The Regenerating Dead
The grotesque muscle-woman whose eyes had been moving independently fixed her gaze on me and let out a shriek before charging. “Kuaaaargh!”
Even though she was a corpse that had come back to life, her speed hadn’t diminished at all. I leapt to the left and dodged the attack. Crash! The wall where I had just been standing exploded from the impact of her fist. I activated the system to deploy the blade in my right arm. The outer shell split along the seam, and the folded blade inside unfolded.
“If I cut her into pieces, she won’t be able to move even if she wants to!”
“Kraaaah!”
Following both the combat-assistance program’s analysis of her movement patterns and my own instincts, I leapt diagonally and swung the blade in a wide arc. Shhk!
“Kwaaak!” The monster screamed, its arm half-severed and dangling limply.
“Ugh, that’s disgusting. I’ve seen plenty of tentacles, but this is a bit…”
I recoiled at the sight of writhing tentacles visible in the cross-section, but before I could finish speaking, something even more horrifying happened. The tentacles from both cut ends tangled together, and the dangling arm reattached itself perfectly. The absurd regenerative ability made me wonder if I was dreaming; I pinched my cheek to check.
“Not a dream. What the hell is that? Is it really a monster?”
While I stood stunned, the program’s rapid analysis suggested a course of action. I fired wires from my left hand, spreading them around the area. The thin, nearly invisible lines stretched across the room and caught on various objects. As the monster charged again, I dodged while wrapping the wires around it, binding it tightly.
Once the creature was completely entangled and immobilized, I activated the electric shock function.
“Taste some electricity.”
Crackle-crackle!
“Kreeeeeh!”
The maximum-output shock made the wires wrapped around its body flash. Smoke rose from its entire frame, and it convulsed violently, yet it still didn’t die. The wires dug into its reinforced skin and muscles but refused to cut through; instead, the sections caught on nearby objects were severed, and the wires began to be pulled free.
Just as my mind raced in confusion, Oppa appeared in the hallway wearing only underwear and holding a sword. “Elisha! What’s going on?!”
“Oppa! Don’t come any closer! I’ve strung wires everywhere!”
“Eek!”
I urgently stopped him. He skidded to a halt and stared at the struggling monster-woman in horror. “What? Wasn’t it dead?”
“It was infected by some unknown parasite and came back to life. It’s basically a zombie now.”
“What the hell… Huh?!”
At his sharp intake of breath, I turned to see the corpses of the men nearby also rising to their feet.
“It looks like all the bodies have come back to life.”
“This isn’t some zombie apocalypse movie… I’ll handle these guys.”
“Their regeneration is insane, so try to cut them completely apart.”
“Got it!”
Oppa swung his sword in the same breath, decapitating one of the zombies. Even with its head and body separated, the creature kept moving. His face twisted in shock as he kept swinging.
“Grrrgh!”
“Alright, what do I do with this one?”
The taut wires began to loosen one by one as the objects they were anchored to were cut apart. I had never seen regeneration this insane before. Deciding to neutralize its mobility first, I raised my output and charged at high speed.
Shhk! Shhk!
I sliced cleanly through both ankles of the zombie woman, who was still struggling inside the wire net. Thud!
“Kuaaah!”
Unable to balance without her feet, she collapsed and flailed her limbs wildly. After dodging the heavy swings of her arms and legs, I severed both wrists as well. Yet the ankles were already knitting back together. This wasn’t going to work.
She sprang up on her newly regenerated feet and lunged again. While dodging, I noticed that the areas burned by the electric shock weren’t regenerating, unlike the parts sliced by the wires.
Why did the wire cuts heal but the burned sections didn’t? Was this monster weak to fire? If so, it had a clear weakness, just like the black monster we fought in Eden.
Even knowing the weakness, however, we had a problem: it was raining outside, and we were indoors. We couldn’t just start a fire. As I considered fire-based attacks, the combat-assistance program displayed suitable options: lure it outside and burn it with magic fire that wouldn’t be extinguished by rain, cauterize the severed parts with fire, or blow it up with explosives. Among them, using the plasma blade seemed the simplest.
The plasma’s duration was short, and recharging the battery would be difficult here, but the priority was eliminating the monster-woman quickly. I activated the plasma, and a thin blade of superheated plasma formed along the edge, glowing brightly. The high-density battery’s charge plummeted immediately. I swung straight at the incoming fist.
Shhhraaak!
“Kreeeeeh!”
The ultra-high-temperature plasma sliced and melted the arm in one motion. Smoke and the distinctive smell of burning plant matter rose from the stump. Plant matter?
When I severed the other arm as it swung back, the burning-plant smell grew stronger.
“Oppa! Whatever’s inside these corpses is some kind of plant!”
“A plant? What kind of plant does that?! Hah!”
Oppa was also struggling against the endlessly regenerating zombies.
“It’ll be hard to finish them indoors. Let’s lure them outside and burn them.”
“Got it!”
He answered briefly, then led the zombies chasing him down the stairs.
“Kuaaah!”
“Hoo, I need to end this fast. Surely they won’t keep moving even if they’re chopped into pieces?”
Shhk! Sizzle!
I swung the blade without pause, trying to finish them before the plasma’s remaining time ran out. Only after completely dismembering the arms, legs, torso, and head did the monster finally stop moving.
