What?! I Became the Zombie Beauty in the Villain’s Arms – CH36

Chapter 36: A Sudden Moment

“Three hours and eighteen minutes.” Ling Lang reported the timestamp with absolute, military precision. His jaw tightened as he added, “I am launching the deployment. I will bring her back.”

Long Yan pulled up her tactical display. “The biometric scanners indicate a massive migratory swarm has altered its trajectory. Thousands of targets are bearing down on this town sector. The unit must be entirely packed and prepared for an immediate evacuation.”

“Then you lead the column out first,” Ling Lang ordered flatly.

Long Yan violently yanked him by his tactical vest, forcing him to face her. “I have zero objections to executing a high-risk recovery op, but we are a single survival cell. There is no such thing as who leaves early and who holds the blast zone. We run the numbers, calculate the highest-probability solution, and we move as a unified front. The girl ran into that valley to secure our logistics and protect this unit. There is absolutely no mathematical justification for you, or anyone else in this vanguard, to play the lone martyr and absorb the fallout.”

Ling Lang held her gaze for a beat, his shoulders dropping slightly as he nodded. “Understood.”

He turned his head, his eyes tracking the dark, fractured trail where Pei Xiqing had dissolved into the wilderness. “Whatever the resource expenditure, whatever the tactical toll… I am dragging her back to the camp lines this time.”

A rare, ghostly paleness manifested beneath the smooth skin of Duan Xiaolin’s face.

He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses, his voice dropping to a glacial, indifferent murmur. “What structural variable makes her worth your absolute destruction?”

Ling Lang subconsciously lowered his head, his knuckles turning white over the grip of his rifle. “I… I simply calculated that her presence is worth the asset expenditure.”

Regardless of the narrative trajectory, he was going to recover her.

Even if it meant his status, his military rank, and his elemental reserves were permanently stripped from the high command’s manifests, he refused to abandon Pei Xiqing in the dark.

“Brother,” Ling Lang muttered, his voice raw. “You’ve been embedded alongside her through the migration corridor. Your analytical perception should read her core value far clearer than mine.”

The High Representative merely cast a dark, piercing look across his brother’s profile before issuing a calm, unyielding command. “Deploy the grid. Locate the asset.”

The exact second the order left his lips, a dozen heavily armed entities materialized from the high concrete rafters and shadows surrounding the compound. They wore advanced, matte-black tactical masks, their movements silent and fluid—resembling a phantom column rising from a subterranean black site. The ambient pressure in the town instantly plummeted, growing suffocating and eerie.

Ling Lang’s eyes widened, his hand instinctively shifting toward his holster. “Brother… those are high-tier operatives from the central black division?! How did a Franlun retrieval unit bypass the outer radar grid?!”

Duan Xiaolin’s expression remained a monument of absolute frost. “They operate under my direct authority.”

“But Franlun’s jurisdiction is strictly confined within the administrative sector of the primary base,” Ling Lang stammered, his mind short-circuiting as he tried to calculate the variables. “Their extraction squads never deploy past the frontier walls.”

He traded a highly panicked glance with Long Yan. The seasoned operator simply shook her head in silence, indicating that this level of classified deployment was completely beyond her clearance metrics.

Yet, logically speaking, the anomaly of a Franlun execution squad manifesting in the wilderness wasn’t entirely impossible—after all, the man standing before them was the supreme commander of the black division, an entity whose shadow administrative network commanded absolute, terrifying deference across every single sector of the central base.

Long Yan quickly adjusted her tactical HUD, trying to stabilize the unit’s morale. “Leveraging a Franlun asset grid will exponentially compress our search window. Let’s move the column out. We push into the valley grid and establish visual contact before the swarm closes the bottleneck. If we hit a blind spot…”

She paused, running a calculation. “Her cellular architecture is entirely immune to the standard virus. The infected cannot inflict physical trauma on her, which guarantees her immediate survival. Our primary concern is a spatial disorientation variable—she might get lost in the dead forest, or Team S1 might attempt to aggressively lock her down. If she isolates herself in a barren sector like this, viral immunity won’t alter the reality; she will simply starve to death in the wilderness.”

