Harem Apocalypse: My Seed is the Cure?!-Chapter 25: Lexington Charter: Second Floor

"Now," I whispered, easing the door open just wide enough for us to slip through.

In the short time since this chaos had begun, I’d already learned crucial information about our enemies. The infected were drawn to sound like moths to flame, but their vision had deteriorated significantly. They could still see you if you were directly in their line of sight, but their peripheral vision seemed completely shot. It was a weakness we desperately needed to exploit.

My eyes quickly catalogued the threats ahead—five infected wandering aimlessly through the corridor, their movements jerky and unnatural. The closest one had his back to us, swaying slightly as he stood near a row of lockers. What remained of his school uniform was torn and stained with dark patches I tried not to think about too hard.

Dropping into a crouch, I moved forward with careful steps. My knees were slightly bent, weight distributed evenly to minimize any sound. Behind me, I could hear the sisters following, their breathing carefully controlled despite what I knew must be overwhelming fear.

The first infected never knew what hit him.

Moving with silence, I approached from directly behind, my knife gripped firmly in my right hand. In one fluid motion, I clamped my left hand over his mouth and nose, pulling his head back as I drew the blade across his throat in a deep, decisive cut.

But even as the warm blood spilled over my fingers, a realization struck me—what if that wasn’t enough? What if they could still function even with their throats cut? I’d heard conflicting reports about what could actually stop these things permanently.

The infected in my arms was still twitching, still trying to move despite the grievous wound. I couldn’t take any chances.

Fighting back waves of nausea, I adjusted my grip and pulled the head further back, working the knife with grim efficiency until I’d completely severed the head from the body. The wet, tearing sound of flesh parting and the metallic stench of blood made my stomach churn violently, but I forced myself to remain steady.

The decapitated head rolled across the floor with a sickening thud before coming to rest against a classroom door. The body crumpled silently.

"Uugh..." Elena’s disgusted voice reached my ears, barely contained. When I glanced back, I saw her covering her mouth and nose with both hands, her face green around the edges. Alisha was using her arm to block the sight and smell, but her eyes remained fixed on the corridor ahead, watching for threats.

I admired her focus even as my own stomach threatened to rebel. There was no time for weakness now.

Four more infected remained between us and the stairwell. My heart hammered against my ribs as I assessed the situation. Four against one—with two civilians depending on me for protection. One wrong move, one moment of hesitation, and we’d all be dead.

The worst part was knowing about my ace in the hole—my ability to freeze time for ten precious seconds. But it came with a brutal limitation: once used, I’d have to wait a full ten minutes before I could use it again. In a situation like this, where we might encounter multiple groups of infected, using it prematurely could doom us all later.

Alright, I told myself, gripping the blood-slicked knife tighter. You can do this. You have to do this.

The second infected was standing near an open classroom door, his head tilted at an unnatural angle as he stared at something only he could see. Instead of attempting another messy decapitation, I decided on a different approach.

Moving like a shadow, I crept up behind him and drove my knife deep into his throat from behind. Before he could make a sound, I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him hard through the open classroom doorway, slamming the door shut behind him. The muffled thumps and scratches from the other side told me he was still active, but trapped.

The third infected had begun to turn at the sound, his clouded eyes searching for the source of the disturbance. I didn’t give him the chance to focus.

Racing forward, I grabbed his head in both hands and slammed it against the nearest door with all the force I could muster. The impact sent a shock through my arms—these things were unnaturally strong, their bodies seemingly immune to the normal limitations of human physiology.

But I was stronger. I had to be.

The infected struggled against my grip, his fingers clawing at my arms with surprising coordination. Black, putrid flesh hung in strips from his neck where the infection had taken hold. What had once been a fellow Lexington Charter student—someone who’d walked these same halls, attended the same classes, maybe even shared lunch in the cafeteria—was now nothing more than a predatory shell.

I pressed my knee against his back for leverage and brought my knife up, sawing through the diseased flesh of his neck with mechanical precision. More blood sprayed across my already-stained clothes, but I pushed through the revulsion. This was survival, pure and simple.

The wet sound of the blade cutting through vertebrae would haunt my dreams for years to come.

When I turned back toward the corridor, my blood ran cold. The fourth infected—a girl who couldn’t have been older than a sophomore—was shambling directly toward us, her mouth open in a soundless moan that somehow managed to be more terrifying than any scream.

"R...Ryan!" Alisha’s voice cracked with terror.

"They are coming!" Elena also yelled in panic.

I spun around to see what had caused their alarm, and my heart nearly stopped. Three more infected had emerged from a side corridor behind us, drawn by the commotion of our fight. They were moving with that characteristic lurching gait.

