Chapter 176: Zombie Siege Practice
Tang Xinjue instinctively leaped to her feet the instant she opened her eyes, her awakened mind pulling the surrounding scene back into view——
This was not the dormitory.
It was not even indoors. The sharp corner of a dormitory building stretched across the front of her, while behind her was an iron railing separating the campus from the outside. In the cramped space, she could not see the building number, but she could still tell that its position had absolutely nothing to do with Building 33.
Dawn had not yet completely climbed over the clouds. The faint light carrying a chill fell upon her, while the wind blew low and heavy, carrying the rustling sounds of movement from afar into her ears.
Tang Xinjue lowered her head to look at the place where she had just been lying——a bare patch beneath the base of a wall. There were no props nearby, nor any traces of movement.
If the possibilities of sleepwalking and still being in a dream were excluded, there was only one answer:
The dungeon had started causing trouble.
What to do when the dormitory had been built as impregnable as a fortress and the zombies could not attack it? Move the examinees outside the dormitory while they were asleep.
Indeed, it was exactly the sort of thing a game could do.
“Hsssss——”
The moment her thoughts settled, some very familiar sounds slowly approached from the other side of the corner. Tang Xinjue pulled out the shovel at her waist with the back of her hand and quietly waited for it to come over.
As a precaution, she had always maintained the habit of sleeping while carrying weapons on her. Aside from the toilet plunger, she would usually also have four or five other weapons attached to her waist.
In fact, from the moment the overwhelming drowsiness came surging in, she had already sensed that something was wrong before losing consciousness, and grabbed the nearest tool beside her.
Before the zombie showed its head, she took that tool out of her pocket——an old-fashioned phone with an extremely long standby time.
Reflected on the back of the phone was a pitted, black-and-purple male face.
The zombie opened its bloody maw and lunged over with a roar!
Smack!
As the shovel sliced the zombie's head away, Tang Xinjue flipped open the phone, thought for two seconds, and pressed a string of numbers.
“Sorry, the number you dialed is powered off and temporarily unavailable……”
It seemed that the phone Yu Wei had gotten from “Qiuqiu next door” had run out of battery. As she slowly walked outward, she dialed another number.
“Sorry……”
Outside the corner was another narrow passage. From outside, she could faintly see the outline of the entrance to the residential area, yet it once again blocked her view just perfectly, preventing her from seeing the open area.
But even so, Tang Xinjue could sense that quite a number of zombies were wandering outside, waiting for the scent of fresh food to appear.
She was in no hurry, trying the numbers in her mind one by one. On the fourth attempt, the call connected:
“Hello, hello?”
On the other end was Yu Wei, whose voice was trembling slightly.
Tang Xinjue understood: “Where are Zhang You and the others?”
“Sister Tang?”
Yu Wei was startled at first, then heavily let out a sigh of relief and immediately complained mournfully: “I don't know either!”
“After I woke up, all of you had disappeared!”
Guo Guo woke from a shudder, her mind still blank for an instant.
When had the dormitory become so cold?
This chill was quickly replaced by a scorching sensation coming from her chest. Guo Guo grabbed the pendant in the previous second, and in the next second suddenly sprang up, horrified:
She was not in the dormitory!
The scene before her eyes was clearly a corridor, and she had just been lying right in the middle of the corridor. Beside her was a bloodied, motionless body.
Guo Guo held her breath and stared carefully: that face, with its bulging eyes, was facing directly toward where she was.
In other words, she had been lying in the corridor sleeping soundly without knowing anything, while another pair of dead, unclosed eyes had been staring at her from just 10 centimeters away, and she had been completely unaware of it?
The pendant was scorching hot, yet Guo Guo felt a chill rush straight into her scalp, making the few strands of hair remaining on top of her head stand on end:
——Aaaaaa, this damn dungeon doesn't play fair!!!
While screaming madly inside her head, Guo Guo did not forget to observe her surroundings. She discovered that this was the second floor, and judging from the zombie's appearance, it was most likely also a girls' dormitory building.
She calmed down, pulled the screwdriver from her pocket for self-defense, and cautiously walked outward.
