The feeling of her body being filled with evolution points was nothing short of intoxicating.
Although the gnawing, sharp hunger in her stomach had completely disappeared the moment she swallowed the crystal, a new and powerful urge began to bloom deep within her mind.
It was an innate, overwhelming desire to devour more of those same infection cores.
As the energy from the red crystal slowly settled into her dead cells, a sensation of abundant, overflowing strength grew in every single fiber of her existence.
Her limbs felt lighter, her muscles tightened with strange power, and her mind felt a fraction clearer than it had just moments before.
And so, driven by this brand-new craving, she began to hunt.
Unlucky for the wandering dead filling the downtown district, one of their own had turned into a relentless predator.
She moved through the ruined streets like a quiet shadow, sliding behind unsuspecting zombies, crushing their skulls with her enhanced strength, and tearing out the glowing red crystals hidden within their heads.
She forgot how many of her own kind she had killed. It was not as if her blank mind could even comprehend what counting meant, nor did she care to measure time.
She simply followed the primal instinct of her cells, which screamed with pleasure whenever they were brimmed with fresh energy.
However, as time passed and she swallowed core after core, the rate of evolution points absorbed into her body began to drop.
The initial surge of intoxicating strength grew weaker with each head she broke open.
Eventually, she reached a point where the standard red infection cores of the common zombies no longer satisfied her.
She hit a stubborn bottleneck. Swallowing another crystal gave her none of the previous intoxicating sensations, leaving her stomach feeling dull and unimpressed.
High above the city streets, on an elevated highway flyover, a strange sight sat amid the chaos.
Among the ruins of countless abandoned vehicles, overturned buses, and the scattered bodies of slain zombies, a young girl was sitting casually on top of a fallen cargo truck.
From afar, she looked remarkably like an ordinary human girl in her late teens. Her pale skin was smooth, and her long dark hair drifted slightly in the warm wind.
But if anyone were to look closely, they would immediately realize she was far from human.
Dark, thick veins spider-webbed across her arms and throat, visible just beneath her translucent grey flesh.
Her fingernails were lengthened into sharp, hardened black talons, and her eyes were a deep, luminescent crimson that glowed faintly in the sunlight.
Yet, unlike the rotting corpses wandering below, her body showed no signs of decay.
She possessed a strange, dangerous beauty.
Currently, she wore a deeply confused expression. It was the same blank stare that most zombies carried, but within her glowing red pupils, there was a faint spark of emerging intelligence and curiosity.
She frowned deeply as she tossed the last red infection core into her mouth.
She swallowed it whole, waited a second, and then grimaced in pure anger when no new energy flooded her veins.
Her lips pouted involuntarily in disappointment as a rough, unused voice rasped out from her throat:
"No... taste."
If anyone had been near enough to hear her soft, complaining voice, they would have felt their hearts break with pity over her childlike tone.
That pity, however, would vanish the instant they caught a glimpse of her razor-sharp teeth and black talons.
She looked around the elevated road, her crimson eyes scanning the area ahead.
A group of wandering zombies had gathered near the ramp of the flyover, but they had obviously sensed the terrifying aura radiating from her.
They stood completely frozen in place, keeping a wide distance and refusing to come any closer.
She considered them for a brief moment, then tilted her head and dismissed them. It was useless to hunt them now.
They were not tasty anymore.
Her mind briefly recalled the rich, intoxicating scent of living food she had smelled earlier in the alleyway.
But the moment her body remembered it, her mind rejected the thought once again. A stubborn wall inside her soul refused to let her hunt them.
She knew she could easily feast right now if she wanted to.
After all, her sharp sense of smell had already picked up the warm, living aroma of two foods hiding in a smashed vehicle just a few meters away from her truck.
She simply chose not to eat them.
Inside an overturned police cruiser pinned beneath the side of the flyover, two men were crouching in terrified silence.
They had no idea that the terrifying creature sitting atop the truck had smelled them the exact moment she walked onto the highway.
The only reason they were still breathing was that she found the idea of eating them unappealing.
Furthermore, because of her overwhelming presence as an apex predator, no other zombies dared to climb the flyover, unknowingly saving the men’s lives for the past hour.
Inside the crushed car, one of the men carefully motioned with his hands, keeping his body pressed flat against the floorboards.
"It seems... it’s not hungry anymore," the man named James whispered in a barely audible voice, wiping cold sweat from his forehead.
"Who knows if it will stay that way if it sees us?" whispered the second police officer, his voice trembling with terror. "Did you forget how it just slaughtered every other zombie on this bridge? It tore their heads open with its bare hands!"
Both men were veteran officers. They had fought against the horde for a brutal hour before their entire battalion was overrun and wiped out.
Only because this strange female zombie had suddenly appeared and started brutally hunting her own kind had the two of them managed to crawl into this wreckage and survive.
"That’s exactly why I’m saying we have to escape right now," James gritted his teeth, his eyes wide with anxiety. "Remaining here is not safe. Who knows when it will evolve further and smell us out? Haven’t you ever watched zombie movies? Monsters like that don’t just sit around!"
"That’s true..." the other officer stammered, his knuckles white as he clutched his empty service weapon.
"Listen to me. I will make a run for it," James said, his expression hardening as he made up his mind. "The flyover splits into two lanes up ahead. Take the left path. There’s an off-ramp that leads straight down to the civilian parking lot where our backup car is parked."
"What about you?" the other officer asked, his eyes wide with alarm.
James gave him a deep, self-sacrificial look, placing a heavy hand on his comrade’s shoulder. "Humanity can only survive through sacrifice. I will wait for you at the end of the road, dead or alive, comrade."
Before the other officer could stop him, James gave a crisp, solemn salute. He scrambled out from the twisted metal of the police cruiser, popping up onto the open asphalt of the flyover.
Driven by reckless bravery, he scooped up a heavy piece of shattered bumper from the road and hurled it with all his strength at the truck where the zombie girl was sitting.
The metal struck the side of the truck with a loud bang.
"HERE I AM, YOU FUCKER!" James roared at the top of his lungs.
It was as if invisible, dramatic music were swelling around him as he turned back to the car, giving his tearful comrade one last sad, heroic nod.
Then, he sprinted at full speed toward the right fork of the flyover, waving his arms wildly and yelling back over his shoulder:
"CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, YOU DIRTY MONSTER!"
Meanwhile, sitting atop the cargo truck, the monster in his dramatic speech simply gave him a long, blank look.
She rested her chin in her hands, watching the loud, flailing food run away down the empty road.
"Food... so... annoying," she muttered softly, her voice still awkward and raspy.
She was about to look away and ignore him completely, but as she watched him run toward the far end of the flyover, her nose twitched.
The wind shifted, carrying a powerful, unfamiliar scent from the direction the man was running toward.
It was not the scent of living humans, nor was it the weak, bland scent of the common red-core zombies around her.
It was a deep, rich, and intensely concentrated aroma that made her stomach violently rumble for the first time in hours.
Far down the right fork of the flyover, standing among a pile of crushed sedans, was a massive, mutated zombie.
Its body was twice the size of a normal human, covered in bone-like armor, and pulsing with a brilliant, dark orange light right at the center of its forehead.
Her deep red pupils suddenly contracted into tiny points as the delicious, overwhelming scent hit her brain.
The bottleneck in her body seemed to melt away just looking at it.
A wide, terrifying grin slowly spread across her pale face, revealing her sharp, gleaming teeth as she locked her eyes on the massive mutated creature in the distance.
"Foooooooooooood!!" she cheered, leaping off the truck with incredible speed.