Dual Blades (Not)
“Keh-keh-keh… keh…”
The monsters people called Mutants didn’t infect you if they bit, and they didn’t eat flesh. All they brought to the table were physical abilities that left ordinary land animals in the dust and a grotesque talent for slaughter. They evolved at random, with no fixed pattern—whatever form they took, it was always hostile to humanity, and always cruel.
“A Mutant.”
I’d heard one of its arms was huge and figured it was one of those classic game-boss types that charged in with a massive muscle arm for a tackle. It wasn’t.
One eye was gone. The skin looked like the muscle underneath had torn its way out through the flesh. It looked thin at a glance, but it was enormous, and that mismatched arm hung all the way past its knee.
Less zombie, more something you’d see in a horror game. The long fingers—especially the ones on that absurdly oversized arm—had no nails, yet they still came to a wicked point.
Wait. Looking at it now, that’s its left arm. You son of a bitch. Mocking the one-armed guy, huh?
“Keh, keh, keh…”
Even with our eyes locked, the Long-Armed Mutant just kept making that laughing sound. Emotion or not, had it been waiting for me to walk in before it dropped the shutter?
“Even zombies set traps now… fucking intellectuals, the lot of them.”
High intelligence. Laughing at a person. Smart enough to dig a pit and patient enough to wait until I stepped into it. I talked a big game, but cold sweat was already soaking my back. This was a Mutant of a completely different breed from anything I’d faced so far.
Alarm bells went off in my skull. The thing just stood there, chuckling at me, with no intention of raising the shutter and coming through. I backed away slowly, putting distance between us and the Long-Armed Mutant.
“…Should’ve just gritted my teeth and taken those other two.”
Against those two I would’ve taken some damage, sure—but at worst I would’ve gotten infected. Probably wouldn’t have died. This thing, though? Charge it and you die. Period.
Fuck it. Run.
The moment I had enough space, I spun and bolted without a second thought. Other zombies didn’t matter. With this thing around, the neighborhood had probably been wiped clean already.
Maximize the distance. Make it chase me for as long as possible. Ideally it would just let me go—but that was pure fantasy.
“What the hell is this?”
As I ran, a fire shutter blocking one side of the road came into view. Underground shopping arcade from here on? I didn’t need a closer look—one whole section of the fire shutter had been ripped clean out.
“It punched through a fire shutter?”
That was past “possible” and into “ridiculous.” Most of these things couldn’t even tell a wall from a shutter. This one had known it could break through—and done it.
There was an emergency-exit pictogram right next to it, but thank God the Mutant couldn’t read. A Mutant that opened doors and wandered around freely? That would be its own special brand of nightmare.
“I can’t even fall back now—wait.”
The second I slipped through the gap the Long-Armed Mutant had torn open, I was inside a banquet of butchered corpses. The blood stench was so thick I couldn’t even swear. Crushed heads. People torn into upper and lower halves. Eyeballs rolled across the floor.
“…”
The thought that I might end up just like them tightened my throat. Even the Mutant whose arms had turned into hooks and shredded people hadn’t killed this creatively.
A hell where looking for survivors was a luxury. Nothing but blood and corpses. I had no choice but to keep pushing forward. A quiet suspicion that the missing people had all met this fate tried to stick its head up in a corner of my mind, but right now my own survival came first.
—Kiiik! Kihyaaak—!
Wails drifted in from far ahead. I kicked up my pace and scavenged weapons from the bodies that looked like they had put up a fight along the way.
A nail bat. A crowbar… classic zombie-hunting weapons. Too bad I was a washed-up one-armed single; anything that needed two hands was off the table.
“This is it, then.”
What I settled on was a jungle knife—or a machete, if you preferred. You could swing it one-handed and it hit hard, but they were rare enough that you didn’t usually get to carry one around. Right now it was more than enough to stand in for my right hand.
I jammed the machete, sheath and all, at my left hip and drew it once to make sure the sheath didn’t come with it. I’d actually seen someone die that way. Back then I’d thought they were an idiot. No guarantee I wouldn’t become one myself. When your life was on the line, thorough checks were mandatory.
Thud! Thud thud!!
A heavy sound—too heavy to believe it was footsteps—rolled in from behind me.
“Hah…”
I’d wished for a lot of things. None of them had come true. I was running as hard as I could, but all that did was make my heartbeat louder—and now the footsteps behind me were louder than my heart.
This underground arcade is huge.
No good. If I kept this up it was only a matter of time. I dove into the first shop I saw.
Furniture? No—a shelter.
A furniture store that had clearly been converted into lodging. Wardrobes and the like had been cleared out and the place packed with beds. I slipped inside and hid under one of them.
“Huu…”
I’d run too hard; my lungs were burning. I held my breath as best I could and tried to calm my heart. Easier said than done—but I had to do it now.
Thud. Thud. Thud!
“Kaga-ga-gak… kirrurruk…”
That ear-scraping zombie noise drew closer. Not running this time—moving like it already knew I was hiding here. The Long-Armed Mutant had stopped sprinting and started pacing the area slowly.
Thud… thud…
Please just leave. Just go. Go already.
My heartbeat and its footsteps seemed to overlap. Sweat soaked my entire back until I felt like I’d showered in it. In other zombie games the special ones weren’t this big—why the hell was this thing so tall and so disgusting?
“Keu-geuk… kigik… kiiik…”
Crunch—squelch—
The Long-Armed Mutant had stopped dead somewhere nearby, repeating those weird cries. Then a sound that should never have come from it started up.