Before she even reached the stairwell, she came face-to-face with a staggering zombie coming down.
Guo Guo: “……”
She reacted quickly and immediately turned around to run. The zombie lunged straight down the stairs to grab her, but made a twist in midair, its body crashing face-first onto the ground in a twisted posture. Guo Guo, who had turned back to attack, directly stabbed it in the head and pinned it to the floor.
Enduring her disgust, she pulled out her only weapon. Before she could wipe the knife clean, she suddenly noticed the zombie's face.
Why did it seem somewhat familiar?
Immediately, she remembered where she had seen this face:
In the phone she had swept from the neighboring 607 dorm.
In “Fangfang's” phone album, there were many selfies of the four people in the dormitory together. If she remembered correctly, then the face of the zombie before her was Fangfang herself.
If “Fangfang” was still here… Guo Guo immediately realized another point: then the place where she was now was most likely still Building 33!
——She only needed to go up four more floors to return to the sturdy 606 fortress.
Fortunately, the dungeon had finally retained a little bottom line and had not thrown her directly onto the sports field, or even into a pile of zombies… Guo Guo climbed upward without hesitation, thinking gratefully.
At the same time, on the wide and flat sports field.
Zhang You stood up and patted the grass clippings from her body, her expression somewhat indescribable.
It was one thing for the dungeon to arbitrarily increase the difficulty and transfer her out.
But did it really have to throw her over to the teaching area?
Why not just throw her out of the dungeon and be done with it?
The only fortunate thing was that there were not many zombies on the sports field. The few zombies she could see were all extremely far away within her field of vision. Before they discovered their target and rushed over, Zhang You still had ample time to prepare or relocate.
Zhang You took a deep breath to adjust her state of mind and removed the large-capacity backpack from her back.
She did not have the habit of carrying too many weapons with her, because this would take up storage space for other items, such as food, water, a complete medical kit, a phone, a signal receiver, climbing rope, a small tent… and other survival tools.
In the end, Zhang You only took out two short shovels and an iron hammer, then hung the account book, which only had its hard quality remaining, in front of her body as armor. Thus lightly equipped, she set off and began searching for a nearby hiding place.
Once she found somewhere to shelter, she would contact Xinjue and the others—Zhang You knew clearly that if things were even more unfortunate and she was not the only one transferred out, then she would probably only be able to contact Xinjue.
Because Guo Guo could not remember phone numbers, and Zheng Wanzheng could not remember to bring a phone. If they wanted to find each other, they could only rely on luck and outside help.
Hopefully they would be a little luckier.
“Ptooey, ptooey!”
In a patch of grass, a swarm of zombies scrambled desperately toward the middle, only to be all sent flying by a sturdy and powerful shovel, tumbling out in a heap like dumplings being dropped into a pot, revealing the tall figure of the girl in the middle.
Zheng Wanzheng beat the zombies violently while forcefully spitting out the weeds in her mouth. The persistent taste of grass roots and dirt made her even more irritable, and she slammed the shovel against the zombies' heads repeatedly.
Only after the last zombie's head had been smashed flat did Zheng Wanzheng concentrate on vomiting, followed by another furious round of smashing, as if what she was hitting was not zombies, but the dungeon's dog head.
What could be more infuriating than waking up to discover that you had inexplicably landed in the middle of a pile of zombies?
—When she woke up, she had been lying face-down with her head pointed downward, and had even eaten a faceful of grass.
Only after the head of the shovel had been beaten crooked did Zheng Wanzheng stretch her limbs a few times and look around: she could not see clearly when she was surrounded by zombies just now, but now that all the zombies were lying on the ground, the surrounding scene became clearly visible.
This was a patch of grass beside a three-story building, surrounded by several small trees, with a total area of less than ten square meters.
Yet for some reason, more than a dozen zombies had gathered in such a tiny place. Judging from the appearance of the corpses and their clothes, they should have been infected not long ago, and their expressions still retained traces of panic.
Zheng Wanzheng could not make anything of it, so she turned to look at the building beside her. After examining it for a few moments, she noticed something familiar:
Wasn't this where the medical room was?
