The bullet never came... All that came was a click as the Zombie hit the trigger again.

CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!

The sharp sound of the empty chamber echoed through the freezing night air as the Crimson Sharpshooter narrowed her glowing green eyes at her heavy weapon...

The thick suffocating darkness that had been trailing her deadly shots wavered for a fraction of a second as the kinetic momentum died completely in the cold wind.

"Oh, it seems I’ve run out of bulle—" the undead sniper started to say with a twisted smirk forming on her rotting lips but before she could even finish what she was saying, Neo tore through the empty air directly past Seo.

He was moving with such explosive supersonic speed that the resulting vacuum blew the Heroine’s crimson hair violently in the howling wind.

The sheer velocity of his sprint shattered the jagged rocks beneath his heavy boots into fine gray dust as Neo closed the massive distance in the blink of an eye and collided physically with the Crimson Sharpshooter.

"You fool!" Neo roared with his golden eyes flashing with absolute fury.

The man didn’t have a single blade on him after losing his makeshift wind sword but he did have his bare fists, and he drove his entire body weight forward as his fist collided violently with the Sharpshooter who had instinctively raised her massive gun horizontally in defense.

The brutal impact generated a devastating circular shockwave outward that shattered the surrounding boulders into shrapnel as the heavy metal of the sniper rifle bore the brunt of the kinetic attack, and the explosive backblast threw Seo’s crimson hair violently backward once more as the undead woman was sent flying back through the air like a broken ragdoll.

"Hehehehehahaha~" the Zombie gave a manic unhinged laugh as she sailed backward over the abyss.

She didn’t panic in the slightest as she flipped flawlessly mid-air, using her unnatural agility to correct her posture while her pale, decaying fingers moved in a complete blur reloading a fresh glowing crimson round into the chamber and rearing up her massive gun against her shoulder while she was suspended in the empty sky.

"I have no beef with you, but if you wish then..." the Crimson Sharpshooter mocked with her fangs bared.

Immediately, a terrifying crimson bullet shot through the cold air heading directly for Neo’s head, tearing the oxygen apart with a deafening sonic boom.

He saw it coming perfectly with his golden pupils shrinking to pinpricks as his eyes glowed with focus, and even with the oppressive, suffocating darkness desperately trying to cloud his vision, the hero simply raised his bare hand.

He merely slapped the hyper-dense magical bullet away, his palm coated in thick layers of swirling wind mana, sending the lethal projectile flying uselessly to the side where it blew a massive crater into the adjacent mountain peak with a thunderous shockwave.

"Oh," the undead woman said with genuine surprise flashing across her dead features.

Realizing the long-range weapon was useless in close quarters against someone with his reaction speed, she threw her massive weapon to the side letting it clatter against the jagged rocks as Neo tore through the air directly to her position and they collided in a brutal flurry of physical blows.

Far above them, Seo looked down to the ground with her body still completely frozen in terror as she shot downward through the air.

"Klaus!" Seo shouted again while moving downward as the wind whipped her face, but she couldn’t see him anywhere in the massive dust clouds and debris below.

’Did he... die?’ Seo thought with tears prickling the corners of her eyes.

She continued looking frantically through the darkness, her heart hammering against her ribs but she didn’t see his face anywhere in the rubble and immediately as she landed heavily on a jagged rock with the stone cracking under her boots...

A massive shockwave hit her face, stinging her cheeks with flying pebbles as it came directly from where Neo was fiercely fighting the undead sniper.

"Harrgh!" Neo roared from the center of the dust cloud.

He forced a massive, highly pressurized volume of roaring wind mana directly into his right hand, the air screaming as it condensed around his knuckles, and he violently thrust it forward to the Crimson Sharpshooter’s direction.

The attack pushed forward with a deafening roar, tearing a deep trench into the solid bedrock, and the undead woman simply braved it directly, crossing her pale arms in front of her face with her rotting hair sailing wildly in the raging wind.

"Was that all you had in store?" she asked with a mocking sneer as her skin peeled slightly from the sheer wind pressure.

However, Neo didn’t answer with words as he simply snapped his fingers immediately.

A blinding spark ignited the highly compressed oxygen, and violent, roaring flames followed instantaneously as they were blasted directly at her full force.

The raging inferno swallowed her completely, the superheated fire melting the stone beneath her boots as it roasted her alive, turning her rotting clothes into ash and charring her pale flesh into blackened crisps within a fraction of a second.

Neo pulled his hand back, completely stopping the two highly destructive spells with a small exhausted breath as he felt his internal mana steadily refilling from the ambient energy in the atmosphere.

’Did she di—’ Neo thought, his golden eyes scanning the thick black smoke.

But suddenly, something moved rapidly through the dense smoke accompanied by another crazy, unhinged laughter.

A blackened, charred hand stabbed violently forward out of the shadows, aiming its sharp decaying fingernails directly at his throat to rip his jugular out, and Neo barely dodged it by leaning his upper body completely backward at an impossible angle.

He balanced his weight perfectly onto his left arm as he dropped backward, and as the burning, heavily charred Zombie passed directly over him with her momentum carrying her forward, he channeled the kinetic force backward into his legs.

