Chapter 377: Absolutely Ridiculous
The giant zombie was dead, the road looked like someone had dropped a building on it, and I was still standing.
Technically.
My ankle had swollen enough that the top of my boot was now pressed painfully against the skin, both of my hands were shaking, and the rush that had kept me moving through the fight was draining away so quickly that I could practically feel my body filling out a complaint form.
But I ignored all of it.
I really didn’t have the time to sit down and deal with it all.
After all, there were still hundreds of zombies scattered across the road, and every last one of them had a core buried somewhere inside its head. With all the work we had done to attract them, trap them, kill them, and avoid becoming their lunch, I wasn’t leaving anything even remotely useful behind.
Roots slid through the piles of bodies, holding skulls steady while thinner vines pushed into the openings left by Yuche’s metal or the damage from Zhenlan’s lightning. Even the baby vine had abandoned my wrist completely and was hopping between corpses, shoving its tiny heads into places that were probably going to give it some type of disease.
Not that it cared at all.
It came out of one skull with a cloudy brown core trapped between the teeth of the left leaf and dropped it into a plastic container with enough pride that I almost praised it.
Then it tried to eat the next one.
"Put it down," I growled at it. This was not the time for it to start eating everything it could get its greedy little vine on.
The vine froze, thinking that maybe, if it didn’t move, I wouldn’t notice it. I scoffed at that idea as I held out my hand, silently demanding the core.
It slowly turned its head away from me, the core still clenched between its teeth like that somehow made it even more invisible. Like a kid thinking that just because it couldn’t see the monster under the bed, it meant that the monster couldn’t see it.
Not that I was the monster.
Or maybe, I was.
Shrugging my shoulders, I waved my empty palm up and down. "Give it to me now. Don’t make me come over there," I hissed, narrowing my eyes.
My baby vine looked down at my ankle, then back up at me.
The little bastard knew I didn’t want to walk.
Lingyun laughed from where he was crouched beside a dead runner, digging through its head with a knife. "It’s learning."
"It’s becoming disobedient."
"Same thing."
"Ah, but I don’t put up with disobedient things," I replied, narrowing my eyes on both the man and the vine.
I flicked my fingers, and a root snapped lightly against the vine’s side. It spat the core into my palm before hissing at me and racing toward Yuche, who apparently looked like a safer parent.
Fucking traitor.
Yuche caught the vine with one hand before it could climb him. He removed a strip of scalp from its right mouth, wiped its tiny faces with the corner of his shirt, and set it back on the road without saying anything.
The vine immediately returned to work.
Because of course it would listen to him more that it would me.
I dropped the brown core into the growing pile to my left, then added the green one I had been holding to the much smaller group near my boot.
That pile was the problem.
We had killed more than three hundred zombies, including one that had worn half the street as armor, and the number of green cores sitting in front of me was insulting.
Sure, there were enough to cover both of my palms if I cupped my hands together, but most were barely larger than my pinky fingernail. Not to mention, a few were so cloudy that the power inside them felt more like an afterthought.
I nudged one with the toe of my good foot.
Pathetic.
Chenghai glanced over from the body he was searching. He had rolled his sleeves past his elbows, although the effort was pointless considering the blood and rotten fluid already covering his arms.
"How many do we have?" he asked like he couldn’t see the piles around me.
"Not enough," I replied, the smile completely gone from my face.
His gaze moved toward the green pile. "It’s more than you had this morning."
"Look at you, being optimistic and everything," I hissed. "Just because there are more doesn’t mean I have enough."
I bent to pick up another core and immediately regretted it when my ankle shifted beneath me. Pain shot up my leg, forcing my hand against the side of an abandoned car before I fell.
Four heads turned toward me like I had done something completely unforgiveable.
Not wanting to listen to them bitching about my ankle, I straightened before anyone could move. "I tripped."
"There’s nothing beside you," Zhenlan pointed out.
"The road is uneven."
"You didn’t move."
I looked down at the pavement, then back at him. "It was a very subtle trip."
Zhenlan stared at me long enough to make it clear he wasn’t buying that explanation, but he returned to the corpse in front of him instead of starting another argument. Apparently, nearly being buried under a giant zombie had taught him something about choosing his battles.
Or he was saving the lecture for later.
It was probably the second option if I knew him.
I lowered myself onto the dented hood of the car before my ankle could betray me again. From there, I directed the roots and vines through the remaining bodies while the men handled anything the plants couldn’t reach.
The green cores continued to arrive one at a time.
Tiny.
Weak.
Barely worth the effort I spent digging them out of the zombies, let alone the effort it took to kill them in the first place.
This was how people died by over drawing their powers. The zombies needed to hurry up and get bigger cores.
This was absolutely ridiculous.