Harem Legion: Queens of the Apocalypse-Chapter 11 Baptized in Blood and Fire

"Tangled up by one centipede, a regular girl can last maybe sixty seconds. If she’s Awakened, two minutes tops. Two of them? Normal ones drop in twenty-five seconds, Awakened maybe hold on for a minute."

Magnus rolled up the shutter of the underground garage. The gasoline at the entrance had long burnt out. Now the rustling tide of mutated bugs - centipedes and spiders - was pouring in. Judging the number as enough, he slammed the shutter down and yelled at the girls:

"Centipedes - aim for the lower jaw and joints! Spiders - go for the belly! Listen up, from now on, I won’t save you. Live or die, it’s up to you!" 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Screams broke out. Over two hundred girls scattered in chaos. Magnus sprayed himself with repellent - it kept the hellspawn off him. The girls, without it, were immediate targets. Sure, even with repellent, they’d still attack you if you got too close - but as long as you kept your distance, you’d mostly be ignored.

More than three hundred centipedes and spiders, a handful of mutant mosquitoes too. Two hundred girls inside, and Magnus had let hell loose on them. He said he wouldn’t step in - and he meant it - but if someone was truly about to die, he wouldn’t just stand there.

Out of the initial swarm, about thirty girls managed to kill at least one of those creatures with their bare hands. All of them - Awakened.

Magnus used a watermelon blade to take down more than fifty himself. The rest were handled by the girls, working in frantic teams.

It took over half an hour. When it was over, seven girls were dead.

The underground garage was huge. Magnus did what he could, but he couldn’t be everywhere. One bite from those things - be it venom from a centipede or acid from a spider - meant game over in five minutes. No cure. No second chances.

The girls were crying - sobbing messes, trauma written all over their faces. They hadn’t fought - they’d been terrified. Emily and Liana stormed up with over a dozen furious girls. Emily shoved Magnus hard, yelling in his face:

"Have you lost it?! Do you even know how many people you just got killed?! Why? Why the hell would you do this?!"

Angry voices surrounded him, loud, accusing, desperate. The rage boiled over. All directed at him.

Magnus stood still. Silent.

They needed someone to blame. He gave them that. No point explaining. They already knew why he’d done it. Just didn’t want to admit it. Not yet. So he let them yell. Let them burn it out. After giving them around ten minutes to catch their breath, Magnus ordered each girl to take up a weapon.

As he stepped to the warehouse gates again, all eyes locked on him. They already knew what he was about to do - but no one moved to stop him. Everyone was on edge, ready for anything.

This time, Magnus released over six hundred apocalyptic beasts into the warehouse. With no way out, the girls had no choice but to fight back. Screams and battle cries rang out as they cut down spiders and centipedes, almost all of them choosing to fight rather than run.

The battle lasted thirty-five minutes. Out of all those monsters, Magnus only killed about twenty himself - the rest were taken down by the girls. When it was over, three were dead.

No one dared accuse Magnus anymore. But many of the girls looked at him with a flicker of hatred in their eyes - some even with killing intent.

"Form groups of three," Magnus barked. "Back to back! Spray that repellent on yourselves!"

Only three minutes passed before they were back on their feet. Gritting their teeth, they lined up. Something had shifted inside them. A fierce refusal to give in had surfaced. No one complained - they all looked ready to fight to the death.

This time, Magnus released more than a thousand beasts. It wasn’t until the warehouse entrance stopped swarming with creatures that he finally closed the gate again.

The whole training - three waves in total - lasted nearly two hours. After surviving it, most of the girls had changed. Their fear was gone. Every single one of them had had centipedes crawling on them, spiders brushing past their skin - they were no longer the same scared group.

The final count: 215 girls survived. Twelve were dead - a loss of about one in twenty. Over a hundred were only alive because Magnus or their teammates had stepped in. Without that help, the death toll might’ve hit one in four.

But after enduring the three brutal trials, the girls who were still standing looked at Magnus with something more than hate. There was a faint trace of respect now, buried under their wariness.

Magnus showed Emily and Liana how to identify Awakened and gave them a quick rundown on what that meant. They found 51 Awakened among the 215 girls - a number that stunned Magnus. In his past life, the ratio was about one in ten. Here, it was closer to one in four.

He then gathered the 215 survivors and gave them ten minutes to split themselves into 21 squads. Each squad needed at least three Awakened and had to appoint a captain and vice captain from among them.

The five extras? Emily and Liana would each take charge of ten squads. Sarah, Taylor, and Isabel were to stay by Magnus’s side. These arrangements were based on how Emily had managed the Ice Regiment in the previous life. The only change was that Sarah and the other two girls weren’t assigned to combat teams - Magnus had made a personal decision there.

When it came time to cook, the girls were drained, both physically and mentally. Magnus took two squads out from the underground parking garage via the safe exit and brought them up to the first floor, hauling back a load of wooden tables and chairs. Chopped everything up for firewood. This first meal in the apocalypse had to be a good one - it was needed to lift everyone’s spirits.

They boiled forty pots of beef soup using bottled water, cooked sixty-five pots of mashed potatoes, and gave everyone a can of meat. The girls’ appetites were shockingly large. Each had a big insulated food container in hand and wiped it all clean in one go.

After the meal, Magnus handed out a can of fruit to each girl. Including his own, that one meal wiped out 216 cans of fruit and 216 cans of meat.

And that was just one meal. Two meals a day for 216 people - he didn’t even need to do the math to feel the pressure.

There were still 46 hours left before the Emberleaf Legion entered the city. Magnus set another countdown on his phone out of habit. There were too many things he hadn’t sorted yet.

All this stockpile of supplies looked like a lot, but not when you had this many mouths to feed.

This wasn’t peacetime anymore. Back then, people had "soft stomachs" - a couple slices of bread or a small serving of mashed potatoes would do the trick. No one had to fight, run, or kill to survive.

But now? In the apocalypse, everyone had "hollow stomachs." Even the average girl could easily put away nearly a pound of food in one sitting - just to keep moving, keep swinging, keep breathing. And the Awakened? Their intake was another level entirely.

One pound of dried potatoes or grain-based mash yielded about 2.5 pounds of cooked food. A regular girl eating twice a day needed around 0.8 pounds of dry rations daily. Multiply that by 200-plus girls - including 51 Awakened - and you were looking at over 160 pounds of dry food per day.

In a month? That was close to 5,000 pounds of food - minimum.

And that didn’t even include the bottled water needed for cooking, or the canned meat, sauces, and whatever side dishes they could scavenge. Wrap it all together, and the numbers got terrifying fast...

Magnus felt a headache coming on. In his previous life, he only handled combat - Emily ran logistics. Now it was his job, and clearly, he hadn’t planned it all that well.

And food was just one piece of the puzzle...

There was also water for the convoy, fuel consumption, supplies for the fighters... The group had about 200 people, but only 52 Awakened including himself. Their weapons weren’t great either...

Modified nail guns, refitted cars, the firetruck, fuel truck, refrigerated truck, medical supplies... Then there was the girls’ mental state. They missed home. Their nerves couldn’t stay high-strung forever. If they didn’t get something for the soul, they’d break.

All this... had to be figured out within the next 46 hours.

Could he actually pull this off?