Raven moved deeper into the mall, her boots brushing over glass and spilled food wrappers along the ground. Alara trailed behind her without a sound, her red eyes bright and unreadable. The overhead lights flickered dimly, casting a glow across the open food court. Above them, hidden in the dark ceiling, Raven's two drones moved like predators, firing off silent shots that ended any lingering zombies in their path. One by one, they hit the ground. Their skulls shaved open by gunfire.
Raven approached the fallen corpses at a casual pace, pausing to kneel beside each one. Her combat knife slid expertly along the base of their necks, carving out the small, hard nucleus cores embedded in their necks. Four more today. Not bad. She stood, brushing blood from her hands onto the thigh of her shorts, then glanced toward Alara.
Alara stood silently, hands at her sides. Alara's body has grown more stable with every core she eats she now looks no different from a human. But one vulnerability still lingered. Raven studied her closely. "The head. It's the only part that can't regenerate," she thought. "Everything else grows back with enough energy. But if she loses her head."
Raven's mind ran through countermeasures. A baseball cap, perhaps. Inconspicuous. It's hardly noticeable. But with embedded sensors and a quick-deploy face shield, something lightweight yet strong enough to take a bullet or a pipe to the face. She pictured the mechanism folding down like a samurai's menpo, sleek and steel-lined, collapsing neatly into the brim when inactive. The trigger? A mental command from her.
"Blades, though?" she thought darkly. "If someone gets close enough to try a blade, they'll have to go through me first."
Raven turned back toward the corpses and sighed. Manually collecting cores like this slowed her down. She needs a better solution. In her mind, she visualized a new creation: a small robotic four-legged mouse. It could move quickly across any terrain, detect dead zombies, burrow through the back of their necks, and extract the core within seconds. Simple. Clean. Efficient. And with onboard storage? She wouldn't even have to retrieve each core immediately.
As if summoned by her ambition, the Apocalypse Ascendancy System delivered a mental notification:
[Apocalypse Ascendancy System Notification] Mobile deployment of host's drones and robots is now available. Units may be stored in System Space and summoned with a mental command. Current slot capacity: 2/4. Slot count increases as host's strength improves.
Raven smiled. "First a girlfriend," she thought, glancing toward Alara, "and now moble system drone deployment. What's next?"
Yet beneath that satisfaction was something else. A thread of doubt. She didn't believe for a second that her system was responsible for her rebirth. This power, this arrangement it reeked of a deeper conspiracy. The system is a tool. But who is the hand behind it?
Pushing that thought aside, she retrieved the four cores she had just collected and approached Alara. The girl stood obediently, lips parting as Raven came near. Without hesitation, Raven placed each core on her tongue. Alara swallowed them one by one, and each time, Raven felt a subtle flare of warmth through their bond as she grew stronger.
That's when Raven heard them. Footsteps, they sounded untrained but armed. Five men, moving from storefront to storefront, voices low, walking close together. She knelt beside a corpse and started pretending to loot them. Her drones locked onto them from above. The raider squad stepped into her view.
Blood-red leather coats, red pants, boots. It was almost cartoonish. "The Red Blood Raiders," Raven thought. "Always with the themed colored clothing."
She gave them a flat look, then glanced down at her own clothes—a short T-shirt showing off her midriff stomach and shorts that hugged her athletic legs. "What? It's humid," she thought dryly. "And honestly, I'm not even human anymore."
Her strength and reflexes now exceeded a normal Olympic athlete by a lot. She could bend steel if she tried. These men, they weren't a threat.
The five raiders paused when they saw her and Alara standing among the killed zombies. Their eyes moved between them and the surrounding corpses. They saw two women, alone, unguarded. They didn't see the drones above, quietly wating for them.
One of them said, "They must have been ditched by their scavenger crew. Looks like they just froze up when shit hit the fan."
Another one chuckled, gesturing with his weapon. "Let's go say hi. Maybe they will be grateful we came along."
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