Danny slowly relaxed the tight grip on his hammer as he realized that he had won the fight. Sighing softly as he straightened his back and rotated his tense shoulders.

‘It is finally over…’

The whole battle only took a few minutes, but the adrenaline and tension he had coursing his body during the endeavor made him feel like it had taken a much longer time for it to be finally over.

Danny flexed his muscles and joints a few times, only now taking notice of his wounds from the battle. There were not too many injuries on his body however. Just some scrapes and bruises here and there, nothing that would hamper him going forward.

Though his armor was good, it was not an absolute protection after all. It could only do so much. He knew there would be a price to be paid before he had thrown himself into that melee fight. A few injuries were to be expected.

Even so, he was very satisfied with the results of his battle.

Danny had managed to deal with most if not all zombies on the second floor of the building, and for that, he only sported a few minor wounds. A trifling price to pay in his opinion. He would gladly pay it over and over again if he could rewind time.

Apparently, the majority of the horde waiting downstairs had not come after him even after all the ruckus he had caused as well, so he could hardly complain. Things had gone quite well for him.

Looking around, Danny examined the mess he had left behind in the once pristine room.

‘It looks like there were around thirty zombies roaming the floor. And I killed them all… damn.’ Danny thought while admiring the piles of bodies that surrounded him, completely unbothered by the iron smell that permeated the air from all the blood spilt.

At the final stages of the battle there was almost no room for him to dodge or move around, so many were the bodies that covered the floor. While barely moving, he had to make split-second decisions on how to receive the enemies that tumbled their way forward and lunged at him.

It had not been easy and it was truly nerve-wracking.

Even if he did not realize this at the moment, the experience he had gotten during this fight and the proficiency he acquired on handling waves of enemies would go a long way in paving his path of martial skill. In establishing his own fighting style in the future.

For now, however, he was content to simply get out of the messy room alive and well. With all his limbs accounted for.

Danny pushed a corpse aside to free his bag that now had some bloody stains on it, recovering it before making his way out of the room, tripping and tumbling with every unsteady step. The pooled fluids and dropped bodies making it difficult to find firm footing.

Fortunately, there were no more enemies to take advantage of his wobbly gait as he got out of the room. He had made sure of that during the melee.

As soon as he got back out into the corridor proper, Danny looked left and right, searching for any possible, even if unlikely, stragglers that had failed to get to the room and to the fight in time. However, his expectations had not been off, and there were no zombies in sight.

It truly seemed that he had completely cleared off the floor.

Of course, there might still be a few trapped undead in the enclosed rooms, but every other enemy that prowled that level of the building, every single one that was free to move around, seemed to have been permanently dealt with.

Also, Danny did not know what he had to thank for the non-involvement of the rest of the horde downstairs. Whether it was the rain that helped to cover him, or if it was his plan to limit the fight to the room to prevent the spread of noise as best as he could, or even if it was somewhat a combination of both factors, he was glad nonetheless.

He really was not looking forward having to climb the building’s exterior to get out of a thorny situation, so in either case, he was happy that things worked in his favor.

Danny rapidly cleaned his gear, hammer and bag to the best of his ability once he noticed there was no immediate threat waiting for him. Swiftly scrubbing the blood off with a rag he grabbed somewhere.

Even so, Danny was far from spotless after his shoddy attempt of ridding himself from all the blood and viscera that had covered him not too long ago, but at least he would not be dripping all over the place or have to worry about the grip on his weapon slipping due to the wetness.

Strapping his bag to his back again, Danny resumed his exploration of the area.

The second floor was apparently slightly different compared to the third one. Though the rooms seemed to be positioned roughly in the same places, following the same layout of the previous floor somewhat, it was clear that this level had served a different purpose to the factory than the bureaucratic or administrative one of the higher floor.

While the furniture had been moved around much like in the third floor by the previous residents of the survivor camp to suit their needs, Danny guessed from scattered objects, markings on the walls and other various clues that the employees that used to work on the factory performed quality checks and other inspections on this floor of the products made at the factory.

Whereas his guess was right or if it was completely off did not really matter in any case. What did matter was that Danny found in some of the opened rooms piles and piles of canned goods. A veritable treasure trove of food.

