The walker was a former man in the tatters of a postal uniform. It stood alone in the field beyond Alexandria's southern wall, trapped in the moat of silence Ainz's broadcast had created, pounding its grey fists against the reinforced steel with a slow, mindless rhythm. Thump. Thump. Thump.
To the survivors, it was a monster. A target. To Ainz, it was the perfect test subject: isolated, typical, and expendable.
The entire population of Alexandria, it seemed, had gathered on the walkway behind the wall. Deanna stood with her council, her face a mask of fraught hope. Rick's group clustered together, a knot of tension. Daryl's fingers whitened on his crossbow. Carol watched, not the walker, but the people watching, her expression unreadable.
Ainz descended from the wall not via the ladder, but by stepping off the parapet and floating gently to the ground with [Feather Fall]. He approached the walker, which turned from the wall to shambling towards this new stimulus. It got within ten feet before the combined auras of Ainz and the silent Death Knight following him froze it in place. It trembled, caught between hunger and primal terror.
"The procedure will commence," Ainz announced, his voice carrying unnaturally over the silent field. He wasn't speaking to the walker, or even to the onlookers. He was dictating a log entry. "Subject Alpha: Standard variant walker. Goal: Localized, permanent inversion of resonant frequency from Death-state to Life-state, overwriting the 'Wildfire' tuning."
He raised the data crystal in one hand. With the other, he began to inscribe intricate, glowing runes in the air. They were not the symbols of Yggdrasil magic, but his own constructs, derived from Milton's acoustic models and his own analysis of the primal frequency. He was writing a counter-song in fire.
[High-Tier Spell: Reality Shift – Localized Frequency Inversion].
The mana draw was immense. The very light around Ainz dimmed, pulled into the forming matrix. The air grew heavy and still. The walker ceased trembling and stood utterly rigid, as if sensing the fundamental violation about to occur.
Ainz thrust the data crystal forward. It flashed, and the runes shot from the air, wrapping the walker in a cage of coruscating, silent energy. Then, he began the true casting. A low, resonant hum, deeper than the world's dead-hum, emanated from him. It was a note of pure negation, of un-making.
The walker jerked. Not like it was being struck, but like a radio receiving a powerful, conflicting signal. Its grey skin began to ripple. A horrible, wet crackling filled the air, the sound of necrotized tissue being forced through changes it was never meant to undergo. Its sunken eyes, milky white, swirled with chaotic colors.
On the wall, people gasped and turned away. Glenn hid his face. Carl watched, fascinated and horrified.
The walker's jaw unhinged, not to bite, but to scream. A sound emerged—a dry, tearing shriek that was not a moan, but an expression of profound, existential agony. It was the sound of a closed circuit being violently forced open.
Ainz observed clinically. [Biological systems are resisting re-alignment. Cellular structures, tuned to the death-frequency, are collapsing under the new resonance. Unexpected variable: The consciousness, or what remains, is experiencing the transition. A form of metaphysical pain.]
He increased the power output. The hum deepened. The walker's body began to… bloom. Patches of grey sloughed away, revealing raw, pink flesh beneath. Its hair fell out in clumps, then fine new fuzz pushed through. The changes were rapid, violent, and wrong. It was healing, but through a process more traumatic than the original decay.
Finally, with a sound like a sigh from a grave, the energy field collapsed. The runes faded.
In the field stood not a walker, but a man. Naked, shivering, covered in a mixture of old rot and new, bleeding skin. He blinked, his eyes a clear, confused blue. He looked at his hands—clean, human hands—and then up at the sky, and began to weep silently.
A profound, absolute silence gripped Alexandria. Then, a ragged cheer erupted from the civilians. They cried, hugged each other. Deanna put a hand over her mouth, tears streaming down her face. "A miracle," someone sobbed.
Rick didn't cheer. He stared at the weeping man, then at Ainz's impassive back. He had seen the agony. He had heard the scream. This wasn't a resurrection. It was a taxidermy of the soul, performed with cosmic force.
Ainz was not looking at his success. He was reviewing the data streaming into his mind.
[Result: Partial success. Biological reversion to pre-infected state achieved. Neural activity restored to basal human patterns. However, the subject's connection to the primal death-frequency has been severed traumatically, not harmoniously. Psychological integrity: Unstable. Long-term viability: 34% and falling. Energy cost: Prohibitive for large-scale application. Conclusion: The base frequency is more deeply ingrained than projected. A simple inversion is inefficient. A more nuanced manipulation is required—a grafting of a new frequency, not an erasure of the old.]
The man in the field—the former walker—took a stumbling step, then another. He looked toward the gate, toward the people, with the confused longing of a child. Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed.
The cheers died.
"He needs help!" Glenn cried out.
"He is a data point," Ainz said, turning and floating back up to the wall. "The experiment is concluded. The subject will be retrieved and quarantined for observation. His survival is not the objective; the data he provides is."
He landed beside Deanna. "The procedure, while costly, confirms feasibility. The next phase will involve a living subject who is in the terminal phase of infection, to map the transition point more precisely. You will provide a volunteer from your medical ward."
The celebration was snuffed out, replaced by a chill deeper than any winter. He had turned a walker back into a man, only to treat the man as a used laboratory rat. The miracle had been revealed as a mechanical, brutal process.
In the jail, the captured Wolf leader, who had been forced to watch the spectacle from a window, began to laugh. It was a harsh, broken sound. "You see?" she rasped to her captors. "He doesn't want to save your world. He wants to take it apart to see how it ticks. Your 'Savior' is just the last dissector."
That night, the atmosphere in Alexandria curdled. Hope had been shown, then yanked away, replaced with the promise of more horrific experiments. The survivors from Rick's group found themselves isolated, seen as the harbingers of this cold new god.
Carol approached Ainz as he stood in the moonlight by the water tower, his form outlined against the pulsating, silent machinery.
"You could have let them have their hope," she said, her voice barely a whisper.
Ainz's skull tilted. "Hope is an emotional placebo. It degrades logical assessment. The data is what matters."
"The man you changed… he was in agony."
"The process of fundamental rewriting is inherently traumatic. His suffering was a measurable output, confirming the resistance of the system. It was valuable."
Carol was silent for a long time. Then she asked the true question. "When you have all your data… what happens to us? To this place?"
Ainz looked out over the quiet, lit houses, the tidy streets. "Alexandria is a stable control environment. Its utility may evolve. It may become the source of a new frequency broadcast, a template for a re-ordered world. Or it may have served its purpose. Efficiency will dictate its fate, as it dictates all things."
He turned his glowing gaze upon her. "You asked a direct question. That demonstrates analytical progression. Your role may also evolve. Continue to observe."
He walked away, leaving her in the shadow of the tower that silenced the dead. Carol understood now, completely. They were not just living in an experiment. They were the experiment. And the head researcher was now preparing for the next trial, one that would likely require a living human to die, and then be forcibly, painfully, brought back.
The silence of Alexandria was no longer peaceful. It was the quiet of a waiting operating room. And Ainz Ooal Gown was scrubbing in.