Chapter 350: Got You
Lingyun watched the fire gather in the dead thing’s mouth and felt every pleasant thought in his head step aside.
The zombie had no style.
That was its first offense.
Fire should move like something alive. It should answer the hand that called it, curl around the wrist, wait at the fingertips, and strike exactly where it was told.
But this thing’s fire was sacrilege.
It crawled out of a split chest and broken throat like a disease with light attached. It leaked through cracks in its ribs, smoked through its teeth, and shook inside the body as if the corpse could barely keep from bursting apart.
The second offense was a death sentence.
It had burned Rouxi’s plants.
Lingyun stepped forward as the glow in the zombie’s mouth brightened. Rouxi’s vines lifted around him, blackened tips trembling from the last attack, and his smile vanished so completely that even Yuche stopped laughing.
Rouxi’s voice came from behind his shoulder. "Lingyun."
He didn’t look back. If he looked back and saw the ash on her face, the burned vines at her feet, and the fury in her eyes, he would probably forget the front lawn existed and turn the whole road into glass.
Instead, he lifted one hand.
"Pretty princess," he replied, fire sliding over his fingers, "let me handle the ugly candle."
The dead thing vomited fire.
Lingyun met it halfway.
His flames shot forward in a narrow band, not wide enough to touch the grass and not low enough to kiss the roots.
The two fires collided above the burned circle where the gate used to be. Heat punched across the lawn, but Zhenlan’s wind hit the blast from the side and shoved the worst of it upward.
The windows rattled. Smoke spun into the sky. A few burning scraps dropped toward the ground, and Lingyun snapped his fingers before they landed.
They went out.
Rouxi’s plants stayed safe.
Good.
Now he could be angry.
The horde kept forcing itself through Yuche’s metal field. Zombies dragged torn legs over spikes, pushed against hooks, and fell into the waiting vines.
Rouxi was already moving again, both hands lifted as she pulled the plants away from the worst of the heat and sent them around the edges instead. She wasn’t playing anymore. Her vines worked low, fast, and mean, catching ankles and jerking bodies into the flowers before the dead could clog the opening.
Chenghai stood at the porch steps and killed anything that made it past her line. One zombie crawled through on its elbows, mouth open and fingers digging into the stone. Chenghai crushed its head beneath his boot and shoved the body aside without looking away from the road.
Yuche’s metal screamed as he reshaped the spikes. "It’s staying behind the wave."
"Coward," Lingyun snapped.
The fire zombie opened its mouth again.
Lingyun answered before the thing finished glowing. He sent fire straight down the lane Yuche had cut through the horde, burning a path between the bodies without letting the flames spread into the grass. Zombies blackened and dropped on either side, clearing his view for half a second.
There.
The fire zombie stood near the entrance of the cul-de-sac, taller than the others because its spine had arched backward beneath the heat inside its chest. Its skin had split in glowing lines from throat to stomach. Every breath made the cracks flare brighter.
Lingyun hit it in the face with fire.
The flames wrapped over the zombie’s head, chest, shoulders, and arms. Its burned skin peeled away. Its jaw cracked farther open. The body staggered, but it didn’t fall.
Instead, the orange light inside its ribs brightened.
Lingyun’s eyes narrowed.
"Oh, I hate you."
The zombie inhaled through its broken mouth, dragging smoke, heat, and air inward. The glow in its chest pulsed harder.
Zhenlan saw it too. "It’s feeding the fire before releasing it."
"Then don’t let it breathe," Rouxi ordered.
Zhenlan raised both hands. Wind slammed down the road, then tightened around the fire zombie in a hard, invisible shell. The next fireball swelled in the creature’s throat and stopped there, trapped behind compressed air. The zombie jerked, chest pulsing as the heat built with nowhere to go.
Lingyun laughed once, sharp and pleased. "That’s better."
Rouxi’s vines slid across the lawn toward the burned circle, but she kept them low, avoiding the glowing scraps scattered through the opening. "I can get under it."
"Do it," Lingyun replied.
Yuche drove three metal rods through the road from below. They punched up around the fire zombie’s feet, bending over its ankles before it could step back. The creature strained against them, and the trapped fire in its chest flared brighter.
The horde reacted.
Zombies began throwing themselves into the metal field harder, tearing their own bodies apart to clear a path. One crawled over another’s back and reached the edge of the porch before Chenghai caught it by the neck and slammed it into the railing. Wood cracked. Bone cracked louder.
Lingyun kept his focus on the fire zombie. His own fire gathered around both arms, but he didn’t throw it. Throwing fire at a furnace was stupid, and he was many wonderful things, but he wasn’t stupid when Rouxi’s plants were on the line.
He pulled instead.
Heat shifted.
The glow inside the zombie’s chest wavered as Lingyun dragged the fire outward, not letting it spread, not letting it explode, only pulling it thin piece by piece. The zombie shook harder. The air around it rippled. Zhenlan’s jaw tightened as he held the pressure in place.
Under the road, something moved.
Roots.
Rouxi’s roots came from deep beneath the burned ground, avoiding the scorched surface and rising where the heat was weakest. They coiled around the metal pinning the zombie’s legs, then wrapped the lower bones through cracks in the pavement. Smoke curled from the first root that touched burned flesh, but it held.
Rouxi bared her teeth. "Got you."
The fire zombie screamed.
The sound tore through the road, through the porch, through the open door behind them. Lingyun felt it in his teeth. The glow in the creature’s chest flashed white, and for one second, every zombie in the cul-de-sac stopped moving.
Chenghai froze with his hand buried in a zombie’s skull.
Yuche’s metal hung in the air.
Rouxi’s vines tightened around the road.
Then every dead thing turned toward Rouxi.