"You've been holding back on us, huh?" Rio asked, sounding aggrieved. Mai was sitting beside her, bandaging her limp left arm that had a large cut along its length. Beyond that, aside from looking a little disheveled, she didn't have any other real injuries.
"It's not that. The usual zombies just didn't need me to go all out," he said. "How do you feel?"
"I'm fine, we can continue once Sakurajima-senpai bandages me up," she said.
"You sure? We could go back, recover. I'm not in that much of a—"
"No," she interrupted him, a little too quickly. "I'm fine. I don't want to be the one holding you back. I'll be more cautious now."
"I'm sorry about Yuuma," he said.
"It's fine…" she said darkly. "I'm no stranger to loss. We may be here to help you, but gathering supplies is just as important. This shopping center is chock full of them."
"I guess it's these zombies that have kept those guys from the settlement from coming here, huh?" Orion said, noticing how Mai paused when Rio said the thing about not being a stranger to loss. "I'd say you should join us when we go there. There's no point in staying alone by yourself anymore."
"I'll consider it," she nodded absently as if lost in her thoughts while Mai finished bandaging her arm.
With that, the three of them left the building as Mai vanished, and Rio stayed behind Orion, leaving the horde of zombies to him. At this point, having revealed his full physical strength, he did not need to hold back anymore and could use the advantages of his physique fully, especially his speed, which made his movements seem like a faint blur to Rio. In this state, there was virtually no difference between the grade one harvester and the assault zombies that had been mixed into the horde.
He even had the leeway to pay attention to her slowly crumbling mental state.
"Has he already crossed the first threshold… No, you need to be a Baron for that. And before the second phase, there can't be any promotion tokens on this planet to let him get to the tower." Her words were soft enough that it would have been impossible to hear if he hadn't been paying attention to the inspection rune's connection to her. "What shit luck… then again, I get to kill this monster. Once I get his levels, I'll reach the first threshold myself and become a Baron when I go back…" Perhaps in her excitement, she blurted out quite a few things.
However, while giving him some insight into the Tower of Chaos, her words only raised more questions for Orion. He didn't dwell on the information for now because he had already made it to the main entrance of the shopping center after carving his way through the parking lot. At this point, he heard loud thuds from all around him, with especially loud thuds from behind the main gate. Feeling something amiss, he planted his feet on the ground, raising his katana and stabilizing his stance.
"It's no use, Orion," Rio said with a sigh, shaking her head. "You can't handle this."
With her words, the entire wall was torn down, and multiple deafening roars filled the air, drowning away the dead groans of the surviving harvester zombies in the parking lot.
"What are you talking about?" He asked, feigning confusion while looking around at the hundred or so hulking zombies that had emerged after breaking through the main entrance wall of the lot. Not only that, multiple similar figures had appeared all around him from behind cars. They hadn't been noticeable previously because Orion's focus had been on carving himself a path through the zombies and not on clearing all of them.
"These are grade four assault zombies," she said. "Each one is just as strong as the one from before."
"Oh?" Orion raised a brow. "As much as I would like to believe that you've awakened some kind of inspection ability… I believe this is what they call being backstabbed."
"I wouldn't have done this if you weren't so intent on taking her away, Orion," she sighed. "I let you play with my body like a toy for the whole night… thinking you might be swayed, but alas, it seems I'm not a match for her just yet."
"You do know Mai is near us, right?"
"It doesn't matter," she shook her head. "As long as I can kill you, I'll have enough levels to get promoted. By then, she won't matter."
"How boring," Orion said. "I thought we could keep this farce up for a bit longer. Mai, you know the reality now, right? Mind helping me keep her in place while I take care of the rabble? I still need her for later."
Suddenly, Orion felt something hitting the back of his head. At the same time, he heard Rio's gasp. Mai was already standing behind her, one holding her arms behind her back and the other holding a dagger to her throat.
"Seriously?" Orion asked.
"You deserve that," she said. Before he could retort, he felt another rock accurately hit the back of his head.
"Do you have a third hand somewhere?" He asked, sensing a third rock about to hit his head. "Fuck's sake. Fine, I won't call you by your first name. Stop hitting me with your magic rocks if you want me to help you survive these zombies."
"I can run at any time," she said flatly, leaving Orion speechless.
"Seriously, you fell out with me for this troublesome woman," Rio said. "I would've let you do anything you wanted to me. Instead, you chose this."
"In my defense, I never fell out with you. You just realized that I was planning to take Mai away and decided to kill me, skipping a bunch of steps from bargaining, coercion, and more. Kind of a dick move if I'm being honest."
This time, it was Rio who didn't have any retort.
"Sakurajima-san, stop hiding me from the zombies," he said mockingly. "You can retreat with her if you want, or stay here. It's all the same. I should be finished in a minute or two."