“Ugh… even the severed parts are still alive…”
The cut surfaces had melted and hardened from the heat, but the plant-like tentacles elsewhere continued to writhe. I drove the blade into the solar plexus where the heart should be and the head where the brain should be for good measure, then folded the blade away and headed outside to find Oppa.
After opening a third-floor window and leaping out, I scanned the surroundings. It was pure chaos: a horde of zombies chasing a single human in an extreme game of tag. Oppa was sprinting in circles across the wide clearing, steam rising from his body despite the cold downpour. When he spotted me jumping from the third floor, he shouted.
“Elisha! Do something, quick!”
“It really does look like a scene from a movie. Pfft.”
“Don’t laugh!”
“Yeees~ Yes.”
I brushed my rain-soaked hair away from my face and activated the Word Magic. Instead of creating a small spark, I drew a deep breath and exhaled forcefully toward the zombies, just as Guardian had breathed fire in dragon form.
Whoosh!
A blazing stream of flame lit up the dark surroundings and instantly set the rain-soaked zombies ablaze.
“Kreeeeek!”
“Kieeeeh!”
The magic fire burned even in the rain, consuming the zombies before they could regenerate.
“Whoa! I almost got burned!”
“Phew~ Are these all of them?”
“I dragged every last one out from the nooks and crannies on the second floor, so these should be the last.”
“Hoo, why did these things suddenly appear? We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Even when we dropped the gangsters from the mart or killed the scouts at the apartment, plant monsters had grown from the corpses as nutrients, but the corpses themselves had never risen. Oppa cracked his neck with a loud pop while watching the burning zombies collapse one by one.
“Who knows? It started right after the rain began, so maybe the rain triggered it. Or maybe they were already infected with something we didn’t know about, and dying turned them into plant zombies.”
“Hmm…”
Whatever the reason, if these plant zombies had existed before, stopping humanity’s extinction would have been nearly impossible. A parasitic plant with overwhelming regenerative power that could take over a corpse and make it move like a zombie within hours? In a world where monsters multiplied as humans died, survival would have become even harder.
We stood at the first-floor entrance until the last zombie burned and fell, then went back inside.
“Brr~ It’s cold. Let’s go up and rest. What a mess this turned out to be.”
“You go up and rest first. I’ll do the search as planned and come up.”
“Do it tomorrow. Tomorrow. You need rest too, Elisha.”
At the words accompanied by a thick arm wrapping around my waist and a hand resting on my lower belly, I gave in and followed.
“Hehe~ You’re worried about Madam’s fertilized egg, aren’t you?”
“Can’t it be both? It’s good if both of you are safe. Ah!”
“What is it?”
He suddenly stopped and let out an exclamation. When I asked, he spoke with a deadly serious face.
“Is it a daughter or a son?”
“Eh… you should ask the mother, Madam.”
“Just give me a hint. So I can decide on a name.”
“Hmm, actually it’s pretty easy to guess… It’s a boy.”
“Really? So this child will be the heir to the family~ I’ll have to give it a cool name.”
“That tickles.”
His hand rubbing my lower belly as if stroking the fertilized egg inside felt ticklish. After returning to the room and falling asleep side by side, we woke the next morning.
I got up early and searched the building while the two of them slept. In a drawer in the third-floor living room I found four boxes of what looked like revolver ammunition. In a locked room deep on the second floor I discovered various rifles, pistols, submachine guns, and plenty of ammunition.
“Why did they stockpile all these weapons but never use them? Guns might not be very effective against monsters, but against humans there’s hardly a better weapon.”
The advance party and the scouts had carried only cold weapons; not a single firearm. Even the men we fought inside the building had been unarmed except for one who carried a decorative revolver. I stopped trying to understand the inexplicable behavior and swept everything into my spatial pouch. I also gathered all the food I found in what looked like the kitchen pantry, then returned to the third-floor room.
While I had been searching, Charlotte had slept deeply and recovered her stamina. She chattered excitedly about the intense battle.
“The final strike was the most thrilling, meow!”
“Yeah, it was impressive. Good job. By the way, is your body okay now?”
“Everything’s fine except my waist is a little sore, meow.”
“Ahem, that’s a relief.”
“Pfft.”
Arin’s laughter made Oppa cough awkwardly, clearly embarrassed. He didn’t seem to know why Charlotte’s waist hurt, so apparently Arin hadn’t told the unconscious Charlotte about last night’s activities. I decided to keep it a secret for now; the situation felt more amusing that way.
The three of us ate emergency rations while watching the rain outside. After a quick meal we gathered on the bed to discuss our plans.
“We can’t just wait around until this endless downpour stops. I don’t know what kind of disaster the rain will cause in a paralyzed city, but we have to move eventually.”
“I think so too, meow.”
“With the sewer system not functioning normally, we don’t know how much rainwater it can handle. Moving too hastily would be dangerous. We need to go safely.”
“I think so too, meow.”
For some reason, Charlotte had been repeating the same line and just nodding since earlier. Oppa also nodded in agreement after hearing my opinion.
“Yeah, safety comes first. Still, since we don’t know the exact situation outside, let’s just go for it. We’ll improvise like proper hunters.”
“I think so too, meow.”
“Then let’s get ready.”
“I also…”
“Charlotte, stop repeating the same thing and get ready.”
“Understood, meow!”
With our opinions aligned, we quickly donned our gear and put on waterproof ponchos to stay dry. The ponchos were large enough to comfortably cover Charlotte’s tail as well. Preparation complete.