January 17
The two women burst into the basement and were instantly swallowed by darkness. Dust filled the air, greeting the uninvited intruders with a faceful of grime.
The damp, lightless place was profoundly unsettling, almost like a karst cave deep underground. Even the drainage pipes overhead had grown long hanging icicles, as if to make up for the absence of real stalactites.
The infected came shrieking through the doorway after them. In the cramped blackness, Kyoko and Brent had only a single tactical flashlight to rely on.
Kyoko's headlamp had been lost outside, leaving them with even less light to work with.
The two of them took cover in the passage leading toward the next building and opened fire on the feral infected rushing in. With ammunition running low, Kyoko was forced to switch to semiautomatic fire and pick them off as accurately as she could.
These creatures' flesh had not evolved to the point where it could shrug off 6.8mm rounds. When a bullet struck the head, brains burst everywhere. If it hit some other vital area, the infected would jerk once, then collapse limply to the ground for good.
But their bloodthirsty nature made them incapable of retreat. Once the desire to seize fresh prey took hold, they were willing to charge straight into slaughter. Even after taking heavy losses, they launched wave after wave at the two women.
Some of them even split up, using the tangled basement layout to attack Kyoko from multiple directions.
"Brent, please deal with the one peeling off down that side!"
"Got it."
This was not the sort of hot-blooded, knife-in-hand melee where she rushed forward and killed with clean, direct strikes. Brent chose a smarter method.
Without hesitation, she snatched up a piece of debris from the floor and hurled it upward, striking one of the icicles hanging from the ceiling.
Crack.
The loosened chunk of ice dropped like a thrown spear and punched straight through the small, shriveled body of an oncoming infected that had failed to notice the danger. It pinned the thing to the ground on the spot.
Only after confirming that it could no longer move did Brent step forward to finish it off.
Still, these special infected's sonic attacks were absurdly overpowered. Brent's head was swimming. She felt a little better than before, though. Having learned her lesson, she had yanked up her thick padded hood in the hope that it might dampen the sound waves.
It was mostly psychological comfort, but still. After decisively plunging her blade into the infected's skull several times, she finished by kicking its already ruined head hard enough to cave it in.
On the other side, Kyoko felt like she had been trapped through sixteen agonizing hours of advanced mathematics. Her brain had reached its limit.
These sonic fusion-types were beyond irritating.
Kyoko could not take much more of this.
This wasn't the kind of fight she liked. She wanted to end it all at once.
"You bastard infected—Brent, get down behind cover! I'm throwing a grenade!"
At last, with her ammunition spent, Kyoko pulled an M26A2 egg-shaped grenade from nowhere and prepared to clear out the remaining infected inside the basement.
The situation was too urgent, and the darkness around them was so absolute, that she could no longer worry about Brent noticing where the grenade had come from.
It struck the wall with a bright metallic clink, then rolled toward the infected.
Boom!
The explosion hurled the infected off their feet. Even Kyoko and Brent, taking shelter behind a wall, were rattled badly by the blast.
Their ears rang as if someone had jammed a radio with no signal directly into their heads.
Because the explosion happened indoors, the blast wave reflected repeatedly through the enclosed space, compounding the overpressure.
Any infected within three meters of the detonation were reduced to unrecognizable pieces. Bodies burst apart, fragments spraying everywhere.
The structure itself became a weapon. Even infected outside the immediate blast radius were struck by secondary fragments as doors, glass, and chunks of broken wall were torn loose and launched through the air.
The confined environment amplified everything, broadening the killing zone.
Some of the infected who were not yet fully dead had already suffered burst lungs, ruptured eardrums, crushed organs, and catastrophic internal trauma. Others, collapsed on the ground and bleeding from every opening in their faces, had their chests compressed by the blast, leading to torn alveoli, pneumothorax, displaced hearts, and concussions so violent that their brains had practically been shaken inside their skulls like jelly in a cup.
From their mouths spilled chunks of pulped viscera.
Furniture and broken walls inside the room blocked some fragments, but also ricocheted others into new, unpredictable paths. Even at five meters, the shrapnel still flew at more than 200 meters per second, enough to punch straight through a human chest.
Severed arteries and punctured organs were the main causes of death. A belly hit by fragments would bleed out internally with almost no chance of self-rescue.
Only after the noise had finally died down did Kyoko and Brent emerge from behind the wall.
The floor was a total wreck. Some of the infected were still crawling. Stubborn as cockroaches, they dragged themselves across the ground. Their wings, once their greatest advantage, were shredded beyond use. Their bodies had been perforated so badly that they could no longer stand, forcing them to claw their way forward with their arms, leaving straight trails of blood behind them.
"You're still this persistent? Then get back to hell and take your halftime break there!"
Pulling her clothing up over her nose and mouth, Kyoko pushed through the settling dust and strode into the wreckage, bringing the metal stock of her rifle down onto the surviving infected.
Clang, clang, clang.
The impact traveled up through her weapon into her hands. Brent did not stay idle either. With her knife, she drove clean finishing blows into the hearts and brains of the enemies still moving.
