I raise my hand with the pistol again, but there's no need to finish off the one that's already been shot. The bullet passed straight through and entered the top of the insect's head, and both of them seem to have gone quiet. Well, that works.
I holster the pistol—it'll only get in the way now—and instead draw a second knife. Let's see how this goes. Of course, fighting a small group of opponents, as in Vector's memories, doesn't quite match the current situation, but it's worth trying.
I step forward, severing the arms of two zombies reaching for me. Another step—piercing the throats and heads of the next two. I spin in place, literally tearing the dead bodies impaled on my blades free and using their bodies to scatter the other zombies from the nearby rows..
Yes, this technique requires tremendous strength. Your arms have to be spread in different directions and, ideally, shouldn't even tremble. Vector mastered it only by sheer miracle—and promptly chose to forget it, because there were far too many variables that interfered with proper execution. For me, as someone not quite alive, holding my arms steady with opponents impaled on them was easy enough. And I'm certainly not lacking in strength, thanks to my current mutation stage.
It was in the first form that it jumped around wildly, but now it seems to have stabilized. And if it changes again, it will only be for the better… I hope.
A funny thing—I still feel Umbrella's touch on me, same as on their special projects. I've got my own mutation stages too. After all, the same Nemesis had three or more—I don't remember exactly—and Birkin, a pure carrier of the G-virus, definitely had at least three. Hmm… no, even more than that. It's a shame I don't remember everything.
And now I'm already in the second stage, and I can only hope I won't end up as a piece of garbage like the two I mentioned. I really don't want to become a tentacled reservoir like Nemesis's final form, or something resembling a gigantic slug like Birkin. Although, I suppose that would be a fitting end for the monster I've become.
Still, I do want to keep on living for a while yet — ideally in a humanoid form.
But all of those thoughts stayed somewhere in the background while I was literally carving my way through the crowd of dead around me. There was something surreal about it: a dead man killing other dead men—who, in turn, were hostile toward him.
Back to the fight. I had to fully adhere to the demands of this method of combat: constant movement, and limiting myself to one—ideally—or two strikes per opponent. If I stayed in place, I'd be simply crushed. Even for me, there were too many of them, and lingering to deal with each individually would have led to the same outcome. So if I couldn't kill someone immediately—if I missed, or if the enemy shifted position too quickly—I had to ignore the wounded and trust Four Eyes to handle them.
It's also worth noting that the idea of pompously—fine, just proudly—walking straight through the crowd didn't work. By the end, the dead were coming in dense, almost orderly rows. So I had to dart around in different directions throughout this crowd, constantly wielding two knives and occasionally adding my feet to the mix. At least Yamata was shooting accurately, and those wounded not packed tightly into the main mass—as well as those whose formation I'd disrupted by carving gaps—were quickly upgraded to the status of permanently dead.
"Cain, aim for the parasites. Many of them have separated from the bodies we've already killed. You can't see them from the center of the crowd, but I can clearly see how they retreat into the tunnel and then return riding new zombies. We definitely won't be able to clear the entire collector, so it's easier to eliminate the creatures controlling them, and the zombies themselves, which will remain in front, don't react to us, so that won't be our concern," Four Eyes's voice came through the internal comms.
Thank God that connection had survived.
"Got it," I replied shortly and adjusted my tactics, trying to slip behind the "living ones."
Although their speed was higher than that of ordinary zombies, but still clearly within human limits. They weren't nearly as fast as the "redheads," which were noticeably quicker. And that was good—very good! So now I focused on getting behind the dead and driving the blade straight into the parasite itself. Still, I didn't abandon my previous fighting style entirely; it wasn't always possible to get behind them, not with such a dense crowd.
But everything has a tendency to come to an end, so ten minutes later—and that's under acceleration!—the last insect was killed.
Whew. That was a real test of this new form.
No, of course there was no shortness of breath or other signs of physical fatigue typical of the living—where would those come from in a corpse? But mentally, I felt an unprecedented sense of relief.
Roughly sixty to seventy meters of the tunnel—at a glance—were carpeted with zombie corpses, with the smaller insect bodies starkly visible among them. Yes, there were definitely far fewer of the latter. How much more work had I done?
Still, it was good that Yamata had noticed all of this from the sidelines. That, too, was part of the plan: one of us engages the enemy directly, in full contact, while the other observes from a distance and identifies weaknesses.
🙌Bonus chapter for 50 power stones!
🎁The next bonus chapter will be for 100 power stones.