The humming silence of the server room was more deafening than the moans outside. The final, desperate words of Dr. Jenner hung in the air like dust motes caught in the beam of a single emergency light. A new sun. A different frequency.
Ainz's mind, a fortress of glacial logic, processed the revelation with seismic intensity.
[Paradigm Shift Confirmed. This reality's "undeath" is not an invasive pathogen but a latent planetary constant. The "Wildfire" is a catalytic trigger, not a cause. Analogy: The world was always flammable. The pathogen is the spark.]
[Strategic Re-evaluation: Objective "Find a way home" remains primary. However, the existence of a manipulatable "base frequency" presents a secondary objective of immense scale: Planetary Frequency Re-alignment. Feasibility: Unknown. Resource Requirement: Catastrophic. Potential Yield: Unprecedented. This world would become a testament to the power of Nazarick, a conquered fundamental law.]
The red pinpricks of his gaze swept from the preserved walker—a mere antenna—to the terrified survivors huddled by the blasted door. They were no longer just assets for navigation. They were witnesses to the initial hypothesis. And one of them had become an active contaminant.
"We have what we came for," Ainz's voice resonated in the sterile space, devoid of triumph, only statement. "The data core is intact. We will extract it and depart."
"Depart to where?" Lori whispered, clutching Carl. "You heard him. There's no cure. It's… it's the world."
"The world is a set of variables," Ainz corrected, turning to the server banks. He extended a hand. [Data Crystalize]. With a sound like shivering glass, the essence of the server's stored data—terabytes of research, logs, scans of the primal frequency—flowed out in streams of blue light, coalescing into a pulsating, sapphire-like gem in his palm. The physical servers smoked and died. "The variable has been captured. Now we address the immediate contamination."
He meant Shane.
The sound of the gunshot and the ensuing siege had been a catastrophic breach of protocol. Ainz's policy of calculated, overwhelming force had been circumvented by a single, irrational human's self-destructive impulse. It was a lesson. In Nazarick, such an act would be impossible. Here, it had nearly derailed the primary objective. It could not stand.
"The Death Knight and Stitch-Wire will hold the entrance," Ainz stated. "We will ascend to the roof for extraction."
"The roof?" Glenn stammered. "We're blocks in! The streets are packed!"
"A correction," Ainz said, already moving toward a stairwell door marked 'Roof Access.' "The streets are a resource. Follow."
They followed, a chain of desperation. The stairwell was dark, close, and echoed with their frantic breaths. Ainz led, a sphere of pale light emanating from his raised finger. They passed floor after floor of silent horror behind glass doors: labs filled with shadows that moved.
They burst onto the rooftop under a bruised, twilight sky. The air was fresher, but the sound was worse—a ceaseless, guttural roar rising from the streets below, a sea of upturned, grey faces churning around the base of the CDC building. They were utterly surrounded.
Rick looked over the edge, his face ashen. "My God…"
"Observation: The asset 'Shane' has utilized the urban topography effectively," Ainz noted, peering down. He spotted him, a lone figure on the roof of a lower adjacent parking garage, visible across a chasm of empty air. Shane was waving his arms, shouting soundlessly, drawing more of the dead toward the CDC. A final, spiteful act of sabotage.
"He's trying to bury us here," Daryl snarled, raising his enchanted crossbow.
"An inefficient strategy," Ainz replied. He then performed a series of actions so swift they seemed simultaneous.
First, he pointed at the crowd directly below the CDC's main entrance. [Aura of Despair IV] – a focused, downward blast. The effect was like dropping a stone into a pond of gruesome fish. Walkers screamed a soundless scream, clawing at their own faces, stampeding away from the building, creating a temporary, chaotic repulsion zone.
Second, he turned his gaze across the gap to Shane. He did not cast a flashy spell. He used a skill.
[Long-Distance Shot: Penetrating Bolt].
