Chapter Text
There’s a certain type of mindset you need to have in order to really last in the apocalypse.
With the blood-thirsty zombies, the constant death, the never ending conflicts between survivor groups, you need something to live for. If you have a weak will to live, you’re as good as dead, about as useful as the stumbling creatures walking around outside.
Personally, Technoblade is alive out of spite.
When society as a whole started to quickly unravel, when things went from somewhat contained to terrible chaos, Technoblade, by all means, should have absolutely died.
First week of the outbreak, he got tackled by a zombie, miraculously didn’t get bitten, and was able to get away while people were trying to get the ‘person’ to a hospital of some sort. While he was figuring out a way to get out of the chaos, the undead were starting to get more common, and the slow realization of something terribly wrong was settling into people’s minds.
Third week of the outbreak, things had gone downhill really fast, and there was an awful amount of bloodshed on the streets. Technoblade might’ve been the cause of some of those bloodstains, he won’t say.
He had gotten into a car crash, got away from that with a bad limp, and he then added a few more bloodstains to the street. To his luck, he was able to get into a survivor camp, where there was some semblance of order, and at least some medical care.
Fifth week, he almost got shot in the head, thanks to a trigger-happy idiot and an argument over food that didn’t really make much sense. They were all starving, at that point. He supposes any sort of logic got lost in the starvation.
That week, Technoblade killed a human for the first time, by slamming a bat into someone’s skull and hearing it crack .
That survivor camp went really downhill after that.
The point here is that Technoblade really should be dead, by all means, and yet he still walks. With a slight limp in his step and a healing scab across his nose, but he’s still walking.
After the absolute dumpster fire of the survivor camp, Technoblade set out on his own, and left that disaster behind. He was better on his own, survived better on his own, and he didn’t die.
He couldn’t die. Ever. (He refused to.)
No matter what the apocalypse threw at him, he was determined to live through it, and gain some power while he was at it. He had a knack for killing zombies, and a lack of hesitation in life-or-death situations. That alone made him a bit more capable, and a bit more dangerous than most.
While others would still hesitate at pulling the trigger, Technoblade pulled it without a second thought. At this point, the blood that stained his hands would never come off, but if it’s in exchange for him being able to survive, then he’ll stain his hands a little more.
Technoblade traveled on his own and stayed on his own. He scavenged for supplies, looked for weapons, and mowed down any zombies that were in his path. He was on a mission. Did he know what the end goal was? Not really. But he was reaching it, one way or another.
Survivors started to dwindle as the months passed and zombies kept on multiplying. Technoblade saw death often, and caused death often. At first, he tried to keep his bullets aimed towards the undead only. But sometimes the living are more dangerous than the dead, and after everything Technoblade has been through, he refuses to die to someone with a gun and a grudge.
He didn’t mean to gain a reputation, but he got one anyway. He was oblivious to the talk that surrounded him, but he was well aware of the threats that could come his way. To him, he knew that people were wary, and heard about the sheer amount of zombies he had killed. (However, he didn’t know about the nickname of “The Blood God” they were giving him, and he certainly didn’t realize that he was quite literally becoming some sort of folk tale from the bloodshed he left behind.)
After a few months, traveling got boring.
He could only go so far before his leg acted up, and he was quite literally leaving a trail of dead zombies in his path. It was slow going.
He wanted a safe base to retreat to, but didn’t want a repeat of the first survivor group he had gotten into. So he picked a city, got a map of its streets, and got to work.
If there’s one thing that Technoblade knows, it’s that he’s persistent. Persistent with being alive, and persistent with his goals, when he really becomes set on them.
Most cities are abandoned by any survivors, because of the zombie hoards that travel through that make it too dangerous to travel across. It’s too closed in, too risky.
Any groups that try to stay inside get snuffed out within a few weeks, either by hoards getting past their defenses, or their own conflicts killing them from the inside out. Technoblade has seen it before. It’s a constant cycle, with no sense of permanence.
Sure, there’s a few towns that really stay sturdy, like the big names with the communities that have stayed relatively peaceful. Those ones are put together, with systems and walls that stay steady. Technoblade has thought about going there a few times, maybe finding a spot there where he might even settle, but he’s not fond of people. And he’s not fond of conflict that is bound to rise up.