Not really fast but terrifying.

We were trapped between two groups.

"Let’s go!" I shouted, making the only choice available to us.

I charged toward the infected girl blocking our path to the stairs. She reached out with arms that seemed too long, too thin, her fingers ending in what looked like sharpened nails. But whatever had enhanced her physical capabilities had apparently done nothing for her speed or coordination.

I saw the attack coming from a mile away and responded with a straight punch to her face, putting every ounce of my strength behind it. The impact sent her sprawling backward, her head striking the floor with a crack that echoed through the corridor.

Rather than wasting precious seconds finishing her off, I leaped over her prone form and continued toward the stairwell.

"Alya!" Alisha’s scream made me whip around.

The infected I’d punched down wasn’t as incapacitated as I’d hoped. Despite being flat on her back, she’d managed to grab Alisha’s ankle in a strong grip that looked strong enough to crush bone. Alisha was struggling to maintain her balance, her makeshift weapon waving frantically as she tried to break free.

"L—Let her go!" Elena’s voice rose to nearly a shriek as she raised the broken chair leg high above her head.

What happened next would be burned into my memory forever. Elena brought her improvised weapon down on the infected girl’s skull with a wet, crushing sound that made my earlier kills seem gentle by comparison. But the thing’s grip didn’t loosen—if anything, it seemed to tighten.

Elena didn’t hesitate. She raised the chair leg again, tears streaming down her face as she brought it down a second time, then a third. Each impact was accompanied by sounds that no human should ever have to hear, but she didn’t stop until the fingers finally relaxed their death grip on her sister’s ankle.

"Move, move, move!" I shouted, grabbing both sisters and pushing them toward the stairwell.

Behind us, the other three infected were closing in, their moans growing louder as they scented blood. We reached the stairs just as I heard the wet slapping of their feet against the linoleum floor.

Alisha was limping slightly, her ankle already swelling from the infected’s grip and because she twisted it a little because of a quick movement, but she kept pace as we began our ascent. Elena was sobbing quietly, the broken chair leg still clutched in her white-knuckled grip, but she didn’t slow down.

"Almost there," I panted as we climbed up to the second floor.

But seeing Alisha somewhat struggling to climb up I went toward her. "Lean on my shoulder." I saidK.

Alisha looked at me and nodded.

I then proceeded to help her climb the stairs, it was much faster like that.

Elena went in front of us just in case.

The Infected down the stairs were quite awkward with the concept of climb stairs so they were crawling up. They were quite slow so we were at safe there but I was more worried to the state of the second floor.

When we reached the stairwell of the second floor. I heard quickly Elena who went ahead fighting swinging her the chair leg.

Even though the Infected were strangely strong their bodies were quite weak easily capable of getting folded as much as human’s bodies in fact so even Elena could deal damages to them as long as she wouldn’t get grasped.

"D—Do we continue?" Elena looked at me.

As we reached the landing between the second and third floors, I glanced upward toward our intended destination. My blood turned to ice at what I saw.

The stairwell above us was crawling with infected, their grotesque forms tumbling and sliding down the concrete steps in a macabre avalanche of rotting flesh and gnashing teeth. They moved with singular purpose, drawn by our scent, our movement, our very presence.

"No way," I breathed, quickly reassessing our options. "We can’t go up—not through that."

"What do we do?" Alisha whispered, her injured ankle causing her to lean heavily against the stair railing.

"We settle here for now," I decided, turning toward the hallway of the second floor. "We need to find somewhere safe."

The second floor corridor stretched before us.

I spotted the first classroom door—Room 2A, according to the small placard beside it. Without hesitation, I grabbed the handle and pushed it open, praying we’d find it empty.

Elena limped in behind me, her breathing labored from our flight up the stairs. She immediately moved to close the door, her hands shaking as she turned the lock with a soft click that sounded impossibly loud in the sudden quiet.

But our relief was short-lived.

"Grrr!"

The low growl came from the shadows at the back of the classroom, followed immediately by three more. As my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting filtering through the windows, I saw them—four infected students who had been trapped in here since the initial outbreak.

"Are you kidding me?" I muttered under my breath. We’d fled from one group of infected only to trap ourselves with another.

What kind of bad luck was that?!

I felt Elena stiffen beside me, her whole body beginning to tremble as the reality of our situation sank in. But when I glanced at her, she looked over at Alisha, who was struggling to stand on her injured ankle, and I saw her expression transform.

The fear was still there, but it was being pushed aside by something stronger—determination. Love for her sister. Elena bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, then stepped forward, placing herself between the infected and Alisha.

