novelraw Chapter 48 48: It was an enemy
Chapter 48 48: It was an enemy
"Easy," Valeria said at once when she saw the tension ripple through his body again. "It's been less than two hours."
Leon only clenched his teeth harder, breathing heavily as fresh waves of itching and burning rolled through him, as if something were crawling beneath his skin. Sweat ran down his forehead, which he wiped away with a trembling hand.
"T-this…" he growled through gritted teeth. "What's wrong with me…? Why does everything itch… everywhere…?"
Valeria didn't answer immediately. She studied him calmly, the way someone who had seen this many times before would, then spoke in a measured, almost gentle tone.
"During the fight, you sustained an entire catalogue of injuries. Burns. Micro-tears in your muscles. Strained fibers. Overloaded joints. Minor ruptures in blood vessels," she listed without haste. "If you were an ordinary human from before the apocalypse… those injuries, especially the burns to your legs, would have meant death, or at best amputation."
She paused, letting the words sink in.
"But you're not that person anymore."
Leon lifted his eyes to her.
"After absorbing essence and increasing your stats," she continued, "your Vitality has surpassed one hundred. At that level, your body's regeneration rate is… incomparable to anything you were used to before."
She leaned closer.
"That itching you're feeling right now is accelerated healing. Tissue is rebuilding at high speed, nerves are firing more intensely, and your body is struggling to keep up with the pace it's forcing on itself."
Leon frowned.
"Over… one hundred Vitality…?" he repeated slowly, as if the words refused to fit in his head.
He stared into empty space for a moment, then summoned his status window.
[STATUS WINDOW]
Name: Leon
Level: 20
Race: Human
Age: 21
Class: None
Title: None
Mana: 100 / 300
Strength (STR): 97 (+11)
Agility (AGI): 100 (+19)
Vitality (VIT): 106 (+6)
Intelligence (INT): 20 (+5)
Free Stat Points: 48
[Equipment]
Combat Gloves (Normal Grade)
Urban Survivor Socks (Normal Grade) [Broken]
Reinforced Training Pants (Normal Grade) [Broken]
Shadowstep Walkers (Rare-class artifact) [Broken]
Veil of Silent Ward (Rare-class artifact)
Twin Fang of the Umbral Rift (Rare-class artifact)
[Skills]
Active Skills:
Darkness Manipulation (Phase One Skill) - Tier: Expert
Passive Skills:
Cold Mind (Unclassified Skill) - Tier: Mastery
Elite Soldier (Unclassified Skill) - Tier: Expert
Staring at the system window, Leon couldn't suppress his shock. His eyes locked onto a single line that simply refused to align with what he remembered from before the fight.
Level 20.
"…Twenty?" he whispered, as if saying the number aloud might make it real. "That's… those are really my stats?"
Only now did it fully hit him that because he'd lost consciousness, he hadn't noticed how many levels and stat points he'd gained after killing the Crimson Horned Boar. Back then everything had blurred together, the system messages slipping past his awareness. Only now was he seeing the full picture of what had changed.
His stats were nothing like before the fight.
Not just higher.
They were… scaled beyond reason.
Agility and Strength brushing against a hundred. Vitality clearly past it. A level that had felt distant not long ago was now a fact.
Valeria let out a soft laugh, light and amused, as if the situation struck her as both impressive and oddly endearing.
"Yes, they're really yours," she said with a faint smile. "And I have to admit, your current stats are… terrifying. It's extremely rare to see a human at level twenty with three attributes hovering around the hundred mark."
She leaned in slightly, warmth glinting in her eyes.
"A little more, Leon, and you'll qualify as an average Evolver… even by the standards of higher beings."
That made Leon knit his brows. He understood the scale she was talking about, but from his own perspective, he already felt overwhelmingly powerful for his level. He had just killed a First Order entity, after all. For a split second, a seed of pride, almost arrogance, stirred in his mind.
Then it vanished.
Leon drew a deep breath and lowered his gaze to his equipment list, where the red [Broken] labels hurt far more than any number ever could. They were a reminder of the price he'd paid for that victory.
