“Your Highness, we just lost over 1,000 men. How can I face the souls of our fallen comrades if I don’t slaughter every last one of these monsters?” Neville asked.
His expression was one of rage and grief, and his fingers trembled on the blade’s handle.
“The dead can’t be brought back to life. Our men have already made their sacrifice. You can’t throw your life away too. We have to fall back now. Once we figure out a way to stop them, we’ll avenge them properly,” Matthias said firmly.
Ordinary soldiers could be replaced, but a battle-hardened general like Neville was irreplaceable, and Matthias wasn’t about to stand by and let that happen.
“But Your Highness-”
“This is an order!” Matthias cut Neville off. As the zombie horde closed in fast on the front line, Matthias grew anxious. Without saying anything, he pulled Neville toward a nearby helicopter.
With a deafening roar, the rotors spun to life. The wind kicked up around them as the aircraft lifted off the ground.
Just as they rose into the sky, one zombie leaped from the advancing horde. It shot upward nearly 25 feet and slashed at the chopper with claws that carved deep gouges into the fuselage.
The entire aircraft jolted, and Matthias turned pale from the shock. But the pilot quickly steadied the controls, pulled higher, and sped off toward safety.
The helicopter flew fast and quickly pulled ahead, leaving the zombies behind. But the horde didn’t slow down as they kept pursuing.
Zombies didn’t need sight or sound to hunt. As long as something was alive and breathing, it became their target.
In Sommertown, Nathaniel was taking a much more innovative approach than Matthias’ panicked retreat.
Rather than confronting the zombie horde head-on, Nathaniel had mobilized his military forces to evacuate civilians at maximum speed while simultaneously building defensive barriers to slow the zombies’ advance.
His strategy was simple. If he couldn’t solve the crisis himself, he would leave it to someone who could. He firmly believed that the powerhouse who single-handedly cleared the scarlet mist wouldn’t stand by and watch the city fall.
For now, Nathaniel’s priority was preserving what remained of his forces and waiting for that powerhouse to step in and rescue them.
Nevertheless, he had prepared a last-resort plan. If even that powerhouse couldn’t handle the zombie threat, he would have no choice but to request missile strikes from Oakvale to level the infected zones.
However, such a scorched-earth solution would leave most of Sommertown in ruins, and recovery would take years or possibly decades. It was a nuclear option in every sense, and Nathaniel would only authorize it if there were truly no other way because the cost would be almost too great to justify.
At the break of dawn in Reedcrest, Grace’s suicide squad had successfully lured around 10,000 zombies into a narrow canyon.
The canyon stretched between two mountains with only a thin passage in the middle, barely wide enough for three people to walk side by side. This confined space forced the massive zombie horde to form a single long line stretching through the entire canyon.
Dustin stood quietly at the cliff’s edge, watching everything below with perfect clarity. Once every zombie had entered the canyon, he finally acted. He raised both hands high above his head and gently pressed them toward the canyon’s entrance.
A tremendous roar shook the earth as the ground began trembling violently. The mountains on both sides of the canyon began to close in rapidly. It looked as though invisible giant hands were forcibly squeezing the two massive peaks together.
The canyon’s front end sealed first, blocking the zombie horde’s exit completely. The rear end quickly followed and cut off any possibility of retreat.
With both ends now closed, the zombie army found itself completely trapped. They couldn’t move forward or backward. All they could do was to roar and howl endlessly at the canyon walls surrounding them.
“Go back to wherever you came from!” Dustin roared as he took a deep breath and pressed both palms downward with crushing force.
A deafening crash erupted as the two mountains collided and buried the original canyon entirely. Over 10,000 zombies were instantly crushed and vanished without a trace, buried deep within solid rock.
However, Dustin wasn’t satisfied yet. He struck down with another devastating palm strike from above. Massive boulders tumbled down from both mountain peaks and buried the already destroyed canyon under several additional layers of stone.
Under these conditions, the zombies trapped inside would never escape unless someone completely leveled both mountains.
So what if they were undead and immortal with their sinister evil nature? Since they were buried directly under the mountains, they would never see daylight again.
Inside the helicopter hovering above, Grace and Sadie watched this shocking scene unfold before them with undisguised amazement.
Although Grace had mentally prepared herself, she still couldn’t hide her astonishment. With just a single wave of his hand, two entire mountains moved. That was the true power of a terrestrial immortal. As she watched it happen, she couldn’t help but feel like she was witnessing a living god.
Sadie was even more shaken than Grace had been. Back when Dustin created the vortex to absorb the scarlet mist, it hadn’t hit her that hard.
But after seeing him move entire mountains as if it were nothing and reshape the landscape itself, she finally understood just how powerful Dustin truly was. He had surpassed what any human should be capable of.