Maybe it was a sound I knew better than anyone: flesh and muscle tearing, bone twisting.
What is it doing? Ripping up a corpse for fun?
I would’ve preferred it if it were just taking out its frustration on a body. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case. The twisting sounds cut off, and the thing that had been standing still started moving again—coming straight toward me.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
CRUNCH!!
The footsteps got close enough that I could see its feet from under the bed. At the same time its hand punched through the mattress, skimming so close to my head I felt the air move.
“You son of a—!”
I’d never had my guts turn this cold. A few inches to the side and that hand would have crushed my skull flat.
“Kikikikik…!”
The Long-Armed Mutant heaved its embedded arm upward. The whole bed came with it, and of course that put me right in its line of sight—but my eyes locked on something else.
That mismatched left arm.
Crrk. Grnd.
The grotesque long arm I’d seen through the steel shutter was different now. Holes had opened all over it, pulsing like a heartbeat. At a glance they looked almost like ear canals.
“This game’s fucking rigged.”
The words slipped out before I could stop them—self-mocking. One guy has to walk around with an axe bolted on because he’s missing an arm, and this thing gets to swap arms whenever it wants. Unfair didn’t even cover it. Resentment and rage mixed somewhere deep in my chest.
“If it’s gonna be like this I might as well have turned into a zombie myself!”
BOOM!!
Even while I was spitting complaints I rolled out from under the descending bed. One-handed bed-lifting strength. An arm that reshaped itself to fit the situation. I fled the furniture store, but I filed every scrap of intel on the thing carefully into my head.
“Moments like this really kill the will to live.”
If I ran it would catch up in no time. If it got behind me I was dead meat. For now I had to strip away the Long-Armed Mutant’s mobility and bolt back the way I’d come.
“Kihiik… kik-kirruk!”
The Long-Armed Mutant grabbed the shattered window frame, uncoiled the body it had hunched to enter the shop, and walked out. Tall enough to nearly scrape the ceiling—filthy huge, just like every other Mutant.
“Fine. Let’s do this.”
I drew the axe on my left arm and the machete I’d stuck at my side. Dual-wielding something I’d never tried before, but having two blades in hand somehow made confidence surge up out of nowhere.
Who said dual blades are the symbol of defeat?
Today that history was going to change—because of me.
THUD!
“Hrrk… haah… ha…”
Dual blades really were the symbol of defeat.
I couldn’t even attack. Just dodging the Long-Armed Mutant’s swings was already too much. My hands got tangled; I nearly chopped off the only arm I had left.
Dual blades weren’t something just anyone could pull off. This wasn’t even dual blades to begin with. Who the hell picks up an unfamiliar weapon mid-fight and immediately masters it? Balance, technique—none of that was happening.
“Kihiik kigik!”
The few things I’d learned: this Long-Armed Mutant was seriously smart, and right now it was playing with me.
Whoosh—! THUD!!
It felt like it was deliberately sweeping that long arm in big arcs, watching my reactions, enjoying itself—like it was asking how far I could go.
Once. Just once.
Never thought I’d have to bait an opening against a zombie. Against people it was already hard to create a real gap; they always tensed up the second they saw my axe, so I’d never needed the trick much.
“Kaga-gak kikikik!”
“Now!”
CRACK!!
While it was making those nonsense noises and its massive left arm swung in for the kill, I used the opening and buried the axe into its knee joint.
But—
What the fuck. Its leg—
I felt the solid hit of a clean strike. The feedback said otherwise. That stick-thin leg clamped onto my axe blade like thick timber and refused to let go. Completely different from any other zombie’s.
“Keh.”
“Ah. This.”
I was the one who’d been baited, not it. Should I have stuck the machete in instead of the axe? A thousand thoughts whipped through my head—then the zombie’s mocking laugh from above wiped them all clean.
Crrk. Grnd.
The raised left arm began to change. Muscle writhed on its own. The thin, hole-riddled arm swelled back into the same oversized limb as before.
I’m dead.
If that connected cleanly, would internal bleeding even be the end of it? Body torn open or exploded outright. The corpses littering this place made that easy enough to picture. Still… dying like this?
CRUNCH—!!
“Kiik!”
“Ghk!”
The zombie must have expected meat to burst open for free. Unfortunately for it, I barely scraped past the strike. I was flung a long way and emptied my lungs on the way down.
“Cough—cough…! Keuugh… fuck… that hurts…”
My insides felt like they’d been shaken into jelly. Or maybe they actually had—every breath brought the coppery iron taste of blood into my mouth.
An empty left arm. The axe that had basically been part of me was gone in a sad little farewell. But releasing the lock and letting it go was what bought me a little more life.
“I’ve… been thinking—uek!—about it.”
With a trembling body I raised the machete still left in my right hand and pointed the edge at the thing.
“I can let everything else slide. But I am not dying to a bastard like you.”
To a freak with a left arm—an absurdly transformable, overpowered left arm. A guy who didn’t even have one left arm of his own wasn’t going to die quietly to that. Too unfair.
Clink.
With the machete’s pommel I deftly hooked the motorcycle helmet that had been dented by the last attack, lifted it, and flung it aside. Living with one arm had been inconvenient in a thousand ways, but I’d picked up my own bag of tricks. Even when people looked down on me, I’d still said what I needed to say.
“Hey.”
CLANG!
“Kiiik…”
The zombie was still standing there, staring blankly, as if it couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t burst open. So I made a show of it—I smashed the machete against a nearby pillar and got its attention.
“Come here, you son of a bitch.”
“Kyaaaah!”