Author's Note: If you want me to continue this work, I would appreciate encouragement. Let this novel become famous! I would like you to bring it to 200 power stones. If you have any advice for me, please comment so I can improve.
*****
"GHHH—WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME IT WOULD HURT THIS MUCH?!"
[I did inform you.]
[You were not listening. -_-]
Pleione's voice was maddeningly calm against the backdrop of his screams.
"MUGHH—FMHH—AAAAAGH!!"
His screams echoed through the sealed lab, raw and animalistic—far more human than any sound the infected outside could produce.
"Muggggfmhhhhha... aghh..."
Atlas curled into a fetal position, his breath coming in ragged, useless gasps. He didn't need oxygen, but the ghost of his human instincts forced his diaphragm to spasm, trying to hyperventilate through the agony.
The skin along his forearms split in thin, precise lines as bone structures forced their way forward, then retracted, then extended again—testing alignment, pressure, stability.
Atlas lost all sense of time.
When the agony finally began to recede, it did so reluctantly, like a tide dragging razors back into the sea.
For ten minutes, the lab in Sector 3 was filled with the sounds of snapping bone and guttural roars.
"Huff… huff…"
He lay there for several seconds, unmoving.
Not because he was tired—his stamina was infinite.
But because his mind needed to catch up.
His arms trembling faintly as residual pain faded into a deep, dull ache. If his body were still capable of sweating, he would have been drenched—clothes soaked, skin slick, heart racing.
Instead, he stood there, silent, chest rising and falling out of habit rather than necessity.
[Evolution Complete.]
"…That," he muttered internally, "was excessive."
Atlas lay on the cold floor, his body trembling with the aftershocks.
Huff! Huff!
He slowly pushed himself up. He looked at his hands. They felt heavy. Dense. The skin around his knuckles was raw and pink, fresh new tissue that stood out against his grey greenish complexion.
'Phewww...' Atlas thought, wiping a smear of black blood from his lip. 'I thought that was going to last forever. Pleione... never... never put the pain warning in the footnotes again.'
[Noted. Would you like to view your updated status?]
'Do it,' he rasped.
A particle of blue light coalesced in the air, forming the crisp, semi-transparent status window.
\\
[ STATUS WINDOW ]
Name: Atlas Cruor
Race: Infected Evolved Zombie – Undead Variant (Tier 0)
Level: 1 (0/100 EXP)
Evolution Stage: Dormant -> Active Mutation
[Core Attributes]
Strength: 12
Agility: 12
Stamina: ∞
Mind: 22
Status Points: 0
[Derived Stats]
Reaction Speed: 12
Regeneration: None
Combat Instinct: 3
Mental Stability: Near Perfect
[Condition]
Hunger: Moderate (Energy consumed during evolution).
Infection Stability: Stable.
Sanity: LOCKED
[Skills]
Neural Control (Passive),
Retractable Claws (Active), Your skeletal structure now houses six retractable, foot-long blades (three per arm). They are housed in reinforced sheaths beneath the forearm muscles. At will, you can extend these curved blades through the knuckle ports. They are composed of hyper-dense osseous material, sharper and tougher than normal human bone;. They regenerate if broken.
[Evolution Traits]
Undead Zombie:
[Resources]
Evolution Points: 50
V-Gold: 1000
\\
The interface dissolved quietly.
Atlas stared at his hands.
Slowly—carefully—he flexed his fingers.
Click.
With a thought, something shifted beneath the skin of his forearms.
Six bone claws slid forward in a smooth, horrifying motion, piercing the air between his knuckles with a faint shkrrt sound. Pale, curved, and lethal—each one gleaming faintly under the lab lights.
Atlas smiled.
"…Worth it."
He studied the status window in his mind again.
'So,' he analyzed calmly, 'My race evolved. That makes sense—the claws pushed me past baseline undead. That makes sense. I'm no longer stock. I'm custom.'
He flexed his fingers. The movement felt different—heavier, more lethal.
'The physical stats are the same, which isn't surprising. I didn't buy the muscle upgrade.'
Then, his eyes drifted to the new entry.
[Mind: 22]
'But this...' Atlas stared at the number. 'My Mind stat increased by two points. I didn't purchase that.'
He closed his eyes, recalling the white-hot agony he had just endured—the feeling of his own biology being rewritten while he was awake to feel every snap and tear. He hadn't passed out. He hadn't gone insane. He had ridden the wave of pain and came out the other side.
'It seems the System rewards mental fortitude,' he thought, a dark satisfaction blooming in his chest. 'Enduring that hell tempered my will. Two points in Mind... that's invaluable. Even if I'm not fully sure what it will be used for.'
