Chapter 11: The Exploration Team
Inside the pitch-black elevator shaft, a zombie was slowly climbing upwards, using the faint light from above.
Despite the smooth walls, it climbed as if walking on flat ground.
Looking closely, one could see bone spikes protruding from between its fingers, piercing the walls to ensure a stable climb.
Soon, the zombie climbed from the basement to the first floor, and the sunlight from outside the mall illuminated its face.
…It was difficult to describe how grotesque this zombie was.
Below its head was a bloody, filthy female corpse with tattered clothes, organs hanging from its abdomen, and dark red skin.
But its head was pale, a stark contrast to the skin below.
Behind the handsome head’s long white hair, numerous bone spikes protruded, swaying against the zombie’s thighs as it moved.
And in the zombie’s hand was… a pistol?!
“Hmm…”
The zombie slowly raised its head, its bone spikes extending behind it to touch the ground, as if listening for something.
Soon, it turned and looked towards the stairs.
Where its gaze landed, one could see a bald head pressed against the glass of the stairwell’s safety door, staring intently in its direction.
“Gurgle, crackle—”
Suddenly, the zombie in the stairwell opened its mouth wide, emitting a low growl.
Seeming to express anger?
The pale-faced zombie that had just climbed out of the elevator shaft didn’t hesitate. It walked towards the stairwell, pistol in hand.
As if seeing food coming towards it, the zombie in the stairwell couldn’t restrain itself any longer and burst through the safety door.
“Boom—”
The steel door was flung open, crashing against the wall beside it. The three-meter-long Nest Zombie quickly crawled onto the ceiling and charged towards the pale-faced zombie.
“Click, click, click—”
The Nest Zombie’s bone legs clicked crisply against the ceiling. In almost an instant, it was upon the pale-faced zombie.
But the clearly weaker pale-faced zombie showed no intention of fleeing. Instead, it raised its left hand above its head.
This seemed like suicide.
The Nest Zombie wouldn’t miss this opportunity. It opened its maw and leaped down from the ceiling, seemingly intending to swallow the pale-faced zombie’s hand and head whole.
“Crack—”
Just as the Nest Zombie swallowed the pale-faced zombie’s left hand and was about to reach its head, the head suddenly snapped off and fell backward.
A bundle of bone spikes still connected its neck to its spine, but it looked as if the head had fallen off from fright.
Although its head was gone, the pale-faced zombie’s body still reacted quickly.
As the Nest Zombie closed its mouth, its sharp bone teeth firmly biting onto its upper body, the pale-faced zombie’s right hand, which had been held out, rose.
It seemed completely unconcerned that its body was being devoured, as if using itself as bait.
At such close range, the dark muzzle in the pale-faced zombie’s right hand was pressed against the Nest Zombie’s head.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang—”
The headless zombie’s right index finger repeatedly pulled the trigger, hollow-point bullets flying out of the barrel with smoke and fire.
The bullets shattered upon impact with the Nest Zombie’s skull.
The petals of the fragmented bullets, carrying tremendous kinetic energy, smashed into its head, while the highly penetrative base of the bullets, spinning, deeply embedded themselves in its brain.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—”
Even though the Nest Zombie’s head was completely shattered, the pale-faced zombie didn’t stop, firing shot after shot, shattering its spine inch by inch.
Only after all 20 rounds in the pistol were spent, and the mangled corpse of the Nest Zombie lay limp on the ground, did the pale-faced zombie lower its gun.
“Hoo…”
Lin Jiayao looked at the Nest Zombie’s corpse and breathed a sigh of relief.
She had used the zombie controlled by Mask as bait and target, only firing when the Nest Zombie was close enough and even in the process of devouring the zombie’s body.
Why? Because she wasn’t confident in hitting it from a distance.
The most reliable way to ensure a hit was to press the barrel against its head.
But Lin Jiayao didn’t let her guard down.
She used Mask to control the Biter zombie, making it pull her body out of the Nest Zombie’s maw.
Zombies didn’t feel pain.
By the time it fully extricated itself from the rows of bone teeth, there wasn’t an inch of intact muscle or skin on its body.
It was like a pile of scarlet rags hanging on a slightly pale skeleton.
As long as the fingers could move, it was fine.
Lin Jiayao controlled the zombie, ejected the magazine from the pistol, took out bullets from the safehouse, and loaded them one by one.
This pistol was currently Lin Jiayao’s strongest offensive weapon, and she only had one magazine; she had to ensure it was loaded.
After filling the magazine with 20 rounds, inserting it back into the pistol, and chambering a round, Lin Jiayao finally looked at the Nest Zombie’s corpse.
The nearly three-meter-long corpse, with its enormous bulging abdomen, even in death, still exuded the terror it possessed in life.
Perhaps due to a lack of combat experience, this Nest Zombie, residing within the building, hadn’t been that difficult to deal with.
But what Lin Jiayao hadn’t considered was that no one else could, like her, offer a part of their body to be swallowed and then shoot it at point-blank range.
Ordinary people would have been overtaken the moment they saw it. Even if they wanted to resist, the pain of being bitten would make them instantly lose consciousness.
Ordinary zombies?
Ordinary zombies didn’t use pistols.
More importantly, where were the blood crystals?
Lin Jiayao didn’t see any signs of blood crystals precipitating.
As if attracted by the gunshots, Lin Jiayao could hear the growls of zombies in the underground parking lot, transmitted through the elevator shaft.
She didn’t need to look to know that those zombies must have piled up in the elevator shaft, like a mass of disgusting cockroaches, stacked on top of each other, climbing towards the source of the sound.
Lin Jiayao walked to the Nest Zombie’s abdomen and raised a bone spike, slashing at its belly.
“Rip—”
With a sound like a plastic bag being ripped by a sharp blade, a pile of foul-smelling intestines and undigested flesh and bones splattered across the floor.
Among them was a fist-sized, angular, blood-red crystal.
This is…
“Tap, tap, tap…”
Footsteps? Zombies? No! Humans!
Lin Jiayao didn’t hesitate. She instantly grabbed the blood crystal and quickly put it into the safehouse.
The safehouse was immediately occupied by one grid, clearly displaying a number.
500g.
This wasn’t just the Nest Zombie’s own blood crystal, but also the blood crystals it had stored for future evolution—they didn’t have a safehouse; they could only store it within their bodies.
The moment this blood crystal was placed into the safehouse, Lin Jiayao felt a huge wave of relief wash over her, a feeling of exhaustion.
But she didn’t forget the footsteps.
After putting the blood crystal into the safehouse, Lin Jiayao quickly abandoned the useless Biter corpse and controlled Mask, using its long legs (bone spikes) to rapidly climb up the mall.
By the time the human footsteps were close, Lin Jiayao was already hanging upside down on the ceiling of the eighth floor.
“The gunshots just now came from here…”
“Hey, is anyone there? Are you also an exploration team? Which camp are you from?”
“We mean no harm, we just want to go back…”
“We can give you all our blood crystals, just leave us 10g. We only need 10g to go back and heal our injuries…”
This was clearly a distressed exploration team. Though their clothes were intact, most of them had dry lips and were thin and sallow.
For them, gunshots meant the presence of other people. The gunshots here gave them hope.
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