Chapter 69

Breathing heavily, Daniel checked everything was in place. They were standing on the stairwell that exited into level twenty-one. Just himself, Zac, and Ivey.

“How secure are these doors?” Ivey asked.

“Good enough.”

She nodded. “Do you remember the plan?” He nodded. “Zac?”

The boy startled. “I scream then run.”

“Yes.” Ivey knelt down next to him. “We can’t do this without you. You are being very brave.”

If only she did not have her internal hangups, Daniel thought to himself while looking at Ivey. She was fierce in all the right ways. He had confided his dark thoughts to her, and rather than taking the easy path, she had fought for them, and unlike some of the useless men and women upstairs, she actually understood how precarious their situation really was.

It was simple to claim the intellectual high ground and reject confronting notions, but she had not done that. Instead, she had acted, and remembering Ivey standing there in front of all the survivors and railroading them still gave Daniel chills.

“Yes, that is all you have to do,” she continued kindly. “Open the door, yell, and run, and then Priscilla will turn on the traps on after you have run past. Keep going all the way to us and they will follow you right up to us and we’ll kill them.”

“I can do that.”

“You are so brave to volunteer to be first.”

Zac grinned.

“Remember count to sixty. Then open, scream loudly, then run.”

“Ready?”

The boy nodded and stood there.

They strolled away from him. “He is going to count fast,” Ivey told him. “The moment we are out of sight, we sprint.”

Ivey took off, and Daniel followed her. They burst out on level twenty-four. Ivey ran behind the archers, and he positioned a bit off to the side. Once he was in place, he engaged the conduit he had placed to let him trigger the traps from safety.

An image came to him. They were already on the stairs, and Zac was gone. Hairs on the back of his neck raised. There was blood on one of claws of the leading monster. Not a lot, but the kids were not supposed to get hurt. At least Carly was up there to heal him in the event the wound was larger than the scratch the tiny flecks of blood suggested.

“Yell.”

The group of them started yelling to get attention while his mind switched to activating traps.

Via the open stairwell, and despite the noise they were making, they could hear roaring and the familiar cracking sounds of his traps triggering all over the place. Meticulously, he kept turning on traps, enabling them before the zombies reached them.

The cacophony got closer, but clear screams of pain were mixed in with what he was hearing. Two ferals burst through the doorway.

Twang! Twang! Twang!

One went down with half of its head gone and another arrow through its neck. The other stumbled backwards like it had been hit with a mace and promptly stepped on a pressure plate trap.

Crack.

Its leg got severed just below the knee.

Twang! Twang!

An arrow sprouted in its heart and another in its eyes. It fell like its companion. An image of the stairwell reached him. Broken, shattered bodies filled them. Sounds of pain of pain continued to float upwards, but nothing emerged.

Priscilla swept down the stairwell. There were at least five still alive. They were all so mangled he could not imagine them surviving, but given how healing worked in this new world, even a single beat of life might be enough for them to revitalize. As the mouse sped downwards, he attempted to count the dead, but she was too quick. The answer was a lot.

More had rushed the stairs than he had expected, but the traps had performed incredibly, dicing, crushing, and killing. The real question was how many were still alive and uninjured. Only a few Daniel was sure, but a single elite could be problematic.

Priscilla had reached level twenty-one and was searching, and while she looked Daniel sealed off the stairwell and let his magic deactivate all the traps now that they no longer needed to be used. At a minimum, he needed to go down and execute the survivors before the Alpha magic pieced them back together and turned them back into a threat. He did not want to step on a live trap accidentally.

They were safe.

Priscilla sent him a view of two elites that had not charged the stairs. Only two! Using Zac as bait had clearly riled them up far better than he predicted. Daniel’s heart thumped. Please let the boy be okay, he prayed internally, remembering the blood. It had supposed to be risk free, but the system had not worked as they had expected, and maybe Jayden was right. Maybe using them as bait was a step too quickly.

