44 Ground floor
Mathew descended down the stairs. Following after him were two girls, each holding a machete in their right hand.
They moved down the stairs, one step at a time. Yet, no matter how each of them wanted to prolong the moment before the fighting would resume…
The world continued to move forward regardless of their wishes.
“Take the sides!” Mathew commanded, bringing his hand up the handle of the ax, grabbing it pretty near the blade mount.
“Yosh!” Daria breathed out only to take a deep, long breath. And then, just as she started to let the air flow back into the atmosphere, she moved forward.
Her machete drew a wide arc in the air, only for the girl to decapitate one of the few monsters that had already made their way towards the staircase.
On the upper floors, clearing the corridor and the staircase adjacent to it would give Mathew’s group at least ten to fifteen minutes of rest. But now that they were invading the very bottom floor of the building, that time shortened to just five minutes.
“I’m on it too!” realizing that she was late for the party, Leila shouted and rushed downstairs.
“Go on,” Mathew said, nodding his head.
As ungentlemanly it was for him to move behind the girls, he had to save his strength for the fight with evolved monsters. pᴀɴᴅᴀ-ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ.ᴄᴏᴍ
It was a challenge he never encountered and, all the more, never accomplished during his first run of the apocalypse.
But now, Mathew had little to no choice regarding this matter.
“Let’s go!” Mathew said out loud, shaking his shoulder to warm them up.
And then, he took the corner on the staircase, officially entering the space considered to be the ground floor.
‘I can see…’ Mathew ignored all the zombies swarming below, focusing his attention on scanning the place of battle. ‘Four… No, five of them!’
The monsters were there, just like Mathew guessed.
Each of the monsters took a separate spot in the open space of the bottom floor, each of them banging their massive bodies against the concrete walls supporting the building.
‘What the hell?’ Mathew thought, shocked by what he saw.
This wasn’t a random rampage of monsters unable to find the prey despite sensing it. pᴀɴᴅᴀ ɴoᴠᴇʟ
It was a coordinated effort clearly aimed at taking the entire building down!
“Take care of the small fry!” Mathew shouted his order, rushing ahead.
The experience of clearing the upper floors with the girls quickly proved to be quite useful.
Mathew didn’t pay any mind to the zombies. He simply rushed ahead, aiming for the nearest of the evolved zombies.
Even though each of the zombies and evolved ones as well had distinctive traits that made it one of a kind, all the basic evolved zombies had a pretty similar frame.
They all looked like massive piles of meat and bones. And from what Mathew could tell by staring one of such monsters down, the evolved ones actually were made from several zombies.
‘They couldn’t move like that without any sort of skeleton,’ Mathew thought, using the fact that the monster didn’t notice him yet to pave a way towards it.
‘Still, that skull armor is going to be a pain,’ Mathew thought, noticing where the rest of the bones from the five bodies of the evolved zombie consisted of go.
The evolved zombies looked as if someone had taken a man, plastered flesh of four more people all over him, only to then enclose the subject in a cage made of bones. ρꪖꪕᦔꪖꪕꪫꪣꫀꪶ
There was only one special element about the monster, save for all sorts of organs hanging on the outside of its skin.
And it was a gentle-shining crystal whose shine could be seen even from through the folds of fat of the monster that covered it.
It was the monster’s crystallized heart. An organ allowing its form to operate, yet so overused due to this task that a single scratch was enough to make it go into overdrive.
‘Disgusting,’ Mathew thought, swinging his ax to the side and allowing the handle to seemingly sweep out of his grasp.
Thrown to the back, the ax’s blade pulled the entire weapon along. Mathew only closed his hand when nearly the entire handle brushed past his fingers.
And then, with the greatest possible leaver on the weapon, Mathew swung it forward, right against one of the few exposed vitals of the monster.
“RAAOOARAR!”
The monster unleashed a hectic scream when one of its organs squeezed and then exploded, covering everything in the vicinity with dark blood.
‘Again!’ Mathew shouted in his mind, retracting the weapon only to swing with his entire body and pull a downward slash right against the monster’s shoulder.
“SCREEEEE!” once again, the monster released a powerful cry. Yet this time, Mathew’s attack turned out to be successful, digging deeply into the monster’s flesh and reaching all the way to its crystallized heart.
The second Mathew’s blade touched the crystal hidden by lumps of flesh and bones, the entire thing exploded, shredding the body of the evolved monster apart.
‘I guess it couldn’t rely on muscles alone to keep that kind of mass up,’ Mathew thought, shaking his head and looking around to take stock of the situation.
The girls did their job well, holding all the other enemies at bay. Yet, the screams of the monster that Mathew defeated already alerted all the other ones present on the ground floor.
And then, Mathew saw it come out.
It wasn’t anything that he had seen in either of his lives before.
Just like the simply evolved monsters, it was constructed from flesh, blood, and bones, making it look pretty grotesque. Yet, its form alone was enough to nearly send Mathew into a frenzied puking.
From afar, the new kind of monster looked like a centipede, standing on ten pairs of legs and hands alike while flailing four more pairs in the air like some sort of weapon.
Its legs were constructed out of bones connected with lumps of flesh.
‘What the hell is this?’ Mathew thought, feeling all the satisfaction and euphory from killing an evolved monster disappear in the heat of a moment.
He had encountered the evolved monsters before. This was the one reason why he dared to go against them with only three souls in his group.
Yet, in the face of this new opponent… Mathew could feel something warm spreading over his legs and crotch.
‘FUCK!’ Mathew screamed inwardly out, shaking his body to get rid of the terror that froze him in place.
For a second, everything except Mathew froze in place.
The zombies stopped moving, and the evolved monsters dropped their charge.
Then, every last undead being on the ground floor of the building turned their eyes towards Mathew.
“ROAAAAR!”
With what seemed like an order from the undead centipede, all the undead rushed forward, eager to tear Mathew’s body apart!