TWD - Zomboid - Chapter 318: Boost My Stats! Keep Boosting Them!! (Patreon)

Wesker, the mysterious man in the trench coat, had once been Rebecca's teammate.

Maybe it was during the time they fought walkers together that Wesker started developing feelings for her.

For all anyone knew, the mysterious man in the trench coat might still be holed up in some warehouse somewhere, staring at Rebecca's picture and reminiscing about the old days.

"Wesker?" Claire repeated thoughtfully.

Why did that name sound familiar?

Jill, meanwhile, felt a jolt of alarm.

"Wesker? You're saying it was Wesker? You guys know about him too?"

She and Chris had dealt with Umbrella plenty of times. Chris was the one who had told her about Wesker, saying that he was supposedly behind all kinds of trouble from the shadows.

"Well, looks like everyone knows the guy. Saves me the trouble of explaining everything!"

Luke nodded.

"What's he doing here?" Jill pressed. "Why did he attack us? Was it just to sabotage the summit? What does any of this have to do with him?"

"His motives? There are plenty."

Luke began counting them off on his fingers.

"For starters, they want to sabotage our summit, turn the Commonwealth and your city-states against each other, then profit from the conflict. That's one reason..."

"And then..."

He grinned.

"Wesker is a social Darwinist taken to the extreme. To him, the global apocalypse is nothing more than a giant testing ground. He enjoys every minute of it and even wants to use it to observe human evolution!"

"That lunatic!"

Jill cursed angrily. Claire looked equally outraged.

"Exactly!" Luke agreed wholeheartedly.

"Fortunately, we're not pushovers either. After making inquiries through several channels, I've already tracked down Wesker's base. So once we meet up with Chris, you can start taking measures to deal with him!"

Luke fixed his gaze on Jill.

She couldn't shake the feeling that he was up to something.

"What kind of measures?"

"Nuke the place flat, obviously! What, are we supposed to let that little pest keep running around causing trouble right under our noses?"

"You want the city-state to use a nuclear bomb?" Jill's eyes widened.

"Bingo!"

Luke snapped his fingers.

The city-state had three nuclear bombs.

He wanted one for himself, the city-state could keep one, and as for the last one, they might as well be generous and use it to help them out.

"Th-that's not something Graham can decide on his own."

"We can worry about that later. Let's survive this first. We'll have plenty of time to settle accounts afterward."

Luke clapped his hands lightly.

"For the next few days, we'll have to keep those walkers outside from getting in. Claire, Jill, you two are in charge of checking our ammunition and supplies."

He continued assigning tasks in an orderly fashion.

"Rebecca, do you still have that antidote sample case?"

"I do."

Rebecca patted the sample case she'd kept with her the entire time. There was still a considerable amount of antidote inside.

"Excellent!"

Luke nodded.

"Use it sparingly. If we really end up with no way out, it might be enough to clear an escape route for us."

Everyone accepted their assignments and got to work.

Taking advantage of the lull, Luke walked over to one of the supermarket windows, pulled back the covering just enough to make a narrow opening, and peered outside.

Night was slowly falling.

Atlanta was already eerie enough during the day, but once darkness arrived, that was when the real nightmare began.

Under the faint moonlight, Luke could see that the walker hordes in the streets had grown even more restless than during the day.

Meanwhile, the mutants that had spent the daylight hours hiding in the shadows were emerging one after another from the ruins, sewers, and even cracks in the crumbling walls.

Hunters leaped between buildings, waiting for opportunities to strike.

Roarers threw back their heads and unleashed spine-chilling howls, attracting even more walkers. Bloated Suiciders also wandered among the hordes, dragging their heavy bodies along.

At night, this city belonged to the walkers!

Luke's expression grew serious.

Just making it through tonight probably wouldn't be easy.

And sure enough...

Just as darkness fully settled over the city, an especially shrill howl suddenly rang out from a nearby street.

It sounded completely different from the usual growls of ordinary walkers, with a piercing quality that seemed to stab straight into the eardrums.

Then, as though the howl had been some kind of signal, the walkers scattered throughout the surrounding streets all turned in the same direction.

Like a rising tide, they began surging toward the supermarket where Luke and the others were sheltering!

Hundreds, even thousands of walkers!

A dense black mass quickly filled the street in front of the supermarket.

They slammed frantically against the roll-up door, unleashing terrifying roars.

And at the very front of the horde, several unusually tall figures were slowly approaching.

Mutants!

Entire groups of mutants!

"Now that's interesting. So they don't just follow sound?"

Luke lowered the window covering.

In the dim light, all three women had gone noticeably pale.

An assault by mutants on this scale would be enough to wipe out an ordinary special forces unit on the spot, let alone the three of them.

"Don't panic! We can still handle this!"

Luke grinned and drew the cold, gleaming dragon-head knife from behind his back.

"Delivery right to our doorstep! How could I turn that down? I was just complaining that I wasn't getting enough Essence."

He licked his lips, a glimmer of excitement appearing in his eyes.

"Girls, guard the entrance, spray your pheromones, and cover me!"

Before he'd even finished speaking, Luke kicked open the roll-up door and charged into the horde alone.

With his very first kick, he sent a walker infant flying.

"Aw, what a cute little thing! Where's your mom? Somebody come get your baby and take it away!"

Luke shouted toward the horde.

The few walkers leading the charge actually seemed momentarily confused by his behavior.

But that hesitation didn't last long.

Soon, the horde came surging straight toward him.

Luke stood alone against them, his eyes burning with excitement. He even licked the corner of his mouth with an almost greedy expression.

Come to think of it, when walkers bit people to death, they created new walkers.

Didn't that mean biting humans was essentially how walkers reproduced?

Kind of lewd when you thought about it, right?

In that case, what he was doing was basically an anti-porn raid!

Faced with a walking gold mine of Essence, Luke was even more ferocious than the walkers glowing green!

"Time to grind."

Luke suddenly burst into motion.

He moved so quickly that his body became little more than a blur.

The dragon-head knife flashed repeatedly in his hands, moving too fast for the eye to follow.

Wherever he passed, entire rows of walker heads flew into the air.

Several Hunters were leading the charge.

These mutants were agile and ferocious, preferring to lurk in elevated positions.

But against Luke, they couldn't even survive a single exchange.

The blade flashed.

The first Hunter's head immediately fell.

[Essence +2]

Luke's eyes lit up.

Mutants really were something else!

With ordinary walkers, he might have to kill more than a dozen just to get a single point of Essence.

But one slash against a mutant had earned him two points!

With the entire city packed full of mutants, they were practically handing him Essence on a silver platter.

As for the danger...

A wolf charging into a flock of sheep could only end in slaughter.

The chances of the wolf getting gored to death by a sheep's horns were practically zero.

Luke charged straight into the densest concentration of mutants.

[Essence +2]

[Essence +1]

[Essence +3]

The system notifications barely stopped.

When a Roarer was about to howl, Luke actually let it finish the cry and draw out a few more enemies before splitting its head open with a single slash.

Suiciders were even easier to handle.

He could simply kick one into a crowd of walkers and let the resulting explosion blow them all apart.

Or he could rip a piece of bone from a walker's chest and hurl it like a projectile, piercing a Suicider and making it explode on the spot.

Entire swaths of walkers were reduced to bloody pulp.

The longer Luke fought, the more effortlessly the slaughter came.

In just half an hour, the Essence in his account had climbed back to over two hundred points.

"Come on, come on! Time to add some points!"

There was only so much fun to be had from mindlessly hacking walkers apart.

With an entire street full of moving targets right in front of him, he might as well use the opportunity to properly test just how much difference those extra attribute points could make.