A/N: Hey guys, you had to wait a long time for an update, but now it's finally time and we also have the EGO POV of Zhan again.

1 year! That's how long it's been since Yibo and I escaped from the city. Since then we have survived and will continue to do so. Even if it means, that we have to continue to live like in the times of the wild west and worse. Where we go to sleep every night with our weapons within reach. Where we even forge our own weapons to ensure our survival.

We no longer live in luxury with electricity, oil, gas or hot running water. We cook over open fires what we have previously collected and hunted. We make our own clothes. Use fabric scraps as washcloths and towels. Even make our own soap. Torches bring light to our dark dwellings. Caves, ruins that were once beautiful homes, underground tunnels and bunkers, if you can find them, are now the safe home for us humans!

And I honestly can't believe, when I hear myself or Yibo talk about it, that we have gotten used to our new life. Because it's not a life, it's a survival and nothing more. We don't plan anymore, we just live from day to day. Always thinking, at any moment we could be attacked.

Even now that these other flying creatures came to protect and support us, whose only difference from the others is their brown and sometimes spotted fur coloration, we don't feel safe. These creatures are just like the black flying devils, they are as ugly and dangerous as the others. But, they are watching over us. Whatever that may mean.

Because in most cases, these flying assholes just sit on a high point and watch the area. If they spotted an enemy, they only made a squawking sound, but they didn't intervene and defend us. I think King Bac did not intend it that way. After all, he had spoken of us fighting the creatures in the cities together with them and freeing the cities from these other creatures.

And as if all that wasn't bad enough, winter hit with full force. First it snowed once briefly at night, but then it snowed for days and almost continuously. We were literally snowed in. The snow has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, we can see from the tracks in the snow when someone or something is approaching us, but the other way around, the other creatures also see our tracks.

So what that means is clear. And quite soon exactly what we feared happened. A group of the Amores was out searching for food and spreading their tracks all over the snow. We tried to cover the tracks leading to the cave, but it was already too late. It came to the attack of a whole horde of the other creatures. Those naked hairless grays and the Demoids.

In the middle of the night, just as Yibo and I were sleeping, the screeching sound of the flying creatures shrilled into the cave. Only a short time later, the first sounds of battle and screams rang out. Within seconds, Yibo and I were dressed and running forward to the large cave with our weapons. We saw how the attackers rushed at the Amores and how they had no chance under the overwhelming power of the attackers. They were simply too few. For a large part of the Amores were gone. They took the women and children back to their kingdom.

We saw King Bac fighting at the same time with a handful of gray creatures. The noise of battle could also be heard from the mountaintop. The flying creatures were fighting. The Amores were fighting and we just stood there in shock. And then Yibo grabbed me by the arm, dragging me behind him into our cave. We grabbed our things that we always kept packed and then searched for He Peng, but couldn't find him.

As the screams grew louder and louder and apparently more and more attackers poured into the cave, King Bac came to us with a handful of his men. He told us to leave the cave through the secret second exit, of which we had no idea, and had one of his men make sure that we actually escaped before he returned to the fight. This Amore pushed us through narrow unlit corridors at a pace that almost caused Yibo and me to fall more than once, had the Amore not grabbed us and held us tight.

Crawling deeper and deeper into the cave through various often very low passages, we eventually arrived in another large cave room and finally outside. We were really exhausted. The cold air did us good at first, after we had been sweating during our escape through the cave passages. But quite quickly the cold became very uncomfortable.

The Amore, however, did not give us time for a break, but pushed us further into the forest, around to the right, straight ahead, then left and crisscross, until we suddenly arrived at the car I had parked. "Drive, drive!" Said the Amore and yanked open the passenger door. He almost pushed me onto the seat before looking sternly at Yibo and Yibo took a seat in the driver's seat.

"What about our friend He Peng?" I asked, still breathing heavily.

"Gone." Said the Amore and slammed the passenger door.

"We can't leave without He Peng, can we?" I said to Yibo, who had already started the engine.

"Yes, we can and we have to. I'm not going to risk our lives by waiting." Yibo replied shaking his head and started the car. Because the car was an all-terrain vehicle, he made good time through the snow with it. And it didn't take long to reach the road, even if it was buried under a blanket of snow like everything else. But because of the tracks our attackers had left in the snow, the road was still easy to see.

Yibo drove in the opposite direction of the tracks and again and again he went off the road, which was not visible because of the snow and the missing tracks. In the end, I don't even know how long we drove around in this way before we saw an abandoned building at dawn that was somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

There was nothing we could do about our own tracks at that moment. We simply had no choice but to drive to that building, because we needed to rest and reorganize urgently. Yibo parked the car so that we could escape with it again at any time. We armed ourselves and entered the house after Yibo broke the lock of the front door. And the first thing we noticed was that it was even colder inside than outside. And that even though the front door was locked and there were window panes.

After a short tour through the house, we noticed that obviously nobody had lived there before the apocalypse. The house was largely empty. Only a few old chairs that had been left behind were still there in the former living room. We used these chairs as firewood for the old fireplace that was there. Yibo had only had to check the shaft before. But except for some snow, it was otherwise clear.

After we had closed all the doors around us and covered the windows with a few blankets we had in the car, it quickly got warmer in the living room. Nevertheless, we were shivering all over, but this was probably more because of the excitement and shock we were feeling about the attack and our inability to help. For we could have fought against the gray hairless creatures. But we would not have stood a chance against the Demoids. After all, they are just like the Amores, big and very strong.

