Zombie Domination-Chapter 392- Slash

Elsewhere...

Sweat poured down the man’s face, his heavy breaths coming in ragged gasps as he stumbled through the ruins. He was built big, thick with muscle, but right now, all that strength was being spent on pure, frantic escape. Every few steps, he’d throw a panicked look over his shoulder, then duck behind a crumbling wall or a rusted-out car, heart hammering against his ribs.

’Shit, shit, shit... How did they find out? How did he know I was there?’

He pushed off and started running again, his boots slapping against broken asphalt. The sound seemed too loud in the eerie quiet—a quiet that didn’t last.

A low, collective groan echoed from a side alley. Then another. Shapes shambled into the dim light—zombies, their movements jerky but persistent, drawn by the sound and smell of a living, breathing, terrified man.

"Oh, you gotta be kidding me!" he hissed, changing direction and breaking into a full sprint.

He hit the main road—what was left of it—and moved with a surprising, desperate grace. Vaulting over a twisted guardrail, rolling under a collapsed billboard, his parkour was sharp, instinctive. But he was tired. So damn tired.

His foot caught on a piece of rebar. He went down hard, the air knocked out of him with a painful whoosh. Gasping, he tried to push himself up, but the groans were closer now. The first zombie was almost on him, reaching with gray, broken fingers.

With no other choice, he swung the small combat knife in his hand in a wild, slashing arc in the air, aiming nowhere near the zombie.

A sharp, visible crescent of force—like a blade made of compressed air—shot from the knife. It sliced through the zombie’s neck cleanly, sending its head tumbling to the ground. The body crumpled.

Two more lunged. He swung again, twice. Two more aerial slashes launched, cutting them down. A mutated one, bigger and faster with grotesque swollen muscles, charged from behind a car.

"Fuck this!" he yelled, scrambling to his feet. He launched one more wild slash behind him to buy a second, then turned and ran.

Just when he thought he’d put some distance between himself and the horde, something wet and rope-like snapped around his ankle with a sickening thwip. He yelped, jerked off his feet, and slammed into the ground, getting dragged backward over broken concrete.

"The hell? Let go of me!"

He twisted to see the larger mutant, its mouth hanging open, a grotesque, elongated tongue retracting and pulling him in like a fish on a line. Desperate, he slashed wildly with his knife in the air toward the tongue.

Another one of those invisible blade-projectiles shot out and severed the tongue cleanly. The mutant shrieked, recoiling, and the grip around his ankle went slack. But the effort left him gasping, his vision spotting. That weird power took something out of him.

He was spent.

Slowly, shakily, he tried to push himself up again, but the metallic taste of exhaustion was thick in his mouth. The groans surrounded him now. Not just from the front or back—they were coming from all sides. Zombies shambled out of every shadow, every broken doorway, closing the circle.

He scrambled back until his back hit a rusted car door, trapped. He looked at the decaying faces closing in, a pathetic, furious defiance bubbling up in his chest.

"Don’t... don’t you know who I am?" he rasped, his voice trembling. "I’m someone important in the Eclipse! You mess with me, you’re all dead! You’ll regret this!"

The zombies didn’t even pause. One reached out, rotting fingers inches from his face.

He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the bite.

It never came.

A heavy, unnatural silence fell.

He cracked one eye open.

Every single zombie in the street had frozen mid-step, arms slack at their sides. Their low groans cut off as if switched off. They just stood there, swaying slightly, completely docile.

’What...?’

A soft thud landed on the roof of the car right behind him. He flinched, whipping his head around.

A man stood there, looking down at him with an expression that was neither friendly nor hostile—just calmly observant. He had a cold, focused gaze that seemed to take in the entire scene, the horde, the mutant carcass, and the trembling man, all in a single glance.

"Giving up already?" Julian asked, his voice cool and level. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The man glared up at Julian, fear morphing into a shaky defiance. "Screw that! I’m not telling you anything!"

Julian tilted his head slightly, his expression unchanging. "Hmm. So you haven’t given up yet. Would you prefer to be tortured? To be honest, I’m not particularly skilled at it."

