What?! I Became the Zombie Beauty in the Villain’s Arms – CH35

Chapter 35: Will Die

Pei Xiqing patted the hound’s head, and the creature immediately understood the silent command, bounding away into the dark foliage. She lowered her gaze to the vanguard remnants below, who were still frozen in absolute shock.

They had been eagerly anticipating her brutal demise just a second ago, but the narrative parameters shifted instantly. In the next breath, several low-tier mutants violently slapped them to the ground, pouncing onto their chests and tearing into their armor.

The ravine transformed into a visceral bloodbath, yet she remained the sole anomaly, perched entirely untouched amidst the carnage.

Xiao Yue’s brow furrowed in frustration. Channeling his elemental shockwaves, he violently blew the swarming mutants away from his frontline and hoisted a fallen operative to his feet. “Focus your fields and neutralize the targets! If your reserves hit zero, fall back immediately! Hold the line for just a few more minutes—the base extraction column is incoming!”

The survivors were entirely consumed by their own frantic race for survival; not a single asset had the spare focus to worry about Pei Xiqing’s presence.

When Xiao Yue finally managed to steal another glance up at her branch, his jaw tightened. He opened his mouth as if preparing to shout an explanation, his gaze deeply clouded with a complex mixture of lingering guilt and tactical calculation.

Ultimately, the agonizing screams of his dying squadmates violently snapped his focus back to the dirt. He reached out, firmly grasping Pei Yanting’s hand. “Tingting, you need to fall back to the secondary ridge right now.”

Pei Yanting violently wrenched her hand from his grip. “If the unit falls, we fall together. There is mathematically zero reason for me to abandon the core. Besides… my biological sister is standing right above us. There are structural anomalies in her parameters that I must personally clarify.”

In her mind, she had given her absolute devotion to Xiao Yue; why had her own flesh and blood chosen to betray their survival cell back then?

No one within the high command had supported the girl’s insertion into Team S1, yet the original owner had dismantled every bureaucratic hurdle to embed herself within their ranks. Yet, the manipulative, self-serving actions she executed later had been entirely chilling and repulsive to the core memory.

“Our structural defense cannot hold the threshold much longer,” Xiao Yue hissed, his energy fields violently fluctuating. “If you do not execute the retreat now, you will never clear the bottleneck.”

“Our internal inventory still holds enough field rations and battery reserves to sustain a localized pocket defense,” she argued coldly.

“Negative!”

While the two protagonists aggressively clashed over the command hierarchy, Pei Xiqing smoothly dropped from the oak timber, effortlessly navigating the chaotic trajectories of the lunging undead. The S1 scouts who had been crudely boasting about her body a moment ago caught sight of her silent, graceful advance. Terrified by her lack of mortality, their bravado vanished instantly. Not even daring to raise their weapons, they spun on their heels and fled deeper into the brush.

Completely pathetic.

She had fully intended to manually settle the score for their verbal degradation, but she hadn’t expected the elite scouts to sprint away faster than frightened lapdogs.

Pei Xiqing continued to push through the undulating sea of rotting tissue. Several male zombies, tracking the faint remnant of her living scent, tried to clumsily press into her personal space. A sudden instinctual revulsion seized her, and she rapidly dodged away, sliding down a steep mud embankment on the right. To her surprise, she landed directly amidst a massive pile of logistics crates discarded by S1 during their frantic retreat.

She immediately began tearing through the military canvas, but the calculation was running late. A significant portion of the medical inventory had already been compromised and trampled by the passing horde. She grabbed a bloated zombie that was aggressively gnawing on an overturned truck seat, violently throwing it out of the cabin, and offered a sarcastic wave. “Apologies for the interruption.”

The mutant let out a wet grunt, shook its decaying head, and passively shuffled back to chew on a nearby corpse.

Her smile remained tightly fixed behind her mask as she forced her hands into the blood-slicked wreckage, systematically turning over the remains of the fallen.

High-tier crystal cores… regenerative pharmaceuticals…

She scavenged through the crates three times over, but the specific assets Ling Lang required were completely missing from the logistics pile.

She dropped to her knees on the blood-soaked dirt, her sharp eyes scanning the wider valley.

Deep within the epicenter of the pulsing horde, Xiao Yue was unleashing a localized elemental storm, and a distinct, high-density illumination was flashing continuously against his chest rigging.