Only after an hour did we dare to wonder about the whereabouts of He Peng and how King Bac and his men were doing. Were they alive at all? The answer was yes. For we could still sense them. A side effect of the connection we made with King Bac when we drank of his blood.

Lately, He Peng had been retreating frequently. Before the women and children had been returned to their kingdom, he had spent a lot of time with the children. He played with them, taught them our language, and had their language taught to him. Then, of course, when the children were gone, he missed them. He even wanted to go where the children were.

However, King Bac was against taking us to his kingdom or having us brought there, because it was too dangerous for us there. Because there are, as he told us, many other dangerous creatures and we would be there in greater danger than here. Since he has no reason to lie to us, we believed him and therefore voluntarily refrained from taking a look at his kingdom,

However, since He Peng often talked about wanting to move on and look for other survivors lately, we assumed that he often sneaked off at night to look for a way to get back to civilization. Or what was left of it. He was also eager to look for a hospital, or at least a well-stocked pharmacy, to replenish our medicine supplies and get what was missing.

We therefore assumed that perhaps he was on the road again that night. As always, he had taken his things with him. So we had hope that he was really gone when the attack started and would realize in time that he can't go back to the cave. Because we are friends and we care about him. And after all, he is a human being like us. And we humans have to stick together. After all, there don't seem to be that many of us left.

After resting for a while in front of the fireplace, we actually fell asleep, even if not for long, we decided to get back on the road, since we knew we shouldn't stay too long in one place. The risk of being discovered by creatures was just too great. But where should we go next? Where could we hide and spend the night?

Since we also needed supplies, especially water, Yibo suggested that we go to the nearest city. We would wait in a hiding place until nightfall and then go into the town to look for food and water. While I didn't like the idea, Yibo was also right. We really needed those things. And he suggested that we then work our way bit by bit to get to the place where we thought our parents were. If they were still alive at all. The last contact was 4 months ago.

We set off shortly after and used the last three hours of daylight to get close to a city and to look for a hiding place. And what can I say? Yibo and I were more than surprised when the next city was our city. Although we should have known it, the way there seemed strange to us. As if it was the first time we had driven along there. And the view of the city itself seemed just as strange. Maybe because most of it was destroyed?

Without stopping as planned and seeking shelter, we drove on as if controlled by a stranger and stopped only in front of the apartment building with my apartment. Miraculously, the apartment building was still standing and looked intact. We convinced ourselves that we were not seen and observed by creatures, then got out and hurried to the house entrance. The door was locked. However, for some reason I had always kept the key and carried it with me. So I unlocked the door and we slowly walked upstairs through the eerily silent stairwell to my apartment, which still looked the same as we left it.

I ran into my bathroom, grabbed one of my towels and pressed it to my face, crying. Yibo wrapped his arms around me and we both cried for what must have been five minutes before we regained our composure. The next miracle was that water was still coming out of the faucet. Hot water, even! Which, we knew, was only possible if someone was controlling it. So someone had to be at the waterworks!

Without even looking around the rest of the apartment, we first took a hot shower. We washed our hair surely three times with shampoo and soaped us several times with shower gel. Because it was a real relief to be able to use these products again. We brushed our teeth, because I always had spare toothbrushes and toothpastes there, something we ran out of a month ago, and then we put on clean clothes from my closet.

We didn't have electricity, but we had a gas heater over which we could heat a few cans of ravioli that we had left back then a year ago. In addition, my battery-powered radio was still working, and we found that two stations were still online and at least playing music on a continuous loop.

Yibo dealt with his old radio that we had left behind because it was too big and too heavy and therefore we could not take it with us on our escape from the city. He rewired it and was now able to run it on battery power. And after a few minutes, we heard a recorded voice from the device telling us that there was a group of survivors in the waterworks and so far they were still able to defend it. And that voice sounded very familiar.

While I was still searching for the appropriate name, Yibo bumped my arm and said, "That's the traitor Liu Haikuan!"

"Oh damn, you're right!" I replied. "I wonder if that ass Meng Yao is there too?"

"I don't know. But if he is, they're all fucked up there. Because if you have that one around, you don't need enemies."

"And you want to go there I suppose, don't you?"

"Not anymore tonight. We should try to radio them first and find out more."

"Like what?"

"Well, how many survivors there are. How they're positioned. How good their security is. What supplies they still have there. Things like that."

"You don't seriously think Haikuan and Meng Yao are going to welcome us there with open arms after leaving us at sea and without anything."

"We'll try to make contact first thing in the morning and then see. And if we go there, it will only be for a day or two. I still want to find our parents. And Zhan, I'm not as naive as I was a year ago and trust everyone right away just because we have the same goals."

"But if you don't plan to stay there longer, we don't even need to go there."

"Yes we do, because that's how we'll find out if there might be people there that we know." I knew who he was talking about or what he was hoping for, but didn't say it out loud.

"Mhhh, I'm not sure about that. But then again, I agree with you. There might be people there that we know." I said. Although I was against the idea, I thought that we might actually run into people there that we know. Maybe I secretly hoped that we would find our parents there. That maybe they were coming back to the city to look for us.

And there's one thing we shouldn't forget. We know roughly where our parents were staying, but we had no idea exactly where that was or how safe they had been there for the past four months. It wasn't even certain if they were even still alive.

After dinner, we retired to the bedroom and slept like babies, having finally been able to sleep in a real bed again. It didn't rock back and forth like it did at sea and it's not just straw, hay and a few old blankets. It was a real luxury and a real relief for our bodies.