novelraw Chapter 91 : Chapter 91
Chapter 91 : Chapter 91
Chapter 91
Haram.
Though now an empty ruin where no one lived, it was once a great city bustling with countless people, just over a decade ago before the war broke out.
From what I knew, it had been a city large enough to rival the capital of the Mergan Kingdom.
The fact that the Mergan Kingdom, which had barely clung to its status as a major power, was demoted to a minor nation after losing Haram in the war was a testament to the city’s scale and the size of its population. To explain it further would be a waste of breath.
The problem was that Haram’s great history had now become a deadly poison to me.
“Pant… Dammit… I’m really going to die…”
Hiding in a corner of a shabby house, I desperately tried to calm my ragged breathing.
My breaths were so short that my heart ached.
The creatures were still letting out chilling cries, hell-bent on finding me, the only living being in this city.
The number of zombies was impossible to count.
Just how many people must have died when a metropolis like Haram was swept up in the flames of war?
Even if the number of zombies was only a quarter of those who died in Haram, it would be impossible to exterminate them all by ordinary means.
The only means of survival I could choose was to endure.
‘How much time is left until morning…? About five hours?’
I recalled the moment I first entered this city.
The city had been empty, and the path to the dungeon was lined with rotten corpses.
Thinking back, corpses that were ten years old should have been reduced to skeletons, but perhaps because I had grown too accustomed to the battlefield, I hadn't felt anything was amiss.
While chiding myself, it was more important to first figure out why the corpses had remained motionless until I entered the dungeon's deepest part, only to attack all at once.
‘Could the sun have been suppressing their movements?’
Just before I entered the dungeon, a red sunset had hung in the sky.
This meant there was a possibility that as soon as the sun rose, the zombies currently combing the city for me would all cease their movements at once.
‘The problem is, this is also just a hypothesis…’
It would be a great relief if the sun rose and they stopped moving.
But what if it did not?
What if it had nothing to do with the sun’s presence in the sky, and my timing had simply been bad?
Then it would truly be irreversible.
That was why I had to arrange for some insurance.
[Celina.]
I called out to Celina using telepathy.
It was late, but we were in a state of war, and Celina was the commander of an entire unit.
And she, more loyal to her role than anyone, was likely putting in considerable effort to master telepathy even now.
Even if that were not the case, I was confident that the ever-astute Celina would not miss the signal I sent.
[A problem has occurred. I am in Haram, and I need the help of an airship to escape.]
I sent the signal and waited for a reply.
But there was none.
It was likely a problem caused by Celina’s lack of proficiency with telepathy; she could probably only receive signals and did not yet know how to send them.
Though I was sure she knew, the lack of a reply to my request made me anxious, a feeling of ‘what if’ that wouldn’t go away, even as I was certain she would appear leading Unit 917’s airship.
“Hoo…”
I tried to hold it in, but I could not suppress the sigh that escaped me.
Realizing my mistake, I hastily covered my mouth, but it was too late.
I could feel the footsteps of the sound-sensitive creatures quickening.
Since my position had been compromised, there was no benefit to staying here, so I quickly got up and moved through the window to the adjacent building.
I could feel that my stamina had recovered slightly from the brief rest.
Fighting endlessly against the ceaseless tide of zombies was a foolish act.
The wisest choice would be to avoid fighting as much as possible, running here and there, and holding out until morning or until Celina’s rescue arrived.
It was the best course of action I could take, but this, too, had its problems.
“Grrrrr…”
“……”
The house next door, which I reached by climbing through the window.
In a dark corner of the room was the silhouette of a person.
Yes, this was the problem.
The number of zombies spread throughout the city was so large that the places I could hide were extremely limited.
Even when I went to places where I thought, ‘Surely there won’t be any here,’ zombies were invariably there, as if to mock me.
“Kyaaaaaak!”
I had learned a few things after being hounded by zombies for hours.
Zombies have extremely sensitive hearing and smell.
Even though they could not have seen me in the thick darkness, they had pinpointed my presence and location just from the small noise I made upon landing and from my body odor, and charged at me.
‘Is there only one zombie?’
That was a relief, at least.
If there were several of them in a group, it would take time to deal with them and also create noise, forcing me to run another marathon that tested my limits in search of another safe place.
But if there was only one, it was possible to deal with it quickly and quietly.
I looked at the charging zombie and calmly prepared to counterattack.
“……?”
I felt something was wrong when the creature’s form was fully revealed by the light pouring in through the window.
Unlike the other zombies, beyond its tautly swollen belly, I could glimpse the flickering remnants of a hot flame.
I felt pathetic.
This was not the real world, but a world ruled by sword and sorcery, yet I had been thinking in such one-dimensional terms.
