Chapter 160: The Killing Blow
Ever since opening his inventory earlier, he had already been considering the perfect opportunity to use the bomb.
The Big Belly Zombie possessed astonishing defensive power.
Ordinary attacks were incapable of inflicting meaningful damage against it.
Even after its organs were destroyed, it could simply regenerate them and even grow them back in entirely different locations.
That alone proved that the exterior of its body could not possibly be its weak point. But if its exterior had no weakness, could the inside of its body really possess the same absurd level of defense?
That was impossible.
Even though Joo Joowon had already realized this long ago, he had never acted recklessly because of it.
There were two reasons Joo Joowon had held back from using the bomb earlier.
First, the indoor space had been far too small, making it easy for him to injure himself in the blast.
Second, the Big Belly Zombie had still been capable of using skills at that time and there was no guarantee it lacked some method of avoiding the explosion.
Most importantly, Joo Joowon only possessed a single Earth Bomb.
Because of that, if he used it, it had to be a guaranteed killing blow.
More than anything else, Joo Joowon had been wary of the strange ability the boss had used against him when they first met.
If he approached the creature and it suddenly used that attack on him again, he would not even know how he died. Yet until now, even in such a desperate situation, despite him getting this close to it, the Big Belly Zombie still had not used that ability again.
That alone explained a great deal.
Clearly, that move differed from its other skills.
The boss could only use it once within a short period of time and its cooldown was extremely long.
Joo Joowon had survived that attack back when his Mental Power was only sixteen points.
Now that his Mental Power had surged to 21 points, he naturally dared to gamble and close the distance.
After repeatedly calculating the situation, Joo Joowon estimated there was at least a seventy percent chance that the Big Belly Zombie had already exhausted everything it had.
A seventy percent chance was enough for him to risk it.
If he continued slowly whittling away at it and allowed it time to recover, then the unlucky one would become him instead.
The Big Belly Zombie exploded into countless chunks of flesh.
Those chunks wriggled as strands of flesh budded from them, as though they were still desperately trying to stitch themselves back together into a complete body.
Enhanced Cognition!
Joo Joowon narrowed his eyes and raised the Fire Axe like a hammer before smashing it down onto one of the larger pieces of flesh.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
With thirteen points of Strength and without holding back in the slightest, he directly crushed the flesh into pulp.
...
[ Ding! ]
[ Level 7 Lord • Big Belly Zombie has been killed! ]
[ EXP +1536 ]
[ Reputation +1. ]
...
Hearing the system notification, Joo Joowon finally allowed himself to relax slightly.
Even so, his eyes continued sweeping across the surroundings without pause.
As the Big Belly Zombie died, the chunks of flesh finally stopped producing new flesh buds.
Instead, they rapidly shriveled before his eyes.
In less than a minute, they had turned into piles of black dust that scattered into the air and mixed with the surrounding debris, becoming impossible to distinguish from the rest of the rubble.
Perhaps because his Mental Power had increased so dramatically, leaving him with lingering discomfort, Joo Joowon could not shake the feeling that what he was seeing was not dust at all.
Instead, it looked more like countless microscopic parasites too small for the naked eye to detect.
Joo Joowon shook his head and forced those thoughts aside.
He reached out and grabbed the card that rose from the red pillar of light above the Big Belly Zombie’s corpse.
There had been a total of six cards.
Joo Joowon did not rush to inspect them.
Instead, he stored all of them inside the Spatial Waist Pendant before walking over and picking up Byeol and Hwi.
Looking at Hwi’s noticeably thinner body, he thought for a moment before taking out the Bird Whistle and blowing it.
Earlier, Joo Joowon had considered summoning a flock of birds to interfere with the Big Belly Zombie, but after thinking about it, he concluded that birds below Level 4 would probably be useless against a Boss of that level.
The amount of time he could control them was also too short, so he had simply given up on the idea.
Joo Joowon could not see Hwi’s current attributes, so naturally he did not dare feed it zombie core.
He was worried that the energy contained within them might be too overwhelming and that Hwi’s weakened body would be unable to handle it.
At the same time, it was obvious that Hwi desperately needed energy replenishment in its current state.
Although Joo Joowon had always known that Hwi was a Mutated Beast, it had never looked particularly different from an ordinary cat.
At most, it was slightly larger and sturdier than average.
That only suggested that it had a large frame or perhaps some Maine Coon ancestry.
It did not really prove anything.
Only today had Joo Joowon discovered that Hwi’s ability was to grow larger.
Thinking back to Hwi’s frantic eating habits after he had first brought it home, perhaps eating was how it recovered its strength so quickly.
As the whistle echoed through the sky, a dark cloud soon appeared in the distance and flew rapidly toward him, leaving Joo Joowon somewhat surprised.
Considering the enormous commotion that had taken place here, the birds should have long since fled the area according to their natural instincts.
He had assumed that being able to summon three or five birds would already be a good result.
He had not expected so many to appear.
However, once they flew closer, his surprise disappeared.
Because every single one of them was a Zombie Bird.
Not a single Mutated Beast could be seen among them.