As soon as Tim exited the operation theater, Tim felt an extremely ugly odour permeating the air due to which, he immediately covered his nose with his free left hand. After he made sure that the nauseating stench no longer entered his nose or his mouth, he began running forward.

Tim had ran without facing any trouble for a good 10-15 seconds and was about to reach one end of the hospital which was very close to the entrance of the hospital when suddenly something hard hit Tim on his left hand due to which he was forcefully thrown into the air.

He flew for a good 1 or 2 meters before finally crashing into the hospital building. This was the situation in which Tim’s makeshift protection on his neck and abdomen truly payed off. Although, Tim suspected the left hand, which had taken the full force of the attack to be broken and some minor injuries he took from crashing into the building, there wasn’t any fatal injury.

Tim then looked in the direction from which he received the attack only to find that a grey ferocious looking cat which was as almost as large as a fully grown tiger, blood dripping from it’s mouth was looking at Tim with bloodshot eyes filled with incomparable killing intent.

Tim stood up despite the injury on his arm because he knew that lying there and doing nothing would get him killed. He then heightened all his senses to the maximum amount and fixated his eyes and attention towards the mutant cat.

As soon as Tim stood up, the mutant cat started running towards him with a speed which was incomparable to any human or cat that he had seen before.

Thankfully, Tim’s reaction was increased due to his unique skill as he immediately jumped out of the way of the pounce of the cat. Even though he had used all the force in his legs, he couldn’t completely evade the attack of the mutant as it was extremely fast. He sustained claw wounds on his left while blood dripped from the wound and stained the sleeve of his shirt.

Tim felt pain like never before as he howled out aloud in pain however, fate wasn’t so good willed to allow him stop yet. Gritting his teeth, Tim bit his lip as hard as he could so that at least he could counter the attacks of the mutant cat.

‘Shit, shit, shit, what should I do? At this rate, I’d definitely die. Think Tim, think, there must be something that you could use to counter this cat.’ Tim was cursing in his mind when he had an epiphany.

The cat was, by now, running towards Tim again however, this time instead of running away, side stepping or trying to evade Tim also ran towards the cat at full speed. If anyone saw a person running towards a tiger like beast, they would definitely assume that he is a lunatic however, Tim had something even greater going on in his mind.

As soon as both the cat and Tim closed in on each other, Tim immediately screamed out “Slash” with a hint of pride and gave a disparaging look to the cat thinking that this move would surely kill the cat.

However, the cat was very agile as it quickly sidestepped out of the range the attack and jumped to the side thereby easily evading it.

‘Damn! I thought that this would be a sure kill move but to think that it didn’t even faze the cat and it was 3 of my precious stamina points due to which I’m feeling fatigued already. Looks like this cat is on a much higher level than me and probably, I was a bit too optimistic to think that a common skill would kill a mutant cat that could easily decimate a horde of zombies. I’ve got to think of something and fast because the longer the battle drags out, the lower my chances become of surviving. I only have the stamina to use the skill again once or twice without risking to face the consequences of stamina exhaustion.’

Just as he was pondering about his next move the cat started dashing towards him when he suddenly had a flash of inspiration.

This time, when the cat pounded at him, instead of side stepping or evading, Tim simple slid underneath the pounding mutant cat.

When Tim was just below the abdomen of the mutant cat, he immediately activated his skill ‘slash’. He was definitely hoping to kill the cat this time because, however strong a beast may be, it can’t survive an attack to it’s abdomen…. Well, al least that’s what Tim thought because of the study he had done in medical sciences before the apocalypse.

However, what Tim didn’t knew was that this world wasn’t his normal everyday world that would follow every law of science and opposite to his expectation, his slash wasn’t able to penetrate through the rock hard hide of the mutant cat. Instead of dying or even getting it’s stomach and entrails hurt, what it did receive was a minor wound on it’s stomach.

‘No, no, no, don’t shit with me destiny! Are you kidding me? That was a direct slash to the abdomen with an 75% increase in my slash power where my normal slashes were easily able to decapitate those normal zombies?’

The cat got up again, however this time something had changed- not it’s body posture, not it’s HP and neither it’s stomach which was almost unharmed, however what had changed were it’s eyes which were filled with unprecedented anger and killing intent while looking down on the lowly human that had caused it to suffer an injury.

Seeing the rage filled eyes of the mutant cat, only one thought came to Tim’s mind’

“I’m f***ed.”

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Author's Note: Please follow, favourite, rate and review as it means very much to me and is the only thing that helps me keep going. And yeah, I'm eventually trying to increase the word count of the chapters. Please feel free to point out any mistakes I've made in the comments.