The man spat on the ground near Julian’s boot. "Go ahead and try! I’m not scared of you!"

Julian let out a small, almost imperceptible sigh. "This is getting tedious. If that’s what you want, fine."

As Julian stepped down from the car roof and took a single, calm stride forward, the man saw his opening. With a grunt, he tried to summon that strange projectile slash again, swinging his knife wildly. But only a faint, sputtering ripple of force flickered from the blade before dying—he was completely drained. Instead, he lunged forward, aiming a clumsy stab at Julian’s torso.

It was pathetically easy to read. Julian sidestepped the lunge without even appearing to move fast. His left fist drove deep into the man’s solar plexus, knocking every last gasp of air from his lungs with a painful whump. As the man doubled over, retching, Julian’s leg swept up in a brutal arc, his boot connecting with the man’s side with a sickening crack of ribs.

The man crumpled to the ground, writhing in agony, his knife skittering away across the asphalt.

Julian stood over him, looking down with detached curiosity. "Your skill is tied to your stamina. Interesting. But useless when you’re exhausted and surrounded." He gestured vaguely at the still-frozen zombie horde standing silently like a macabre audience. "Now. You can talk to me. Or you can talk to them. Your choice."

But as Julian looked down at the writhing man, something felt off. The man’s pained gasps were shifting, turning ragged and... rhythmic. A low, pounding thump-thump-thump began to echo from his chest—unnaturally loud, like a war drum beating from inside his ribs. Julian’s eyes narrowed.

"Hey. What are you doing?" Julian took a cautious step back, instincts flaring.

The man looked up, his face contorted not in pain, but in a manic, pained grin. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. "You got careless... I let you get close... so I could take you with me." His voice was a guttural rasp. "Better to die together... than alone... to these things!"

’Damn it,’ Julian thought, already moving to create distance.

But it was too late.

The man’s body convulsed violently. Sharp, sickle-like bone spurs erupted from his back, shoulders, and forearms with sickening wet cracks. His skin darkened, taking on a hardened, chitinous texture. In seconds, he was no longer a beaten man, but a hunched, bladed horror—a living weapon of serrated edges and pulsating, corrupted muscle.

Without a word, the transformed man spun, his movements now a blur of deadly momentum. A long, scythe-like arm whipped toward Julian in a wide, decapitating arc.

Julian didn’t try to block. He commanded.

The dozen frozen zombies standing nearby suddenly lurched into motion, not toward Julian, but into the path of the attack. They shuffled and threw themselves in front of him with mindless obedience.

The bladed arm cleaved through four of them in a spray of black ichor and rotting flesh, slowing its deadly momentum just enough.

Julian used the split-second distraction. Shadow clones burst from the ground around the transformed man, not to attack, but to disorient, buying Julian another precious moment to assess this new, self-destructive threat.

Julian’s eyes narrowed, analyzing the spinning bladed horror before him. "I didn’t expect you to resort to something this drastic. You were just running for your life earlier."

No coherent reply came, only a guttural, grinding roar as the figure spun faster, becoming a vortex of slicing edges and distorted air.

"Seems your brain’s already rotted through," Julian muttered. He raised his katana, its blade humming with latent energy. "Fine. If you want a clash, I’ll give you one."

He lunged forward, Lightning crackling down his arm and across the blade, mixing with the focused precision of Critical Chance. The strike was aimed to pierce through the spinning defense with overwhelming force and pinpoint accuracy.

But the man had become more than a person—he was a living buzzsaw. The rapid rotation wasn’t just for attack; it created a tangible kinetic field around him, deflecting and shredding anything that came close. Julian’s enhanced slash was deflected in a shower of sparks and fragmented electricity.

Thinking quickly, Julian invoked Gravity, aiming to crush the spin by increasing the man’s weight exponentially. But the field of rotating force seemed to disrupt the manipulation itself; the gravitational wave slid off, ineffective.

The bladed vortex surged toward him, picking up chunks of concrete and debris, turning itself into a localized tornado of destruction.