OPTC Chapter 191. Gently Awaken the Sleeping Soul
The three-headed dog was rejected because it was too ugly, and Zhang Da Ye's idea of using it as a mount was scrapped.
"Fine, we won't ride it. It really is pretty ugly, and it smells terrible too. Who knows how long it's been since this thing had a bath," Zhang Da Ye muttered, wondering if he should just feed it a bag of salt.
"I'll handle it. Didn't we agree not to draw too much attention?" Ye Yan said as he walked up to the three-headed dog. He pointed behind it. "Look over there! Tasty dog food!"
"Woof?" The gullible beast immediately turned its heads. Even the fox head, after spending too much time with the dog heads, gave in to temptation and looked back.
Ye Yan instantly leapt up, hammer in hand, and tapped each of the three heads once. "One-hour triple strike!"
The poor Cerberus swayed, then all three heads drooped, tongues lolling as it fainted.
The timed hammer was a watchman's signature skill—he could decide exactly how long someone stayed knocked out. From a five-second knock to an hour-long sleep, all possible. If he wanted someone unconscious for a whole day, he just needed to stack twenty-four consecutive hour-strikes.
Not knowing how the dog's three heads would be counted, Ye Yan smacked each one for safety.
Zhang Da Ye nudged the unconscious beast with his foot. "An hour's not very reliable. Better give it a few more."
"One-hour hammer, ten-strike combo!" Ye Yan's arm blurred, striking each head ten times in rapid succession. His practiced motion proved once again—he was born to bang gongs.
With the Cerberus knocked out cold, the group followed the trench for a while and came across a staircase leading up. Nobody knew what the designers had been thinking. Was the idea to kill intruders with the fall and then come down later via the stairs to clean up the bodies?
Reaching the ground above, their vision widened slightly. Though the fog was still thick, visibility was much better than out at sea.
They only needed to cross an open field and a forest to reach Moria's castle.
But this "field" wasn't ordinary at all. It was a graveyard. Black gravestones of every shape—rectangles, crosses, and more—were planted in the earth, making the place look like a level straight out of some game.
As they drew closer, Zhang Da Ye muttered under his breath, "A huge wave of zombies is approaching."
The others stayed calm. After all, knowing the true nature of these zombies made them far less frightening.
But Tom was still terrified. In one paw he carried a bag of salt, in the other a braid of garlic. A cross dangled from his chest, and he kept chanting the exorcism verse his master had taught him: "Evil spirits begone, evil spirits begone…"
Crack! A bony hand broke through the soil, clutching at the air before pulling itself out. Soon a dry, twisted head followed, then a torso, then legs.
The zombie's clothes were in tatters. Its face twisted into a grotesque expression, moving stiffly and deliberately, trying hard to play up the horror.
Everyone watched silently, letting it act out its little performance. Only Tom panicked, hurling his garlic, salt, and cross at the creature.
But that wasn't all—Tom kept throwing more. Billiard balls, tennis balls, bowling balls, cigars, a fishbowl, an iron, a pistol, a sledgehammer, a hatchet—everything came raining down on the zombie, piling into a mountain that buried it completely.
Tom only stopped when he was exhausted from throwing.
Ye Yan, still unaccustomed to Tom's bizarre antics, gaped. "Where do you even keep all that stuff? Some kind of storage dimension?"
Tom spread his paws and shook his head, as if to say, "No idea what you're talking about."
From beneath the pile, the zombie suddenly burst out, furious. "Stop throwing things at me, damn it! Show some respect for a zombie who worked so hard to crawl out of the ground! I'm supposed to be terrifying!"
The zombies Moria created feared salt, but only if it was stuffed into their mouths. Since Tom's bag of salt had just bounced off its head, this one was fine.
Zhang Da Ye, holding the trembling Tom in his arms, said casually, "Oh. Well then, go on."
"Go on, my ass!" the zombie shouted, tossing away the cigar that had somehow ended up in its mouth. "Come out, everyone! Let's show them real terror!"
Apparently the leader of this little zombie squad, it had hoped to scare some intruders for fun, only to become the butt of the joke. Humiliated, it called its underlings.
One after another, zombies clawed their way out of the ground, surrounding the group.
But Zhang Da Ye wasn't about to play fair. Before they had even finished crawling out, he grabbed the hammer Tom had thrown earlier and began whacking heads like it was a game of whack-a-mole.
"Gently awaken the sleeping soul…" Bong, bong, bong. Each strike landed perfectly on beat, strangely satisfying.
The cheerful rhythm even drove away Tom's fear. Pulling out a baseball bat, he joined in, whacking heads alongside Zhang Da Ye.
Unlike Zhang Da Ye, Tom picked one head and just kept pounding it nonstop, as long as it stayed up.
The scene quickly turned brutal.
"This is too savage. Let's go after someone else. That fish looks weaker."
"Yeah, we can't mess with the cat, but we can bully the fish."
A few zombies with more brains turned toward Shark Chili—only to see him smack one of their kind dozens of meters away with a single slap.
"Uh… maybe not the fish either."
"Fine, then that woman over there. I like pretty girls."
But as soon as they looked, Artoria swung her sword, unleashing a golden slash that sliced seven or eight zombies clean in half, the kind of cut even Hogback couldn't stitch back together.
"Gulp." Some zombies swallowed hard. They still had intact human throats, so swallowing was one function they hadn't lost.
"Looks like we don't have a choice. That blond kid looks weak enough."
"Yeah, him! There's so many of us, let's gang up and crush him!"
Dozens of zombies turned toward Ye Yan. "Surrender, kid! You're outnumbered!"
"Being outnumbered, huh? That's rare. Usually it's us doing the outnumbering," Ye Yan smirked, waving his hand. Six Flags floated into the air, and the Flag spirits emerged, grinning and cracking their knuckles.
They'd spent days doing nothing but chores and had only ever bullied the pervy skeleton once. They were itching for a real fight. And these soft targets looked perfect for stress relief.
Soon the graveyard was filled with the chorus of zombie screams.
Ten minutes later, the zombies stopped moving.
Not dead—just lying flat.
They had no idea where these people had come from. Even though the zombies had immortal bodies and could get back up over and over, they were still beaten down every time.
And these maniacs didn't even care that zombies couldn't die—they just kept knocking them flat again and again. Did they have some weird hobby?
So the zombies gave up. Lying down was easier, and if something broke, they could just get Hogback to stitch it back together. Maybe even upgrade with some new animal parts.
Tom poked at one zombie's head with his bat, but when it refused to move, he lost interest. Cats only liked things that moved.
Just then, a man carrying a lantern walked out from the forest. Tom perked up immediately—finally, a zombie that moved! He bounded over and smacked the man on the head.
"Ahhh… why hit me? I'm just an old man, badly injured…"
Tom bit his paw in confusion. This one… was human? But he really did look like a zombie.
(End of Chapter)
[Please give powerstones if you're enjoying the story.
500 stones = 1 extra chapter
patreon com/GuessMyName33 for up to 40 chapters ahead]