So he makes his own ‘town’.
By picking a building to be his base, then killing every zombie in a mile radius.
(There’s a reason people call him “The Blood God”)
The work is tedious. Techno spends a solid month just clearing out the streets, painting them red with the zombie parts left behind.
He’s lucky enough to come across a literal sword in the first week, a metal blade that’s tucked away underneath a rotting corpse. He gives thanks to the person that had a sword in the zombie apocalypse, and then promptly becomes that person with a sword in a zombie apocalypse.
Techno finds a lot more within the city, more weapons, more supplies, and he tells himself that before he can start bringing the goods back to the base, he has to clear out the big crowds of zombies that plague the streets.
He’s glad to find a metal file in someone’s apartment a few days after he finds the sword, because after the amount of killing he has to do, the sword needs to be sharpened rather often. And his knives, too. And his axe.
Frankly, all of his weapons get good use, and all of them become absolutely stained with red.
At that point, Technoblade is honestly tired of the constant killing, the constant blood. He’s entirely numb to it, zombies are little more than pests in his mind, and they’re tedious to mow down.
He takes the time to find a car that still works, and figures out how to get it to work.
He then uses the car to speed up the process of cleaning out his streets, and runs over a zombie horde while trying to think of what he might be able to cook for dinner.
Techno gets creative with it. He keeps a mental tally, counts each zombie he kills off, then does something special for the hundredth one. He drops a brick off a roof, aims it for a zombie's head and watches the thing fall to the ground with a thump and a bloody splatter.
He takes his sword and knife and meticulously cuts away the jaw and arms of a zombie, rendering it to be completely harmless, just a stumbling creature that keeps trying to attack Techno. All it can really do is bump against him, though. He then pushes it around a bit, then plays an unfair game of fistcuffs, just to see how hard he can land a punch.
For the fifth hundredth zombie, he takes some gasoline and a box of matches, and you can guess where that one went.
Surprisingly, zombies can still walk pretty far while entirely on fire. Technoblade had actually walked backwards for a whole block, letting a flaming zombie follow after him, and he watched in curiosity as the thing barely acknowledged it was on fire, only staying determined to try and kill Techno.
Technoblade takes that experience as proof that zombies really don’t die unless you kill off the brain. Even heads stay moving until you destroy the brain, he’s found out after several decapitations.
It takes a solid month to kill the majority of them, and to clear away the bodies. It gets to a point where there’s makeshift walls of dead zombies at the end of his territory, and while Technoblade thinks it’s kinda gross, he supposes it could also work as a deterrent. He makes barriers that are normal, made of wood and metal, and then makes ones that are only about four feet tall, but are still a giant pile of zombie bodies.
He keeps the ‘walls’ up. (And stays blissfully oblivious to the stories of “The Blood God” claiming his land. Stories of the walls made of dead zombies, hundreds of them, a silent warning, because if all those zombies were killed, do you really want to meet the individual who killed them?)
The second month, he focuses on bringing supplies back to his base.
The first part of his base is a low building, not as high as the skyscrapers over his head, and it looks like it used to be some sort of office place before everything went south. Technoblade doesn’t think too hard about it, he just counts the rooms, moves out the furniture, and moves in.
With basically a whole part of the city to himself, there’s a lot of supplies, and he has plenty of food, plenty of water. It’s too much to just have with him all at once, so he uses that building purely for storage. He moves in shelves he’s taken from other buildings and he puts tape down on the floor to make some sort of organization system.
He takes numbers, writes it down in a notebook, and makes sure to continue to count numbers every week, in case anything goes missing. He wants to stay vigilant, just in case any people wander in, steal his stuff. Maybe he’s a bit paranoid, but he has good reason to be in this world.
All the doors are shut behind lock and key, heavy metal chains wrapped around the handles to keep it secure. The supplies inside are just extra stuff he can’t keep in his main base, so he’s not entirely worried about constantly protecting it, but he doesn’t exactly want any intruders to be wandering in either.
