Chapter 75: The Zombies' Weakness
"Roar!~~~"
"Urgh urgh urgh!~~~"
"Aaaaah!~~~"
The zombies' agonized screams echoed one after another. The horde, which had been frenzied moments before, descended into utter chaos in an instant.
Finally, the flames reached the fuel tank.
Boom!!!
A deafening explosion ripped through the air, hurling countless zombies into the sky on a wave of blistering force.
The fire spread like lightning, engulfing the dense pack of zombies surrounding it.
These creatures seemed laced with some highly flammable substance—any that collided with a burning one burst into flames themselves.
It all happened in the span of a few breaths.
The once-impenetrable horde was swallowed whole by the inferno.
Bang!!
Bang!!
Bang!!
The sharp cracks of precise shots rang out as Xiao Yi ignored the chaos beyond the iron gate. He lay unmoving atop the roof, eyes locked on the zombies inside, his rifle barking tongues of flame in relentless rhythm.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The wet thuds of heads exploding synced perfectly with the gunfire.
Now the zombies were mere ten meters away—a perfect range for Xiao Yi's marksmanship. At this distance, every shot was a guaranteed headshot, and the rifle's lethality peaked.
The hulking zombies he nailed in the skull dropped instantly, brains pulped.
Bang!!
Bang!!
Bang!!
Bang!!
…
As he picked off the zombies one by one inside the gate, Xiao Yi's rhythm grew smoother, his movements more fluid. Slaughtering them with the rifle felt exhilarating.
Though the system still auto-collected zombie core energy from rifle kills to recharge itself, the yield was pathetically low compared to close-quarters melee. After dropping over a dozen, it barely equaled the energy from two cold-weapon kills.
Zombies vaporized in the car explosion or charred in the blaze yielded nothing at all.
Melee kills brought a satisfying rush—a holistic surge that strengthened him from head to toe. Agility, strength, stamina, senses: everything ticked upward.
Rifle kills? Barely a whisper of that sensation. Gains in strength, stamina, or agility were negligible.
The only real boost Xiao Yi felt was heightened acuity—sharper vision, keener hearing, refined perception.
With each successive kill, his aim sharpened further, his motions honed to perfection.
He was nailing headshots without fail.
Soon, the magazine ran dry.
Without pause, he reloaded and kept firing.
Time stretched—minutes feeling like hours, or perhaps mere moments.
Suddenly, Xiao Yi lowered his rifle and rose slowly to his feet.
The front yard was a slaughterhouse, littered with zombie corpses.
Especially near the main hall—dozens lay sprawled in grotesque heaps.
Three rounds left in the rifle.
Five more in the Space Magic Cube.
Over a hundred bullets, nearly spent.
But the zombies lured from the villa? Cleared.
Xiao Yi exhaled deeply, glancing at the horde beyond the gate.
Flames still roared across the ground, devouring dozens of mangled corpses in eerie green fire, reducing them to charred husks.
The rest shied from the blaze. Drawn by the noise but cowed by the fire, they lingered at the edge of the inferno before slinking away.
"These zombies... they can actually be set ablaze like that..."
Xiao Yi watched one still thrashing amid the flames, his face grave as he sank into thought.
"And they fear fire so intensely..."
This was a crucial new discovery: the zombies' weakness.
Some volatile, flammable compound coursed through their bodies—once ignited, the flames consumed them relentlessly.
And like their dread of sunlight, they shunned fire entirely. No zombie dared approach a blaze.
A game-changer.
Since arriving in this apocalypse, Xiao Yi had relied on preconceptions from his past life's movies and novels to understand these monsters.
It had helped at first, filling the gaps for a transmigrator blind to this world's truths.
These zombies did share traits with some fictional depictions.
But fiction was fiction. Against the raw reality of the end times, those imagined zombies diverged in key ways.
The deeper he delved, the clearer the differences became.
Clinging blindly to movie and novel tropes would bite him eventually—hard.
ZZZ~~~ ZZZ~~~ ZZZZ~~~~
Static crackled from the walkie-talkie, followed by Stephanie Seymour's anxious voice: "Xiao, are you okay? Answer me! Xiao!"