What?! I Became the Zombie Beauty in the Villain’s Arms – CH30

Chapter 30: Bit Him

Pei Xiqing’s palms were raw and scraped from the fall. The stinging pain made her want to physically tear Meng Jiankai apart, but the sudden neural shock from the virus kept her voiced trapped in her throat. She could only glare at him with pure, venomous hatred.

Idiot.

“Hey! You actual trash, you still dare to glare at me?!” Meng Jiankai’s temper flared. He raised his heavy combat boot, preparing to violently kick her while she was down. Pei Xiqing’s fingers clamped around a jagged chunk of concrete. If he dared to bring that boot down, she was going to smash it straight through his foot.

But before Meng Jiankai’s boot could even get close to her, a blinding, terrifying streak of pure elemental energy erupted across the asphalt.

The violent shockwave threw Meng Jiankai completely off his feet, sending him crashing into a pile of rubble.

Ling Lang led his remaining vanguard operatives in a rapid tactical retreat, rushing into the camp. He forcefully grabbed Meng Jiankai by his collar, dragging him up before throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of garbage. “How many damn lives do you think you have to waste out here?!”

Meng Jiankai’s eyes widened in sheer terror. “Captain Ling Lang! I’m sorry, I’m sorry… it was a misunderstanding! I didn’t see her!”

Ling Lang kicked him hard in the ribs, sending him rolling across the dirt. “Get the hell out of my sight.”

Pei Xiqing pushed herself up from the concrete, dusting off her hands. She adjusted her mask, her voice muffled but steady. “Thank you. How is the frontline holding up?”

Ling Lang spat on the ground, his jaw clenched tight. “I have never fought alongside such a pathetic pack of cowards in my entire military career. These useless bastards are worse than the last. All units, pack the high-priority crates immediately! Fall back to the vehicles! I’ll hold the line and cover the tactical retreat!”

He wasn’t terrified of a brutal firefight, nor was he afraid of facing a losing battle against a massive horde. But he absolutely despised cowards. Being anchored to a spineless joint-force like this was a catastrophic stroke of bad luck.

Sensing the explosive violence vibrating beneath his aura, Pei Xiqing simply nodded. “Understood. Stay safe.”

Long Yan stepped up beside him, checking her rifle. “I’m staying with you to anchor the line, Captain.”

“Negative,” Ling Lang barked. “The rest of the squad, fall back now!”

Pei Xiqing let out a quiet sigh, turning toward the vehicles, but Long Yan suddenly grabbed her firmly by the wrist.

“What’s wrong, Sister Long Yan?”

Long Yan lowered her voice to a tense whisper, her eyes serious. “The second you climb into that G-Class, maintain an absolute, safe distance from Brother Duan. Do not push your luck until we regroup.”

Pei Xiqing blinked. “What happened?”

Long Yan shook her head grimly. “Just listen to me. Whatever you do, do not cross his boundaries tonight. Do not touch his reverse scale.”

“Okay.”

Long Yan turned her head, casting a highly anxious glance back toward the concrete roof of the collapsed skyscraper.

Just a minute ago… when Pei Xiqing had been thrown to the asphalt by Meng Jiankai, if Ling Lang hadn’t violently sprinted into the camp to break the tension, that Base Four operative would have been a dead man. As for how brutally he would have died, it would have depended entirely on the mood of the man watching from the roof.

Even though Duan Xiaolin claimed his primary ability was no longer functional, Long Yan had spent years serving alongside him; she was intimately familiar with his terrifying, untraceable methods of execution.

Thinking about it, a cold shiver ran down her spine.

From what she recalled, she hadn’t sensed that specific, suffocating aura from Duan Xiaolin in years—especially the latent pressure of his specialized interrogation mindset. If Ling Lang hadn’t intercepted the confrontation when he did, the internal political fallout would have been catastrophic.

Although a parasite like Meng Jiankai fully deserved to be executed, fracturing the base’s joint-coalition by murdering a rival officer in cold blood was a treasonous offense.

No one in the vanguard wanted to see Brother Duan’s hands stained with allied blood over a civilian.

Pei Xiqing followed Long Yan’s gaze. Looking up at the ruined roof, she spotted Duan Xiaolin standing silhouetted against the floodlights, staring down at the camp with an expression of freezing indifference.

He was watching the entire time.

She straightened her oversized coat, pushing the lingering anger from her mind, and hurried toward the vehicles alongside Fu Feng and Nie Bin.

Every single step felt like a physical crucifixion as the virus violently throbbed in her veins.

But the tactical situation was rapidly crumbling, and the entire camp was retreating in full-blown panic. She didn’t have the luxury of collapsing.

Griting her teeth against the blinding waves of pain, she climbed into the backseat of the G-Class. The internal itch in her jaws was growing so agonizingly intense that she subconsciously reached for her combat knife, wanting to plunge it into her own skin just to ground her senses.

The retreat was chaotic. The grand “joint-defense strategy” the Captains had boasted about was reduced to a pathetic joke. As the G-Class tore through the barricades, navigating the crumbling exit corridors, they blew past Team S1’s armored convoy.

