Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse
Chapter 13: The Eyes of a Tiger, Survivor

Chapter 13: The Eyes of a Tiger, Survivor

Dion began with the path on the left. They were the least numerous.

His hand holding the fireplace poker was suddenly freed as the item disappeared in a strange, brief, and rapidly shrinking red flash.

He did not have the option of leaving behind the zombies that were on this floor. The staircase would immediately lead him down, but it would also lead him to another floor from where he could hear the sounds of zombie groans.

Looking at the way these that he had killed had behaved, moving towards him without him having made too much noise, there had to be more about the way they could sense things that he did not know about.

If Dion made the decision to run down, they would all eventually, from this sixth floor down to the first, chase after him, and he would have a horde trudging for him.

Thus, even despite his wonder at how, from the corpses of zombies that he felled, red, mist-like streams flew out swiftly to sink into his body and sent a euphoric rush through him, he moved forward to kill them.

He leaned his body down, clutching the arm of the closest zombie corpse to himself.

"Aarh!" He roared as he threw the man.

The zombie he had killed had been a student, though not one that he was close with.

But he was an acquaintance in the form of someone he happened to see every so often just because they lived in the same building, sharing the odd greeting or dap.

And with that violent throw, where the corpse grated over the ground, and trails of blood followed it as it bulldozed through the air, he had been reduced to a means towards violence.

With the body flying, Dion had chased after it.

A loud thud and tumble groaned through the floor, two of the zombies taken down by the impact, while three others continued running forwards.

He rushed through the hallway, running faster than he had ever felt his body move, and his bat rose high to smash down upon one of their heads.

He could feel the skull, brain, then its spine shatter within moments, the sensation rattling through his forearms, and his jaws clenched.

Then he kicked it away, not taking any chances with it being near him.

As soon as his foot landed, pivoted, swinging a smash across, breaking against the side of the second one’s face.

Dion hit it so hard that it left the ground and its body was flung, shattering through the glass, the moonlight shimmering through the shards as blood sprawled through the air.

The last one, he had to swiftly dodge.

It had lunged fast, oddly faster than his eyes had seen any of the others move.

His eyes widened, and he felt his already slit, predatory pupils strain.

They flashed with red as his body wrenched one side in its dodge.

Then he had to use only a single hand to swing his retaliation against the back of its head.

With his non-dominant hand, he hadn’t been able to generate enough power to immediately kill it even though he had felt himself break through its skull. It staggered, blood slipping down its back.

And glaring harshly behind it as it, barely affected by an otherwise debilitating injury, snapped itself backwards, blood slobbering down its mouth, swinging a grabbing arm, Dion’s arms had been raised high with the bat clutched tight.

He swung hard, and the impact smashed through his brain and sent it thudding over the ground.

{You have felled a Level 10 Destitute Zombie, harvesting its essences. Your Agility has been nourished.}

Dion was not someone who knew how to fight properly. All that he understood was violence; how to inflict it, how to take it, and the consequences of it.

There had been a time in his life where a lot of insecurity had plagued him, about his desires for the future, about whether his simple self could really change the fate of his family.

During that time, he had made himself an unsavoury part of less-than-ideal relationships for what he had been envisioning for himself since then.

He had made friends of less-than-good people, and did less-than-good things with them, where he learned of violence.

Be that as it may, his violence had never crossed the point where it ended a life, even if he had nearly seen it happen before.

From then on, he had always understood that there was a very thin line between the consequences of it, and while that line seemed so faint and dainty, its depths were unfathomable.

He had never thought that one day, not only would his brief glance into that dark abyss return its gaze back to him in the form of an apocalypse, but he would also take that step forward, leaning his legs into it as he sat over its edge.

By the time that he had killed those zombies, the others had gotten back up behind him.

Along with them, those coming from the other end had drawn closer.

Thus, he once more raced down the other end as he used the fallen corpse of one to push back the others.

Thereafter, he went on to kill whatever zombie crossed his path.

His bat swung, blood sprayed through the hall, skulls shattered, and necks snapped.

They were not human, certainly not.

And neither was he anymore.

However, it remained that he had taken that lean into the abyss.

**

Dion did not quite have a sense for how much time had passed with him fighting through the floors of zombies.

The only thing that he knew was that he had killed seventy-three zombies in his descent.

’The specified nourishments really stopped...’ He had thought to himself at some point earlier.

From what he had seen, there were three tiers, so to speak, of the types of nourishments when it gave a specific one:

Significantly, Slightly, and one that only mentioned an even nourishment.

From the fourth floor downwards, he had completely stopped gaining specific nourishments for zombie kills, and the only things that remained constant were the mentions of harvesting.

Although to what end, he was yet to find out even after so many kills.

Dion was on the third floor by now, his breathing slightly hastened, and his jaw loosened somewhat from its earlier tension.

’Thankfully, Endurance is one of my better traits...’ He thought that, and he even distantly wondered whether endurance was related to mentality.

After all, it felt so, so strange to mentally reconcile himself with the fact that he had already grown used to this.

And he had wished that it felt disturbing that he was feeling a rush from the improvements that were brought about by the nourishment of killing.

’Or is it because of my SSS Soul?’

He hoped that he would be able to, at least some time soon, figure out what his best trait was to be used for.

By this point, the metal bat, largely deformed in places, was bending at an odd angle and even broken at its tip where he had made it into a sort of goring weapon as well.

It stabbed through the face of the last zombie on the floor.

And finally, his brows rose to attention hearing a new system message, and seeing it appear at the corner of his vision, neatly away from obscuring his sight.

{You have felled a Level 4 Destitute Zombie, harvesting its essences.}

{ You have earned a freely distributable Essence Saturation + }