I had been so caught up in the image of zombies from movies and anime that I had turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to all the bizarre phenomena that could occur due to magic and the mana that fueled it.
This was the result.
BOOM!
The zombie exploded the moment it reached me.
Although I had hastily thrown myself out the window, I could not completely escape the intense heat.
The violent impact sent me flying, my head hit something hard, and I rolled across the ground for a good while.
I thought I had dodged it rather well, but I ended up with severe burns on my left arm and shoulder.
Of course, it would heal if I endured for a bit, but the pain from the burn was no small matter, making it difficult to bear.
The only reason I did not scream was due to my desperate struggle to reduce the number of enemies I had to face, even by a little.
I stumbled, forcing myself to get up.
But my efforts were in vain; countless zombies were rushing toward me with terrifying speed down the alley stretching before and behind me.
It was fortunate that the creatures, knowing nothing of order, were so busy shoving each other to be the first into the cramped alley that they were not making any speed at all.
Instead of fighting them, I looked for an escape route.
‘Let’s go up for now.’
It was true that I had not analyzed the city’s overall situation, having been busy just running away.
Since things had come to this, I decided to be certain and headed for the roof of the building.
It was something I could not have dreamed of before, but after reaching level three, it became possible for me to scale walls by stepping on ledges or slightly protruding bricks.
What greeted me on the building’s roof was the head of a zombie.
SLICE!
“…I knew you’d be here.”
I lopped off the zombie’s head and threw its persistently clinging body down to the ground below.
Something was repeatedly and forcefully banging on the door leading to the roof.
It had to be a horde of zombies.
There was no reason to deal with them.
I jumped to the roof of the next building.
Like that, I moved from roof to roof, scaling walls when necessary, and surveyed the city’s overall situation.
“There are so damn many.”
There is an expression, “half water, half fish.”
Applying that to the current situation, it would not be an exaggeration to say that half the space was empty, and the other half was filled with zombies.
At this point, I even began to wonder where so many zombies could have been hiding.
“With this many, they could probably wipe out a small kingdom… Even the Mergan Kingdom would be in danger if not for that woman…”
A shiver went down my spine.
If Purity somehow discovered a way to control the zombies, the Alliance would suffer considerable damage.
With Odin not actively participating in frontline battles at the moment, Purity and the Alliance were locked in a back-and-forth struggle with neither side giving an inch.
In such a situation, the fall of a single kingdom due to a zombie invasion would be no different from one of the pillars supporting the Alliance collapsing.
Of course, it seemed unlikely that a method to control zombies even existed, but…
At the same time, the thought, ‘Is there really no way?’ crossed my mind.
In the first place, weren’t zombies themselves a phenomenon close to an anomaly that did not exist in the D&K I knew?
If such a method existed…
“Graaaaaaah!”
THUD!
A thunderous roar was accompanied by a great vibration in the ground.
I, who had been moving across the slanted roof of a building, had to stop for a moment to keep my balance.
After managing to avoid slipping by grabbing a half-broken chimney, I turned my head in the direction the sound came from.
“What is that now?”
A sight that made me doubt my eyes unfolded before me.
A zombie with a body larger than a decent-sized house was roaring at me.
Every time it took a step, the unstable ground around it trembled.
“Is that the leader of the zombies?”
Anyone could see it was a special creature.
A Zombie King.
A Zombie Lord.
Perhaps it was a fiend with a similar name.
Seeing as I had neither experienced nor heard of it in D&K until now, maybe it was a legendary fiend that revived once every hundred years to plunge the world into terror.
It might have some backstory like that.
Perhaps if I dealt with it, all the zombies here might return to being ordinary corpses.
‘First, I’ll test its combat strength and see how it is to fight.’
My remaining stamina was…
It was tight, but not to the point where I could not hold out.
The creature reached its hand toward me on the roof, and I jumped in time to get on its arm.
With a squelching sensation, I felt my military boots dig into its rotten flesh.
It felt like every hair on my body was standing on end.
I felt like I was going to retch from physiological revulsion.
However, the trials and tribulations I had experienced in this world so far were too harsh for me to be shaken and collapse over something like this.
I took the next step.
Like that, I ran up the giant zombie’s arm and reached its head.
The zombie swung its hand to grab me, but perhaps because of its large size, its speed was on the slow side compared to a normal zombie.
Having succeeded in dodging without difficulty, I plunged my sword toward the top of its head.
CLANG!
I had expected it, but it was hard.
Should I say it felt like hitting metal rather than bone?
But I did not think it was impossible.
If once was not enough, I just had to attack multiple times.
I continued to dodge or parry the zombie’s relentless attacks, striking its head whenever I had a chance, and with each strike, I could feel cracks forming on its skull.
The result of dozens of such attacks.
CRACK.
The skull split completely, revealing the brain.