Ideally, to make things even more difficult for the enemy, we should have opened every room on the floor. Unfortunately, the other corridors were fully visible from their positions, so this was the only one available to us.
No sooner said than done—outside, zombies in patients' clothing, and here and there even in doctors' coats, were already swarming, advancing on the mercenaries. How convenient that Yamata and I held no interest for ordinary infected.
The first zombies reached the squad that had started moving in our direction. Heh. It seemed the mercenaries had decided not to split up—which was perfectly logical. There were only seven of them left. Two per corridor (and three in one case) would've been too few, even against Yamata alone.
Taking advantage of the fact that they were moving to bypass the common infected, I gestured for Yamata to head up the stairs. Then I accelerated, opened the doors along the central corridor as well, dashed to the stairwell, and repeated the same maneuver there.
I remembered all too well the bug caused by the fact that such scanners can't accurately determine the vertical position of a target. I'd tested that personally while trailing Four Eyes's former team.
Yamata was waiting for me one floor up, in the exact same spot where she'd been before we split, clearly having caught my intent. Now let the mercenaries guess—should they go down after Yamata, who had "apparently broken through" their perimeter, or continue climbing upward? And they could have some fun with the zombies in the meantime.
With that in mind, I decided to open the doors on this floor as well. Carefully stepping around a doctor's body lying in the middle of the corridor, I went to work.
The first room I checked was an office with burned-out data drives, scattered folders, and the charred frames of cabinets. So this was where Nikolai had burst out from, if I understood correctly.
The next door led to a patient room with an open safe, a nightstand, and strange contraptions scattered across the floor… damn this world's puzzles! Good thing I hadn't stumbled into that one. Flying through the air locked in an embrace with a Hunter had been more than enough for me.
The last room—yes, this floor was absurdly small, even though in theory all floors except the first should have been the same size—was almost an exact copy of the previous one. Only without the puzzle or the nightstand. Instead, it was filled with swarm of worms mutated by the T-virus to the size of an adult human arm.
And now an entire swarm of squealing creatures tried to launched themselves at me.
I split three of them in midair—they can jump too, how "wonderful!" Two more I pinned to the wall and the floor with knives yanked from my belt. The last one managed to reach me and latched onto my body… only to fail to pierce my skin.
Yes, I've been through a lot—but "tender elbow suckling" was definitely not on that list.
Peeling the mutant off my arm, I simply and without fuss stepped on its writhing body and walked through it, as if through… well, never mind what. The creature was divided into two halves.
Approaching the two I had pinned, I finished them off with a couple of blows and pulled my knives free, wiping them off on the bed standing nearby.
Well. That was unfortunate. There was simply no one left to release on this floor. Zinoviev and Carlos had already cleared it of zombies earlier, and now I'd dealt with the last remaining life-forms. Incidentally, I didn't see any highlighting on the worms. Were they considered full-fledged zombies? Or can I only see plants and other viral strains unrelated to the T-virus? Of all the infected, I'd really only seen that glow on the plants in the laboratory, and on Birkin and his daughter. And even then, with Sherry, I'd mostly witnessed the transition from human to infected—that's a somewhat different category.
I left the room, noting that the mercenaries had reached the stairwell and were now debating whether to go down or up. Judging by the muffled voices our shared—Four Eyes's and my own—keen hearing picked up, they were actively discussing it.
"Should we attack?" Yamata mouthed silently.
Sigh. We really were losing time, especially now that the canon was clearly accelerating. After a brief moment of thought, I nodded, wary of using my new ability so close to our opponents.
Yamata fired first, putting a round straight through the squad leader's head and instantly decapitating the chain of command.
I dashed down the wall and, like those same DDs, leapt onto my target. I didn't need to do anything else—my acceleration and body mass did the work for me, effectively turning the mercenary beneath me into a smear.
Before I had even fully straightened, I slashed my claws across the torso of another mercenary who had decided to fire his pistol at Four Eyes.
Wrong target. I'm the real threat here! That's what you're supposed to think.
I jumped forward from a standstill and, given my position, downward along the staircase, bowling mercenaries out of the way with my body alone. Two thuds behind me told me that only the pair I had just shoved down the stairs remained alive.
I grabbed them both by the throat, lifting them to face level and slamming them back against the wall—almost smashing them into it.
Oh, the terror in their eyes when they saw what lay beneath my hood.
Yes, I'm a monster. Bitter as it is to admit, no human could hold two grown men at arm's length without effort while they desperately tried to find footing with their feet. And no human could have survived the ordeals I've endured.
Come to think of it, I must have grown somewhat taller, since my face seemed uncomfortably high for them to meet at eye level.
(End of Chapter)
P@treon: /SadRaven
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