“What is happening?” Ivey asked

“Zac got hurt. Otherwise success,” he answered simply. From the stairwell, they could hear the sounds of pained agony. “But we still need to put a couple of them down.” His mind rushed back down the conduit, checking everything was deactivated. They were, but traps could malfunction.

“Two elites alive and uninjured on level twenty-one. I have sealed them off. Multiple elites injured in the stairwell. I am going first. Everyone else watch your step,” he ordered and then, following his own advice, stalked through the traps, careful to avoid stepping on them.

They were incredibly obvious, as he had given up on trying to camouflage them. Observing the zombies told him that most of them no longer had the mental capacity to understand what a trap was. Some would, but those noticed the hidden traps as well. Put those suppositions together with malfunctioning traps and hiding them was just not worthwhile. The smart ones would get through anyway, and they had, and then the archers had blown them to bits. Having that extra firepower made these fights safer.

Daniel reached the stairwell, and with a Tamara-created light globe attached, looked down it. It was gross. It was like a crazed artist had scattered red paint and maimed mannequins throughout. It smelt of the tang of copper, faeces, a disgusting animal musk, and death. Behind him, Ivey gagged.

Two steps below, a zombie groaned. It had triggered multiple traps. Spikes of wood protruded from it, and its thigh and been cut open to the bone with a bear trap that had closed over its shoulder, but it lived. Tough and strong and given their intended tactics, Priscilla had not mapped out all the opposing abilities and features. Whatever this thing possessed it had kept it alive through injuries that should have comfortably finished it.

Blood Drinker swelled in excitement. Daniel could see the swing that the club wanted him to do. Double handed, right down onto its upturned nose with an infusion of strength. It was a guided course without compulsion. Daniel matched the movements it was showing, triggering strength half way through the strike and feeling his muscles change ever so slightly. The weapon distorted.

Clunk.

It sank right into the skull, and then Daniel left it there. He could feel it drawing in the blood and using it to get stronger. While it drank, he leant down and used a scrap of wood from one of the pressure traps to crack open the thing’s chest and grab the core. While he did not want to open up more skills, if it gave healing, then he wanted it.

One mutated feral, two mutated ferals, Daniel counted in his head. Three. . . . The club had drunk enough, so he pulled it out. The wood looked shiny and new, with not a single bit of organic matter on it. He wished he could do that with his clothes.

Stepping down, the squelch of blood. There was no way of avoiding it. The stuff was everywhere.

Splat.

Whatever he had stepped on was spongy. Some type of dislodged organ, but he really did not want to think about it. He was definitely going to need to find water to give himself a decent scrubbing.

“Watch your step,” he warned once more. “It is slippery.” When he talked, he could taste the air, swallowing to dislodge the taste, but it did nothing. A flood of saliva only seemed to concentrate all that the unpleasantness.

The next creature was clearly dying, split almost in two. Daniel smacked its already-shattered skull and left the club there for a moment.

There was a throb of thanks.

He kept moving, executing another five with two of them requiring a strength boost. Daniel did not argue, cooperating with the club’s request, and it did the job. Each one took only a single swing, and that brief flash of strength did not deplete his resources.

Finally, he reached the door to the twenty-first. When he looked back, only Tamara was behind him, everyone else having decided not to brave the mess. Her light globe provided him the visibility to let him navigate safely. A hand was over her mouth and nose. He wished he had been able to do the same.

Daniel placed his palm against the door and focused on reinforcing it, then finished with a ward on it that would warn him if the door was damaged. Priscilla independently offered to keep a watch and give him extra warning if they looked like coming. His reinforcement had the the wood growing into the walls, roots making their way through the hollow bricks that the walls were constructed from. After that with an eye on mana limited but carefully placed spikes popped out on the other side. Nothing was getting through the door.

Part of him thought they should finish it straight away and save the trapped people, but they would be fine. After all, there were only two zombies left and Daniel was sure they could focus them down risk free if the ferals were stupid enough to attack them.

He turned to face Tamara. “I need to check on Zac,” he told her while his chest thundered.

Nightmare scenarios flashed in his mind. Tamara nodded, and then they hurried back up the stairs away from the slaughterhouse.

‎