He launched a devastating upward kick directly into her blackened head, his boot connecting with her jaw, and he exploded a massive burst of compressed wind again from his sole.

The sheer force of the impact snapped her neck backward with a sickening crunch as her body was sent flying violently across the battlefield, smashing heavily into the vertical wall of the mountain with a deafening crash.

But the undead woman didn’t stay down. She casually peeled her broken, mangled body off of the crushed rock wall and looked directly at him with her glowing green eyes as white steam erupted continuously from her charred flesh.

The severe burns, the broken bones, and the shattered jaw were healing completely in real-time as the necrotic tissue knitted itself back together flawlessly.

"What don’t you understand?" she asked as she cracked her freshly healed neck with a sickening pop. "I am incapable of dying... so you can spend as much mana as you want, but you won’t ever be able to actually touch me!"

As she finished the arrogant shout, she raised her pale right hand and casually folded her fingers in the exact way one would do a pistol, pointing her index and middle fingers directly at his chest.

Immediately, a terrifying Booming sound came from her fingertips. It wasn’t as harsh or deafening as when she was using her massive Sniper rifle, but still, the condensed bullet of pressurized air was so impossibly fast that Neo barely had the physical time to react.

He slammed his hands together, desperately trying to form a thick defensive barrier of solid Earth directly in front of himself...

But as the brown magical barrier was only halfway into forming from the bedrock, the invisible air bullet tore straight through the rising stone.

The projectile lost some of its initial momentum as it shattered the rock, but it collided heavily against his chest regardless, the blunt force hit him like a runaway carriage.

Thick hot blood was sent flying completely out of his mouth as Neo groaned in sheer agony of the air being forcibly emptied from his lungs, and he was sent flying violently backward until his spine smashed against the solid stone wall.

"Neo!" Seo yelled out in horror as she witnessed him fall.

She immediately moved from where she was standing, her boots kicking off the jagged rocks to rush to his aid, but the Crimson Sharpshooter casually turned her glowing eyes to her.

The undead sniper pointed her finger guns at the Heroine, and she immediately fired off several invisible air bullets directly in her direction.

However, one could easily tell she wasn’t being serious about it in the slightest, treating the girl like a mere distraction as the shots were slow and relatively easy to read.

’I will teach you... not to underestimate me...’ Seo thought with her crimson eyes narrowing into deadly slits.

She moved with fluid grace, pushing her agility to the absolute limit as she dodged smoothly past the first deadly shot of compressed air.

She jumped completely over a second one that tore a hole into the ground beneath her, and while she was airborne, she performed a flawless third flip directly above the third and last invisible bullet.

Using her downward momentum, she raised her index finger directly at the grinning Sharpshooter.

"Burn..." Seo said with authority.

Searing, white-hot fire trailed instantly out of her crimson eyes, the ambient temperature of the battlefield skyrocketing in a microsecond.

Immediately, blinding flames burned out of her eyes as she vividly imagined them violently burning the Zombie to a crisp, and immediately there was a deafening crackle as the sheer volume of magical flames completely overtook the Zombie, swallowing her in a vortex of heat and burning her whole for the second time today.

But while Seo was still suspended mid-air, the Crimson Sharpshooter’s voice echoed directly from inside the roaring pillar of fire.

"That wasn’t half bad..." the undead woman mocked.

Without warning, she pointed her fingers through the flames and shot her two consecutive times directly in the chest with high-velocity air bullets.

"Aaaah!" Seo screamed at the top of her lungs as she got impacted brutally in the chest by the invisible air bullets.

The kinetic force of the attack was devastating, but the magical projectiles didn’t pierce her skin like normal metal rounds; they carried massive concussive blunt force that went completely through her body without piercing a hole.

The internal shockwave rattled her ribs and organs, knocking the wind out of her completely, and she shot violently to the ground, her body bouncing heavily across the jagged rocks before coming to a painful stop.

Seeing the Heroine fall, Neo’s golden eyes glowed with rage. He pushed himself off the crushed stone wall and charged directly at the healing Zombie with terrifying speed.

He didn’t bother with long-range spells anymore. He closed the distance and engaged her in a brutal high-speed hand-to-hand combat .

Neo immediately had the upper hand at first, his martial arts completely overwhelming her sloppy undead reflexes as he delivered a devastating combination of strikes.

He threw a heavy right hook coated in swirling wind magic that snapped her head to the side, followed by a brutal left knee engulfed in roaring flames that dug deep into her stomach, burning her internal organs.

He chained the attacks flawlessly, combining wind and fire together to create explosive vacuums that tore chunks of flesh from her body, ending the massive combo with a devastating last punch completely wreathed in blinding white Holy magic.

"Die!" He shouted out as it hit sending a shockwave all over.

However, after being pushed back repeatedly by Neo’s relentless attacks, the Zombie casually ate this final holy punch directly to her face.

Her cheekbone shattered, the holy magic burning her rotting skin, but a wide sickening grin formed on her face regardless. She didn’t even flinch from the pain.