A spear of condensed negative energy, invisible to living eyes but tasting of absolute void, materialized in the air before Ainz and shot across the gap with a faint tear in reality. Shane, in mid-shout, jerked. No visible wound appeared. But his eyes widened. He looked down at his chest, confused. Then his skin grayed, his veins turned black and visible under sudden, spreading necrosis. He gasped, a rattling, dry sound, and collapsed. Not dead. Not yet. The spell was a slow, terminal curse, a calculated act of reprisal. He would turn, from the inside out, conscious for every moment. A lesson in consequence for any other "variables" who might be watching.
Third, Ainz raised both hands toward the sky above the parking garage where Shane lay dying. He began his first true, high-tier incantation since arriving in this world. The words were in a language that cracked the air and made the survivors' teeth ache.
"[Super-Tier Magic: Summon Catastrophic Entity]."
The mana pull was immense, straining the thin energy of this world. The sky darkened further. A vortex of black and green energy swirled, and from it descended a being that was an offense to nature. It had the general, bloated shape of a gigantic, hairless bear, but its skin was a translucent membrane stretched over pulsating, internal necrotic energy. Four mismatched limbs ending in bone scythes scrabbled for purchase on the roof. Its head was a lamprey-like maw, lined with spirals of teeth. It was a Carrion Golem, a Yggdrasil entity designed for one purpose: mass consumption and conversion of biological matter.
The golem let out a ground-shaking roar that momentarily silenced the horde below. Then it began to feed. Not on the walkers on the street, but on the ones on the parking garage levels, and on the still-twitching form of Shane. It was a gruesome, efficient factory of annihilation.
"Our exit is prepared," Ainz said, as if he had just called a taxi. He pointed to the Carrion Golem. "It will consume a path. We will follow its wake to the city's edge. The psychic trauma of its presence will keep the majority of the indigenous undead at a distance."
Rick was vomiting over the edge of the roof. Carol had covered Carl's eyes, but she was staring at Ainz, not with fear now, but with a hollow, cosmic understanding. They had prayed for a savior. They had been given a force of nature that operated on a logic beyond good and evil, beyond life and death. He didn't hate them. He didn't care about them at all. They were data points in an experiment titled "Planetary Dominance."
The journey out of Atlanta was a parade through hell, led by a greater devil. The Carrion Golem lurched ahead, its maw vacuuming up walkers in scores, leaving a trail of crushed bone and dissipating necrotic energy. Behind it, surrounded by the despair-aura of Ainz and the painful hum of Stitch-Wire, the survivors walked through a temporary corridor of terrible quiet, flanked by walls of walkers who cowered and clawed at the buildings to get away from the passing entities.
No one spoke. The only sounds were the grinding consumption of the golem, the hum of Stitch-Wire, and the distant, fearful moans.
As they reached the outskirts at dawn, the Golem, its purpose served, dissolved into a pool of foul smoke at Ainz's command. The survivors stood on a highway overpass, looking back at the smoking, cursed city. They were alive. They had more supplies in their trucks than they'd had in months, thanks to Ainz's casual conjuring. They had magical weapons. They were, by any metric of the old world, safer than they had ever been.
They were also in the thrall of a being who had just demonstrated he could summon monsters from nightmares and snuff out a man's life across a city block with a thought. A being who now held a crystal containing the terrible secret of their world, and who looked upon that secret not with despair, but with the analytical interest of a composer looking at a discordant symphony, wondering how he might re-orchestrate it.
Ainz stood at the edge of the overpass, the dawn light doing nothing to warm his polished skull. He held the data crystal up, watching the internal light pulse in time with a frequency only he could hear.
The song of this dead Earth is off-key, he thought. The instruments are flawed, the players mindless. But the score… the score can be rewritten. The question is not if I have the power. The question is what symphony would be most… efficient.
He turned his gaze from the crystal to the exhausted, broken, and forever-altered humans behind him. Their usefulness was evolving. They were no longer just guides. They were the control group.