The zombies, as if sensing Lothe’s intentions, grew even more frenzied.
Their guttural roars merged with the steady drumming of the red rain as they surged forward, entirely devoid of fear.
Two zombies lunged at Lothe together. He didn’t step back. He thrust his black spear forward with a sharp, linear drive.
The reinforced tip pierced straight through the first skull, exiting the back of its head to impale the forehead of the second.
With a hard, twisting pull, Lothe ripped the metal shaft free, spun on his heel, and swept the blunt butt of the spear into the jaw of a third zombie sneaking up behind him.
[You have slain a Level 2, Tier 3 Zombie.]
[Experience gained: 35 EXP.]
The battle raged in the mud.
Diego and Oren moved in behind them, their heavy broadsword and bow cracking bones and severing heads. For a brief, chaotic window, the four of them fought with an unspoken coordination, keeping the pack from surrounding them.
But as the minutes dragged on, Diego and Oren began to falter.
Their breathing turned into ragged gasps, and their arms grew heavy under the relentless weight of the assault. Yet, despite the exhaustion settling into their muscles, they kept swinging.
During a brief pause to catch his breath, Oren stared at Lothe and Seana in flat disbelief.
The pair were carving through the infected as if physical fatigue simply didn’t apply to them.
Especially Seana.
Every swing of her slender sword was cleaner than the last. Her blade sliced through flesh, found the gaps between neck joints, and never lost its momentum.
She pivoted on her heel, driving her sword backward to skewer a zombie trying to ambush her flank.
The system notifications kept chiming in her mind, but she ignored them.
The thought of reaching the medical laboratory and retrieving her phone filled her with a desperate urgency.
She needed to know if her father was still alive. That single, burning focus drove her to end the fight as quickly as possible.
Three zombies rushed her at once from the left.
Seana didn’t swing. She simply locked her eyes on them.
Within her eight-meter domain, the blood pooling inside their decaying bodies suddenly went cold.
With a sharp flick of her wrist, she forced the blood to halt its flow. The three zombies froze mid-stride, their muscles locking up as if bound by heavy, invisible ropes.
Slash!
In one clean, horizontal sweep, Seana took all three of their heads. They fell into the mud, splashing dark crimson water around her boots.
Nearby, Lothe moved like a shadow. He channeled a single unit of Qi into the spearhead, causing a faint, sizzling hiss as the heated metal met the cold rain and shattered bone.
Four youths stood in the pouring red rain, surrounded by a sea of decay, fighting with everything they had just to breathe.
Then, the sound of heavy, leathery wings beating against the storm echoed from above.
Before Seana could look up, a massive shadow dropped from the blood-red clouds.
Instinct took over. She crossed her dark steel sword before her chest.
Clang!
A heavy, clawed limb slammed into her blade. The sheer impact forced her boots several inches into the soft mud, but she held her ground.
Grit flying into her eyes, she grunted, shoving the heavy weight back to create distance.
She finally got a clear look at her attacker.
It was an enormous, mutated bat, easily the size of a motorcycle. Its torso was covered in coarse black fur, but its head was long and reptilian, ending in a snake-like snout. Its wings ended in curved, razor-sharp bone edges, and its pitch-black eyes stared down at her with cold, predatory hunger.
The creature flapped its wings with a violent snap.
Whoosh!
Dozens of crescent-shaped wind blades sliced through the rain, producing sharp, glass-like whistles as they flew toward her.
Seana steadied her breathing.
She didn’t have her glasses, but her senses were sharper than ever. Her skin prickled with the sudden shift in wind pressure, mapping the trajectory of each incoming blade.
She moved.
It wasn’t a graceful dance, it was a series of tight, desperate, and athletic dodges. She slid beneath the first wind blade, rolled over a pile of broken concrete to let the second shatter the stone, and pivoted hard on her heel to let the third graze past her shoulder, cutting a clean line through her sleeve.
The giant bat let out an angry, high-pitched screech.
Screeech!
It dived straight at her, its wings beating furiously as it whipped up another wave of wind blades.
Seana looked at the incoming monster.
