Chapter 55: Clip Wings With Spikes
All four of the people there jumped from their positions.
They brought themselves towards the window, with the leader and the older man towards one of the other windows, and the woman and the younger man towards a different one.
Their heads were faced towards the right, down the road.
Hurtling down the street was a car racing down at well over a hundred kilometres per hour, though they couldn’t tell exactly how much.
Soon enough, its wheels roared right past them.
They had relatively cleared the road upon their arrival a couple of hours ago for their own car’s travel, and so, it was only once it had gone some distance past the law building and the Blackout Armoury shop.
Abruptly, the front wheels thudded over one of the corpses lying on the ground, and it quickly spun out, thrown into a tumble.
The car smashed into the side of one of the buildings down that path, and a rumbling explosion resounded throughout the area.
"Shit! We’ve gotta get in there, now!."
The one who had spoken was the younger man.
He immediately broke free from the ground and was the first to be on his way, leading their rush out of the building.
Meanwhile, away from the rest of them, to the back of the buildings coming in from one of the rear alleys that was not visible from the front where the law office stood, blood sprayed.
Dion skidded to a halt and one hand clutched the edge of the large trash bin he had been dragging past.
He threw it hard back towards the opening of the alleyway.
The large bin tumbled through the air, its contents spiling against the ground, and within moments, a sprinting zombie appeared, turning down the alley right for him.
It’s figure crashed right against the bin, and it was thrown back along with it.
At the same time that he had forced himself back to his feet, the blood that had been on his wrist made a cut against that same wrist, and more blood, far more than the small cut should have allowed, sprayed out.
It transformed into a gelatinous wall that the second and third zombies turning down the alley threw themselves into.
Dion’s hands had reached out, and with the tension that he had to hold against from the speed that they had been going at, he had to pour more mana into the wall he had formed to make sure they didn’t tear through it.
Even with that though, the zombies’ bodies stretched through it, their malignant, ravenous figures imprinted on the harshly stretched wall.
Once they had stretched it enough, Dion released the blood’s hold against the walls and he snapped it around the two of their figures in tight cocoons.
Those cocoons were rapidly skewered through as the blood was made into bleeding spike balls before they had even fallen to the ground.
However, there was no time for him to collect himself.
The time that it had taken to hold those two and then skewer them had been more than enough for the first zombie, even with one of its hands snapped backwards and a part of its head broken, to break into another sprint after him.
As the pierced zombies fell, the third snapped through the gap between them.
Dion hurriedly dodged.
And yet even with how fast the zombie had been going, it had been able to swiftly bring itself to a stop and pivot, grabbing for where he had dodged into.
Blood coated up the arm that he had used to block, and he hardened it. At the same time, letting some blood spill downwards.
The zombie had flailed its broken hand at him then and at the same time, snapped its head for him in the closed distance.
With his relieved, blood-coated hand, he snapped it up and punched square against the creature’s jaw so hard that the neck snapped harshly in one direction, with the flesh twisting and breaking.
Yet it still hadn’t been enough to kill it.
And in that moment, as it had been brought to that brief stop by his impact, the blood that he had let spill to the ground suddenly jutted up high, and it speared up through the bottom of the creature’s jaw, up through the top of its head.
Finally, the damned thing went limp, and he stood faintly catching his breath as the blood that he had used began to slither itself back to him.
It rose, and it formed a ball that hovered ahead of him.
{ You have felled a Level 12, Destitute Zombie, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity and Agility have been nourished significantly. }
{ You have felled a Level 11, Destitute Zombie, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity and Agility have been nourished significantly. }
{ You have felled a Level 11, Destitute Zombie, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity and Agility have been nourished. }
{ Your Dexterity has been enriched to G+ }
{ You have earned a freely distributable Essence Saturation + }
’For zombies to be evolving so soon... just what the fuck is going to happen in a week or months time?’
The urgency that filled him at these thoughts had clogged his throat for the seconds that it had come.
They were too fast for him to safely use the bat or his fireplace poker.
It was simply too much of a risk, and if he had to use his ability so much just for three of them, to the point where he had taken nearly ten percent of it out, things would be getting very dangerous, very soon.
If he hadn’t lost some of them through his travels here, this fight would not have been as straightforward as it had made it seem at all.
And there, the messages from his chronicle hummed in his ears, and he understood something.
’At the very least, now I know that Level 10 is the threshold for their first evolution.’
And understanding now that there were a lot more mysteries involved with zombies than he had immediately been thinking of, he looked at floating blood ahead of himself.
A part of him was worried about attaching it to his body again or putting it back into himself.
Zombies becoming stronger potentially meant that the potency of their capacity to infect others might grow as well, and with what their evolution had forced him to see, he became aware of how careless he had been thus far.
The blood felt pristine, without the slightest zombie-scented or feeling blemish to him, so his worry gradually eased
But that didn’t diminish the horrors that this slight thing he had overlooked might have caused.
Then, Dion’s head rose at the sound of the explosion down the road.