With just the amount he discovered in those rooms, the food problems of Hank’s encampment could be alleviated by quite a bit. It appeared that the former survivors that lived here had used some of the rooms of the second floor as food storages. They had brought a lot of goods to those rooms, though Danny doubted that this was all that the factory had to offer in terms of food.

When he scouted the area from the distance, Danny had spotted what looked like a storage warehouse. He did not have a shred of doubt in his mind that there was where he would find the lion’s share of the goods available at the factory compound.

Though impressive, the piles of food that now stood before him would be a mere pittance compared to what he would undoubtedly find there.

‘Why did the survivors who inhabited this place decided to create a separate stash of food on this floor?’ Danny wondered while scratching his chin.

However, it was unlikely that he would find out the reason behind it. There was no one left alive to alleviate his curiosity after all, so his questions would most likely remain unanswered.

Pushing the subject to the back of his mind, Danny kept exploring the deserted floor.

Firs he went over each one of the opened rooms. He had to make sure that there really were not any enemies left behind that failed to join the previous fight for whatever reason.

Leaving any zombie free to roam around the floor unchecked was pretty much the same as asking to be ambushed after all.

It was good that he did so as well, since he did find a single zombie in the farthest corridor from the room where the melee happened. The creature stood there, fixedly staring at a window to the outside at the end of the corridor without a single care in the world. Just as if it was content in simply waiting there contemplating its existential state of being.

Of course, Danny knew it was impossible for the undead to contemplate such philosophical questions. Even if it could, Danny did not care either way, and with a single swing, he killed it without any trouble.

Following that, Danny gathered a few objects lying around in the rooms and corridors and started remaking the barricade that the survivors had built on the second floor.

Though it had been toppled by the waves of undead that stormed the floor, its foundation was still there. He could make use of it to quickly erect a barrier similar to the one he had left on the third floor.

The closed rooms in the second floor could wait. The zombies waiting in them would not be going anywhere. It was much more worthwhile to spend his time bolstering his defenses against any random undead attacks that might come from down below for whatever reason than it was to make sure that every single room was empty of zombies.

The potential danger from the waiting horde downstairs was way higher than a few trapped zombies after all.

Sadly, the only rope that he had brought with him had already been used on the floor above, so this barricade turned out to be much less sturdy than the former one, but it would still help if push comes to shove in any case.

With it, Danny had two lines of defense instead of one to retreat to if circumstances demanded him to.

Afterwards, he started going over the closed rooms. Though he had postponed the job, it was still important to make sure there were no threats to his back. Even if it was unlikely that any undead trapped in them would manage to burst through the doors or windows if it had not done so until now.

First, he started by clearing the rooms which had windows to the corridors. It was easier to deal with those, given that he knew what to expect inside them from a quick peek through the gaps of the blinders that seemed to be present in every single window of the place.

‘Blinders huh? Who would expect them to be so effective in trapping zombies inside the rooms…’

Though Danny came across many broken windows during his exploration, it seemed that not many zombies had succeeded in getting out of their entrapments as the disposition of glass pieces and apparent damaged blinders revealed.

Somehow, the dumb creatures would get caught by the blinders if they tried to get out through the windows, like fishes trapped in a net.

Of course, Danny had no doubt that the flimsy looking blinders would not hold out for long if the zombies were truly committed to getting out, but the dumb undead seemed to usually lose interest way sooner than the objects gave out, making them an unexpectedly effective tool in keeping them inside.

‘I would never have guessed…’ Danny thought taking one last look to one of the few dented and battered blinders that he had come across, which indicated that a zombie waited for him inside the room, before turning the doorknob and facing the sole undead vandal that remained in there, swiftly dispatching it soon after.

In this fashion Danny methodically cleared the area. He inspected room by room and killed any zombies he came across to make sure that nothing that could threaten him remained alive at the floor.

After he finished the easier rooms which had windows to the corridors, he started going through the ones that had none.

Though he could not peek inside them beforehand, those rooms did not prove to be much of a challenge either, as just a few undead could hardly be called an obstacle to him by this point. Individual or small groups of zombies were at most a simple annoyance by now.

The undead only revealed themselves as a dangerous opponent to him when added together. Though dumb, one could not underestimate the lethality of the creatures when in large numbers.

His exploration and clearing of the floor continued like this. Without too much suspense. However, in one of the last few rooms remaining, Danny came across an unexpected surprise.

He had found a survivor alive.