Reborn as the Zombie King

Chapter 6: The Dark Underground Passage

Lulu got a good look at Chase then the bone-white skin, the blood-red eyes, the fury twisting his features and her stomach dropped.

That is not a person.

She raised her hand to fire, but Chase closed the distance before she could finish the draw, appearing directly in front of her almost faster than her eyes could track. Point-blank range killed any advantage her arrows had.

He thrust his hand up. A fireball erupted beside her ear close enough to singe her hair, and Lulu braced for the burn.

It never came.

She followed Chase's gaze past her shoulder and found an infected crumpled on the ground behind her, already dead.

"...You saved me?" Lulu stared at him, disbelief plain on her face.

He had, in fact mostly because she'd been decent to him minutes earlier, sharing intel and taking a shot at a threat that hadn't even been aimed at him. Small kindness, in Chase's new math, was worth something.

He also clocked, now that he was standing this close, the faint gold pulse behind her eyes. Another golden core. And whatever she just did with that light-arrow trick that's a real ability.

Without answering, Chase turned and walked straight toward the car to inspect the ruined tire.

"...Sorry," Lulu offered, sheepish now that she understood the math a man who could handle a horde bare-handed clearly hadn't needed her help. Good intentions, bad execution.

"There's a repair shop a few blocks from here," she added quickly. "They'll have what you need to fix that."

Chase straightened, looked at her, and jerked his chin forward lead the way.

"So what exactly are you?" Lulu asked as they walked, unable to hold the question in any longer. Chase looked close enough to human that it kept throwing her off, even with the pale skin and the eyes.

He tapped his throat and forced out a rough "Ahhh"

"Oh. You can't talk. Got it."

She kept glancing sideways at him the rest of the walk. He carried himself less like a predator stalking and more like a man out for an evening stroll, which honestly made it worse.

They spotted the repair shop's sign from a distance and, unfortunately, a thick crowd of infected packed along the same street.

Before Lulu could figure out a workaround, a voice called out from a nearby alley.

"Psst that street's crawling with them, you'll get spotted in two seconds. Come this way instead!"

A woman with bright red hair leaned out from around the corner, waving them over.

Lulu broke into a relieved smile and hurried toward her. Chase followed a step behind. The woman clocked his pale skin but didn't react distance and Lulu's presence apparently reassured her enough not to look twice.

She led them down into an underground passage. "Safer down here, trust me."

The tunnel was unfinished bare concrete, exposed pipes overhead, no lighting installed yet. Even with daylight above, it was pitch dark five steps in.

"Thank you so much," Lulu said. "I really don't know how we would've gotten past all that otherwise."

"Don't mention it. We look out for each other now, don't we?"

In the gloom, the woman allowed herself a small, private smile that neither of them caught.

"Hey," Lulu said after a minute, frowning. "Are we going the right way? It feels like we're doubling back."

"Almost there. I know this tunnel like the back of my hand."

But when they reached the end, there were no stairs. No exit. Just a dead end.

"Nice work, Vivian."

A man's voice, low and amused, rolled out of the darkness. Lulu shrieked, genuinely startled she hadn't clocked that anyone else was down here at all.

"Pretty little thing, too. And look at that pack stuffed full."

"Good. You'll be compensated properly for this one."

Behind them, Chase had already picked out the truth of the room: three separate cores pulsing faintly in the black. One blue. Two green.

"I'll take point on the girl," the first voice continued. "There's a second one that followed her in somebody deal with him."

Lulu finally understood exactly what kind of trap they'd walked into. She threw her hands up, trying to draw an arrow of light and found her arms had gone leaden, impossible to lift.

"Aw, what's wrong, pretty? Power not cooperating?"

She couldn't see a thing in the dark, couldn't even orient toward the voice. "Who are you people what is this"

"Relax. Have some fun with us first, be useful after everybody wins in the end."

"Nobody's beating the three of us down here, sweetheart. One of us sees clean in the dark. One of us can pin you down with gravity alone. One of us heals whatever damage you manage to do. So don't bother fighting it just enjoy the ride."

Satisfied with his own speech, the burly one in front Marcus, evidently the muscle of the operation pulled a dagger and turned toward Chase with an ugly grin.

"Let's deal with the extra baggage first."

Chase had been mildly curious what the blue core's power actually was. Marcus, kind enough to lay out the whole team's abilities unprompted, had just made that question irrelevant and handed Chase every advantage he needed in the process.

A blinding flash tore through the tunnel, bright as a flashbulb in a room that had been pure black a second earlier. Every human throat down there choked out a cry of pain, hands flying to their eyes.

"AH what the hell"

Marcus went down first, thrashing, his whole body wreathed in fire, screaming for help that wasn't coming.

"Boss?! Where are you"

The second man dropped to his knees, groping blindly toward the sound of his leader's screams and choked instead on his own blood as a dagger opened his throat from behind. He tried to trigger his healing ability on instinct, green light barely sparking to life before his body went slack for good.

The third one the gravity user felt the shift in the room and started crawling backward, blind and desperate.

"Stay back I'm serious, STAY BACK"

He kept firing his ability wildly at every sound he could place, but primary-tier gravity powers needed a locked target, and blind panic wasn't giving him one. It also didn't help that Chase, technically, wasn't entirely sure he still counted as a "living being" for the ability to latch onto in the first place.

His wail cut off mid-breath as the dagger found his skull.

When Lulu and Vivian finally blinked their vision back into focus, the sounds alone hadn't prepared them for what they saw.

The smell hit first blood, thick and copper, tangled with the stink of burnt fat. Then the scene: three bodies down, one of them still smoking where Marcus had burned out.

Chase, crouched over the nearest corpse, wasn't finished. He carved the skull open with the dagger and lifted something small and glistening to his mouth.

Lulu doubled over and threw up on the spot.

Vivian's mind went white with pure animal fear. Whatever moral objection she might have had to what he was doing evaporated completely the second she got a clear look at his face in the light.

That is not a man. That was never a man.

Three cores in one sitting did something new to Chase's body. This was his first time consuming duplicates of the same type, and the effect stacked in a way that surprised even him his regeneration sharpened further, and beyond that, he found he could now actively direct healing energy outward, onto someone else.

He crossed to Vivian and, ignoring her full-body trembling, drew the dagger across her forearm in one clean line.

"Please I didn't want to do this, they made me, I swear"

She shook like a leaf, watching in confusion as green light bloomed over the wound and knit it shut in seconds. That's that's the same power the healer had. How

Satisfied it worked, Chase kept going. Deeper cut. Same test.

Then deeper again. The healing slowed with each attempt, taking longer and longer to seal.

By the last cut, Vivian was begging him to just kill her outright.

Chase finally had what he wanted the real shape of his limits. Any wound would close eventually, but depth mattered; the deeper the injury, the slower the repair. Severed limbs stayed severed. Anything outright fatal stayed fatal.

Lulu watched the whole process with a chill settling into her bones. But she made herself remember what would have happened to her in this same tunnel if Chase hadn't been standing beside her and she found she couldn't bring herself to say a word in Vivian's defense.