"W—wait, Elena!" Alisha’s face went pale as she realized what her sister was doing.

"Just sit here," I said gently, guiding Alisha to a nearby chair. Her ankle was swelling badly, and she needed to stay off it. "We’ve got this." 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

As I moved to stand beside Elena, she surprised me by speaking words I didn’t expect.

"I... I’m sorry about your head," she said, the words seeming to cause her physical pain. "I was scared and I—"

I almost laughed at the timing. Here we were, facing down four infected in a locked classroom, and she was choosing now to apologize. But there was something touching about it too. It seemed that facing death was the only thing capable of humbling Elena’s pride, and beneath all that bluster, she really was a good person.

"Don’t worry about it," I replied, raising my knife as the infected began to move toward us. "We all do stupid things when we’re scared."

The first two infected reached us simultaneously, their movements uncoordinated but filled with predatory hunger. Elena raised her makeshift weapon while I made a split-second decision.

Time to use my ace in the hole.

I activated my time-freeze ability, and suddenly the world went completely silent. The infected froze mid-stride, their grasping hands suspended in the air like grotesque statues. Elena’s chair leg was caught mid-swing, and even the dust motes in the air seemed to hang motionless.

Ten seconds. That’s all I had.

I moved with desperate efficiency, driving my knife deep into the skull of the infected directly in front of me. The blade penetrated with surprising ease—whatever process had reanimated these corpses had apparently made their bones more brittle. I grabbed the body and used it as a battering ram against the second infected, sending both creatures stumbling toward the window.

With a grunt of effort, I hefted the first body and hurled it through the glass. The window exploded outward in a shower of crystalline fragments, and the infected disappeared into the courtyard below with a distant crash.

I spun toward the second infected, gripping my knife with both hands. Putting every ounce of strength I could muster behind the blow, I swung the blade in a wide arc. The infected’s head separated from its shoulders with a wet sound that I felt more than heard, rolling across the classroom floor like a gruesome bowling ball.

Five seconds left.

I rushed toward the third infected, but even as I moved, I could feel the familiar sensation of time beginning to flow again. The world started to regain color and sound, like someone slowly turning up the volume on reality.

The resumption of normal time coincided perfectly with Elena’s chair leg completing its arc. The makeshift weapon slammed into the infected’s skull with a meaty thud that reverberated through the classroom, followed immediately by the crack of breaking bone.

But it wasn’t enough.

The infected staggered but remained upright, turning its milky eyes toward Elena with renewed hunger. She had managed to fracture its skull, maybe even break through to the brain, but whatever damage she’d inflicted wasn’t enough to stop the thing completely.

"L—let go!" Elena screamed as the infected lunged forward and grabbed her arms, its fingers digging into her flesh with inhuman strength.

"Elena!" Alisha attempted to rise from her chair, dragging her swollen ankle as she tried to reach her sister.

Meanwhile, I found myself locked in a deadly embrace with the third infected. It had somehow gotten behind me during the chaos, and now its fingers were clawing at my throat while I held it at arm’s length. Its nails scraped across my skin, leaving burning tracks, but I managed to keep its snapping teeth away from my neck.

The strength in these things was genuinely terrifying. This particular infected had probably been a freshman—small and slight even when alive—but now it possessed the power to potentially crush my windpipe if I let my guard down for even a second. I didn’t want to imagine what a more physically imposing infected might be capable of.

Tightening my grip around its throat, I pivoted and slammed the creature against the already damaged window. The remaining glass exploded outward, and I shoved the infected through the opening. It disappeared into the courtyard below.

But when I turned back to help the sisters, my heart nearly stopped.

The infected attacking Elena had managed to force her backward against a desk, its face mere inches from hers. Saliva dripped from its open mouth as it tried to bite down on her neck, held back only by Elena’s desperate hands pressed against its chest and Alisha’s grip on its shoulders.

"Grra!" The infected let out another bone-chilling moan as I appeared behind it.

Without hesitation, I drove my knife downward into the base of its skull, angling the blade upward into what remained of its brain. The infected’s movements immediately became sluggish, though it continued to emit weak groaning sounds.

"Move away, Alisha," I said, and she immediately released her grip and stepped back.

I wrapped my arm around the infected’s neck in a chokehold and began dragging it toward the broken window. The thing was deadweight now, but still dangerous—I could feel it trying to turn its head to bite my arm.

With the last of my remaining strength, I heaved the infected through the window opening. It tumbled through the air and struck the ground below with a wet, crunching sound that seemed to echo through the entire courtyard.

Finally, blessed silence.

I staggered backward and collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath.