Chapter 242: Disparity
Countless zombies grinned from ear to ear, their mouths splitting open as they leaped down. BANG! They smashed into the ground, kicking up splashes of blood half a meter high.
One, two, three… countless numbers of them.
They poured out of the window frames in droves, tracing frantic arcs through the air and giggling as they crashed into the convoy!
THUD!
THUD! THUD!
The dull thuds of bodies slamming against the building exteriors and the ground rang out continuously. Luna Dawson quickly pressed her walkie-talkie. “Drive! Detour around the civic square!”
Just as she spoke, a zombie plummeted straight from the building above and smashed onto the Marauder’s hood. It pressed against the windshield, pounding it violently. Its eyeballs had long since fallen out, leaving only two bloody, mangled black holes. Its mouth split open in excited, frantic glee, revealing sharp teeth strung with bits of dark red flesh.
“Hehehe!”
It was laughing.
As soon as Luna rolled down her window, a wet, twisted zombie face sprang up from the ground and slammed hard against the glass, opening its bloodthirsty maw to bite at her.
Little Sweet Potato instantly whipped out countless vines, entangling the zombies surrounding the Marauder. Before the creatures could even howl, their heads were pierced and skewered together in a single line.
Countless superpowers flashed alongside the convoy as Dylan DuPont’s roar echoed through the comms. “All vehicles, keep up!”
With the muffled roar of the lead car’s engine, the convoy filed into Oakhaven on the right, venturing deeper into the heart of the dead city. The rulers of this city had finally bared their fangs.
Countless zombies struggled to their feet in the rain, their malicious eyes locking onto the fleeing vehicles. Then, their wide mouths split open, and they began their frantic, giggling pursuit!
“Hehehe!”
“Hahahahaha!”
“Haha!”
Unlike the roaring and howling zombies they had encountered before, the ones here were all laughing—a maniacal, sinister laughter!
As the vehicles bumped their way through this bloody hellscape, the radio crackled. BZZT… BZZT… KRZZT! The car radio suddenly flared to life, bursting with a sharp, metallic screech. A voice filled with extreme terror exploded from the speakers. “The safe zone… is fake! Ah! It’s a trap… They’re here!”
BZZT!
BEEEEEP…
A long stretch of static hummed through the air. Then, a lifeless female voice spoke up. “I… see… you…”
Finally, an audio clip looping the sounds of children giggling, mixed with tearing and swallowing, played continuously—as if providing background music for the pursuing zombies outside.
The bombardment of bizarre messages, combined with the eerie giggling, struck everyone’s hearts like an ice pick chipping away at their sanity.
Kevin Keane stared intently at the radio. “They’re different now.”
Luna turned sharply to look at him. Even though she had harbored similar suspicions, she hadn’t dared to fully confirm them. She knew things had not been like this in her past life.
“Damn these freaks! What the hell are you laughing at?!”
Miles Dawson roared as he rolled down the window, lowered the muzzle of his assault rifle, and sprayed bullets at the zombies sprinting from both sides of the road.
All the vehicles lowered their windows, the assault rifles in the passengers’ hands continuously spitting tongues of fire.
CLINK, CLATTER. Spent bullet casings bounced against the car bodies and the ground. Thousands of rounds poured into the horde as if ammunition cost nothing. The bodies and heads of the closest zombies were shredded by the hail of bullets, their dark red blood and pulverized flesh washing into the earth along with the rain.
The sunroofs were thrown open, and RPGs were loaded in every vehicle. Rocket-propelled grenades tore through the rainy mist. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The subsequent shockwaves sent large swathes of zombies flying. Countless monsters were blown to pieces, their severed limbs and broken arms raining down in a shower of blood.
Those with shattered heads crumpled to the ground, but the ones who only suffered limb damage giggled even more frantically. It was as if their mutilated bodies only brought them greater joy and excitement.
“Haha!”
“Hehehehe!”
The zombie horde was simply too dense. They continued to cascade down from the buildings like a tidal wave, forming several torrents of flesh and blood.
In the middle of Oakhaven, the girl in red had somehow slipped onto the second-floor terrace of a commercial storefront.