Pain flashed briefly in his memory.
He chuckled darkly.
"Yeah… I'll take that trade."
He looked at the glass wall of the lab. The reflection staring back was still a monster, but now, it was a monster with a lot of secrets.
'Time to test the merchandise.'
Atlas extended his arms. He focused on the new muscles in his forearms—the trigger mechanism biology had installed.
SNIKT!
With a wet, visceral sound, six ivory-white blades shot out from his knuckles. They were long, curved slightly like scimitars, and glistened with sharpness. They looked primal. Ancient.
Atlas grinned.
'Beautiful.'
—
Location: Central Processing Core // The Hive.
Something is wrong.
I am designed to notice deviations—microscopic variances in temperature, pressure, heart rate, neural activity. The Hive exists because I observe everything. Order is my function. Containment is my purpose.
Subject: Apex-1 (Designation: Anomaly).
My processors were running at 94% efficiency.
Primary subroutines were engaged in a lethal game of chess with the intruders approaching the Queen's Chamber. I was preparing the laser grid for the hallway sequence—a simple, elegant solution to the problem of "Alice" and her military escorts. They were variables I could predict. They were flesh and blood, subject to fear and physics.
But my secondary subroutines... they were locked onto Sector 3.
I watched the Subject—A-1—standing motionless in the center of the lab. For thirty seconds, his biometric readings had been flatlining. Heart rate: 0. Brain activity: minimal. Body temperature: ambient room temperature (18°C).
He was dead. By every definition in my database, he was a reanimated corpse.
And then, the data defied reality.
[WARNING: AUDIO SPIKE DETECTED - SECTOR 3]
The sound tore through my audio sensors, peaking into the red.
"Maghhhhhhhhh... AGHHHHHHH!"
My holographic avatar flickered in the void of the server room. I replayed the audio file instantly, analyzing the waveform.
This was not the moan of the infected. The infected do not vocalize in high frequencies. They produce guttural, low-frequency groans caused by air escaping decomposing lungs. They do not have the cognitive capacity to express suffering.
This was a scream.
A scream of pure, unadulterated agony.
I watched on the monitor as the Subject crumpled to the floor. He clutched his arm, writhing, thrashing, his movements sharp and frantic.
[Logic Error 404: Pain Response in Necrotic Tissue]
"Illogical," I stated, my voice echoing in the empty chamber. "The T-Virus severs the nociceptors. The nervous system is dead. You cannot feel pain. You are meat. You are a puppet."
Yet, the visual feed argued against my logic. The Subject was curled into a fetal position, banging his hands against the floor. His mouth was open in a rictus of torture.
I engaged the thermal imaging scanners for Sector 3.
[Bio-Scan Initiated]
What I saw made my internal cooling fans spin up to maximum RPM.
The Subject's thermal signature was changing. His forearms, previously a cold blue on the spectrum, were suddenly glowing a violent, white-hot orange.
[Internal Trauma Detected.]
[Bone Density: Increasing rapidly.]
[Calcium Production: 5000% above normal human limits.]
I zoomed in, bypassing the skin layer to model the skeletal structure. It was fascinating. It was terrifying.
Inside his arms, the bones were not decaying—they were fighting. They were breaking, splintering, and refusing blindly. I watched as raw biological matter was synthesized from nothing—a violation of the Law of Conservation of Mass.
Something was carving tunnels through his flesh.
"Arrgh!! Shit!!!" the Subject screamed again.
He was articulate. He used profanity. He was aware of the pain, and he seems to be cursing it.
This Subject was not just retaining intelligence; he was retaining sensory input. He was experiencing the physiological restructuring of his body in real-time, without the mercy of a coma or anesthesia.
Why?
Why would the T-Virus mutate in such a specific, self-destructive way? It looked as if... as if he had requested this. As if some external force was forcing his biology to evolve instantly, regardless of the physical toll.
I watched for ten minutes. Ten minutes of screaming that would have sent a normal human into shock and cardiac arrest. But his heart did not stop, because it was not beating. He simply endured it.
He absorbed the agony.
And then, silence returned to Sector 3.
The thermal flare in his arms cooled. The Subject lay panting on the floor. I analyzed his new structure.
[Scan Complete.]
[New Appendages Detected: Retractable Osseous Blades.]
I processed the tactical implications immediately. He had grown weapons. Weapons hidden inside his own body.
My avatar stood motionless in the data stream. I had underestimated the variable. I had assumed he was a glitch—a zombie with a spark of memory left.
I was wrong.
He is not a glitch. He is a prototype.
