Chapter 375: There You Are
The giant zombie dragged more of the road toward its broken arm, grinding chunks of pavement together as they climbed over the thin grey flesh I had exposed.
The new armor formed slower than the first, but it was still forming, and I had no intention of letting it hide behind another layer of concrete after I had finally figured out what was underneath.
I shifted my weight onto my injured ankle and immediately regretted it when pain shot up my leg hard enough to make my knee buckle. Yuche caught my elbow before I could wobble a second time, but he didn’t say anything.
That alone was probably the only reason I didn’t bite his head off.
Lingyun had already moved back toward the smaller zombies, fire tearing through anything that tried to get close, while Chenghai forced the rest away from us. Zhenlan stood a few metres behind me with lightning moving between his fingers, watching the giant and, annoyingly, me.
Everyone was looking at me too much.
Why didn’t they understand that I wasn’t a delicate flower?
As if to prove a point, I rolled my ankle as though the grinding pain was nothing more than stiffness and smiled at the zombie. The expression had been sitting on my face for so long that my cheeks were beginning to ache, but there was no chance I was dropping it while four men waited to see whether I was about to fall apart.
The zombie roared in pain and fury, and slammed its good hand into the road.
Pavement folded around its body as it sank, and my lungs stopped working for one stupid second while the sound of earth grinding around something too large filled the street.
My calf burned where teeth had once closed around it, and the scar beneath my pants pulled tight enough to make me want to claw at it. I called it muscle memory because that sounded better than admitting my body had apparently decided to become dramatic at the worst possible time.
"Running already?" I called after the zombie, forcing the smile wider as I made sure to taunt it. "I was just starting to like you."
The words sounded bright enough, but Yuche’s hand tightened around my elbow as the ground rolled beneath us. He didn’t try to pull me away. He simply stayed close enough to catch me if something broke through again, which somehow irritated me more.
I didn’t want him ready to save me. I didn’t want Zhenlan waiting for me to freeze or Lingyun checking my leg every time the pavement moved. Chenghai was supposed to be dealing with the horde, not glancing over his shoulder because he thought I might disappear into another hole.
I was not used to be coddled like this by all four of these men, and I found it... distracting. I was supposed to be saving them, not the other way around...
Right?
I shook my head and forced my thoughts back to the situation at hand. My overly complicated emotions for four individual men was going to have to wait until I was able to deal with it.
The giant circled beneath the street, and I sent roots after it. They struck broken soil, empty tunnels, and pieces of stone shoved aside by its body. Every time I thought I had found it, the vibration shifted somewhere else. The road cracked near Lingyun, then behind Yuche, then close enough to my feet that my hands curled before I could stop them.
It burst up beside an abandoned car, showed one stone-covered arm, and vanished again before Zhenlan’s lightning reached it. I laughed because that was apparently what I was doing now, but the sound came out sharp and wrong.
The smile I was wearing was starting to feel glued to my face, and I was getting tired of holding it there while the zombie ran circles beneath me.
When the ground moved again and my body locked before my mind could catch up, I had finally had enough.
I pulled my arm out of Yuche’s hand and stepped into the middle of the ruined road. "Go ahead," I called, looking down at the cracked pavement. "Run."
The giant answered with another low roar from somewhere beneath us. I crouched and pressed both hands flat against the road before closing my eyes.
"Rouxi," Yuche warned from behind me.
"I know."
I was going back to chasing the noise, and that needed to stop now.
Taking in a deep breath and grounding myself (ha!) to the pavement beneath my feet, I opened myself to everything going on beneath the surface.
Roots spread under the street in every direction, tangled around old water pipes, broken foundations, buried bodies, and several things I had no intention of identifying. Grass clung to the shallow soil near the houses, while the trees pushed deeper through concrete and rusted lines.
The giant crashed through all of it.
It wasn’t moving through the earth the way the Devourer had. This thing had to shove soil aside with its shoulders, crack the stone ahead of it, and let loosened dirt collapse behind it to hide the tunnel.
Once I stopped listening for the roar and paid attention to what the earth was actually doing, the creature became embarrassingly obvious.
It was coming straight toward me.
I kept my palms against the road while the vibration grew stronger. Every instinct screamed that something was beneath me, ready to burst through and drag me down, but the fear became easier to ignore once I understood the difference.
I was standing on an open road with four men close enough to reach me. The giant wasn’t the Devourer. It was a zombie wearing half the street because the body beneath the armour was too weak to survive on its own.
More importantly, it had buried itself inside my ground.
"You’re an idiot," I murmured.
The zombie angled upward, aiming for the space beneath my knees. Metal spread across the road behind me as Yuche prepared to catch me again, while Zhenlan’s power tightened the air and Lingyun shouted something that disappeared beneath the roar building below.
I waited until the giant committed to the attack, then closed the earth around it.
The tunnel collapsed from both ends at once. Packed soil and broken pavement slammed into the zombie’s back, trapping its legs while the ground ahead hardened into a wall. The creature thrashed, but every movement only compressed the earth tighter around its armour.
Roots drove down around its neck and shoulders. Vines followed, forcing themselves into every crack before I twisted my wrists and pulled.
The road exploded upward twenty meters in front of me, and the giant came out exactly where I wanted it.
It hit the pavement on its knees with half its armor still buried underground. Yuche’s metal snapped around its wrists, Zhenlan sent lightning into the exposed gaps along its back, and Chenghai drove one shoulder into its side hard enough to keep it from standing while Lingyun held the smaller zombies away with fire.
I rose slowly, keeping my power buried inside every weakness I had found. The zombie tried to call more stone toward itself, but roots ripped the slabs from its shoulders while vines peeled concrete from its chest faster than it could rebuild.
It had spent the entire fight making itself larger, so I took my time making it small again.
The final plate tore away with a wet crack. Underneath, the zombie was narrow and twisted, its ribs sharp beneath grey skin stretched too thin to hide anything. Green light pulsed in the centre of its head, bright enough to shine through flesh and bone.
The giant threw back its head and roared, but I was no longer listening for something beneath the ground. I looked at the core glowing behind its eyes, deep in what should be its brain, and the smile that spread across my face didn’t hurt this time.
"There you are."