CHAPTER 141: CHAPTER 140: NEW LIFEFORM (1)

[Extraction successful!]

[Ability: Recall is ready to be used.]

[Necrophage has used a skill slot. 1 slot remains.]

"Finally," Blaze smirked, before looking at the ground.

June was lying there. Well, at least what was left of her.

Blaze’s plan had a slight miscalculation. The Necrophage had to feed in order to steal skills or traits from a target. It reflected in ways such as loss of body mass, among other things.

Even though Marrow and her legion of healers kept healing June, they couldn’t recover the body mass she lost whenever Necrophage feasted on her body.

As a result, June had been reduced to a skeletal state. Her skin clung to the bones as if she had been vacuumed from the inside.

It wasn’t just her skin or the failing organs. Even her eyes were about to pop out of the sockets. Foam bubbled at the corners of her mouth as her lips shrank due to a lack of moisture.

She was a walking skeleton. Still, she smiled whenever Blaze looked at her as if he had become her life’s goal.

The more she smiled, the more Marrow was irked, yet she kept trying her best to save June. After all, that’s what Blaze wanted.

"Not bad," Blaze mumbled. "You managed to hold on for twenty tries. That’s impressive, to say the least."

"Th...ank... you."

Blaze didn’t pay any attention to her, turning to Chimera.

"Get her some human food," he said. "Better yet, get her to the research institute. They can give her liquid nutrition."

Since the entire city was under their control, they didn’t lack resources, whether for a human or otherwise. Voss and Alaric would take better care of her than the undead.

"Reh!"

Chimera was about to pick her up when Blaze stopped him. Instead, he turned to the healer zombies around Marrow and instructed them to carry June.

Blaze had named these guys Patchers. Blaze knew it was lazy naming, then again, they weren’t much important since, unlike Marrow, they couldn’t heal both the living and the dead.

They had to choose a path to walk on for the rest of their undead lives. So, Blaze chose for them. Half were used to heal humans, while the other half could only heal their kind.

But that was all secondary. Right now, Blaze had his gaze fixated on the screen before him.

+++

Skill: Recall

Description: A human-created skill that can be used to teleport to a location remembered by the user. Teleportation isn’t instantaneous. The body and conscience are teleported to a place at 5% of light speed.

The skill had been corrupted and might have lost most of its additional purposes, in addition to incurring some restrictions.

Restrictions:

— The body disintegrates at one point and rebuilds at the destination. This process leads to extreme loss of mass, and assembly requires time proportional to the distance teleported/traveled.

— The skill only works for locations the user has seen or set foot in. Hazy memories might lead to a deviation in recall, which can throw the user several miles away from the intended location.

— Since the skill uses an extreme amount of energy, it is advised that the user should prepare enough food to recover energy upon arrival at the target destination.

+++

"...what?"

The skill, if one could even call it that, had more demerits than merits. It couldn’t be the skill June used. After all, even as a zombie, using the skill could kill him. He could only imagine what could happen to a human.

"Although it would explain how she survived through such extreme body mass loss," Blaze mumbled, remembering June’s skeletal figure.

Usually, he would have complained to the system about it, but it had stopped replying to him entirely, so that was out of the question.

These restrictions left the recall skill something to be used with extreme caution and only under emergencies.

However, there was one more thing that caught his attention.

"This skill was created by a human? The cult can create a skill and also... impart it to someone else?"

The origin only intrigued him; it didn’t put him in disbelief. After all, if he could create corpses from scratch, then it wasn’t surprising someone could create entire skills.

"Alright, it’s something June could know," he said, scratching his chin. "She mentioned that the teleportation skill was given to her as a reward. The cult must have the one creating these skills."

Blaze began wondering what he couldn’t achieve if such a person were on his side. Forget about conquering the states; ruling over the entire planet wouldn’t be a far-fetched dream.

Perhaps they might as well spread to other planets?

No, that was way too big of a dream. Besides, what will he even do on dead planets? It was better to rein in his expectations to reality. Then again, in their twisted world, who was to say what was realistic and what wasn’t?

The sky is the limit, and in this case, there is no limit.

"This cult... it has more interesting people than I thought."

Blaze smiled, thinking his battle with the cult was more beneficial than he realized. Just then, something unexpected happened.

[Your horde is under attack.]

[6x Grade-1 Twisted Walkers were slain.]

[9x Grade-0 Dribblers were slain.]

"Another attack?"

At first, his mind went back to the cult. However, the attack didn’t happen in some faraway region. In fact, it was quite close to the zoo. The cultist couldn’t possibly have made it so far into the city without alerting him.

"Either it’s a mutant or a human camp."

It was difficult to identify the target’s strength, considering walkers and dribblers were the weakest among the zombies.

Thus, instead of heading out to the place himself, Blaze created some grade-3 zombies and sent them to the same location.

If it were humans, the grade-3s would probably deal with them. If it were a mutant, then the grade-3s would die.

In that case, he’ll check it out himself as he wanted to have more grade-4 beings under him, and anyone who could kill five grade-3s had to be grade-4 or above.