There’s an apartment building next to his ‘storagehouse’, and he goes through the whole building and clears it out within the first week of coming to the city. The elevator there obviously doesn’t work, power having been something that disappeared in the first month that everything went sideways, so Technoblade has to take the stairs.
He’s not very happy about it, but it’s his only option, unless he wants to try figuring out a way to get back power to his area of the city. However, that’s not something he’s ready to tackle. He’s persistent for sure, but he’s not a technician.
After the building is empty of zombies, Techno chooses the biggest and cleanest-looking apartment there, and makes it his home, stocking up the kitchen with whatever he has, and wiping down the walls.
The first night when he’s able to sleep in a bed, an actual, clean, comfortable bed, Technoblade sleeps right through the morning, into the afternoon. He very nearly considers just staying there for the rest of the day so he can nap.
It’s tempting, but he does eventually get up, so he can scrub at the bloodstain in the middle of the kitchen.
The living room couch is stained with blood, so Technoblade throws the couch off the balcony and replaces it with one he grabbed from another apartment. He’s able to salvage the rug, scrub it out until the bloodstain is just very faint. He puts away the TV in a closet, and uses the extra space to put his weapons, hanging them up on the wall. He finds a radio, puts batteries in, and gets static.
He’s not sure why he expected anything else.
The radio is capable of playing CD’s, though, so Techno takes the time to look through the apartment a little more, and finds a box of CD’s underneath the bed. He deep cleans the room after that, taking out anything that he doesn’t want to keep, and puts on a song to play. It’s something classical that Technoblade can’t really put his finger on, but he finds it enjoyable anyway, and lets it play while he mops the kitchen.
The cabinets become stocked to the brim with cans of food, and Technoblade then works on stocking up ingredients, after finding a cookbook as well. He’s not yet ready to actually start cooking and making meals, but it’s definitely something he wants as a project, so he puts it away, and also searches for pots and pans, clean spoons, forks, knives from the other apartments in the building. He stocks the kitchen until he has everything he needs, and he then goes to move on to the other rooms of the house.
For example, his bedroom.
Technoblade quickly realizes he’s absolutely entitled to have the best bed ever, and after a lot of consideration, he takes apart another bed from another apartment, and moves it to his, joining it up with the other bed so he simply just has more room.
Taking any pillows he can get, he accumulates a pile of blankets, a few plushies, and takes a long nap after he’s made the best bed ever.
He wakes up with the sun gone and his sleep schedule a bit skewed, but it’s entirely worth it.
After he’s declared his apartment fully stocked and cleaned, he moves to see the rooftop of the apartment building, which, to his surprise, has a greenhouse. It’s a bit pathetic, and terribly overgrown, but there’s definitely potential for more, and someone who actually knows how to garden could figure out how to use it. For a moment, Technoblade wants to turn his back on it and just use his food that he already has, but then again, a garden would truly make him self-sustainable.
He puts it away as a project for later, just like with the cookbook.
The second month is somehow even longer than the first month, with all the moving and cleaning and making sure things are just right.
Zombies being a threat is kinda laughable at this point, since he cleared out so many, and they’ve become rare in his territory.
However, a few survivors wander inside and come across Technoblade in the middle of his work.
Techno takes the opportunity to make it very clear about how he does not want visitors in his territory.
The first group of survivors are just three people, skittish and running away the moment Technoblade goes towards them. They leave on their own, no guidance needed.
The second encounter is with a loud duo, who call out Technoblade where he stands and try to start a conversation.
Technoblade responds by firing his gun into the air, and they run off, but not out of his streets. So, he follows them, keeps trailing behind them and forcing them to run, shooting as if he’s trying to kill them, when really, he’s just chasing until they’re out of his city.
When they’re finally past the barriers and leaving his streets, Technoblade stands at the border with a sword resting on his shoulder, watching them both back away with wary glances behind them. They stare at Technoblade with baffled faces, and Technoblade just stays standing with his sword, making the point clear to not turn around and come back.
By the third encounter, Technoblade is very much completely done with any sort of visitors, so he tries to be as unapproachable as possible, and tries to scare the hell out of them, so maybe it’ll get the point across. He wants to be alone, thank you very much, and he doesn’t want survivors coming in here and getting comfy.
