Chapter 394 The Strongest One



'There are so many of them!' Nadia thought as she sprinted through the crowd of zombies without paying any attention to hundreds upon hundreds of their attempts to grab at her.

With the current state of her body, not even a whole group of zombies standing in a perfect stance and all trying to hold her down would have a shot at completing such a task.

Thrown by her own feelings into the very middle of the horde that stood on the path the expedition had to take, she now found a way to let her feelings speak through her actions.

"Die, die, die..." she shouted with fury while sending her fists and legs forward, crushing a skull for every attack she executed. "Just fucking die already!"

Nadia swirled around in place, killing all of the basic zombies that dared to stand within her range.

Then, rather than waiting a few seconds for the zombies to gather around her again, she rushed forward and ran fewteen steps ahead before starting the process all over again.

'There were at least a thousand zombies in this horde,' Nadia thought as she kept on sending a flurry of strikes against the seemingly unending horde of animated corpses.

With each strike, she would crack a skull open. With each kick, she would shatter whatever was left holding the zombie's body together.

Surrounded by nothing but undead and those that she turned into properly dead, she both looked and felt like the god of damn death.

"DIE!" Nadia shouted for one last time as she sent forth a fist that crushed three skulls with a single swing, the courtesy of those dumb zombies standing close together.

"AAAARGH!" Nadia unleashed a feral cry.

She raised her head, howling in the direction of the brightly-lit sky.

Her emotions were coiling inside the girl's soul, leading to the howl that finally gave them the outlet they needed.

"Haaa..." Nadia finished her scream with a long, exhausted sigh.

She could keep on going for hours upon hours longer before feeling even the slightest sign of exhaustion.

'I have yet to expend a single percent of what this body is capable of,' Nadia thought, using the time she bought by clearing all the zombies around to lower her gaze and stare at her blood-covered hand.

'And to think I used to feel lightheaded at the mere sight of blood,' she thought while watching how chunks of brain matter and the shattered pieces of bone slid down her hands and fell to the ground, turning into a fertilizer that would boost the growth of grass in the area in the near future.

'Is that why I'm so tired?' she thought before heaving yet another sigh and raising her hands.

The short moment of rest she gained by clearing the zombies in proximity has now ended, with all of the undead rushing to fill the void around the girl.

"I guess you really want me to cull your numbers some more!"

Nadia was aware of Leila's momentary presence on the scene. While she never spotted the girl, she could somehow sense the rapid decrease of zombie numbers on the far flank of the horde.

'I wonder if she wanted me to come help, or if she just didn't want to kill too many of them,' Nadia thought.

After all, for the expedition as it was right now, killing zombies proved to be of no benefit.

Out of all the hunters, only Carol had a system that allowed her to turn the act of killing zombies into a training that permanently boosted her strength. For all those system-less hunters, killing the zombies was just a sad duty they had to fulfill to earn their right to get a system in the first place.

'With that in mind, letting them fight such a massive horde, even if it's mostly basic zombies...'

Nadia pressed her lips together, turning them into a thin line.

'I'm sure I'm doing a good thing by cutting down their numbers... But why do I feel guilty about putting Mathew on a spot in regard to this matter?'

Rather than just disappearing from Mathew's side to do what she felt like she had to do, Nadia dutifully informed Mathew about his wish. And while he initially tried to convince her not to involve herself...

Way sooner than Nadia expected, Mathew changed his mind and simply waved his hand to showcase he didn't really care.

Still.

'I bet he didn't want to impose his will on me rather than agreeing with my reasons,' Nadia thought as she yet again jumped into the area crawling with zombies before unleashing her fury upon them. 'Or maybe there is something that I didn't think about?'

Nadia suddenly stopped, frozen by the consequences hidden in her realization.

'What if there was a reason why he initially didn't want me to go?' she asked herself, absentmindedly mowing down the zombies that stupidly repeated the mistake of their fallen peers and got within the girl's range. 'Maybe he thought that facing this horde would make for a good lesson?'

Nadia continued to move around in short bursts, killing all the zombies whenever she stopped only to move to another part of the horde again.

'Maybe he wanted to group all the corpses together to make it easier to gather the cores and bury them?' The girl continued to search for answers while her body kept on doing its thing.

Following nothing more but her sense of blood, Nadia could dive into her thoughts without a care in the world about the lethal danger that surrounded her.

Just like her newfound sense of blood guided her fist while she thought about Mathew, it would warn her if a strong enemy were to appear anywhere near.

"Ah," Nadia then stopped when she ended up on a small hill that in reality was just a crumbled-down pile of rubble that once used to be a tiny service building. "I've really killed quite a lot of them," she muttered while looking down at the scene below her feet.

There were at least a thousand zombies in the horde when Nadia and Leila descended like an Egyptian plague upon them.

Leila's short rampage generated at least a hundred proper corpses. And Nadia's absentminded dedication to cull their numbers, brought it down to a mere ten or twenty percent of the original zombie's headcount.

'I guess that should be enough,' Nadia thought as she wiped the blood and sweat from her forehead before turning around and looking in the direction the rest of her group was. 'Meaning, it's high time for me to return. And if they can't handle so few of the zombies with their numbers and guns...'

Nadia hesitated for a second before jumping down from the pile of rubble and making her way back toward the group.

'Then I want to know where did they find the guts to call themselves hunters!"

From over a thousand to a mere hundred and then some.

What's more, those remnants of the horde would be put against a group of nearly thirty humans. Even if only half of their initial salvo were to be effective, the number of zombies would easily fall below a hundred.

And a single unarmed human was more than enough to deal with five or more basic zombies, as long as they kept calm and worked around their strengths.

'Oh, I think I got it now,' Nadia thought as her face darkened a little. 'I just hope this test of his... will be of any value now that I killed more than I actually wanted.'