Chapter Fifty-Three: The Final Battle (Part Two)

Cracks had begun to snake across the concrete ceiling above. Judging by their number and depth, collapse was imminent.

Qin Fei and Xie Nainai quickly retreated into the laboratory behind them. As they fled, Qin Fei tossed a match outside the door.

The moment the match struck the ground, the gasoline that had been poured across the floor erupted into flames.

As the cracks widened, the zombies clawed through the ceiling, finally opening a gaping hole overhead.

They poured through in droves, nauseatingly dense, their numbers overwhelming.

Qin Fei glanced over the scene. Even without counting those still waiting to drop, the zombies already on the ground numbered at least thirty or forty.

Above the hole, the guttural growls and shuffling footsteps of more zombies echoed, suggesting that many had yet to fall.

It had taken the zombies nearly two hours to burrow through to this point. Considering the time they'd spent gathering, it was no surprise so many appeared at once.

Ordinary zombies and zombie hounds succumbed quickly to the inferno.

The obese military zombies, bloated with fat, similarly lasted only moments, ultimately bursting from within as the heat grew unbearable.

When attacking human camps, zombies instinctively avoided obstacles, traps, and fire. Unless the entire perimeter was engulfed in flames with no possible route left open, zombies would always find an unburned path to assault.

Setting a single fire was simple, but to surround the camp with flames required more fuel than any settlement could afford. Worse still, the nightly zombie tide lasted eight hours—meaning survivors would need enough fuel to burn for that long.

Thus, aside from throwable Molotov cocktails, survivors rarely used fire as a defense against the horde.

Qin Fei had only managed this tactic because he’d found some gasoline within the research facility—and since they only needed to survive one more night, there was no reason to conserve it.

So he could afford to be extravagant.

Before the gasoline burned away completely, the flames started to dwindle.

After all, they were underground, and oxygen was limited.

The facility, built by the military, boasted good ventilation, but even so, oxygen could not sustain such an intense blaze for long.

The fire gradually died.

From the charred heaps of dead zombies, nearly ten emerged, their bodies glowing with a sickly green light.

These green-skinned zombies had survived the inferno.

Their constitution was formidable, their regenerative abilities extraordinary. The fire had not lasted long enough to finish them off, and they soon recovered.

The low-oxygen environment affected them not at all.

In the world of Seven Days to Die, zombies could survive underwater—oxygen was not needed for their movement.

Once recovered, the green-skinned zombies charged at the laboratory, pounding furiously at the walls and doors.

The walls, however, were made from industrial cement mixed with sand and poured over steel reinforcement.

Their quality far surpassed the crude products Qin Fei had once baked in earth kilns.

Even for the green-skinned zombies, breaking through would require considerable effort.

Xie Nainai, watching the zombies outside, stuck out her tongue and let out a long breath.

“Thank goodness—only a handful of zombies. We should be able to hold out.”

“Agreed,” Qin Fei replied.

Counting the super corn cultivation room, the green-skinned pig chamber, the soldiers' rest quarters, the pure steel square room, and the lowest laboratory, the facility had five layers from top to bottom.

Each floor was constructed with steel doors and concrete walls.

Given the destructive power of these ten green-skinned zombies, they could dig until dawn and still not reach the bottom floor.

With that thought, Qin Fei felt his spirits lift.

Beside him, Xie Nainai suddenly looked up, staring at the ceiling.

“I have a feeling—there’s more up there!”

No sooner had she spoken than two zombies with grayish-red skin dropped through the hole.

These zombies were tall, their mouths lined with outward-facing teeth. Bulging veins and blood vessels made them grotesque. Most disturbingly, their internal organs protruded from their abdomens.

Qin Fei recognized them immediately.

They were the zombie kings from Seven Days to Die.

Damn it!

Xie Nainai’s premonition had been spot on—two zombie kings had just arrived.

Qin Fei glanced in astonishment at Xie Nainai—her sense for danger was uncanny.

The zombie kings were formidable foes.

In earlier versions of Seven Days to Die, they were the most powerful among the undead.

As mutated beings appearing in the final waves of the horde, Qin Fei knew without trying that, even armed with shotguns, he and Xie Nainai stood no chance against them.

And now there were two.

With the zombie kings joining the demolition crew, cracks soon appeared in the laboratory walls.

Qin Fei had hoped to use the facility’s five rooms to retreat step by step, firing as he went to delay the zombies.

But even the ten green-skinned zombies alone were more than he and Xie Nainai could handle—let alone with the addition of the zombie kings.

The tactic of fighting while retreating, of slowing the advance, was now utterly meaningless.

The threat was too dire.

So Qin Fei and Xie Nainai retreated to the lowest level of the facility, awaiting the inevitable arrival of the mutated zombies.

At precisely two in the morning, the countdown appeared:

[Mission Return Countdown: 4 hours 0 minutes]

The zombie kings’ digging speed was astonishing.

With them on the team, the zombies made it to the outer wall of the lowest laboratory in just two hours.

The wall’s thickness matched that of the upper floors.

Judging by their pace—four rooms in two hours—the laboratory where Qin Fei and Xie Nainai sheltered would last only half an hour more at most.

They could neither defeat the zombies nor delay them. Death seemed certain.

“What do we do?” Xie Nainai nearly burst into tears, pacing anxiously inside the lab as the zombies outside clawed madly at the walls.

Qin Fei frowned deeply, silent.

“Hey! There’s a ladder in the restroom!” As she paced, Xie Nainai discovered what seemed to be a passage to the surface.

It was a narrow, vertical shaft with a ladder that could bring a person up to ground level.

“I knew about it, but it won’t help,” Qin Fei shook his head. “We can’t outrun the green-skinned zombies, and the zombie kings are faster still—going topside would be suicide.”

Secret passages were common in the facility.

In Seven Days to Die, nearly all complex structures featured hidden routes, allowing players to exit quickly after looting rather than retracing their steps.

Qin Fei felt despair creeping in.

Was there truly no way out?

Impossible!

If the system had given them zero chance of survival, it might as well have killed them outright. To have gone to such lengths to bring them into this world, surely it wasn’t just to send them to their deaths.

The system would not present an utterly hopeless situation.

There had to be a way to break through.