"Three items…" he said quietly, fatigue seeping into his voice. "They're basically useless now. Barely give one or two stat points…"
His expression darkened. He knew how hard it had been to obtain each of them. He was about to say more when his body suddenly went rigid at the sound of slow, uneven shuffling.
Leon looked toward the pharmacy entrance.
Several figures had appeared in the doorway, swaying, gray-skinned silhouettes with dead white eyes devoid of life, yet fixed directly on him.
Zombies.
Drawn by the smell of blood and the dense, saturated life essence radiating from him.
Less than an hour ago, the mere presence of the Crimson Horned Boar had kept this entire area under an iron grip. A First Order entity was a living no-entry sign, driving away anything with even a shred of self-preservation. But the moment the ruler of this part of the campus fell, that balance shattered, and what had been lurking in the ruins finally dared to emerge.
Leon tried to stand, purely on instinct, without thinking, but a spike of pain tore through his feet so violently that his vision darkened. His body refused to obey, forcing him to slump back down, heavy and clumsy. His legs simply wouldn't support him.
He had no choice.
Leon focused on his mana, feeling its flow through his body, and on the shadows of the three zombies now only a few meters away. He spent another chunk of mana and activated Darkness Manipulation, no tricks, no experimentation, just the fastest and deadliest option.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Three thin, black spikes shot out of the shadows, piercing the zombies' heads clean through with a dry, unpleasant sound. Their bodies collapsed almost simultaneously, no drama, no struggle.
Leon barely had time to take a short breath before five more figures appeared at the pharmacy entrance. Swaying. Slow. White, empty eyes locked stubbornly onto him, as if nothing else in the world existed.
He did the same thing again.
The shadows moved. Mana drained away. The zombies fell one by one.
This time, Leon frowned. He could feel it clearly, his reserves were shrinking at an alarming rate, far faster than expected for such simple enemies.
[Essence Record - Kill Confirmed]
[Target: 8x Normal Zombie (LVL 6)]
Under normal circumstances, even a hundred such zombies would have been nothing more than a mechanical problem, something he could solve in minutes. But now things were very different. He couldn't move, and a single scratch or bite from a level five or six zombie would mean a death sentence, no matter his stats or level.
Valeria noticed it too.
She frowned slightly, watching the bodies hit the ground and the way Leon had to rely on mana more and more. She knew perfectly well that the only reason she'd been able to catch him earlier, save him from hitting the ground, was because the fight had already ended and there were no active enemies nearby. The system couldn't classify that as interference.
Now, it was different.
Enemies kept appearing, one after another. Any direct help from her now would immediately be judged a violation, one that would trigger a punishment even she couldn't ignore.
Valeria's unease grew. Something about the situation had felt wrong from the start, not because of individual zombies, but because of a pattern forming. One that was too regular. Too orderly for mindless, instinct-driven corpses.
The zombies were… too synchronized.
They weren't wandering randomly. They weren't scattering or getting distracted. From multiple directions, they were converging almost like a stream, funneling toward a single point, the pharmacy where Leon was.
Valeria knew better than anyone that even if these undead had gained a few levels and strengthened their bodies, they still had no right to sense life beyond three or four hundred meters.
And yet they were.
With unsettling precision.
Her senses, far beyond anything available to humans, covered the entire area effortlessly. She saw it clearly: zombies from hundreds of meters away turning, doubling back, changing direction to head straight for the pharmacy. As if something was guiding them, not merely attracting them.
Valeria closed her eyes for a brief moment, cutting herself off from the chaos. In that fraction of a second, she focused on one thing only, the source of the anomaly.
When she opened them again, they were no longer relaxed.
They narrowed into sharp, cold slits as she slowly turned her head to the right, toward what looked like an empty wall of a neighboring building. But her gaze reached far beyond concrete, beyond ruins, beyond anything anyone else could see.
And then she spotted him.
A figure moving quickly, running in the opposite direction of the gymnasium, retreating, as if he knew exactly that his task was done and all that remained was to disappear before anyone connected the dots.
Valeria was certain of one thing.
That person wasn't part of Leon's survivor group, nor anyone she'd seen before. Otherwise, she would have remembered them instantly. Her memory never failed her.
She understood almost at once.
This wasn't an accident.
It wasn't coincidence.
It was an enemy.