Runebound Reverse Tower of The Dead-Chapter 160: Corpse Tide

Kael was behind the door when it opened and the surge of zombies was like the opening of a dam’s gate. Complete chaos. An amalgamation of rotting flesh and teeth.

The hinge didn’t creak; it shuddered, metal protesting as if the door itself knew it was a bad idea to let anything in. Kael kept his back angled just enough to avoid being the first thing the stampede hit, palms pressed to the frame, shoulders tense. He couldn’t see any of it, but he didn’t need sight to understand what a crowd of undead sounded like when it finally had permission to move.

It was wet. Heavy. The scrape of feet that weren’t careful, the slap of flesh against flesh, the low throat noises that weren’t quite words and weren’t quite animal calls either. The corridor beyond vomited bodies into the room, and the air changed instantly, turning thick and greasy with the stink of old mouths and half-dried gore.

The zombies stepped on each other, stomped each other, clawed over each other, all for the chance to have a bite of that sweet human flesh.

They moved like a single organism made of hunger. One fell, and three climbed on top of it. Another got shoved face-first into a shelf, ribs cracking with a sound like snapping twigs, and it didn’t even slow down.

Elbows jammed into rotten throats, fingers gouged at cheeks, and every one of them kept pushing forward because the only thing they understood was forward. A choke point meant nothing to them. The concept of "space" didn’t exist. Only the scent did.

However.

The moment they got in, they all fell into a stupor. The smell, the scent, even the sight of said human simply ceased to exist.

It happened so abruptly that it felt unnatural. One second, the room was a tidal wave. Next, the wave lost its target and collapsed into itself. Bodies bumped and jostled for another heartbeat, then slowed like puppets whose strings had been cut. Heads twitched side to side. Hands hung half-raised. A few jaws kept working, chewing air out of habit.

Kael felt it more than he saw it. The pressure of the crowd shifted, no longer converging on him with purpose, but swaying in confused, meaningless motion.

There was nothing there. Their eyes were already rotten beyond belief, and for a Zombie sight was the least used sense. So they used their noses, but it couldn’t smell anything but the fumes of a smoldering corpse and the humid, stale air of the room they walked in.

The burning corpse on the floor did him a favor, masking the one thing these monsters could actually follow. Smoke and rot and damp concrete formed a thick, ugly blanket over the air. The zombies sniffed anyway, loud, wet sniffs that sounded like clogged pipes, then flinched from the heat-smell of the charred one and the sharp sting of soot.

There was simply nothing there.

Kael took a long breath. In his head, he was still counting, "Sixteen, seventeen." As he took a step forward.

He didn’t breathe because he needed oxygen. He breathed because it forced him to stay present inside his own body. Because counting gave his mind a rail to hold onto while everything else tried to slip. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Kael was blind, it didn’t fully mean he was crippled. He still had other senses. His ears were his second most powerful weapon right now. With his mind being the first. Always and forever.

His foot moved cautiously, toe-first, feeling for debris. The world was still black. The only "shape" he had was the map and the rhythm of his own counting and the sound the zombies made whenever they moved too close. He knew the petrification would come again, and he couldn’t afford to be caught mid-step when it did.

Something hit his foot, an arm, it simply pushed against him, it was strong, freakishly so. A zombie’s body didn’t have the same physical limitation that a normal human’s.

The limb bumped his shin like a bar swinging in the dark, and the force behind it made Kael’s knee flex instinctively. Not enough to drop him, but enough to remind him these weren’t slow movie props.

They weren’t brittle mannequins.

They were corpses running on pure motor function, and motor function didn’t care about pain.

Yes, it is rotten, but also, it is beyond powerful. The human mind serves as a limiter to a person’s full capabilities. He knows the story of a mother who would be more than capable of lifting a car from the body of her child if need be. Body limitations and physical suppressants can all go to hell when instinct and Adrinalin overpowers reason.

Kael felt that truth in the shove against his leg. The zombie wasn’t "strong" in a trained way. It was strong in a careless way, like a machine that didn’t know how fragile its own parts were. The kind of strength that snapped bones by accident. Its own, or its victims, it mattered not.

And that is only temporary.

Now, what if there was no reason whatsoever, and all that remained was the instinct to eat and kill?

You end up with Zombies.

And these were strong, mighty strong too.

He could feel them around him like a living wall. Not because they were aware of him...Presence made sure of that...but because their bodies were stacked shoulder to shoulder, motionless and mindless, clogging the doorway. Breathing down his neck without knowing it.

A hundred threats standing still.

Still, Kael pushed forward, blind, unable to see, and completely hopeless, he pushed against the tide.

Hopeless wasn’t surrender. Hopeless was a measurement.

It meant he didn’t have a clean plan, just a narrow path and a timer.

He pressed his palms out in front of him, gauntlets scraping against cloth and skin, and tried to wedge himself through gaps by feel alone.

They couldn’t see him, they couldn’t fully feel him, but if one wrong foot of his ends up in the wrong spot, or one zombie decides to close its teeth on an exposed body part of Kael, then he’ll be done for.