Pei Xiqing was completely consumed by her internal war against the virus, her eyes closed in agony. She failed to notice a woman wearing thick, black-framed glasses sitting in the passenger seat of S1’s lead vehicle, staring intently at the G-Class as it sped past.

The convoy sprinted all the way to the primary city gates, only to slam into a massive block. A dense, undulating wave of thousands of mutants had completely choked the extraction corridor.

The vehicles screeched to a halt. The uninfected operatives immediately threw their doors open, engaging the horde in a brutal close-quarters firefight to clear a path.

Inside the cabin, Pei Xiqing was losing her mind. The sensory overload from the virus was suffocating; she desperately wanted to claw her own flesh off.

In a delirious haze of agony, she began violently slamming the side of her head against the armored door frame to knock herself unconscious. Just as she reared back to slam her skull against the steel a third time, the heavy door was suddenly ripped open from the outside.

Losing her balance, she fell headfirst out of the cabin—directly into Duan Xiaolin’s solid chest.

The man looked down at her, the ambient moonlight reflecting off his glasses, masking his deep green eyes in a cold glare. He effortlessly scooped her into his arms, hoisting her against his broad shoulder. “Hold on tight.”

Pei Xiqing instinctively wrapped her arms around his neck, her vision blurring as he ran through the wreckage, seamlessly dodging the grasping claws of the undead. As a rotting mutant lunged at them from a blind spot on the right, Pei Xiqing’s survival instincts flared. She swung a heavy iron pipe she had scavenged from the floorboards, violently crushing the zombie’s skull in a single fluid stroke.

Duan Xiaolin navigated the blast zone, an eyebrow arching in genuine amusement. “Not bad.”

“Barely held on,” she gasped, her breath ragged against his collar. “Why are we on foot? Where is the G-Class?”

“The extraction corridor is compromised. The road ahead is a graveyard of abandoned military transports and compressed civilian vehicles. We can’t drive the SUV through the bottleneck.”

“Understood.”

She had originally wanted to play the role of the polite, unburdened companion—reminding him that since his ability was offline, he shouldn’t be carrying dead weight. She was technically immune to their attacks anyway; she could just crawl through the horde on her own. But to her absolute astonishment, even with her full weight in his arms, Duan Xiaolin’s pace was incredibly fast and perfectly steady. He moved through the sea of shrieking monsters with zero panic, entirely unbothered by the suffocating density of the swarm.

Pei Xiqing tilted her head up slightly, her watery eyes locking onto the sharp, powerful line of his throat. Her jaw throbbed, an intense hunger causing her to swallow hard. “Brother Duan… do you have any idea what the two of us look like right now?”

“What do we look like?” he asked, his voice completely level as he vaulted over a mountain of mutated corpses, the main city gate looming just yards ahead.

“Like a starving predator running alongside a wolfhound.”

“I am the predator?”

“It’s just a metaphor.”

Duan Xiaolin’s expression remained an unyielding mask of calm. “That is uniquely the first time anyone has ever used that comparison for me.”

Pei Xiqing let out a weak, breathy laugh against his skin. “I’m the hunter out here. The kind that wants to devour you.”

Escaping the burning city was a critical necessity, but trapped within the parameters of this brutal apocalypse, being carried through the jaws of death by a man like Duan Xiaolin felt strangely surreal.

She naturally tightened her grip around his neck, gently resting her flushed, burning cheek directly against the soft skin of his throat.

The internal agony was becoming unbearable. The viral heat was so suffocating she felt like her consciousness was going to short-circuit at any millisecond.

Surrendering entirely to the exhaustion, she let her muscles go slack, closing her eyes as she drifted into a delirious haze against his chest.

Duan Xiaolin cleared the primary city gates, sprinting down a narrow, rocky detour flanking the main highway. The distant shrieks of the horde echoed behind them, but the immediate path was clear. He slowed his pace slightly, glancing down at the girl in his arms, realizing she had completely passed out.

He reached up, gently brushing the sweat-slicked hair away from her forehead. He wiped the moisture from her pale skin, his voice dropping to a low, quiet murmur. “Pei Xiqing?”

There was zero response.

His eyes narrowed as he noticed a dark smudge at the corner of her mouth. He carefully pressed his thumb against her chin, forcing her jaw open.

Fresh, crimson blood was actively welling up from her mouth.

She had bitten a deep, jagged gash into the very tip of her own tongue to keep from losing her mind.

His expression darkened to absolute zero, his grip tightening as he pushed forward through the dark trail.

As he adjusted her weight, shifting her body higher against his shoulder, the bare skin of his throat accidentally brushed directly against her nose.

The unconscious girl’s nostrils flared. Like a blind, primal animal tracking a scent, she subtly sniffed the skin of his neck. Duan Xiaolin instantly froze, anchoring his boots into the dirt. He didn’t pull away. He stood perfectly still in the dark, watching her with a lethal stillness, waiting to see exactly how far her mutation would go.

Without a single microsecond of hesitation, her jaw unhinged, and her razor-sharp fangs sank deeply into his neck.

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