Chapter 370- Guards who Faps

Chapter 370: Chapter 370- Guards who Faps

The citadel walls shook.

Three zombie lords stood at the perimeter. Their bodies were massive, eight feet of bone-plated muscle, their gray-green skin armored in growths that had been cultivated over months of viral evolution. Each one carried a hammer the size of a car door. The first swung at the eastern wall, the corroded iron head cracking the reinforced stone, sending fragments flying into the courtyard. The second struck the gate, the metal screaming, the hinges buckling. The third pounded the northern battlement, each impact shaking dust from the parapet.

The walls held.

Barely.

From the citadel’s interior, the response was continuous. Electrical arcs fired from emitters mounted on the battlements, blue-white lightning striking the zombie lords in coordinated pulses. Fire followed, concentrated jets of orange flame from the hands of a villain stationed at the east tower, the heat scorching the bone plates but not penetrating. A third attack, kinetic in nature, slammed into the nearest lord’s chest with enough force to push it back three steps but not enough to drop it.

The villain on the eastern wall ruffled his hair with one hand while firing another electrical bolt with the other.

"Hard! Damn it, hard!"

His voice carried over the noise of the hammers, the cracking stone, the groaning metal. His teeth were clenched. The electrical bolt struck the first zombie lord in the shoulder, the arc dancing across the bone plates, finding a gap, burning into the rotting flesh beneath. The lord roared. Not a human sound. A sound like a dragon screaming through a throat full of broken glass. It swung its hammer. The wall cracked deeper.

"It’s just too much," another villain said from the adjacent tower. His hands were glowing, fire dripping from his palms, his face sheened with sweat. "They kept coming. Three this morning. Two last night. Five the day before."

"Where is the boss?" the first one yelled.

The second laughed. A short, exhausted, knowing laugh.

"You already know what he must be doing."

"Really?"

"Of course. It’s a daily thing."

The first villain looked away. His jaw clenched. His electrical bolt misfired, the arc grounding against his own battlement, the stone cracking. He swore, adjusted his aim, fired again. The bolt hit the second zombie lord in the knee. The leg buckled. The lord stumbled, caught itself, swung its hammer at the gate again.

"Damn it," the first villain muttered.

The scene subsided.

Inside the citadel, the corridors were torch-lit and busy.

Villains moved through the hallways in pairs and groups, some carrying weapons, some carrying wounded, some carrying nothing but the hunched, exhausted posture of people who had been fighting for too long. The stone walls were reinforced with steel beams, the floors grated, the air thick with the smell of sweat and gunpowder and the faint, persistent undertone of rotting meat that came from the zombie perimeter.

A man ran.

His feet slapped the grated floor in rapid, uneven beats. His breathing was ragged, his face pale, his eyes wide with the kind of focused panic that came from carrying information that was too important to deliver slowly and too dangerous to deliver loudly. He was thin, underfed, his clothes dirty, his hair uncombed. A B-class villain. A scout. The kind of man the citadel sent into the dead zone to find things and report back.

A shot rang out.

The bullet passed through the air beside his head. Close enough that he felt the heat. Close enough that his ear rang. He dove, his body hitting the grated floor, his chin scraping metal.

"You are trying to kill me!" he screamed. "I came here just to report!"

Laughter came from the end of the corridor.

A man stood there, a smoking pistol in his hand, his other hand resting on his hip. He was broad, his arms thick, his chest straining against a leather vest. A-class villain. The pistol was a prop, a toy for someone who could crush steel with his bare hands.

"Sorry," the broad man said, grinning. "I thought you were a zombie running like that."

The scout gasped. He pushed himself up from the floor, his palms stinging from the grating, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. He wanted to speak. He wanted to scream. He wanted to tell this bastard that a bullet through the head was not a reasonable response to someone running in a corridor.

He couldn’t.

The man was A-class. The man had power. The man could kill him and call it an accident and no one would question it.

"Damn it," the scout muttered.

He turned and ran. Down the corridor. Past the laughing villain. Past the groups of tired fighters. Past the reinforced doors and the steel beams and the torchlit stone.

"I report to the boss first," he said over his shoulder.

The broad villain struck his own shoulder with his fist, cracking his neck.

"Can’t I just kill this man?" he asked the air.

Another villain beside him, a woman with short red hair and a burnt left arm, shook her head.

"No. They are on our side. Do you want to be left alone to fight zombies?" She looked at the retreating scout. "After all, meat shields are meat shields."

The group laughed.

The sound followed the scout down the corridor like a dog nipping at his heels.

He ran.

His mind was full. The spider woman. The orders. The boss wanting her alive, brought to the team, her steel web ability too valuable to waste on a lone arachne hybrid hiding in a gutted dental office. He had been tracking her for days. He had found her. And then.

And then.

That man. The portals. The kinetic control. The zombie lord killed with two fingers. The four women following him. The casual, hands-in-pocket authority of someone who had never in his life been afraid of anything.

S-class.

The word burned in his mind.

Guards stopped him at the inner corridor. Two of them, armed, their faces carrying the bored, superior expressions of men who stood between the world and the boss and knew it.

"Where is the master?" the scout gasped.

"The big chamber," one guard said. His tone was flat. The tone of a man who had answered this question before and was tired of the answer being the same every time.

The scout clenched his jaw.

"Here I am running around," he muttered, "and he is fucking some bitch."

He ran.

The corridor widened. The torches became lamps. The steel beams became carved stone. The air changed, the sweat and gunpowder giving way to something warmer, thicker, the mingled scent of perfume and sex and incense.

He arrived at the outer window.

The chamber had windows. High, narrow, the glass removed, the openings covered with heavy curtains that didn’t quite close. Through the gaps, light spilled. Amber light. Warm light. The light of candles and lamps and the particular, unmistakable glow of a room designed for one purpose.

Six men stood at the windows.

They were guards. Villain-class, lower rank, the kind of men who were given safe postings as rewards for adequate service. They were not watching the perimeter. They were not scanning for threats. They were looking through the gaps in the curtains.

They were stroking their cocks.