The more mutant blood splattered across his tactical vest, the brighter the hidden energy cell glowed.

There it is.

Pei Xiqing locked her sights onto the true target.

Xiao Yue executed a crushing kick, shattering the spines of two approaching mutants. “Tingting, listen to my command! Our logistics are entirely spent, and I refuse to let your timeline end in this ditch! We all witnessed the physical bite your sister sustained during the evacuation. Her manifestation here is undeniably a psychological trap engineered by an alpha variant. We must maintain absolute tactical caution. Move the remnants out now, and I will anchor the ravine. If I can permanently neutralize her anomaly before I fall, it will secure the sector. Your system hasn’t fully recovered from the chronic fever, and you have already sacrificed your mathematical core for this unit. I will not watch you die.”

Pei Yanting’s eyes rimmed with hot crimson, her voice cracking in a desperate scream. “Negative! We clear the board together!”

The standard-issue firearm in her grip was vibrating violently, its internal mechanisms jammed, leaving her with a single live round in the chamber.

“Obey the command!”

“I won’t! If I abandon you, your survival probability hits zero! Do you have any analytical concept of what a viral transformation actually entails?! I will not watch your neural network degrade into a mindless monster!” The woman’s psychological restraints finally shattered, and she screamed hysterically into the wind, “Once you turn, every single ounce of your global progress is neutralized! The world will reject your existence, the central base will classify your memory as a treasonous biohazard, and those merciless executioners from Franlun will hunt your cells to the absolute ends of the universe!”

Xiao Yue offered a soft, tragic smile, his hand gently lifting her chin. “If my parameters flip and I become a monster… do not return to look for me.”

“No! You cannot turn!”

Xiao Yue’s fingers twitched, delivering a precise, low-frequency elemental strike to her neural meridian. Pei Yanting’s eyes instantly rolled back, her body slumping entirely limp into his chest. He smoothly transferred her weight into the arms of a nearby vanguard officer. “Extract the Vice-Captain through the northern ridge safely. Leave the structural defense of the valley to me. Ensure her vitals remain stable.”

The remaining S1 operatives hoisted Pei Yanting onto their shoulders, their jaws set. “Understood, Captain! We will execute the extraction at all costs!”

Though the Vice-Captain lacked high-tier offensive elements, her strategic contributions to the faction’s survival metrics were undeniable. She was a generational mathematical prodigy. If it hadn’t been for her hyper-precise probability calculations and her algorithmic calibrations of their elemental reload speeds along the trail, the unit would have been systematically slaughtered weeks ago.

A tight wall of heavily armed operatives formed a protective ring around the unconscious woman, rapidly evacuating her through the rocky fault line.

The battlefield emptied of human life. Xiao Yue stood entirely isolated in the center of the mud pit, twin torrents of high-density elemental energy roaring from his palms as he prepared to single-handedly hold back an undead army that blanketed the hillsides like an absolute carpet of ravenous ants.

Pei Xiqing stood a mere twenty yards behind his flank, her expression deeply serious beneath her mask.

Every single human survivor in this wasteland was frantically fighting to avoid the corruption of the virus, willing to sacrifice their lives to maintain their humanity. Yet, Duan Xiaolin—the cold, calculating Representative of Franlun—had willingly compromised his own pristine cell structure and nearly transformed into a monster just to run a calculation for her.

As long as she remained embedded within the Vanguard unit, her erratic, unverified mutation would remain a ticking biohazard. She couldn’t even calculate the exact timestamp of her next viral flare-up.

Tonight, Duan Xiaolin had successfully bypassed the infection through manual mutilation, but what would happen during the next mutation event?

Whether it was Ling Lang, Long Yan, Fu Feng, or Nie Bin… she fundamentally refused to watch her own fangs tear into their flesh.

Furthermore, the convoy was scheduled to breach the primary gates of the central base within days. If she attempted to pass the biometric scanners as an active zombie, she would inevitably drag the entire unit down with her into a treasonous execution.

The high command enforced an absolute, zero-tolerance policy regarding infected entries, and Franlun’s strict penal codes dictated that any asset harboring an anomaly would face a mandatory death sentence.

The destined male and female leads possessed a narrative halo that guaranteed their ultimate survival, but the Vanguard did not. Yet, they were the absolute best comrades she had ever encountered across two lifetimes.