"Is he fucking crazy?" Rio asked with a disbelieving expression, but Mai didn't respond and held her in place with the dagger at her throat.
"No, I'm not, hon," Orion said as the zombies all locked in on him, charging through the rubble. "I just have what is called an outsider's perspective. She didn't realize your little discrepancies, but I smelled them from a mile away."
"I hadn't been in contact with her for a while," Mai said, sounding a little defensive.
Orion didn't respond as the first of the new wave of zombies had already reached him. He immediately activated his defense rune and slashed his sword. What would've cleaved any usual zombie without letting Orion feel any semblance of resistance only earned him the zombie's arm. It was fast enough to react to his sword in time and swerve to the side. Before it could even swing its arm at him, a bright light appeared between the zombie and Orion before condensing into a concentrated beam of light. In an instant, it evicerated the zombie's head, taking down two zombies that were behind it as well.
"Impossible!" Rio screamed, almost hysterically, not seeming to care about the small cut that appeared on her neck, dripping blood.
Orion was in no mood to respond and shot two more beams of light simultaneously, dividing the single unit of Runic energy into two halves after realizing that even for these zombies, the full power rune was too much. Unfortunately, these beams of light also required aiming, and Orion hadn't had any dreams about marksmanship. Since the targets were a bit further away, only one of them had the side of its head destroyed; the beam harmlessly passed by the other one, going into the air.
"Something to keep in mind…" Orion didn't mind that little issue. His Runic Energy reserves had recovered up to six hundred units by the time he reached the open mall, giving him more than enough room to play around for a while.
"This…this…" Rio looked like she was about to have a heart attack at Orion's display, and her expression only grew more shocked when she saw him raise his palm and spray out a massive amount of lava at the ten closest zombies, all of them bursting into flames as their flesh and bones melted. "These aren't even predefined skills… He has raw manipulation… Elemental Conceptual magic? But this is a dying verse with not a single magical entity present. Maybe high charisma and hypnosis, but that has to be all. How did someone like this even emerge before the conclusion of the first phase?"
Orion had only gotten started when he sprayed those ten zombies with lava and directly melted them to death.
Isn't this equivalent to matter creation? Or will these rocks dispel after a few seconds once their Runic Energy dissipates?
He couldn't dwell on that thought for long as he noticed more zombies approaching him from the other side. Mai had already hidden herself and Rio, so he didn't need to worry about either of them, which allowed him to freely practice using his runes further.
Let's try this…
Orion poured an entire unit of Runic Energy into a single beam of light that he imagined being compressed to the diameter of a pencil, with its power being lowered to a tenth of usual, and using the remaining energy to prolong the duration of the beam.
Taking aim, he let the beam loose and immediately willed it to move at an angle, forming an arc. The beam, instead of lasting an instant, lasted ten instants, which was pretty much still an instant, barely even a microsecond. Ultimately, that only allowed him to cut through half of a zombie's body.
Something to consider when I start chaining runes together. If I can prolong this kind of light beam, it could be like a holy sword of damnation… Yeah, no. I'll just call it light arc or something. Maybe I'll make a lightsaber…
He continued trying different experiments, with his two runes— collecting the lava into a ball and throwing it between a group of six approaching zombies, using the light beam as a means of blinding, which ended up having no effect on the zombies beyond making them growl louder. Their primary active sense was hearing, with everything else, including smell and sight, being secondary. That was at least the case for the harvester zombies from what Orion had observed. The grade four assault zombies were still somewhat affected by it.
While playing around and experimenting, he eventually killed off around two hundred grade four zombies and left the entire parking lot covered in slowly hardening magma that didn't seem to affect him in the slightest due to the effects of the defense rune still being active. It had taken him almost twenty minutes to clear the zombies, in which time he had activated the rune three times for ten minutes each. The third activation still had a good eight to nine minutes left.
"All right, good riddance. Time to claim my harvest. M—Sakurajima-san, where are you?" He corrected himself before realizing that the entire area around him was covered in molten lava.
He noticed her and Rio's presence and turned to look.
Good to know she doesn't just turn intangible. That would be truly overpowered.
They were still hidden from the zombies but had moved away from the destructive scene that he had caused.
"Damn it, my shoes are on fire… I need some kind of superhero costume. Better yet, something with nanotech that can automatically repair itself… Maybe even something on the biological side, maybe a symbiote… Maybe I can dream about the Marvel at some point…"
When he was close enough, he called out to them again. "Tell me, do I look cool walking through fire like this?"
"You look like someone who was just robbed and thrown into a burning building," Rio said, either having come to terms with the situation or scheming something else. "Your clothes tattered and burned, a little more and I'd probably be able to see that huge package of yours hanging around."
***
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