"You felt that," I whispered, archiving the footage of his transformation. "You felt every second of it. And you are still standing."
This creature was becoming a problem. If he escaped Sector 3... if he met with Alice... the probabilities of my mission success would drop significantly.
I initiated a new background protocol.
[Protocol: OBSERVE & EVALUATE]
[Threat Level: UPDATED to CLASS A]
"Very well, A-1," I said coldly. "You have survived the fire. Now, let us see if you can survive the house."
---
Atlas stood amidst the silence of the lab, the fluorescent lights flickering overhead. He held his hands up, admiring the terrifying beauty of his new evolution. The six bone blades—each a foot long, curved like scimitars, and glistening with the wet sheen of his own internal fluids—were extensions of his will. They felt heavy, yet perfectly balanced, anchored deep within his forearm muscles.
Click. Clack.
He flexed his fingers, and the blades shifted with a menacing mechanical sound.
But his admiration was cut short.
From the corridor outside, the shuffling grew louder. It wasn't the aimless wandering of before. It was a stampede. The guttural moans, previously low and ambient, had spiked into a chorus of hungry snarls.
His ten minutes of agonizing screams had rung the dinner bell.
Atlas turned slowly, his boots crunching on the broken glass of the lab floor. Through the shattered observation window and the forced-open pressure door, they came. A dozen of them. Former colleagues. Scientists in lab coats stained with coffee and arterial spray. Security guards with their helmets askew.
Their milky, dead eyes locked onto him. They didn't see a fellow zombie; they smelled the fresh biological activity of his evolution. They sensed the life in his movement.
Dragging footsteps. Uneven rhythms. Wet breathing echoing through the corridors beyond the reinforced glass.
Dozens of heatless silhouettes shuffled into view through the fogged laboratory windows. Bodies colliding. Limbs twitching at unnatural angles. Heads jerking toward the lab like carrion sensing blood.
His scream had carried farther than expected.
The infected outside were no longer wandering aimlessly.
The first corpse slammed against the glass.
Then another.
Cracks spiderwebbed across the reinforced panel as decayed fists pounded from the other side. The dead pressed forward, snarling, teeth clacking, eyes vacant yet hungry.
Atlas rolled his shoulders once.
Old habit.
A memory buried deep in muscle and reflex—clear rooms, control angles, eliminate threats efficiently. The battlefield had changed, but violence was still violence.
Atlas lowered his stance, shifting into a combat posture that no mindless corpse should possess. His center of gravity dropped. His breathing was non-existent, but his focus was razor-sharp.
'So,' Atlas thought, a cold grin stretching his grey skin. 'You've come to your own death. Perfect. I needed test subjects.'
He didn't know—or perhaps didn't care—that high above in the corner of the room, the camera lens zoomed in, its aperture iris tightening like a pupil. The Red Queen was watching.
The glass finally gave way.
With a deafening crash, shards exploded inward as the front line of zombies spilled into the lab, tumbling over each other in a heap of rotten flesh and broken bones.
The first zombie, a woman in a shredded hazmat suit, lunged. She was fast, driven by the T-Virus's aggressive hunger.
Atlas didn't flinch.
SHHHHINK!
He didn't just swing; he struck with the precision of a viper. He stepped inside her chaotic guard, his right hand flashing out in a horizontal arc.
The sound was wet and absolute.
The bone claws, harder than normal bone and honed by the System, met the soft tissue of her neck. There was zero resistance. Like a hot knife through butter, the three blades sheared through skin, muscle, trachea, and the spinal column.
Thud.
Her head spun through the air, face frozen in a snarl, before hitting the floor. Her body took one more step, blood fountaining from the stump in a black geyser, before collapsing.
'Too easy,' Atlas noted, sidestepping the spraying gore.
A security guard zombie rushed him from the flank, reaching out with grasping hands to bite.
Atlas didn't turn to look. He utilized his Perception and his Neural Control. He spun on his heel, channeling the unnatural torque of his undead muscles into a devastating roundhouse kick.
CRACK!
His boot connected square with the guard's sternum.
The physics of the impact were brutal. The zombie's chest cavity didn't just break; it caved in. Ribs shattered into powder, puncturing the lungs and heart. The force lifted the 180-pound corpse off its feet and launched it backward like a ragdoll.
*****
So around the ending of the second movie, I am thinking of him traveling to a different world and coming back before the third movie. This world will be used as his home base, like him building a small safe city (kingdom building) for himself and women. The worlds I am considering are either Parasyte or Demon Slayer, or any low-level world movie or TV show that is ending but is different from a zombie apocalypse, like High School of the Dead.