She tightened her grip on her hilt and channeled a portion of her Qi into the blade. Her physical strength flared.
She charged.
Three rapid, vertical slashes burst from her sword, sending three crescent waves of compressed Qi flying through the rain.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The strikes slammed into the bat’s left wing, tearing the leather membrane and throwing the beast entirely off-balance. It tilted, its trajectory failing as it spiraled toward the ground.
The moment it flew low enough, Seana leaped off a ruined concrete bench, launching herself into the air above the falling beast. She brought her sword down in a heavy, two-handed arc.
Slash!
The dark steel blade sheared through the bone-joint, severing the massive left wing completely.
The bat crashed violently into the mud, screaming as it struggled to rise.
Before it could find its footing, Seana raised her left hand. The dark red blood pooling in the mud around the dead zombies suddenly rose like writhing serpents.
Under her command, the blood hardened into heavy, thick chains that wrapped around the bat’s neck, torso, and remaining wing, pinning it flat against the ground.
The creature thrashed, but the crimson chains only bound tighter.
Seana stepped forward and swung her sword one last time.
Thud.
The snake-like head rolled away. Thick black blood gushed into the mud before the massive body finally went still.
[You have slain a Level 3, Tier 1 Great Black Bat.]
[Experience gained: 30 EXP.]
Beside the dead bat, four glowing orbs and two leather-bound scrolls materialized in the mud.
Since Lothe was the only one carrying a backpack, Seana gathered the items into her arms.
A few meters away, Oren watched her in silent awe, his bow still drawn but lowered. He exchanged a quick, tense look with Diego.
Both of them had the same thought: Are these two really students from our academy? If they are, why have we never seen them before?
Their eyes lingered on the glowing orbs and scrolls in Seana’s hands.
Then, almost instinctively, they turned back toward the two dead yellow tigers they had killed earlier.
A sharp howl cut through their thoughts.
Lothe had just driven his spearhead straight through the skull of a massive, mutated mastiff. With a quick pull, he snapped the spear free, letting the beast collapse into the mud.
"Don’t forget its core, if it has one," Lothe said, his voice flat. He didn’t even turn around to look at them.
He knelt beside the mastiff, using his dagger to slice open the skull, and retrieved a small, yellow crystal.
The same savage, burning hunger flared in his Dantian, but Lothe forced it down and slipped the core into his backpack.
Seana walked up beside him, dropping the four glowing orbs, the white core of the giant bat, and the two scrolls into his bag.
Beside the dead mastiff lay two more glowing orbs—one radiating a soft azure light, the other shining with a bright silver sheen. Lothe swept them into his pockets.
Diego and Oren watched them work with a mix of caution and admiration.
"Are those... Power Orbs?" Oren finally asked, his voice hesitant.
Lothe looked at him for a brief second. He recognized both of them. They were regulars in the library, the type who skipped class to hide in the back rows with fiction novels.
"Why don’t you find out?" Lothe said indifferently.
"Wha—"
Oren stopped himself. Lothe clearly had no intention of explaining the system’s mechanics. There was no point in forcing it.
Before Oren could say anything else, Lothe and Seana had already turned and walked away.
Oren stood frozen in the rain.
Nobody had ever dismissed him so casually before, and the indifference stung his pride. But looking at the pile of dead monsters around them, he knew there was nothing he could do.
"...Let’s go," Oren muttered, his face tight.
Diego nodded. "Yeah. Let’s find Nyren. Knowing her, she probably headed straight for the library. It’s only a few blocks from here."
Diego walked toward one of the dead yellow tigers. Remembering how Lothe had extracted the mastiff’s core, he drove his broadsword into the tiger’s skull, retrieving a pulsing, yellow-red crystal.
Oren quickly did the same to the second tiger, finding another core.
But what truly caught their attention were the two glowing, leather-bound scrolls lying in the mud beside the carcasses.
Without a word, they quickly picked them up and stuffed them into their pockets, neither wanting to reveal what they had found just yet.
With their loot secured, they began their trek through the blood-red rain toward the library, their eyes occasionally scanning the distant shadows where Lothe and Seana had disappeared.