The heavy mahogany door shattered inward under the force of my boot, splintering against the stone frame of the high-ceilinged corridor.
The air in the hallway was already thick with the heavy, metallic stench of fresh blood, scorched mana, and the acrid ozone of ruined administrative wards. It was a narrow, oppressive choke point connecting the Governor's suite to the records bureaus and staff quarters. A few paces ahead, a low, wet tearing sound echoed against the polished marble floor.
One of Chris's senior administrative clerks was kneeling over the lifeless body of a guard, his suit shredded, his fingers caked in dark burgundy. Because his initial psychological trauma at the moment of exposure had been relatively mild… a brief, panicked realization before his mind succumbed… his body had not sprouted the grotesque skeletal armor or protruding bone blades seen in the more extreme thralls. He was simply a hollowed-out shell, reduced to pure, primal hunger, blindly tearing into the flesh beneath him.
He didn't even turn toward the thunderous crash of the door. The virus had entirely hijacked his cognitive functions, tuning out sound and sight in favor of raw, instinctual consumption.
Bracing the heavy frame of the Death Chant shotgun against my ribs, I adjusted my grip with my non-dominant left hand and leveled the dark barrel directly at the back of the clerk's head.
Chris gasped behind me, his raspy voice tight with desperate plea as he clutched his bound, thrashing daughter securely against his broad chest. He stared at the clerk, his single eye wide with agonizing conflict.
"Eirene, wait! I... I know him! That's the clerk from the trade registry! Eirene, you said it yourself… they're still living humans under there! Their hearts are beating! Can't you just bind him like you did with Lukreia? Lock him up until the Bureau gets here?! They'll bring grand mages, alchemists... they'll find a way to break the infection!"
Chris's naive empathy was a human luxury I could no longer afford.
My tactical mind instantly systematically shredded his idealistic logic. Could I theoretically use my blood manipulation to bind and suppress every host we encountered?
Technically, yes.
But my blood manipulation drew directly from my own circulatory system. To cast fluid blood bings, solidify crimson handcuffs, and forge suppression gags for even a fraction of this city's fifty-thousand-strong population would drain me bone-dry in minutes. I would faint from catastrophic anemia before we even cleared the Town Hall lobby.
What about my vampiric traits?
The thought flickered dark and cold through my mind. I possessed an innate Mana-to-Blood Conversion technique, and my vampiric lifesteal usually allowed me to siphon vitality and mana directly from living prey through my fangs. If I drank from the infected, I could theoretically generate an infinite pool of blood to suppress the entire city without ever running dry.
It was a suicidal fantasy.
The virus was explicitly bloodborne. The second infected blood touched my throat or entered my digestive tract, the living pathogen would bypass my poison immunity, hijack my vascular system, and turn me into the very bone-armored nightmare I was fighting to avoid. My right arm was already a bandaged, severed stump because I had been forced to hack it off when the pathogen touched my open flesh in the valley. Drinking infected blood wasn't a strategy… it was a fast track to absolute self-destruction.
And physical rope? Iron chains? A thrall driven by an unending surge of adrenaline would snap standard ropes, tear their own tendons, and splinter their own bones until they tore free.
There was no middle ground. No diplomatic solution. No gray area left in the abyss.
I didn't waste breath explaining the intricate biological hazards of blood manipulation or viral transmission to Chris. He was a father desperate to believe the world wasn't burning down around him. I didn't need him to understand the math; I needed him to follow me.
"I'll kill anyone who gets in my way,"
It wasn't a threat, nor was it an edgy display of cruelty. It was the simple, absolute binary rule of my survival. In the abyss of bounty hunting, pausing to debate the humanity of a threat meant dying on the floor alongside them.
There were only two categories of people left in my world: those who helped me move forward, and obstacles that needed to be erased.
BOOM!
I pulled the heavy trigger.
The Death Chant Shotgun roared, flashing a blinding flare of red-and-gold fire down the narrow hallway. The heavy blast of enchanted lead caught the clerk square in the torso, the kinetic force blowing his body backward into the far wall in a spray of dark, corrupted fluid.
As the violent impact registered, the weapon's physical lifesteal enchantment snapped into effect. A faint, crimson aura surged backward from the kill, rushing along the barrel and sinking directly into my body. The dark, necrotic magic sought out my open wounds, hungrily mending torn muscle and cauterizing exposed blood vessels.
A sharp, searing heat washed over the right side of my torso. Underneath the tight, blood-stained bandages at my shoulder, the jagged, mangled flesh where my right arm had been severed began to knit together with unnatural speed. The ragged skin sealed itself smooth, rounding out into a clean, fully healed stump.
Because the lifesteal effect was strictly physical, it regenerated organic tissue and closed my life-threatening wounds, but it restored not a single drop of my exhausted mana reserves. My magical pool remained drained, cold and empty, reliant solely on the natural, slow recovery of my blood.
The smoke cleared from the hallway, leaving a heavy bang punctuated only by the distant, chaotic screams from the lower floors. I racked the shotgun with my knee, sending a steaming brass shell clinking against the blood-stained floorboards.
CLACK-CLACK.
"Keep moving, Chris, the front doors aren't going to clear themselves."
Almost immediately, the heavy, chaotic thud of dozen fast-moving boots… and the sickening, wet dragging of unnatural limbs… began charging up the grand central stairwell.
We were currently on the third floor of the Town Hall. It was a massive, sprawling level… roughly six hundred and fifty square meters of polished hardwood, vaulted ceilings, and interconnecting bureaucratic chambers.
The layout was eerily familiar to me, sharing the exact architectural footprint of the ancient Bremen Old Town Hall from back on Earth before I was reincarnated into this godforsaken world. Long, narrow side-corridors opening into grand administrative reception halls. A perfect kill-zone if you held the choke points... and a death trap if you got flanked.
"Let's go, there's a horde coming up the main stairs."
In my head, calling these thralls "monsters" felt too detached, and "thralls" sounded too high-fantasy. In my mind, I silently referred to them by that old Earth word:
Zombies.
Relentless, violent, living bodies hijacked by a dead mind.
Before we could take three steps toward the main staircase, the heavy oak doors at the end of the narrow corridor burst off their hinges.
Out lunged a heavily mutated zombie… a former guard whose psychological collapse during infection must have been pure, terrifying trauma.
Grotesque, pale bone spikes had ruptured through his chest, leaving his ribcage exposed like a jagged, blood-soaked bear trap, while his entire right forearm had elongated into a brutal, razor-sharp bone blade identical to Lukreia's.
"RAAGHH!" the zombie shrieked, its dilated eyes locked onto my throat as it lunged across the narrow hallway with unnatural, adrenaline-fueled speed.
I didn't hesitate. I raised the Death Chant Shotgun, also known as my means of communication. with my non-dominant left hand, braced the stock against my chest, and pulled the trigger point-blank.
BOOM!
The heavy blast tore through the thrall's midsection, shredding its exposed skeletal chest and blasting its mutated body backward. A violent spray of infected, dark crimson blood detonated across the stone walls and floor.
"Watch the blood! Don't let a drop hit your eyes or open skin, or you're done!" I barked, grabbing Chris by the shoulder of his jacket with my left hand to yank him back before a single flying droplet could touch his open skin.
Sensing the oncoming horde flooding up the central stairs, I shoved open the heavy double doors leading out of the narrow administrative corridor, leading Chris and his bound, snarling daughter out into the relative breathing room of the third-floor grand gallery.
It's showtime you motherfuckers.