Actually, Mo Shao and Little Ka weren’t the only ones guarding the city walls.
The various factions within Seven Hills City weren’t fools, after all; it was just that due to a shortage of manpower, they couldn’t cover some of the more remote areas.
There was no helping it—the issues inside the city also required people to handle them.
Furthermore, most of the people capable of defending the walls possessed a fair bit of strength themselves, so they didn't really need others to help them maintain the watch.
Thus, as the Honkai Beasts were dealt with, most people withdrew from the city walls and returned to the city to handle other matters.
Especially after seeing Mo Shao and Little Ka, two incredibly powerful individuals, keeping watch, they almost all cleared out.
Unlike the two of them, most of those people had relatives and friends inside the city, so naturally, they wanted to head back and help.
On the other hand, the two girls had absolutely no one to worry about.
Mo Shao went without saying; she had been a complete loner before.
As for Little Ka... over the past few days of talking, Mo Shao had gained a decent understanding of Little Ka’s previous life.
She was also an orphan, though she had been adopted by a family for a period. However, they had passed away long before the apocalypse began.
Moreover, she had been a complete nobody at school, with such low presence that she essentially had no friends to speak of.
In that regard, she actually matched Katicia quite well.
As for the group from the school, there was even less need to worry about them. After all, having followed Mo Shao for a stretch, they believed almost everything she said.
Since their preparations were already made, there would naturally be no issues tonight.
...
As the night deepened, things on their side could even be described as "leisurely."
Even though the action never truly stopped, the operations were so repetitively simple that they didn't need to expend much thought at all.
All they had to deal with were ghosts, Vanguard-class Honkai Beasts, and the Imps thrown by the Gargantuars—none of it was difficult.
Mo Shao spent the entire time discharging electricity, while Little Ka simply built up three sword stacks and performed plunging attacks... They were truly playing with high efficiency.
In fact, because the thunder and sword shadows here never ceased, fewer and fewer ghosts even bothered approaching the city walls later on.
They grew more idle as they fought, while the situation inside the city became increasingly chaotic.
There were ghosts trying to possess bodies; souls that had been kicked out and were trying to reclaim their own physical forms; and ghosts that had already completed their possession...
There were so many factions it was impossible to tell them apart, and the thoughts and emotions of both humans and ghosts influenced their allegiances and choices.
Some living people helped the souls of old friends possess their enemies; some living people actively allowed themselves to be possessed just so they could leave their bodies as souls and possess others...
Some open-minded ghosts felt that the dead should not return to the world and attacked other ghosts; some ghosts wanted nothing more than to embark on a killing spree...
There were even some who were just there for the hell of it, knocking people's souls out and then refusing to possess them, instead just flying around wildly causing a ruckus.
By the way, these ghosts were not entirely without abilities.
The souls of Transformers, for example, directly retained their abilities, though usually this didn't include Dead-bound or Live-bound items.
As for Dead-binders, it depended on their level of fusion with the Dead-bound item; if it was high enough, they could naturally retain those powers even in soul form.
To put it bluntly, the chaos was exaggerated beyond belief.
“This is the consequence of blurring the line between the world of the living and the world of the dead,” Mo Shao mused with deep emotion. This was actually the first time she was seeing something like this with her own eyes.
In her previous life, she had spent her time surviving in the wilderness deep within the Phantom Realms. She hardly ever encountered living people, let alone their ghosts.
...
However, it wasn't as if they remained perfectly idle the entire time; some things occurred that were... well, a bit hard to process.
In the dead of night, it wasn't just the ghosts from the city districts that arrived; ghosts from all directions began to converge.
Among them were ghosts coming from the eastern sea—from the direction where they had originally come to Seven Hills.
And naturally, there were some familiar faces among them.
For instance, the person currently before them: Tu Sisheng. Only her upper half remained; her lower body had been bitten clean off by a Steel-toothed Shark.
She emerged from the sea, her entire being carrying the briny scent of the ocean.
“You two certainly seem to be enjoying a peaceful life,” Tu Sisheng remarked as she approached. She showed no intent to attack, merely offering a cynical comment.
“Aren’t you going to find someone to possess?” Mo Shao asked with a hint of confusion. She could feel that this girl didn't have the slightest desire to live.
It was for this reason—combined with the fact that she was a familiar face—that Mo Shao hadn't simply struck her with lightning to send her to the afterlife.
“I’m already dead, so why would I want to play a resurrection match?” Tu Sisheng shrugged, looking entirely indifferent. “To come back and suffer in this apocalypse?”
She appeared very free-spirited. She hadn't been like this when she was alive, but after death, it was as if she had suddenly attained enlightenment.
“You certainly take things in stride.”
“Whether I do or not, things are the way they are. Regardless, I don’t want to torture myself anymore,” Tu Sisheng said. She waved her hand and departed.
Judging by the direction she was heading, she was probably going toward the city... perhaps just to wander around for a bit? There wasn't much else she could do anyway.
After all, there wasn't a single living person left over there.
...
Even though no conflict had broken out, the appearance of this person and the words she spoke caused Little Ka to ponder the future once again.
“Will we also die in this apocalypse?” she asked, turning her head toward Mo Shao. It was as much a question for herself as it was for her companion.
“Hmm...” Mo Shao fell into thought for a moment.
How should she put it? She had once thought about this herself.
Or rather, in the early stages of the apocalypse, whenever anyone had a free moment, they would think about the future. It was almost a universal convention.
By the middle and late stages of the apocalypse, it wasn't that they stopped thinking about it, but rather that they had already reached a conclusion. Generally, there were only three possibilities.
Either they believed they could live until the end of the apocalypse; they believed the apocalypse would never end; or they simply gave up thinking about it altogether.
As for Mo Shao’s thoughts in her previous life... before the Skyscreen-type Phantom events appeared, she had even wondered if she had transmigrated to another world.
So, early on, she hadn't considered this question at all.
By the time she realized she hadn't transmigrated and was actually still in her original world, her answer to that question was...
She certainly wouldn't die, but the apocalypse wouldn't end either.
The former was a rational affirmation of her survival skills, which had been honed to a state of "transcendence" through decades of survival in the wilderness of the Phantom Realms.
Stealth, health gating, displacement, disguise, resurrection, damage redirection, fate concealment, untargetability, and presence reduction...
Given her countless survival abilities... if she were truly to die, there probably wouldn't be many people left alive in the entire world.
Even now, she felt that her rebirth was completely inexplicable. There had been no omen, no reason at all.
She just closed her eyes and woke up reborn!
The latter conclusion was a rational one derived from combining various pieces of information revealed in the Skyscreen-type Phantom events.
The power balance between the Order side and the Chaos side was gradually tilting, and the overall momentum was irreversible. Everything would eventually return to chaos.
...Though, perhaps that was also a form of ending for the apocalypse?
But that was in her previous life. In this life, she had embarked on a new path, so Mo Shao’s answer would be different:
“We will live until the very end, and the apocalypse will definitely end.”
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