Luna wondered what was going on. How did the creature suddenly get over there?! An ominous premonition rose in her heart. It was a Fourth Order!
She immediately opened her vehicle’s sunroof and rode Rollo, hovering in the center of the convoy while her eyes locked on the eerie zombie girl’s movements.
The girl stretched her lips into a grotesque smile and waved her hand. Several disemboweled zombies were carried over. A dozen—no, dozens—of smiling faces crowded around the girl.
Their mouths were stretched to the absolute limit, revealing dark red gums and teeth coated in minced meat. But what truly made one’s scalp tingle with dread was the sight of the disemboweled zombies’ stomachs—they were stuffed full of rocks!
Their abdominal cavities were completely deformed, bulging with stones. The ribs on both sides had been forced apart by immense pressure, and a few rocks coated in crushed flesh and entrails continuously tumbled out.
The girl’s silent smile grew even more hideous. Her hands were covered in filth and blood. Her pitch-black pupils were exceptionally bright in the rainy mist, carrying a piercing chill that caused a cold sweat to run down even Luna’s back.
A trident materialized out of thin air. It impaled one of the rock-stuffed husks and violently hurled it toward the convoy!
Despite the distance of three to four hundred meters, Luna abruptly raised her hand. Every zombie within a thirty-meter radius was instantly frozen in place. Right at that moment, a wall of water appeared in front of the convoy.
The water wall was a full thirty meters high, completely isolating the second-floor zombie girl and her smiling army from the vehicles.
The flesh of the rock-filled zombie exploded against the barrier. Countless stones coated in gore sank into the water wall and were silently trapped within it.
BANG!
The entire wall of water suddenly detonated. The sky full of water droplets, combined with the rain within a thirty-meter radius, all shot out like high-speed Water Bombs, blasting into every single surging zombie.
In an instant, the dense tide of monsters surrounding them was blasted over three meters away.
Everyone felt the moisture completely drain from their skin and the surrounding air, giving them a rare two seconds of absolute dryness.
This was immediately followed by a massive, high-speed tornado of wind and water that spun from the tip of Rollo’s snout toward the front of Oakhaven. All the ruined walls, abandoned buildings, wrecked vehicles, and the corpses littering the ground were violently washed away by this tsunami-like vortex, entirely swept up in a single wave.
At this moment, both humans and zombies were thoroughly stunned.
The people inside the eleven vehicles all looked up at the person hovering in the sky who had unleashed such an unbelievable superpower.
From the red-clothed girl’s pitch-black pupils, a complex gleam of disbelief, mixed with surprise and fear, suddenly burst forth.
The bloody weirdness of this journey and the abnormalities of the zombies had kept everyone’s hearts in their throats. But whenever Luna made a move, she consistently refreshed their imagination of what High Order superpowers could do.
The sky-filling curtain of rain had been siphoned away by Luna. The momentary dryness, followed by the slow return of the rain a few seconds later, perfectly demonstrated the god-like might of her Water Ability.
Among them, Sharon Sloan’s Third Order Water Ability had been the most eye-catching before this. At best, she could conjure dozens of Water Blades to kill zombies, and achieving a fifty percent kill rate was considered accurate aiming on her part.
But with a single strike from Luna, everything within a fifty-meter radius of the convoy was completely annihilated.
Was this the gap between them and the Fourth Order?! Was the chasm between the Third Order and Fourth Order, as published by the research institute, really this massive?!
Was Luna even human anymore?!
Sharon was utterly dumbfounded. This was the first time she had felt the oppressive, crushing superiority of Luna’s superpower at such close range.
Between her and Luna lay a gap that felt like an insurmountable heavenly chasm. From the first time she saw Luna at the Corbin Safe Zone up until her recent provocations and comparisons, everything Sharon had done felt as childish and boring as kids playing house when faced with Luna’s tyrannical power.
Jealousy and resentment grew wildly within her, but she didn’t dare show it, leaving her to bitterly grit her teeth in secret.
The members of Omni Squad stood with their mouths wide open, staring in sheer disbelief at the girl and dog in the sky. Their brains had completely short-circuited. If it hadn’t been for the burning heat of their gun barrels scalding their hands, they wouldn’t have snapped out of their daze.