3

The wind tore at my eardrums. With a dull thud, I smashed heavily onto a mountain of corpses built from severed limbs.

The violent impact nearly displaced my internal organs. Before I could even catch my breath, hundreds of greedy red lights flared in the darkness.

Foul, reeking drool dripped onto my face. Pale bone-claws reached out from all directions, digging viciously into my shoulders, my chest, and my shattered right leg.

A gaping, bloody maw missing its lower jaw snapped straight for my carotid artery.

In this life-or-death moment, Elena's disgusted glare as she hit the gate switch, and Victor's mocking sneer as he crushed my knee, violently flashed through my mind.

Hatred, like a rapidly burning fuse, instantly ignited my blood.

My heart eerily skipped a beat. What followed was a violent, muffled pounding, like a war drum.

The searing heat that had lain dormant in my bone marrow for three months now turned into rampaging magma. It frantically devoured the remaining human cells in my body, restructuring them at an inconceivable speed.

The zombies about to tear through my throat were suddenly paralyzed, as if trapped by some invisible force field.

Razor-sharp nails, hovering barely an inch from my eyeball, were forcefully halted in mid-air. Even as the red glow in their sockets flickered with an extreme thirst for blood, their bodies couldn't move a single millimeter forward.

I looked down at my left hand.

From the wound on my ring finger, charred by a cigar, what welled up was no longer piercing crimson. A viscous, dark gold liquid, seemingly alive, dripped down my fingertips.

A single drop of dark gold blood smashed into the rotting flesh beneath me.

The faint luster instantly illuminated the surrounding darkness. The next second, the scalp-numbing sound of bones grinding against each other rose like a tsunami.

Over three hundred frenzied infected simultaneously dropped their attack stances.

They stiffly pulled back their limbs, their knees crashing heavily onto the blood-stained concrete. Like subjects seeking an audience with their monarch, they knelt in a dense, dark mass all around me.

The hungry shrieks in their throats all transformed into whimpers of awe.

From behind the horde, a jarring, heavy set of footsteps suddenly echoed.

A mutant lord, nearly three meters tall and covered in bone spikes, shoved through the outer edges of the horde. It locked its eyes on me, letting out a low, warning growl. Its faint residual intelligence made it unwilling to submit to a newly transformed human.

It lunged forward with explosive force, kicking up a gale of putrid wind. Massive bone-claws, as tough as steel rebar, slashed down at my head.

I didn't dodge.

Just as the claws were about to touch the crown of my head, I raised my left hand.

Crack.

With a crisp snap, I effortlessly caught this thunderous strike with a single hand.

A flash of human-like astonishment crossed the mutant lord's eyes. Before it could make a second move, the five fingers of my right hand morphed into the sharpest of blades, piercing straight through its incredibly hard skull.

With a vicious twist of my wrist, a crystal core radiating a faint blue light was brutally ripped out.

The lord's massive body instantly lost all vitality, crashing down and kicking up a cloud of dust. The rest of the kneeling horde buried their heads even lower, their whimpers choked off by pure terror.

The dark gold blood snaked down my palm, rapidly enveloping the crystal core.

The blue light dimmed at a visible rate, turning into a stream of extremely pure energy that rushed madly through my veins into every corner of my body.

A series of teeth-grinding, fine popping sounds came from my right leg.

The kneecap crushed by Victor was piecing itself back together in a way that defied all biological common sense. Dark gold granulations intertwined and stitched together, reconnecting the severed nerves and muscles inch by inch.

Not just the leg—the countless old wounds across my body, the ring finger burned by the cigar, all shed their dead skin under the rush of this power, growing brand new flesh.

Leaning against the lord's corpse, I slowly stood up.

The crippling sensation of losing my balance was completely wiped away. Replacing it was a surging power, capable of tearing steel, coursing through every inch of my muscles. I clenched my fist, and a faint sonic pop echoed in the air.

Treading on the viscous black blood beneath my feet, I tilted my head up.

Dozens of meters above in the darkness was that tightly sealed steel gate. Behind that gate was the lofty, supreme Zenith Fortress.

Elena, Victor. You thought you had personally disposed of a piece of useless trash.

Little did you know what kind of monster you just unleashed.

I wiped the dark gold blood seeping from the corner of my mouth, looking at the army submitting to me in the dark. From this moment on, the game of prey is over.

The chessboard of the wasteland—I'm taking over now.