In several cases she stabbed directly through the eye sockets and shredded the brain inside.
Kyoko was even more vicious. The bloodthirsty trait in her status had driven her temperament into something darker and more savage.
Still seething from the sonic assault that had made her head feel like it would split apart, she jammed broken icicles through the infected's skulls and down their spines. Then, gripping hard, she tore away heads still dangling by flesh and tendon, ripping loose sections of vertebrae with them.
She was going to hang these bastards' heads outside on the trees as a warning to anyone else.
At long last, the whole pack of uncanny infected had been wiped out. When Kyoko looked around, the only thing still moving in front of her was Brent.
The headless corpses posed no threat anymore.
Brent swallowed hard.
This girl was bloodthirsty to a frightening degree. Absolutely terrifying.
Thank God she had not tried any clever tricks against Kyoko before. Otherwise, the ones being separated into heads and bodies right now would have been the three of them.
In the dim light, Brent could not even clearly see the expression on Kyoko's face, which somehow made it worse.
Kyoko looked less like a person and more like a demon in the flesh.
One hand clutching several severed heads, the other still holding her rifle, Kyoko did not bother to clear the battlefield. She simply took Brent with her and headed back up to the surface.
The moment they stepped outdoors, floodlights made everything glaringly bright.
And then Kyoko noticed it.
Huaxiu and the others were watching from above.
Kyoko casually tossed the heads she had been carrying into a patch of muddy ground beside the building, where the snowmelt had frozen and thawed into foul slush, then looked up.
Sure enough, Huaxiu and the other two girls were peering down from the windows.
"Kyoko! Are you two okay?"
"We're fine. Not a scratch on us. Brent and I will be up in a minute!"
The noise below had woken all three women upstairs long ago. Huaxiu, in particular, had been standing guard at the window with Kyoko's TenPoint XLT crossbow ready in hand.
Any infected drawn in by the commotion had been pinned to the ground by half-meter bolts before they could get close.
Kyoko picked up the magazines and headlamp she had dropped earlier. Then, using up what little strength they had left, she and Brent climbed the hanging ladder back into the safety zone.
After a brief exchange, Brent followed Miranda and Doris back up to the sixteenth floor. She had no intention of intruding on Kyoko and Huaxiu's time together.
Kyoko went back to her own apartment with the still-worried Huaxiu.
"Why were you and Brent downstairs in the middle of the night instead of sleeping? And why do you look so battered?"
Huaxiu's eyes went straight to the torn places in Kyoko's clothes. Her heart clenched. Please, don't let there be any bites.
She hurriedly uncapped the disinfectant in her hand and reached to pull back Kyoko's clothes so she could check and treat her.
But Kyoko stopped her.
"Huaxiu, Brent and I are both fine. Those infected were troublesome, sure, but in front of me they were nothing but trash. These tears in my clothes came from scraping against debris. Look."
As she spoke, Kyoko pulled her clothes open to show her skin. There was not a single bleeding wound anywhere, only a few red marks where things had pressed hard against her.
"All right, I see. You don't need to pull them open any farther. Hurry and cover back up—it's winter."
Huaxiu's face turned red at the sight of Kyoko's skin. Once she confirmed there were no injuries, she hurriedly told Kyoko to get dressed again.
In truth, the room was not cold at all. Huaxiu was simply weak to Kyoko in every possible sense.
Without the stove-heated indoor bath system warming Apartment 1502, the room would have been around seven degrees Celsius at best. Thanks to the stove, though, the indoor temperature held at about twenty-four.
Breathing hard, Kyoko hurried off to the bathroom to clean up.
She dropped her filthy clothes and gear by the door and came back out only after some time had passed.
It was nearly five in the morning.
Staying up all night—total defeat for Kyoko.
"All right, Kyoko, drink this water and go to bed. Whatever else there is can wait until you wake up."
Huaxiu, seated on the sofa, had been watching for Kyoko to come out of the bathroom. Now she handed her a glass of water and urged her to rest, unable to hide the worry in her voice.
"Okay. I'm going to sleep. Don't wake me for breakfast—just make enough for yourself and the other three."
Kyoko drained the water in one go and hurried off to bed. Pulling an all-nighter until five in the morning was enough to destroy anyone. In her previous life, uncontrollable late nights had left her with all sorts of chronic illnesses. She truly hated staying up through dawn now.
It was time to rest.
With nothing on her but the bare minimum, Kyoko slipped into the warm bedding Huaxiu had already prepared and wrapped her arms around her lovely, soft-bodied girlfriend, falling asleep almost at once.
The perilous night was finally ending.
The clouds above could no longer hold the weight of the snow. Like a split sack of salt, white flakes poured down in a vast curtain, covering the land once more in a blank, monotonous sheet of white.
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 126)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter130)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter89)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter157)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 77
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 133
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 125
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 84
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 143
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 115
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 99
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player 53
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 75
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 66
Uma Musume: From Beginner 75
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 52
Uma Musume: I Want All 51
I Can Copy Unique Skills 53
A Guide to Aid in the Underwor 26
Summoning an Evil God, but the 27
Supernatural Multiverse 27
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