Volume One: The Rise of the King Kong

Chapter 1: The Apocalypse Steel War Machine

On April 21, 2000, Brian Sullivan was born in Wuwei, Anhui. His parents worked hard for half their lives, gradually buying six large trucks and starting a transport company. Later, as the company’s performance declined and housing prices rose, his parents sold five of the trucks and bought seven apartments.

Just after the Spring Festival in 2015, a car accident took the lives of his parents and caused a complete transformation in Brian Sullivan, who witnessed the accident firsthand.

He was no longer humorous and cheerful, no longer positive and optimistic, stopped making friends, stopped going out, even quit school, and spent his days suspicious and paranoid, convinced that someone wanted to harm him.

The Brian Sullivan who was once called a “top university prospect” by his teachers and could repair cars at the age of seven became a patient with persecutory delusions. Relying on the one cargo truck left by his parents, the rental income from seven apartments, and 800,000 yuan in compensation from the accident, he began living as a shut-in.

Until one day in 2016, a post on the internet once again changed Brian Sullivan’s life trajectory.

“Humanity has been taking from nature without restraint. Sooner or later, the apocalypse will come. The erratic weather in recent years is proof!”

The post’s author was clearly an environmentalist, maybe even a self-proclaimed expert, and listed in detail many data points about abnormal climate, magnetic pole shifts, glacier melting, frequent earthquakes, and so on. Who knows how it was reasoned, but the conclusion was that if we don’t protect the environment, the world will end sooner or later.

“My prediction: 2022 is the final deadline for the apocalypse! Humanity, if you don’t stop destroying the environment, you’ll regret it when it’s too late!”

Posts like this might fool internet newbies, but for veteran netizens, it was pure nonsense.

On the contrary, the veterans were actively planning in the comments: if the apocalypse comes, how should everyone save themselves, what survival gear to bring, and so on—discussing it with great enthusiasm.

However, Brian Sullivan, who was deeply immersed in his own world of “there are always treacherous subjects trying to harm me,” immediately believed the author’s claim—perhaps he wanted to find some spiritual support for himself. Brian Sullivan decided to start preparing for the apocalypse right away, hoping to survive when it came.

He found an outdoor survival forum online and began to pay attention to how to break away from current civilization and survive better outside.

A month later, Brian Sullivan had become a senior member and had a complete apocalypse plan in his mind.

He spent a week organizing this plan into a 90,000-word document.

Looking at the result he had typed out, Brian Sullivan felt a faint excitement deep inside. Maybe when his parents left him, his life became empty and illusory, so he set his life’s goal on surviving an apocalypse that might never come.

If there is an apocalypse.

Then let the apocalypse destroy this gray world before his eyes, strip away all the pain, and let him find a new self in a new world.

……

So.

Brian Sullivan, a patient with persecutory delusions, made a chuunibyou decision at a chuunibyou age: he would modify his truck into an apocalypse war machine and drive it to survive in the end times.

Picking up his car repair talent again, from 2016 to 2022, over six years, Brian Sullivan gradually realized his apocalypse war machine.

Building the war machine gave him a way to stop being decadent.

Preparing for the apocalypse made him want to make use of every day, arming himself. No one knows what the apocalypse will really look like, but making yourself stronger is the most basic response.

Push-ups, sit-ups, horse stance, running, swimming, pull-ups, nunchaku, sanda fighting.

Brian Sullivan even contacted an online dealer selling homemade firearms, and after several transactions, bought three high-pressure air guns and two high-quality imitation Type 64 pistols. He even personally scouted out the local police stations and armed police units in nearby counties and towns, chose routes, drew maps, and planned to rush to grab firearms as soon as the apocalypse came.

If he got caught, he’d definitely go to jail, but Brian Sullivan wasn’t some dangerous criminal. After buying the guns, he just hid them away and never used them.

To practice shooting, he went to a shooting club in the provincial capital.

Most of the time, he worked out and modified his truck in an abandoned warehouse his parents’ transport company used to rent, and learned archery, crossbow shooting, and slingshot shooting. His archery and crossbow skills were on par with professionals, especially with the slingshot—within twenty meters, he could hit whatever he aimed at, even a single soybean.

In the apocalypse, bows, crossbows, and slingshots would definitely be powerful weapons, with ammo that could be made anywhere.

……

The weather was clear.