Special Zombie Assassination Operation (2)
Is it starting now?
Dawn was just breaking. Through my Mana Detection, my field of vision was a sea of pitch-black dark mana, save for one corner of the University Campus. On the hill behind the school, slightly away from our target—the library—flashes of blue and silver light sparked in turns.
What we had prepared was a super-powered water cannon. Unit 2, having devoured the Mana Cores we brought, was continuously channeling her steel attribute to construct the cannon.
Meanwhile, Unit 1, also fueled by Mana Cores, received a synergy bonus as she compressed water inside it, charging up the pressure.
The plan was to gather enough water pressure to blast right through a basement door, then fire it to obliterate the spot where the bastard was hiding.
And the golems were steadily gathering power exactly according to my plan.
Just how many cores is that?
It was the same method Unit 2 had used at dawn when the zombies attacked, continuously burning through Mana Cores to build a massive barricade.
If the output of multi-element magic wasn't great, you just had to keep casting it, accepting the inefficient consumption of mana. It was like trying to fill a bathtub with a teacup, but hey, as long as it worked, who cared?
Wait, isn't that a bit too big? Won't the other side notice the mana flow?
I massaged my temples, trying to suppress the dizziness that grew worse the longer I maintained Mana Detection. Before I knew it, the mana gathering in front of the golems had reached a somewhat alarming scale.
"That's enough for now. They might notice us, and any more than that might collapse the library," I commanded via Sound Transmission.
It was a place I never even looked at during my college days, except for the night before an exam. Even though I'd attended university for two years, I hadn't opened a single book in there. Still, the thought of the building collapsing made me nervous.
In the zombie games I used to play, locking yourself in a room and just reading books early on would boost all kinds of stats.
Of course, reality and games were different, so reading a single book wouldn't suddenly turn a useless humanities major into a mechanical engineering expert. Still, I wondered if there might be some knowledge in there that could help with survival.
Then again, books weren't more valuable than my life. Even if we blew the library to smithereens, taking down that bastard came first.
By the way, it's awfully quiet. Has he not noticed?
Yet, even as such a dangerously immense amount of power was gathering, the Necromancer Zombie remained still, holed up in the basement. My guess was that he was gathering power to buff the massive horde of zombies gathered on the athletic field.
I could tell by the way the mana around him was slowly churning and rising. Watching it made me feel slightly nauseous.
I should stop staring so much and save my mana.
Anyway, though I felt a bit uneasy, it seemed the bastard didn't possess any impressive mana detection capabilities. In that case, we could push a little further.
"Head that way. Once you pass the smoking area and the recycling station, there's an emergency exit leading to the basement. Aim in that direction."
It was a stroke of luck that during my freshman year, fascinated by the novelty of the university campus, I had explored all the obscure corners where people rarely went. I directed the golems, and they began to slowly advance, carrying a water cannon larger than their own bodies.
But at that moment, an unsettling sensation washed over me from the zombies. There wasn't any dramatic change, but the mana radiating from them felt slightly... minutely... off. I wasn't the type of person to brag about having great intuition, but this was... how should I put it?
The mana is strangely unstable.
It didn't feel like a mere hunch. I felt an absolute certainty that something was about to explode. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I found myself shouting to the golems before I could think.
"Fire it now! Fire and run like hell!"
Through Mana Detection, the silhouettes of the golems seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second, but they immediately set up the water cannon according to my command. It didn't take much to unleash the heavily compressed water pressure. A tiny spark of power to act as a catalyst.
Blue water-attribute mana flashed from Unit 1's hand, and with a brilliant flash of light visible even from my room far away, a massive explosion pierced straight through the emergency exit leading to the basement.
Ugh!
Perhaps because of the massive torrent of mana unleashed, the moment I witnessed it through Mana Detection, a shockwave hit me as if I'd been struck on the head. Just as one instinctively shuts their eyes when a flashbang goes off, I unconsciously deactivated Mana Detection and collapsed onto my bed.
"Ugh..."
When I came to my senses and opened my magical perception again, all traces of the Necromancer Zombie in the library basement had vanished. Given that not even a single speck of mana could be detected, he was almost certainly dead.
I couldn't tell what had happened to the building itself, but judging by the sheer force of the impact, it had likely collapsed, or at the very least, tilted to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
I wanted to say, Did we get him?
But setting aside the fact that those words were a high-tier resurrection spell that worked even without a Magic Tower, I didn't have the luxury to joke around.
The hundreds of zombies gathered on the athletic field were running wild, tearing everything apart.
Even from a distance, through my mana sight, they looked completely berserk. They were sprinting at incredible speeds, venting mana indiscriminately.
The school buildings aren't going to survive this.
If there was any silver lining, it was that because the golems had eliminated the main body, the zombies seemed to have completely lost what little mind they had, acting on pure, chaotic instinct.
Normally, they seemed to possess at least a beast-like level of basic intelligence, but now, they were moving like nothing more than mindless monsters.
Meanwhile, the golems were running like mad, taking the long way back to avoid the rampaging horde. Seeing Unit 2 holding something unusual that radiated mana, it seemed the Necromancer Zombie had indeed dropped something upon his death. Impressive that they managed to loot the place amidst all that chaos.
"Well, it looks like we got him, but..."
I didn't know. Would those things eventually stop over time? To think that even after we launched a preemptive strike the moment we felt something was off, the aftermath was still this chaotic.
I couldn't even begin to guess what would have happened if we'd let them finish whatever they were doing. I watched the rampaging zombies through Mana Detection for a long time until my mana ran low, at which point I collapsed back onto my bed.
"So tired..."
From what I could see, the rampaging zombies didn't seem to wander outside the campus boundaries. Still, the university must have been reduced to a wasteland that looked like it was ten years into the apocalypse.
I was planning to thoroughly farm the library, labs, and dorms later. I wonder if there'll be anything left after this.
Some alchemy recipes required various chemical reagents, too.
Still, asking around on the forum made me realize this was actually the best-case scenario. That unsettling feeling had been the signal that a massive buff spell was being cast on the zombies. If we had messed up, that entire horde of Enhanced Zombies would have swept through the surrounding area. Since an active necromancer said so, I had to believe it.
I was incredibly glad I had sent them out the moment we were ready. The bastards had definitely been plotting something, and if we had been even a little later, we would have been in deep trouble.
It seems sneaking in like this will continue to work in the future.
I already knew that no matter how much magic I used, the zombies wouldn't aggro as long as I didn't make a racket. Now that I knew special entities like the Necromancer Zombie were no different, sneaking in to deliver a fatal blow would be a highly viable strategy if dangerous zombie variants or hordes appeared in the future. Maybe I should learn an invisibility spell and cast it on the golems.
I mulled over these thoughts while waiting for my mana to replenish and my dizzy head to clear. Once I felt a bit better, I activated Mana Detection once more, only to find that the golems had already made it back to the front of my building.
"We have returned."
Unit 1 entered the room and thumped a bag that was clearly stuffed to the brim down in front of me. Inside were quite a few Mana Cores. There were also a few books she seemed to have snatched from the library in that brief window of time.
However, unlike Unit 1 who came straight up, Unit 2 for some reason didn't enter the building. She just stood still on the nearby street for a moment, as if trying to shake off any potential pursuers. Sensing something was off, I looked down out the window to where Unit 2 was standing. To my utter shock, Unit 2 was cradling a living human in her arms.
A female college student with light brown hair tied in a ponytail. She was completely limp, to the point where it was a miracle she was even alive, likely suffering from severe starvation and dehydration. But it was definitely a face I recognized.
The PC Room Part-timer...?