"I told you, I can’t die."

She immediately counter-attacked with terrifying unnatural strength.

She parried his next blow, stepping inside his guard, and delivered a brutal combination of heavy bone-cracking punches directly to his ribs.

As Neo staggered, gasping for air, she flipped completely forward in a chaotic acrobatic blur, wrapping her thick muscular legs tightly around his neck.

Using her momentum, she violently slammed him backward, burying his face directly in between her thighs as they both landed incredibly hard on the broken ground.

"Oho~"

She began ruthlessly crushing his face beneath her thick, undead thighs, applying a suffocating vice-like grip around his windpipe and skull.

"How does it feel to be crushed by my muscle thighs?" she asked with a dark mocking giggle, leaning forward to increase the pressure. "Guys like you have that kind of fetish, huh?"

She squeezed Neo’s face with monstrous hydraulic force as he desperately tried to use his magic to blast her away, but his concentration was completely shattered.

His magic failed to ignite, fizzling out into nothing as his face grew a dark suffocating purple and his golden eyes rapidly lost their vibrant glow with his hands clawing uselessly at her iron-like legs.

A few yards away, Seo had finally pushed herself up from the rubble and begun running desperately at them with tears in her eyes, but her ribs were bruised and her breathing was ragged.

At the slow rate she was physically moving, Neo’s skull would be completely crushed like a ripe melon long before she ever reached them.

CLICK!

A sound cut perfectly through the noise of the battlefield as the heavy solid iron cock of her own massive Sniper rifle hit the back of the undead woman’s head with a dull thud.

The Crimson Sharpshooter froze with the mockery dying on her lips.

"Oh, you are still alive?" she said, not even bothering to unwrap her legs from the suffocating hero as she spoke over her shoulder. "Not like you can do anything about i—"

"Sayonara, Fucker." Klaus said.

He didn’t hesitate for a single microsecond. He pulled the heavy trigger, letting the massive, armor-piercing magical bullet go completely through her head at point-blank range.

The deafening explosion rattled the very foundations of the mountain. The massive kinetic force of the sniper round blew the entire front half of her face completely off, spraying blackened blood, shattered bone, and rotting brain matter all over the jagged rocks.

She instantly lost all of the unnatural motions in her body, her muscular thighs going completely slack around Neo’s neck as her ruined corpse fell heavily to the side with a wet, meaty slap.

’But this is okay because I can regenera—’ The undead woman’s thoughts echoed confidently in the dark void of her mind as her physical brain was destroyed.

But suddenly, her thoughts stopped completely as paralyzing terror gripped her consciousness and she suddenly realized something impossible was happening.

Something dark and terrifying was actively eating into her undead body, bypassing her physical regeneration completely and tearing directly into her very soul...

’No... No... No...’ she panicked internally.

He didn’t only attack her physical body with that single, point-blank shot, he had brutally attacked her actual soul with some kind of unknown terrifying energy but her fragmented memories told her he wasn’t awakened yet, so how did he possibly do this?

’No! No!’ she could only shout frantically in her own head as the very essence of her soul was being actively, painfully eaten away by an overwhelming gravity.

Her broken body completely refused to move, the unnatural regeneration failing entirely, though dark, bloody tears were trailing continuously out of her remaining ruined eyes.

’I don’t want to die, I don’t want to di—’

The unnatural, green light in the undead Zombie’s eyes died immediately and permanently. The rotting flesh began to turn into fine ash, blowing away in the freezing mountain wind.

Klaus stepped backward with the heavy sniper rifle slipping from his numb trembling fingers and clattering against the stones as his vision blurred and his eyes spun wildly in their sockets.

The adrenaline crash hit him like a physical blow.

Immediately, translucent blue screens appeared floating directly in front of his failing vision.

[Due to your near Death Experience, you have partially awakened your Hidden Bloodline!]

[You can now use Soul Banishment to banish the souls of the people you kill into your soul and take at least one of their abilities!]

[You can now use Soul Mana!] 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

[Welcome back to the world of the living, Soul King!]

Klaus really didn’t care about all of this system nonsense at all as his knees finally buckled under his own weight.

He fell to the cold ground with the sharp stones biting through his torn clothes. All he truly wanted right now was for this absolute nightmare to be over.

His head landed softly on a set of warm, soft laps. He blinked his heavy, spinning eyes and looked up slowly to see the Heroine looking down at him.

But why was she crying so much? Her warm, salty tears dripped down from her chin, falling directly onto his bruised and bloody face, mixing with the dirt.

The physical exhaustion was overwhelming, and as the darkness crept into the edges of his vision, he genuinely felt like he wouldn’t actually make it out of this alive.

"Tell them..." Klaus whispered.

He slowly reached his trembling hand up, his bloodstained fingers gently holding Seo’s soft, tear-streaked cheek.

"Not to use my gold..." Klaus finished with a heavy exhausted breath.

And with that incredibly selfish demand, Klaus’s head grew heavy and his face fell completely to the side. He didn’t die... but his body finally completely shut down, and he fell into a deep dreamless sleep.