Whether in her past life on the movie sets or within the pre-written pages of this novel, Pei Xiqing and the original owner had completely fused into a single consciousness. In reality, both iterations were deeply accustomed to absolute isolation. She had climbed from a disposable extra to a box-office lead by enduring absolute loneliness and grinding in the dark. The original owner was even more detached—she had navigated five brutal years of the global outbreak entirely alone without letting a single asset exploit her. Compared to playing the role of a standard teammate, her current physical status was vastly more suited for the dark.

The structural calculations inside her brain clashed violently with the memories of her bickering with Ling Lang and the warm porridge Long Yan had handed her.

Finally, the image of Duan Xiaolin’s cold, bleeding face manifested in her mind.

Those calm, green eyes concealed an ancient, heavy abyss that could never be shared with the base. He looked profoundly tragic, yet anchored by an immovable monument of internal power.

She slowly raised her left forearm, pulling her sleeve back. The grey-green necrotic web was darkening aggressively, spreading across her capillaries at an uncalibrated, exponential rate.

In a single heartbeat, the mutation surged, transforming her entire skin structure into the deadly, ashen palette of an active mutant.

Standing dead center within the swarm, she had completely blended into the sea of monsters. But a single human doctrine remained seared into her consciousness: I cannot bite a single asset in that unit. I will not harm them.

Xiao Yue stood directly ahead of her, his back exposed. Pei Xiqing grabbed a heavy, jagged rock from the mud and violently smashed it down onto her own forearm, tearing a deep laceration into her flesh. The sudden, intense wave of physical pain forced her nervous system to ground itself, aggressively suppressing the primal urge to sink her fangs into the protagonist’s neck.

Her blood trickled into the mud, a dark, venomous green.

Xiao Yue was practically radiating the blinding aura of a destined savior. Pei Xiqing sank onto her knees in the dirt, fully aware that the narrative would inevitably grant him an evolutionary breakthrough in the coming minutes. She tilted her head up, her piercing eyes locking onto his startled profile. “I am opening a negotiation, Commander. Do you care to hear the terms?”

“Because if you refuse the board, your sister and every single asset in your unit will be slaughtered before they clear the ridge.”

The sun slowly breached the horizon.

Due to the jagged, elevated topography surrounding the settlement, dawn illuminated the peaks much earlier than the lowlands. As the distant horizon shifted into a crisp, cold blue, Ling Lang and the remaining Vanguard operatives stood up, having remained awake in full tactical gear for the entire night. He checked the chamber of his rifle, his expression deadly. “I am launching the extraction search.”

The surrounding operatives immediately checked their weapons in unison. “Agreed! We’ve been holding our positions for twelve hours. Even if Pei Xiqing carries a viral immunity, she should have navigated back to the camp coordinates by midnight. Her line must be compromised!”

“I ordered the scout sweep at first light! Let’s move! Even if the horde density in that valley is astronomical, we systematically purge the sector! No matter how many thousands of mutants are choking that ditch, we do not let a civilian girl hold the blast zone for us!”

“Hell yeah, Captain! The entire vanguard column is forming up on your flank!”

Fu Feng and Nie Bin slapped their tactical vests, their elemental fields instantly aligning.

Ling Lang reached out, firmly grabbing Long Yan’s shoulder. “Brother Duan has remained inside a deep neural coma since we established the campsite last night. You anchor this concrete bunker and monitor his diagnostics. The absolute second his consciousness returns, you suppress all data regarding Pei Xiqing’s extraction op.”

Ever since his brother had issued those cryptic administrative directives the night before, his physical system had collapsed into a heavy fever dream due to the unmedicated trauma of the manual flesh-cutting. That was the sole reason Ling Lang was so desperate to plunder S1’, high-tier regenerative serums. His brother had endured the agonizing torture in absolute silence without a shred of anesthesia. For a man operating without an active elemental core, the survival threshold was incredibly narrow.

Long Yan gave a tight nod. “I will run the interference, but his sensory perception is hyper-acute. I cannot guarantee the illusion holds for long.”

The exact second the words left her lips, the heavy metal door behind them violently swung open against the concrete wall.

Duan Xiaolin strode out into the freezing morning air, his windbreaker draped loosely over his bandaged shoulder, his face a mask of glacial, absolute zero. “Exactly how many hours has she been unaccounted for?”

Like this novel? Read Advance Chapters (PDF & EPUB Format)