Chapter 370: Oh Goody... Round Two
Zhenlan watched Rouxi hold the green core up between two blood-covered fingers, her grin widening as Chenghai refused to give her the reaction she wanted. "And here you said I couldn’t find only green crystals. Bet you feel stupid now, huh?"
Chenghai’s expression stayed flat, although the muscle beside his jaw jumped once. "You found one."
Rouxi glanced down at the hundreds of rotten heads buried along the road, then back at him. "You’re right. I should probably check a few more."
As if they were invisible now that she had her first green core, Rouxi was already moving on.
She crouched beside the next zombie, drove the knife through the back of its skull, and twisted until the bone gave way. The core she pulled out wasn’t green, but she didn’t seem bothered. She tossed it into an empty container Yuche had found in the SUV and shifted to the next head before the first had stopped twitching.
For the first several zombies, Rouxi looked like she was having the time of her life. She worked her way along the road, laughing whenever one of the trapped zombies snapped its teeth at her like it was the biggest joke that she had ever seen.
Lingyun joined her immediately, crouching on the opposite side to hold a head still while she worked the knife free. When rotten fluid splashed across his sleeve, he jerked back and stared at the stain in disgust.
"You’re the one who wanted to come," Rouxi reminded him as she wiped the blade on what was left of the zombie’s shirt.
"I wanted to watch you kill things," Lingyun complained. "I didn’t agree to be marinated in them."
Rouxi snorted and moved on, leaving him to decide whether the sleeve could be saved or not.
Chenghai dealt with the zombies that had started wrenching their shoulders loose, forcing them back into the dirt whenever they gained an inch or two.
In contrast, Yuche used thin strips of metal to open skulls without getting close enough for the teeth to reach him, while Zhenlan sent short bursts of lightning through anything that looked too active.
Rouxi started it, and then somehow, the rest of them followed like that had always been the plan. It wasn’t, but Zhenlan wasn’t going to say that part out loud.
By the time she opened another stubborn skull to get a core that wasn’t green, the excitement had started to wear off.
When the core inside turned out to be useless to her, she stared at it as though it had deliberately wasted her time. The next skull collapsed beneath her knife and coated her hand in something thick enough to make Lingyun step back in disgust.
Rouxi looked at her fingers, then at the long stretch of heads still covering the road, and sighed.
She killed three more, although the last one received far more stabbing than it required. Then she stood, wiped both hands on the nearest piece of intact clothing she could find, and turned toward the trees with the thoughtful expression that usually meant someone else was about to inherit whatever she had grown tired of doing.
The grass along the roadside lifted first. Its long blades started to twist together and thicken into a padded base while roots pushed through the soil to form curved legs.
Branches bent down from the nearest tree, weaving themselves into a high back until the patch of shade had become a lounge chair angled perfectly away from the sun. Rouxi inspected it, pressed one hand against the seat, and sat as though the road had always come furnished.
Chenghai looked over from the zombie he was holding in place, while Lingyun stared at the chair like he had just witnessed a miracle. Yuche, annoyingly, didn’t seem surprised at all.
Rouxi crossed one leg over the other and pulled a pair of sunglasses from her jacket pocket. After settling them over her eyes, she leaned back and adjusted the branches beneath her shoulders until the chair supported her exactly the way she wanted. Then, she reached under her chair, and an iced tea appeared in her hand.
Zhenlan’s attention dropped to the clear cup before he could stop himself.
Condensation ran down the sides, and a slice of lemon floated near the top amongst the cubes of ice. He looked at Rouxi, but she only took a long sip through the straw. Chenghai did the same double take before returning to the zombie in front of him. Lingyun opened his mouth, clearly about to ask the question none of them should be asking, but Yuche turned his head and gave him a look that made him reconsider.
Rouxi pulled out her phone next and started one of the dramas she had watched enough times to quote. While a woman cried about betrayal through the speaker, the grass around the lounge chair sharpened into thin blades.
Roots slipped beneath the nearest skulls, cracked through bone, and dragged the cores free before dropping them into the container beside her. Vines carried the containers closer whenever they filled, and Rouxi never looked away from the screen long enough to acknowledge that she had replaced herself with half the roadside.
That was the part that annoyed Zhenlan the most.
She didn’t appear to be doing anything, but at the same time, she hadn’t actually stopped working.
While the four men stood in the road covered in blood and rot, Rouxi controlled the dirt trapping the zombies, the roots breaking skulls, and the vines carrying the cores back to her. She was probably doing more than all of them combined, yet she looked like she had dragged her couch outside and expected the apocalypse to arrange itself around her.
A zombie beside Chenghai managed to wrench one arm loose and caught the hem of his pants. Before he could crush its skull, a root snapped around its wrist and dragged the limb back underground.
Rouxi didn’t look up from her phone. "You missed one," she muttered while awkwardly pointing in a general direction with her phone.
Chenghai stared toward the lounge chair. "You were already dealing with it."
"I had to because you missed it," she replied with a shrug. "It’s not my fault you are slow."
"You buried it." Chenghai snarled through his teeth before punching down into the closest zombie’s skull.
"And somehow. it still managed to almost touch you."
Lingyun laughed so hard at the unimpressed look on Rouxi’s face that the flame above his palm sputtered out.
Chenghai turned his glare on him, but Lingyun bent over the zombie in front of him and pretended to cough. Zhenlan lowered his head before Rouxi noticed the smile pulling at his mouth.
They had cleared most of the road when the ground shifted beneath Zhenlan’s boots. He assumed Rouxi was moving another section of earth, but the vibration seemed to have came from farther away and carried too much weight.
The abandoned vehicles along the roadside began to tremble, broken glass rattled inside the empty houses, and the remaining zombies went unnaturally still.
Everything seemed to have stopped moving all at the same time.
Rouxi paused her drama and lowered the phone to her lap as another tremor rolled beneath them, strong enough to send ripples through her iced tea.
Zhenlan turned toward the far end of the road, but Rouxi only pushed her sunglasses down her nose, looked in the same direction, and smiled.
"Oh, goody," she murmured. "Round two."