The Tales of the Legendary Mimic : Momo

Screaming curses

A low vibration crawled through the ground, subtle at first, then stronger, like an engine revving under the earth.

Max felt it through the soles of his boots on the transport roof. The hair on his arms prickled. Around the battlefield, soldiers shifted uneasily, glancing at each other and the shattered lab.

“Anyone else feel that?” someone muttered over comms.

Before anyone could answer, the sound hit.

A scream—no, a screech—ripped across the battlefield.

It stabbed straight into their skulls, a jagged, piercing wave that shredded through helmets and earplugs as if they didn’t exist. Men dropped to their knees, rifles clattering, hands flying to bleeding ears as red trickled between their fingers.

Even Max wasn’t spared.

The screech hit him like a spike driven through his head. His vision swam; his lungs seized; for a heartbeat, he thought he might black out.

Then the goo reacted.

It surged up around his ears, forming thick, muffling cups that hardened in an instant, like living noise‑canceling armor. The worst of the sound cut off. The screech dropped from lethal to merely agonising.

He dragged in a breath and forced his eyes to focus.

The zombies were moving.

Not forward. Back.

They were retreating in a loose, ragged stream, pulling away from the lab entrance and flowing toward the far side of the ruins. They didn’t scatter—no panicked breaking of ranks, no random flight. They shifted as one, like a school of fish changing direction.

Max’s frown deepened.

They aren’t just reacting.

They’re obeying.

He replayed the last hours in his head: the way the zombies had protected their heads, the disciplined wall they’d formed around the southern entrance, the trick with only four zombies showing themselves earlier like bait.

They hadn’t been acting alone.

Someone—something—was commanding them.

The screech came again, slightly farther away this time, like a retreating siren.

That’s the controller. That’s what I need to kill.

Max slung the Golden Ravine across his back.

Then he ran.

He blurred past stunned soldiers still recovering from the sonic assault, boots hammering over cracked asphalt and spent cartridges.

“Max!” Captain Jane’s shout crackled over the comm. “Maximus, get back here! That’s an order!”

He didn’t look back. He didn’t answer.

She watched his figure cut through the chaos, heading straight after the withdrawing horde. For a second, she froze—caught between duty, fear, and Command’s last message.

Bring him back in one piece. He is the core of the mission.

If she lost him now, they wouldn’t just be angry.

They’d call it treason.

“Cover fire!” she snapped. “Push forward and support him! No one lets him get isolated!”

Some soldiers shifted to comply, firing to thin the zombies near Max’s path.

Others… didn’t.

On one flank, One‑Eyed and a cluster of bandits traded looks. The banshee’s screech still rang in their bones, and the memory of a comrade turning into a zombie in front of them clung to their thoughts like tar.

“This is suicide,” one of them muttered.

“Let the hero handle it,” another snorted.

One‑Eyed’s jaw tightened. He hesitated—then turned away.

He and a few mercs peeled off, slipping back toward the vehicles under the cover of smoke and confusion.

The report reached Jane moments later.

She almost saw red. “Cowards,” she hissed—but she couldn’t spare anyone to drag them back. Not with Max charging toward the heart of whatever controlled this nest.

Max plunged into the retreating horde.

The zombies thickened around him, forming a grim tide of greyflesh and hardened goo. The nearest ones spun, reaching for him with clawed fingers.

“Fine,” he muttered. “You first.”

Goo flowed over his arms, swelling into heavy gauntlets, layered and ridged for impact. The first zombie lunged; he met it with a straight punch that crushed its face and snapped its neck. He twisted, drove an elbow into another skull, then pivoted and kicked a third sideways into a crumbling wall, shattering both.

More came.

He moved like a machine—fist, elbow, knee, boot—each strike backed by goo‑enhanced strength. Heads cracked, spines snapped, torsos folded. The lot shook with every impact.

Dead zombies didn’t just lie there around him.

Goo tendrils slid from the side pouch at his waist, hooking into corpses and dragging them toward that small, seemingly ordinary bag. Its opening warped, stretching into a small, dark maw that swallowed limbs and torsos whole.

Absorbing them.

Feeding on them.

He didn’t have time to freak out about it. There were too many enemies between him and that screech.

“If only I could fly from the start,” he thought bitterly, smashing another zombie aside. “This would be a lot faster.”

The thought lit a fuse.

Goo pulsed along his back.

Two masses burst outward, stretching and reshaping as they grew. Fleshy, sinewy wings, thick with muscle and translucent membrane, unfurled in a spray of droplets.

They flared once, clumsy and heavy.

Max’s feet left the ground.

His eyes widened as the battlefield dropped away beneath him.

“Okay… that’s new,” he breathed.

A dragging weight yanked at his shoulders.

The GMC‑6.

The Golden Ravine, slung across his back, suddenly felt like a concrete block. Up here, without his full goo muscle reinforcement focused on his arms, the massive rifle was nothing but dead weight trying to pull him out of the sky.

His wings faltered.

“Tch.” He gritted his teeth. “You’re a problem now.”

He reached back, fingers fumbling for the strap, ready to toss the sniper before it dragged him down.

The pouch at his waist twitched.

Its opening yawned wide, the fabric stretching into a circular, abyss‑like maw lined with writhing strands of goo. A tendril whipped out, wrapped around the Golden Ravine in a single smooth motion—

And yanked.

The rifle vanished.

Max jolted mid‑air, stunned.

“Did you just eat that?” he demanded of the pouch.

It pulsed once, satisfied, then shrank back into its usual, harmless shape.

Great. Now I have to explain to Jane that my bag swallowed her experimental sniper.

That was a future‑Max problem.

Right now, his flight steadied.

With the rifle gone, his wings beat stronger, cleaner. He rose higher, got a clearer view of the retreat.

The zombies were flowing toward the far side of the lab, into a half‑collapsed courtyard choked with weeds and broken concrete.

He angled his body and sped after them.

He found the nest in a sunken courtyard.

Around fifty zombies knelt and grovelled on the cracked ground, heads bowed, bodies trembling—not in fear, but in worship.

At the centre stood their master.

The creature was thin, almost skeletal, its skin a pale, corpse-grey stretched far too tight over a narrow frame. Instead of hands, long tendrils of goo dangled from the ends of its arms, coiling and uncoiling like restless snakes.

Its head was a swollen, transparent blob—like someone had fused a jellyfish onto a human neck. Inside that clear dome, clumps of dark goo drifted and pulsed, swirling in slow, unsettling patterns.

Its mouth was just a narrow vertical slit when closed, no wider than a pencil line.

But when it screamed…

That slit peeled opened and so did the eyelids of the zombies, which made no sense, as zombies were blind. They stormed at max

under the orders of the screaming mutant. They continued to attack Max, who managed to slay ten in a few minutes due to flight and precision.

sensing the fearsomeness of its opponent

Its jaw unhinged. The slit widened, and widened more, stretching impossibly far until the opening was the size of a car tyre. The air shuddered around it as it drew breath.

The banshee was about to yell out a curse.....!