He worked hard to make it clean, dammit. He refuses to let others taint it.
Wearing a gas mask he had found in the city, Techno pulls his hair back and lets it stay in a loose ponytail behind him. He takes an axe in one hand and a small gun in the other, and stands in the middle of the street.
At night.
Needless to say, the moment their flashlights land on him, screams ring out in alarm, and he runs out of sight before they can start shooting. He repeats the process, popping up in the dark, following at their heels with loud footsteps, dragging his sword across the wall to make a loud scratching noise.
It’s a bit fun, to be honest, watching the survivors squirm and try to escape an unknown threat, and just before they’re about to leave past one of the barricades at the end of the road, Technoblade lunges at one of them.
He kicks the person he thinks might be the leader and lets them hit the floor. He leans down towards them as their group yells and panics, stumbling back from a stranger that has come out of the shadows too quickly to process.
“Stay. Out.” Technoblade had said quietly, getting a frantic nod in response.
And he then left just like that, leaving them in disarray.
Survivors came a lot less often after that. He assumes that word spread.
(Word did indeed spread, and while he thought he was just being intimidating, he was actually quite terrifying to the point of fueling the rumors like gasoline on a fire. At this point, The Blood God was a title, and people thought his territory was actually cursed. Or blessed. Depends on the person, really. Either way, people knew not to enter.)
After that, Techno takes the time to finish up with fortifying the outside of his main base, and cleans up his storage-house a bit.
Once his apartment is fortified well, and his storage-house is locked up tight, Technoblade goes to sleep, and wakes up late the next morning to do a routine walk, so he can check the streets he owns for any wandering survivors or zombies. He expects it to be empty, like usual, and plans on getting back home quickly, so he can start the project of that greenhouse on the roof.
He finds a dog.
A starving dog, one that’s barely just skin and bones, limping along, too tiny to be surviving. It must’ve squeezed through the barriers that Techno had put up, and it had gotten far with no threats of zombies walking around.
Technoblade approaches the little thing carefully, knowing it could still bite, and he gets a growl with each step. There’s no collar, and it’s fur is matted and dirty, brown with mud and dried blood, perhaps.
At first, Techno considers trying to pick it up, but he doesn’t exactly want to get bit.
So instead, he starts to go back to his base, to maybe get some food and try to coax it over to him instead. Except, there’s no need, because when he starts to walk away, the dog begins to follow. At a distance, carefully, but still following Techno.
With that, Techno walks slower than usual, and lets the dog follow him all the way back, where he then quickly goes inside to get a can of food.
After that offer of food, Techno finds that he can’t get rid of the dog, because it will not leave him alone.
He names it Floof, because he’s uncreative, and it’s fur is fluffy after Techno’s given it a bath in a metal bucket. Some of the parts of its fur are still matted, though, so Techno snips those parts away, and leaves it with a ridiculous haircut for a few minutes before just snipping the rest of the hair away as well, so it can grow back even.
He’s careful with feeding it, wanting the dog to get back to full health, but not throw up, with the way it seems to breathe in any food in sight. Technoblade is a bit annoyed to admit Floof has stolen the food right out of his hands at least three times already, when he wasn’t paying proper attention.
With a new dog at his side that’s getting back to a healthy weight, Technoblade takes the time then to pick up gardening, so he can wrangle that greenhouse up on the roof. He focuses on getting rid of all the weeds, and overgrown plants, then works on seeing what he has to work with.
After some time, and a lot of cleaning and getting his hands dirty, (With dirt, and not blood, for once) Technoblade focuses on farming potatoes, because that’s what he finds.
Only potatoes, actually.
Did the madman who owned this greenhouse just farm potatoes?
Either way, Technoblade carries on that legacy, and spends his weeks tending to the crops, cleaning the apartment, counting up his stock of supplies and also taking walks around his territory with Floof.
Life actually...starts to kinda settle down.
Technoblade never thought he could have something nice of a home in a world like this, but he thinks he’s gotten pretty close to finding it.
