Reborn as the Zombie King

Chapter 8: Breaking the Cocoon

As evening settled in, Derek Kane made his way toward Chloe's estate, confident she'd be home soon tired, alone, and about to have a very bad night.

His ability, discovered through some careful late-night forum digging, had turned out to be metal manipulation full control, offense and defense both. Compared to the "useless" powers everyone online kept complaining about, Derek considered himself one of the lucky ones. He genuinely couldn't imagine anything out there that could stand against him.

Every test run had gone perfectly. Even the infected weren't a problem a flick of his focus, and a stray kitchen knife would drift through the air and punch clean through a skull from twenty feet away. Each success fed the same growing certainty: nothing could touch him now.

He'd already pictured it in detail a blade at Chloe's throat, her face twisted with fear and humiliation as she gave in. The image alone quickened his pace.

"Ridgemont... sixteen... here we are."

He crested the hill into the community and spotted Pinky parked in the driveway. Confirmation enough. She was home.

Derek used his ability to ease the gate open without a sound nothing loud enough to alert her and planned to do the same with the front door. Then she's mine.

Chase's hearing, sharpened well past anything human, caught the gate the instant it moved. He signaled the other two to go quiet someone was coming in.

Lulu shifted into a ready stance immediately. Chloe backed behind her, useless and hating herself for it, wishing desperately she had something anything to contribute if this went wrong.

The front door lock clicked and eased open.

Derek stepped through wearing a smile that would've turned anyone's stomach, a small arsenal of bloodstained forks and knives hovering silently around him, reeking of whatever they'd last been used on.

He was not expecting three sets of eyes already locked on him from across the living room.

Before he could redirect a single blade, a burst of light tore across the dark straight at his chest.

Lulu's shot. But this one didn't look like her usual arrows no delicate line of light this time, more like a compressed blast of raw energy, hitting Derek with the force of a small missile.

Under his own stunned, disbelieving eyes, a hole the size of a fist opened straight through his chest. He folded and dropped like a sack with the air let out of it, black smoke curling from the wound's edges.

Lulu stared at her own hands like they belonged to someone else.

"Did I did I just kill someone?"

"If you... hadn't," Chase said slowly, nodding at the pile of bloody, reeking blades scattered across the floor, "he would've... killed us."

Lulu nodded, still dazed. "But that shot that's never happened before. My arrows don't do that."

Chase's mind went back to the fireball Chloe had accidentally nearly set the chandelier on fire with, back on their first night. A theory started forming.

He dragged Derek's body out to the yard and, testing the theory, called up a small, controlled flame.

The fire devoured the corpse almost instantly not burning so much as consuming, reducing the whole body to ash in seconds, and leaving behind one thing untouched at the center: a crystal core, glowing a deep, unfamiliar purple.

Confirmed. Something about this place or maybe about me is amplifying every ability that comes near it.

He didn't explain the theory yet. First, he needed to know what the purple core actually did the first one of its kind he'd come across.

He swallowed it, and immediately felt his body lift off the ground.

Black energy poured out around him, wrapping his frame like smoke given shape. Somewhere underneath it, Chase felt every broken, imperfect piece of himself being stripped down and rebuilt from scratch. His mind slid sideways into something that felt less like unconsciousness and more like a very long, very vivid dream.

He stood on a mountain built entirely from corpses, looking out over a horizon he somehow already knew. Tens of thousands of the infected knelt at his feet. A handful of figures stood beside him, silent, waiting. In the far distance, a line of elite fighters shimmered with power bursts of ability lighting the sky like an aurora, gorgeous and lethal, every ounce of it aimed straight at him.

Back in the living room, Lulu and Chloe watched in stunned silence as Chase's body was slowly swallowed by a thick, rippling cocoon of black energy solid-looking, almost liquid, like he'd been wrapped in dark silk and set down gently on the floor.

"Sister what is that? Have you ever seen anything like this before?"

Chloe shook her head slowly. "No idea. Should we... move him? Or just leave him out here?"

"I can't drag him alone. Help me?"

Lulu approached first, reaching out carefully. The moment her fingers brushed the black energy, it curled around her hand like smoke given weight cool, but solid underneath. His arm felt cold to the touch, but unmistakably firm.

Chloe took the other side, and together they hauled Chase's cocooned body into the living room, both of them breathing hard by the time they set him down.

"You've been out collecting supplies with him all day," Chloe said, catching her breath. "There's a bed upstairs go rest. I've been sleeping way too much these past few days anyway. I'll keep watch."

"Sister Chloe what's your power, actually?"

Chloe looked down and shook her head. "I don't have one."

"That can't be right. Everyone I've met so far has something. Maybe yours is just hard to notice yet."

Chloe managed a small, unconvinced smile. Lulu let the subject drop, careful not to mention just how strong her own ability had turned out to be not tonight, not when Chloe already looked like she was carrying enough on her own.

"Honestly, sister, I don't even need sleep tonight. Chase saved my life twice today. Least I can do is stand guard for him for once. I owe him that much."

She launched into the whole story from the day the tunnel, the ambush, all of it and Chloe found herself genuinely drawn in.

It had been a long time since anyone had just *talked* to her like this. And somewhere in the telling, Chloe realized how wrong her first guess had been she'd assumed, the second Lulu stepped out of that SUV, that she was looking at Chase's girlfriend.