Chapter 19: Volume One and Two: Chapter 19: Wiping Out the Zombie Horde

A tall, slender figure leaped from the third floor, limbs spread at unnatural angles, sharp claws glinting with a dull metallic sheen.

The next instant, a crushing force struck it in midair. It slammed into the ground at three times its falling speed.

Fuling flashed past, leaving a blurred afterimage. Her shovel came down as she swept by the mutant, and its tail dropped cleanly to the ground.

So she really can control her ability at will.

Linglan marveled for a moment, then the two of them turned and ran for the gate. The wounded monster said nothing as it scrambled back to its feet. Fury flooded its dim black eyes.

It was incredibly fast. Like a black grasshopper, it used its powerful legs to bound along the ground, leaping more than twenty-five feet at a time.

But the moment it drew near, gravity slammed it down. It could only watch helplessly as the loathsome intruders escaped the school.

With its brain stripped of intelligence, it couldn’t even grasp the most basic idea of self-preservation. Its murky eyes fixed on Linglan’s retreating figure.

Without hesitation,

it chased them out of the school.

The car roared to life. Its rear tires screeched against the pavement, and it shot forward.

Fuling was pressed against the back seat. Once the car’s speed evened out, she grabbed her rifle and scrambled to the open rear of the vehicle.

Through the firing port, she saw the black monster hot on their heels, its limbs thrashing wildly in a scene both frenzied and horrifying.

Linglan couldn’t use her ability while driving. Fuling was just about to fire when the mutant lowered its body and charged on all fours.

The plates on its head spread into six sections, revealing a skull eaten away almost beyond recognition. Its nose and mouth had been replaced by a vertical insect proboscis, which rapidly opened and closed as it expelled foul air.

Even Fuling couldn’t help commenting on its ridiculous evolution. It had exposed its weak point outright.

“Ugh… One shot and I might kill it.”

Fuling hesitated. The road was choked with debris and potholes, so even a driver as good as Linglan could only manage about fifteen miles per hour. In just a few minutes, the mutant had caught up to the rear of the car.

It tucked its head, then shot four tongues from its proboscis.

The long tongues quivered in midair, dripping green slime. They were only inches from the rear door—

“Zziii!”

Bang!

The insectile shriek and gunshot rang out together. The bullet punched effortlessly through the seemingly solid shell and buried itself inside the mutant, tumbling and tearing through its body.

It entered through the shoulder and burst out through the chest, ripping open a wound the size of a bowl.

Black blood and scraps of viscera sprayed everywhere. The monster stepped on its own intestines, slipped, and tumbled to the ground.

Fuling’s pupils contracted. She stood frozen in shock, the terrifying sight still etched in her mind.

After two quick, ragged breaths, she scrambled back up. Only when she confirmed the monster was still chasing the car did she finally relax.

The wound in its shoulder had left one arm hanging uselessly, so the monster returned to running on two legs.

“How much longer?”

Honk, honk!

Two short blasts meant ten more minutes.

Argh! This is so frustrating! Both my and my senior’s abilities are built for single-target kills. I finally find a weakling, and I still can’t kill it!

So disgusting! So disgusting! So disgusting!

Fuling clenched her jaw and raised the rifle again. She didn’t know what those tongues were for, but she couldn’t let the monster get any closer to the car!

The gunshots echoed over the city like pulses from a massive sonar array, spreading beyond the city center.

The zombie horde near the Second Ring Road stirred, but couldn’t be bothered to chase the noise. Zombies crowded the streets and rooftops, a black ring dividing the city when seen from above.

Amid the scattered clamor, a massive figure raced over the horde. It vanished among the buildings after only a glimpse, but the mere trace it left behind sent the zombies scattering in fear.

Like a shark passing through a school of sardines, it left a thin white seam through the black ring, headed straight for the source of the noise.

Hooonk—

Linglan held the horn down to signal that they’d reached the overpass. She downshifted, pressed the gas, and steered the car into a controlled slide. Then she let off the accelerator and countersteered.

The car whipped around the bend in a stylish drift and shot onto the side road. The zombies on the overpass glanced down at them with mild interest.

Only when the car came into view did the usually apathetic zombies reveal their vicious side.

They scrambled over the edge of the bridge in a frenzy. Many of them broke their bodies on the way down, becoming a pile of flesh for the rest to land on. The survivors charged after the car in a feral rush.

“Ling!”

Fuling jumped out with her rifle and watched the terrifying horde bear down on them.

But they couldn’t run yet.

Linglan’s lifeless eyes reflected the mutant’s twisted form. It crouched, coiled its knees, then sprang at them. Its nauseating head spat out those long tongues, its eyes burning with a desperate hunger for evolution.

Wolves ahead, a tiger behind. And yet Linglan felt perfectly calm.

That was one of the advantages of becoming a zombie.

Just as the monster reached the top of its leap and began to fall, gravity caught it and flung it toward the horde.

Fuling shifted into acceleration mode again. The rifle spun so fast that its parts shrieked under the strain, and at last she aimed the muzzle upward.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

With the rifle firing in full-auto, it seemed to have no recoil at all. Every bullet struck the mutant’s legs, snapping them clean through.

As the mutant fell into the horde like a puppet with its strings cut, Linglan pulled the same trick as before, laying down a line of gravity in front of the zombies to slow them.

The two rushed back into the car, spun around, and took a wide loop around the bridge entrance before heading back toward the city center.

Fuling gasped for breath, peering behind them through the firing port. Dark shapes were already churning faintly in the horde.

The badly wounded mutant needed sustenance. The horde so close by was the perfect all-you-can-eat buffet.

“If we come back tomorrow, we’ll be able to cross the bridge, right?” Fuling asked with a smile.

The killing beneath the overpass continued until nightfall. The greedy mutant had slaughtered a horde nearly a thousand strong. Now it crouched on the ground, gnawing on a human skull.

Suddenly, it sensed something approaching and roared toward the darkness ahead.

Green fluid sprayed from the flaps of its gaping head. Its facial tissue quivered and shook with its high-pitched scream.

It braced itself to attack, ready to teach the unexpected intruder a lesson.

In the moonlight, a fat human body without arms or legs slowly crawled out of the darkness, face turned upward. Its chest had been ripped wide open, its ribs curved backward and spread like flower petals around a living heart exposed to the air.

Six human arms grafted to its back stretched out. With graceful, unhurried motions, they rose, flexed, and fell, carrying the body closer to the mutant.

Its dark green head drooped forward. Nothing human remained in its face. It looked like modeling clay mangled by a child, the flesh wet and clumped together, as if it were melting and then setting again.

A breathing pore sat where its crown should have been, pointed straight at the mutant.

“Zziii!”

The mutant lunged. In the next instant, the pore ballooned outward. A pink bubble of flesh unfolded from the opening, swelling its head from the size of a ball to the size of a small car in half a second.

The slender mutant crashed into the flimsy membrane. It slashed wildly with its claws, but couldn’t even break the surface.

Amid a ghastly sound of squeezing and swallowing, the bubble shrank back into the creature’s head. It had swallowed an entire humanoid figure, yet its body hadn’t grown in the slightest.

Suddenly, its head lowered toward the ground and drifted slowly to the spot where Linglan had stood.

Like a hound following a scent, it began crawling toward the apartment at an unhurried pace.

Black blood seeped from its revolting breathing pore. The creature stopped beside Miss Revival Coin. The membrane inside the pore pulsed, as if it meant to swallow her.

After several seconds of silence,

it turned and crawled away.

Different.