The red cross on the wall was especially bright and glaring in the gloomy air. Above the symbol was the only window on the side wall, and inside, there seemed to be a faint figure moving.
Although it had only appeared for an instant, Zheng Wanzheng did not think she had imagined it. She nimbly flashed behind the shade of a tree while simultaneously dragging over a corpse with a flattened head to shield herself.
The next instant, a clear figure indeed appeared inside that window.
It was a young long-haired girl, her face filled with wariness and suspicion. She pushed open the window to observe below, but did not discover anything unusual among the zombies lying scattered all over the grass, as if they had originally been supposed to be there. The window then slowly closed again.
The medical building was as quiet as ever. If one did not know beforehand, even if they passed by, they would not be able to tell that there were people inside. Zheng Wanzheng took a simple look and did not intend to continue observing. She only wanted to return to 606 first.
Although she did not know what the dungeon was up to this time, the dormitory was the most important place and absolutely could not have anything go wrong……wait!
Zheng Wanzheng stopped and keenly caught a trace of something wrong.
The shovel swept up a fierce gust of wind from behind her hand, sending the zombie that had just opened its mouth flying back into the grass.
Zheng Wanzheng frowned.
Whether from her memory or from the zombie's face, she had just smashed its head until there was no more it could possibly smash. According to normal patterns, it should have completely lost its ability to move. How could it still attack people?
In less than a second, several zombies that had been lying quietly at the edge of her vision also staggeringly climbed back up. One of them did not even have its head attached to its neck, yet was holding it in its arms and staggering forward all the same.
——The third mutation.
In the blink of an eye, Zheng Wanzheng understood the answer.
She kicked over the few zombies in front of her without hesitation. Before the shovel that followed could even come down, another strange noise suddenly came from above her head, this time mixed with shouting and arguing.
Zheng Wanzheng glanced from the corner of her eye toward the source of the sound: it was still that window.
The increasingly loud argument suddenly stopped. Several seconds later, both glass windows were violently pushed open. The same long-haired girl, her face terrified, leaned half her body out, opening her mouth as if about to shout, but another pair of hands covered her mouth and forcibly dragged her back!
The girl grabbed onto the window frame and still tried to struggle, but a boning knife appeared above her head.
The hand rose and the head fell.
Two pairs of hands pushed the no-longer-struggling body down together. One of the boys was still not at ease and leaned his head out to look down, likewise failing to discover anything unusual on the lawn.
The window closed again.
Behind the small tree, Zheng Wanzheng threw down the last zombie and walked over to the girl's corpse with its dead eyes staring. She discovered that there was still a piece of paper hidden inside the girl's sleeve.
[6:00 a.m. Release water to flood the entrance, 3rd floor south window]
There was another sentence on the back of the paper: [A University can only have one student stronghold, impostors must die!]
Zheng Wanzheng: “……”
Is the competition between your student strongholds really this intense?
She put away the note and looked up for a long while, then inserted the shovel into a crack in the wall. Using it for leverage, she climbed and leaped upward, soon reaching the third-floor window.
Inside was an office. The two boys from earlier had already left, and the room was empty, with only a box of unopened water sitting on the office desk.
The moment she saw the water, the strange taste in her mouth surged up again. Only then did Zheng Wanzheng make up her mind to pry open the window and jump inside.
When she twisted open the bottle cap to rinse her mouth, an identity badge that had been left beside the box and not taken also caught her eye:
[Dong Jingdong, Student Stronghold Leader]
It seemed the student council radio had indeed not been wrong. At the very least, student strongholds really did exist.
As for their reliability……from the girl who had been “silenced,” and the inexplicably gathered zombies outside the building, anyone who believed there was nothing fishy going on would have to be a ghost.
There were no other clues inside the room. Zheng Wanzheng had just intended to leave when a sudden, abrupt sound of running water entered her ears—like someone was releasing water into the room?
She quickly turned around, only to see a water pipe extending in through the edge of the window and spraying outward. The large amount of mist brought by the murky water instantly enveloped the room.
“……???”
Is the campus culture at A University really this fierce? The competition between student strongholds really involves flooding each other?
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