295 Isn't this fight... too easy?
Mathew jumped over the car.
At this point, avoiding zombie detection would be counterproductive. Instead, he wanted to draw all of their attention onto himself.
‘Mind’s flesh!’ he shouted in his thoughts, producing as many mana-hands as he could and reaching with them for the heads of the nearest zombies.
Meanwhile, Nadia rolled over to the side of the car. She nearly laid herself flat on the ground, pressing her legs against the asphalt of the road while burying her fingers into the road as far as she could reach.
“I’ve got you now,” she whispered, her eyes flashing with red.
And right as Mathew pulled out the heads of roughly twenty zombies at once, Nadia sprung her entire body forward.
‘Damn,’ Mathew gulped his saliva down, watching how the girl turned into a frisk of red. She jumped from zombie to zombie-like some sort of bouncing ball. Every zombie in her path would end up torn into shreds, leaving a bloody trail in her wake.
And yet, despite the girl massacring all the zombies in front of her… she wasn’t even a bit as cinematic as Mathew with his mind’s flesh!
‘Yes,’ Mathew thought, limiting his actions to just selecting new targets for his mana-borne hands. ‘Focus all your attention on me!’ he ordered the zombies while making sure to throw their no longer animated corpses around, making his part of the fight into an even bigger commotion.
“ROAR!” a cumulative scream came from nearly a thousand throats as the zombies all over the place directed their attention to him.
But it was already too late.
Nadia turned into some sort of a bloodthirsty beast. Every jump of hers only served to increase her speed. At some point, she stopped caring about tearing the zombies she stepped on apart, as the sudden change of momentum caused by her landing on the zombie only to kick herself off it was enough to pulverize half of their bodies.
Then, she jumped for the last time. She pulled her saber to the back while her eyes flashed an intense hue of red.
‘It’s over,’ Mathew thought, blinking once only to see Nadia’s saber cut right through the neck of one of the evolved zombies.
‘I wonder how Leila is doing,’ Mathew thought. He turned his head around, designating yet another set of twenty zombies to have their heads plucked before finally laying his eyes down on his other wife.
Contrary to Nadia, Leila didn’t focus on the evolved one alone.
Mathew missed the moment when she jumped into the fray, so he had to do with the show that she was displaying right now.
She didn’t use the zombies as footholds. No, she would simply leap forward, swing her saber around at a speed even Mathew struggled to follow with his eyes, and then calmly land. Yet, instead of taking a breather before going back to work, she would build up on the momentum of her earlier jump, instantly executing another leap and repeating the process.
Mathew was lucky enough to catch her performance right as she reached the second of the evolved zombies within the horde.
Yet, instead of getting excited, Mathew ended up dumbfounded.
“Huh?” he only managed to utter a small whisper of shock when Leila… landed several meters behind her target. She then raised her head… and spent good three seconds looking around with a confused expression on her own face!
‘She didn’t even realize she already killed the bastard,’ Mathew realized, blinking his eyes a few times to ensure he wasn’t just hallucinating.
Then, a small smile emerged on his lips as he focused back on his tedious job of plucking the heads of all the zombies around.
‘I didn’t even need this saber,’ Mathew thought while looking down at the weapon in his hand.
The young man then raised his eyes, right in time to see how some sort of a shock wave washed over the entire horde.
It wasn’t an aftereffect of a powerful explosion. It wasn’t anything that would deal any kind of damage in the first place.
It was simply the effects of all the zombies losing their command and ending up temporarily stunned once they had to search for their prey on their own yet again.
‘This is the golden opportunity,’ Mathew thought, tightening his grip over his saber before jumping into the fray himself.
pAnDa (nov)e1 He could take down twenty zombies every two or three seconds it took him to decapitate them with his mind’s flesh. Yet, when he added his swordsmanship to the equation, this number grew to twenty-five or even thirty if the zombies ended up lining up for his strikes properly.
‘Assuming they will be able to reach twenty per two or three seconds each,’ Mathew thought, only for a vile smile to appear on his lips.
‘To think that we could clean a horde of this size in like what…’ he took a second to calculate, ‘less than two minutes?’
Mathew gave up on his smile. He gave up on all the meaningless thoughts too. And for the next minute, mere sixty seconds, he pushed himself to the limits.
As soon as his mind’s flesh would pluck out the heads of the current batch of zombies, Mathew would push it to the next set of targets. He would only clear the zombies to his sides and back with this ability, saving those in front of him for his saber.
In this way, in a mere minute, Mathew managed to clean up nearly half of the street that the horde occupied and which separated Leila from him.
“Ah” a short scream forced Mathew out of his focus, only for the young man to realize he nearly swung his saber at the girl!
As it turned out, Leila ended up carving her way back to the rest of the group herself. And a mere five seconds later, Nadia burst out from the pile of corpses to the back.
“That was… easy?” Mathew muttered, raising his forearm to wipe his forehead from the blood trickling down his eyes… Only to realize that there wasn’t a single inch of his body or clothes that would be free from zombie blood.
And as he raised his eyes and looked at the girls… neither of them was the exception from this bloody appearance either.
“Dear, I only have one question,” Nadia ignored their appearance and approached Mathew before she nearly shoved her nose into his mouth. “What the hell was that?”
“You mean, how did I kill all those zombies around me?” Mathew asked for clarification even though it was fairly obvious there was hardly anything else that could make the girl so upset.
And just like Mathew thought, Nadia didn’t confirm his doubts, opting to cross her arms on her chest and just stare daggers at him.
“Well, it was my mind’s flesh,” Mathew revealed without holding back at all. “It allows me to mold mana into any shape I want and then move it around as if it was my own flesh.”
Knowing that a mere explanation wouldn’t be enough, Mathew exerted his will once again. This time, however, there were no zombies left for him to rip into pieces, so he simply raised one of the many corpses around them.
“Woah!” Both Nadia and Leila backed off a single step, taken aback by the sight of a floating, headless corpse.
“That’s amazing!” Nadia admitted, her eyes flashing with adoration.
“That…” Leila hesitated before averting her eyes to the side. “That gives me some ideas…” she admitted while a slight blush appeared on her cheeks, turning them even redder than before.
“Anyway,” Mathew dropped the corpse and the topic at the same time. “I initially wanted to continue with our expedition, but…” he looked down at himself before raising his eyes and giving the girls a meaningful stare. “I think we should take some time to wash up and rest.”
“And it just so happens, there is a base of survivors right ahead,” Leila smiled viciously while raising her saber and dropping it over her shoulder.
The residual blood from her rampage started to flow down her blade, dripping down from its handle only an inch away from her back.
“Yeah,” Mathew nodded his head. “We still need to gather the stones, and…” Mathew took a short pause to take a breath…
And then it hit him.
All the exhaustion of overusing his ability way beyond his limits. All the pain of pushing his body beyond what it should be capable of.
‘What?’ he thought, a moment before his body nearly completely broke down. And as he glanced at the system he ignored so far, the answer to his current state was right there.
[Mathew Karian]
[Mind – 277[100](-37)]