Apocalypse, then transforming into a magical girl

The square-faced man pondered for a moment, then suddenly slapped his thigh and cursed at his henchmen:

"Are you stupid? Who said we had to take that lousy overpass?"

He pointed to the downhill ramp not far away and said:

"All the monsters in this area have been blown up. Why don't we just go down here, circle around to the other side, and then come back up?"

The people at the bank had obviously thought of this as well.

The two groups faced each other across the ruins, gesturing and shouting to each other, and quickly agreed on a meeting place below.

Upstairs, the two newly joined girls quickly packed their belongings. Soon after, three magical girls led the two down from the building.

On the way, two new girls were chattering and introducing themselves.

"My name is He Yaoyao, you can just call me Peach!" The pink-haired girl introduced herself with great energy.

She pointed to her chestnut-haired companion: "Her name is Shi Yao!"

Xia Zhaozhao's eyes were already glued to the huge binoculars bag behind Shi Yao. She asked curiously, "This thing must be expensive, right?"

"It's alright," Peach casually quoted a price.

Xia Zhaozhao's mind went blank for a moment, and she blurted out, "Holy crap! Twenty orders?"

"Huh?" Peach understood immediately and became interested. "That trash game that costs 800 yuan a game on the market, right? You play it too?"

"Yeah, yeah!" Xia Zhaozhao excitedly announced her ID, "My ID is Zhaozhao123123, I use my real name online!"

Before she could finish speaking, Peach's expression froze.

She pointed at Xia Zhaozhao in disbelief, her voice trembling with tears: "It's you! It was you! You ambushed me at the respawn point and killed me twenty times!"

"Huh? The world is so small!" Xia Zhaozhao exclaimed in surprise.

"Rich lady, why don't you hurry up and VIP me for 50?" She then retorted without backing down, "You got killed twenty times, and then you put an 800 RMB bounty on my head for a server-wide manhunt? Pretty generous, huh!"

Sensing the suspicious look from Xiao Lü, Xia Zhaozhao quickly explained, clearing up Xiao Lü's misunderstanding:

"I've always played on the good side in games, don't get me wrong! She dragged a whole trainload of elite monsters over, then used a teleportation ability to escape, leaving me to get killed by them!"

"She even stole the gear I got after I died!"

Peach, of course, was not convinced and immediately began to refute.

Seeing the two of them start jumping around, Shi Yao and Xiao Lü could only exchange a helpless glance and sigh.

Bai Shuyuan completely ignored the noise around her and began to make her own plans.

The cooling system of the MRI machine at the hospital didn't seem to be completely damaged after the quench. The telescopes here can be used as aiming scopes, and the transformers that are everywhere in the city can be salvaged to make coils with copper wire.

"Next, all we need to do is find a capacitor array with a sufficiently large capacity..." she muttered to herself.

"Wow, Xiaobai didn't forget the electromagnetic cannon!" Xia Zhaozhao immediately stopped arguing with Taozi and came over.

Peach overheard this and excitedly leaned closer: "Is Sister thinking about how to build a new weapon? I'm super interested in that too!"

"This is my job!" Xia Zhaozhao declared indignantly upon hearing this.

Peach looked over excitedly, indicating that she was also very interested in this and always wanted to launch electromagnetic cannons or laser weapons.

Peach simply rattled off a string of ballistics terms, which probably contained a lot of aptitude for astronomy.

However, that was enough to scare Xia Zhaozhao; she immediately lost her temper and retreated to the side, looking dejected.

As they chatted, they walked through the ruins of the overpass and approached the survivors.

Witnessing the ruins firsthand, everyone was shocked by the power of the explosion.

"This feels like it could evaporate even a magical girl," Xia Zhaozhao complained.

"In fact, if we were within fifty meters of the epicenter," Bai Shuyuan calmly stated the fact, "you would probably be the only one who could survive using only your physical body."

"Wow, I'm this strong?" Xia Zhaozhao couldn't help but exclaim.

"...Is it really that thick-skinned?" Little Green listened from the side, speechless.

Finally, the survivors officially met up at the edge of the ruins.

The square-faced men felt a sense of awe at the bank squad's strict discipline. The bank squad, on the other hand, was both surprised and speechless at the two strange vehicles and the bandit-like aura emanating from the men.

"So... are we going to set up a temporary base here next?" the square-faced man asked, leaning closer.

With the overpass broken, the two outposts would have to detour from below if they wanted to communicate with each other.

Therefore, it is necessary to set up an outpost here.

"Definitely," Old Wang replied, pointing to a distant, unaffected area: "Look there."

Following his gaze, everyone saw that, in the distance, in a place unaffected by the storm, the words "Xinmao City Elevated Road Maintenance and Management Co., Ltd." were clearly visible.

The gate was locked, so Xia Zhaozhao volunteered to forcefully break it open.

Shortly after entering, the group discovered a huge indoor garage. The garage was filled with all sorts of road maintenance vehicles.

Some of the survivors had expressions of ecstatic joy in their eyes.

"Wow," one of the underlings muttered, his mouth agape as he looked at the rows of massive machines in front of him, "This is so cool."

The group immediately dispersed excitedly, each taking on tasks according to their own team's needs and style, a tacit understanding between them.

Square Face and his underlings immediately took a liking to the snowplow. To them, the massive snowplow blade on the front of the snowplow was a perfect work of art.

They excitedly discussed how to drastically modify the thing, imagining it rampaging through hordes of monsters.

"Square face, and this one too! Driving this out there would definitely be a thrill!" one of the henchmen shouted excitedly, pointing at the road roller next to them.

The square-faced man looked at him like he was an idiot: "Awesome my ass! Who can you catch up with in that metal lump? You want to pick it up and smash monsters with it?"

The veteran's gaze calmly swept over each machine, finally settling on the road maintenance truck. Its built-in heating system and independent generator could perhaps be modified into a heavy-duty flamethrower.

While everyone was excited about the engineering vehicles, Bai Shuyuan calmly followed the pipelines on the wall and found the oil storage tank.

She opened the observation port of the oil storage tank, shone a flashlight inside, and found that it was almost full of diesel fuel.

She then calmly announced to the crowd that the diesel reserves were sufficient to support the outpost's electricity needs for a long time and to meet the fuel consumption of vehicles.

"The power problem has been temporarily resolved."

After a brief discussion, everyone quickly decided on the next step of the plan. Fang Lian led a portion of the mall's staff, along with Lao Wang, to stay behind at the newly discovered maintenance company, using it as an outpost.

The remaining people targeted the hospital, which had already been cleared out. The threat along the way to the hospital had been eliminated earlier.

Thus, the bank, shopping mall, hospital, and this outpost, four locations were barely connected by an elevated road.