Michonne's appearance and that stunning strike made even Merle glance at her a few more times. He muttered under his breath, "That badass chick... damn, she's something else."
Calista wiped the specks of blood from her face, swept her gaze across the battlefield, and finally settled on Michonne with a complicated look.
This "blade" was even sharper than she had imagined.
The team began finishing off the raiders on the ground who had lost the ability to fight.
Just as the cleanup was almost over, something unexpected happened.
A raider lying on the ground, his thigh pierced through by Leah, watched his companions fall one after another. Madness and despair flashed in his eyes.
He struggled to crawl toward a nearby raider sedan, then used the last of his strength to twist the key still stuck in the ignition.
"Vroom. Roar!"
The sedan's engine actually started.
He laughed wildly, jerked the steering wheel, and slammed the gas pedal to the floor.
Like a horse breaking free of its reins, the car went berserk and smashed straight into Michonne's pickup parked by the roadside.
"Crash!"
A violent impact rang out.
The pickup shook hard, and the panels of the bed twisted out of shape.
As for Michonne's two walker "pets," chained in the back, the enormous force snapped the chains holding them down.
They were flung out like rag dolls and slammed heavily onto the ground.
The raider driving the car did not seem satisfied. Or maybe he knew he could not escape and was simply venting his madness.
He struggled out of the crumpled sedan with a machete in his hand, then staggered toward the two walkers writhing uselessly on the ground, unable to get up.
"Shit! Monsters! Die! All of you, die!" he roared, raising the machete and hacking down hard at one walker's head.
"Splurt!"
Black blood and brain matter sprayed out.
Then he turned to the other one and struck it down the same way.
It all happened too fast. Too fast for anyone to react.
When Michonne turned around, what she saw was the scene that made her heart stop.
The "companions" she had guarded for who knew how long had been completely "dealt with" right in front of her, by a crazed raider in the crudest way possible.
Michonne's body went rigid.
The knuckles of the hand gripping her katana gave a faint crack from the force, draining instantly of all color.
Overwhelming rage gathered wildly in her eyes.
Michonne made no sound, but the killing intent pouring from her body thickened tenfold in an instant.
It was as if even the air around her had turned heavy and cold.
Michonne moved.
The katana in her hand cut through the air with a sharp hiss.
There were no complex techniques. No wasted movements.
Only the purest, most extreme urge to kill.
The raider who had just hacked down the walkers was still laughing like a madman. He seemed to hear the sound of air being split behind him.
He turned back and saw a pair of eyes more terrifying than any walker's.
The blade flashed.
The raider's wild laughter stopped abruptly.
His body froze in place. Then a thin line of blood appeared from his forehead down to his crotch.
The next second, his body slowly split apart along that line, and his organs and blood spilled all over the ground.
But it was not over.
Michonne seemed to have fallen into some kind of frenzy.
She swung the katana like someone possessed, hacking, slashing, cutting, and chopping at the raider's corpse, which had already been split in two.
"Clang! Clang! Clang! Crack! Clatter!"
The sound of bones shattering. The sound of flesh being torn apart.
Michonne's movements were vicious, carrying a rage that seemed ready to destroy the world, as if she wanted to tear everything in front of her to pieces.
Everyone stopped what they were doing, staring in shock at the terrifying scene.
Even the Rock Fortress team members, who had seen plenty of blood, felt chills run down their backs.
Calista watched quietly. She did not stop her, nor did she approach.
Right now, Michonne needed this release.
The death of those two walkers had severed more than two chains. It had also cut through some stubborn emotional anchor buried deep inside Michonne.
When Michonne finally stopped, leaning on her katana and breathing lightly, the area around her was already a wreck, like a slaughterhouse that had been ravaged.
Her dark clothes were splattered with blood, and dots of it marked her face as well.
Michonne slowly raised her head, and those eyes turned back to Calista. The rage inside them seemed to have faded somewhat, replaced by a hollow emptiness that was almost nothing at all.
Calista knew the turning point she had been waiting for had arrived.
After the battle, the gas station was filled with a sickening stench of blood.
The raiders' bodies lay scattered across the ground in all kinds of ugly deaths.
The Rock Fortress team silently cleared the battlefield, collecting usable weapons and ammunition, checking the damage to the vehicles, and dragging the raiders' bodies farther away to deal with them together, so they would not draw more walkers or other trouble.
Amid the mess, Michonne stood alone.
She stood beside her wrecked pickup, head lowered, her gaze fixed on the two bodies lying motionless near the edge of the bed.
At that moment, they were only two truly ugly, broken corpses.
The last light of sunset stretched Michonne's shadow long, outlining the tense line of her back, as if she were the only person left in the world.
Calista waved for the others to keep working, then slowly walked over.
She stopped beside Michonne, not too close, and did not speak right away. She simply followed Michonne's gaze to look at the two walkers, then raised her head toward the distant horizon stained orange-red.
A long while passed, until even the smell of blood in the air seemed to thin a little under the evening wind.
Only then did Calista speak softly. Her voice was calm, with no pity in it, only the coolness of stating a fact.
"In a way, they protected you, didn't they?"
She meant the role those two walkers had played as her warning setup.
Michonne's body stiffened slightly, as if the words had struck some hidden corner of her heart.
She did not nod, nor did she deny it. She only remained silent, though the fingers gripping the hilt of her katana turned even whiter at the joints.
A few more seconds passed. Just as Calista thought she would continue staying silent, an extremely hoarse, dry voice, like it had not been used properly in a long time, forced its way out of Michonne's throat.
"They... were my husband and... his friend."
Those words stirred a trace of pain in her hollow eyes.
Michonne paused, then spoke the even heavier words that followed, her voice numb.
"When the disaster broke out, they turned into those things... and ate my child."
She did not look at Calista. Her eyes stayed fixed on the two corpses, as if she were looking through them at that bloody, hopeless past.