a look at Xiaoyun's paper before being amazed by it.
"Damn, this is really impressive. I can't write better than this." Yuqi complimented.
"Of course you can't, I spent almost the entire day writing this thing." Xiaoyun proudly smiled as he lifted the paper in the air.
"Yeah, yeah, you better clean up the floor though." Yuqi pointed at the floor, which was full of crumbled paper.
"Oops."
Xiaoyun scratched his head in embarrassment as he quickly got up from his seat, picking the crumbled paper one by one before throwing it into the bin.