I stepped out of the lab, navigating a trail of torn armor, discarded weapons, empty bullet casings, shattered plaster, and the bloody remnants of the security force that the Goliath had left in its wake. I looked around. The collapsed walls, buckled structural pillars, and exposed wiring suggested that the entire subterranean infrastructure might collapse right on top of me.
But structural integrity was a secondary concern. A more immediate danger was already clawing its way down the corridor. The roar of the hand cannon and the vibrations of the destruction had acted like a dinner bell, attracting the infected.
They had breached the upper levels of the compromised general hospital, and now the first wave was tumbling down the stairwells into our sector. I could hear the wet scrape of dragging limbs and the frantic snarls of things that used to be human.
I should have kept the Goliath closer. Shaking my head, I hurried down the hallway, picking up weapons from my fallen men to arm myself. I had to remind myself that right now, in this body, I wasn’t a defenseless archivist or a weak IT guy—I was a seasoned, combat-trained B-rank Hunter.
I rushed toward the stairwell, even though it was clearly compromised. Apart from the deep underground tunnels, these stairs and the elevators next to them were the only way out of the lower levels. I had deliberately avoided the tunnels because they were a death trap without the Goliath by my side. If I took the stairs, despite them crawling with the infected, I could retrieve the Goliath on my way up and use Major Bane’s waiting aircraft on the roof to escape the city entirely.
When I neared the stairwell, I found the entrance completely jam-packed with infected. Fortunately, their attention was entirely elsewhere. They were frantically scrambling upstairs, following the noise created by the Goliath as it executed my purge order. Their distraction gave me the perfect window to slip undetected into the elevator lobby.
I had no intention of riding the elevator. In a zombie apocalypse, a moving metal cage is just a vertical coffin. Instead, I pried the elevator doors apart, stepped onto the threshold, and popped open the maintenance hatch on its ceiling to climb onto the roof of the car.
Reaching into the mechanical housing, I violently yanked the primary power cables, disconnecting the elevator’s grid entirely. It was a calculated precaution. If a desperate group of surviving staff or soldiers managed to restore power from an upper console and call the elevator while I was climbing up the shaft, I’d be crushed to death instantly. With the elevator dead in the water, I grabbed the cold steel of the emergency service ladder and began my long, vertical ascent to the highest floor.
The climb was brutal. Through the thin metal of each floor’s elevator doors as I passed them, the echoing roar of the infected reverberated down the hollow shaft along with wet snarls, scratching claws, and the terrifying sound of a horde in a feeding frenzy. Reaching the uppermost level, I pulled myself onto a narrow service sill right next to the terrace elevator doors. I pressed my back against the shaft wall and pried the doors open just a tiny fraction—just enough to give myself a narrow line of sight.
The scene on the hospital roof was absolute carnage. A massive flood of infected was pouring out of the main stairwell toward the terrace door, but the Goliath was standing like an unyielding black fortress, systematically mowing them down. The corpses of the last remaining Clover Corporation guards of Red Creek General Hospital facility were already trampled underfoot, reduced to red paste. The Goliath was doing its job a little too well, drawing the entire hospital’s population right to my escape exit.
I needed to clear a path. Slipping two mana blended fragmentation grenades off the utility belt I’d picked up, I pulled the pins with my teeth. Wedging the elevator doors open a bit further, I cooked them for a split second, then threw them with B-rank precision—one bouncing directly into the tightly packed staircase, and the other landing square in the middle of the horde swarming the terrace door.
Without waiting to watch the fireworks, I snapped the elevator doors shut and jumped backward off the sill, sliding down the service ladder as the deafening CRACK of dual explosions shook the entire concrete shaft.
The heat from the twin explosions blasted through the gap in the elevator doors, singeing the hair on my arms, while a series of system prompts flashed before my eyes.
[You killed an Infected human and gained: +0.1Pp]
[You killed an Infected human and gained: +0.1Pp]
[You killed an Infected human and gained: +0.1Pp]
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I didn’t waste a single heartbeat. Bracing my boots against the rungs of the service ladder, I hauled myself back up to the service sill. I pried the doors open and lunged out of the elevator shaft to breach the terrace before the remaining infected below flooded the gap.
My boots crunched down onto the smoking, charred flesh of blasted monsters. The rooftop air was thick with the stench of ozone, burning blood, and sulfur. Ahead of me, the staircase entrance was a mangled bottleneck of severed limbs and twitching bodies, but more infected were already spilling out from the lower levels like a relentless tide.
Sprinting past the carnage toward Major Bane’s waiting transport, I unclipped the last three fragmentation grenades from my tactical belt. I yanked the pins in rapid succession, turning on my heel to hurl a desperate volley of mana blended grenades directly back into the stairwell bottleneck. The moment the metal cylinders left my hands, I slammed the heavy, reinforced terrace door shut, cutting off the view just as I yelled at the top of my lungs: "Goliath, get us in the sky!"
Behind me, the door buckled outward with a deafening roar as the grenades detonated simultaneously, blowing the terrace entrance completely apart.
Tons of concrete collapsed in a fiery shockwave, vaporizing the stairwell and the infected swarming out of it. Simultaneously, the blast wave tore across the roof, threatening to incinerate me. But the Goliath was faster.
[You killed an Infected human and gained: +0.1Pp]
[You killed an Infected human and gained: +0.1Pp]
[You killed an Infected human and gained: +0.1Pp]
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