After a year and then some of the apocalypse fully breaking out and everything going terribly, Technoblade finds something like a home again, with a cookbook he’s trying to figure out, and a fluffy dog nipping at his ankles to try and get a treat.
Technoblade wakes up in the morning with a dog on top of him, and he groans and pushes it off, trying to not get licked across the face.
“Floof, no.” Technoblade mutters, turning over in his bed. A snout sticks into his neck, making him jolt. “No! Wha- Get down, get off the bed.”
Floof listens, jumping off the bed and trotting away out into the kitchen for breakfast. Technoblade face-plants into his pillow with a sigh. After a moment, he gets up, goes to change clothes, and pulls his hair back into a braid. It’s gotten long now, and while Technoblade could cut it, he finds that he likes it long.
It gives him a sense of control, in a way, a spiteful decision in showing the universe and the apocalypse that even though the undead is trying to kill everything and it tore life as he knew it apart, Techno still very much took the time to grow his hair out, care for it, and make it pink .
Yeah, that was an impulse decision. And maybe a waste of water, too, but he can’t take it back, so his hair is just a light pink now.
He’s made a note to not make decisions at ungodly times of the night. He needs more sleep.
And maybe more pink hair dye, while he’s at it. His roots have been growing out for a while, the brown color of his hair coming back, and Techno should probably get around to touching those up.
A bark comes from the kitchen, yanking Techno away from his thoughts.
“Uhg.” He adjusts his braid in the mirror, rubbing the last bits of sleep out of his eyes.
Another bark.
“I’m going!” Techno calls, walking over to the kitchen, taking his knife from his nightstand as he does, and putting it away. He still keeps weapons on him, even in the apartment, just because of habit. It lets him breathe easier.
Technoblade goes to feed Floof, then opens up the window blinds, yawning as the sunlight comes through and lights up the whole place. He shuffles over to the kitchen with not that much enthusiasm, and begins on making food for the day.
He takes a pot out of the cabinets, follows a recipe for some sort of soup. Floof plays around with his toys in the living room as Technoblade squints at the words written down, and tries to properly measure ingredients.
The apartment fills with the smell of food that could actually be pretty good, and Floof eventually makes his way back into the kitchen, sitting at Techno’s feet, obviously waiting to be the taste tester.
“This is soup.” Techno tells him, stirring the pot. “You can’t have this.”
Floof continues to stare, as if Technoblade is just taking his time with giving Floof a piece of breakfast.
“No.” Technoblade stresses. “Go. Go play with your ball.” He nudges the dog with his foot, having the dog jump around a bit around him, trying to play. “I’m cooking, Floof.”
A bark.
“Where’s your ball? Go get it for me, go.” Technoblade says, but he steps away from the stove anyway to retrieve the ball himself. He chucks it across the apartment, and watches the dog zip fast him to catch it as it bounces against the wall.
Techno returns to his soup, and serves himself a bowl.
He sits at the kitchen table while eating, reading a book that he had left there last night. Some sort of story of mythological tales, gods and such. Techno found it in an old dusty box a few buildings down the street.
Technoblade eats his breakfast, finishes up reading a chapter for the book, then goes to get ready to go out. He passes Floof, who chews on one of his toys like it’s his sole mission.
“Come on, Floof.” Techno calls, and he leaves the apartment with a sword on his hip and a gas mask in hand. Floof follows at his heels.
The gas mask is a recent thing, since Techno doesn’t want to come across any survivors with just his face. He’s only used it once, from that time to scare away survivors. The mask has an intimidating vibe to it, he thinks that’s useful if he ever finds anyone else wandering in his territory.
Techno goes on his usual walk, mostly just to get Floof’s morning energy out, and to check out the perimeter for if anything changed.
It goes normally, until Floof runs past him, barking non-stop, and making a bee-line into what used to be a small shop, it’s shelves now knocked over and supplies already emptied out.
Techno chases, walks quickly into the store with careful steps, thinking Floof has found a trespasser, someone who went past the barriers and needs to be kicked out. He keeps a hand on his sword, keeps an eye out for a stray survivor who thought this was a good place to lay low.
He finds a kid.