Long Yan crouched by a massive, scorched pine tree at the edge of the town gates. Drawing a heavy combat dagger, she carved a deep, geometric tactical mark into the thick bark. “Establish structural markers along the path. If her navigation fails, she might track our signature back to this grid.”

“Copy that.”

Ling Lang strode into the dark woods, systematically drop-marking their coordinates on the fractured asphalt as they advanced.

But the column hadn’t even pushed a quarter-mile into the dense timber when a lone figure stumbled through the brush ahead.

Xiao Yue, his uniform heavily drenched in visceral blood, was clutching a massive, ruptured hematoma against his chest rigging. He was limping violently, dragging his boots through the dirt as he collapsed toward the camp lights.

His tactical uniform was frayed and torn to shreds, clearly lacking the high-density alloy plating of the vanguard elites, yet his aristocratic features remained entirely unyielding, locked in a mask of rigid, protagonist determination.

Ling Lang’s elemental aura flared violently. He sprinted forward, bridging the gap in a millisecond and seizing the male lead by his tactical vest. “Where the hell is Pei Xiqing?! Why are you breaching my perimeter alone?!”

Xiao Yue spewed a thick mouthful of dark blood, his knees violently giving out as he crashed onto the gravel, using the barrel of his empty firearm to barely keep his torso from collapsing into the dirt. “I cannot verify her spatial coordinates… She ordered me to deliver these tactical assets directly to your unit, and then she dissolved back into the swarm.”

Reaching into his shredded utility pouch with trembling fingers, he pulled out a pristine, military-grade case of high-concentration pharmaceuticals, alongside a dozen glowing, high-tier crystal cores and two radiating special-grade elemental matrices.

He had surrendered virtually every single endgame resource in his inventory to the Vanguard.

Ling Lang’s eyes turned completely black with rage. He snatched the priceless crystal cores, violently throwing them into the dirt as if they were worthless pebbles. Ripping the regenerative serum from the box, his voice dropped to a lethal hiss. “I have the medicine.”

He violently bundled the fabric of Xiao Yue’s collar into his fist, hoisting the bleeding commander off the ground. “Where did her line break?! Take me to the exact coordinate sector where you left her!”

Xiao Yue’s head dropped, his consciousness fraying from neural depletion. “My tracking system… failed…”

Long Yan instantly stepped between them, her hand locking onto Ling Lang’s forearm to break his leverage. “Stand down, Captain. His core has experienced total elemental backlash. If we do not deploy a medic to stabilize his neural pathways immediately, his system will permanently fail.”

Ling Lang violently threw the bleeding man back onto the dirt, spinning on his heel to sprint deeper into the dense brush.

But before he could even clear the first line of overgrowth, a familiar, crisp voice echoed from the heavy shadows behind the timber.

Pei Xiqing strolled out from a thicket of dry brush, entirely unbothered. “Didn’t I literally just harvest a slab of cured meat for you five minutes ago? Why are your base instincts acting up again? Are you seriously refusing to clear the trail until you consume the entire stash? Get moving.”

“Listen to me, you stubborn little idiot! You think this pathetic psychological trick works on my authority? Scramble up right now! Do you honestly expect me to manually drag your frame across the gorge? Your bone density is ridiculously heavy!”

Though her words were sharp and critical, her tone was filled with such a gentle, unvarnished affection that there wasn’t a single shred of genuine malice in her voice.

The Vanguard operatives froze, completely bewildered. “Is… is she holding a conversation with an invisible entity?”

Ling Lang bypassed the brush in a blur of motion. But just as his elemental fields flared to neutralize whatever alpha variant was tracking her, his jaw dropped.

Pei Xiqing was holding a crude piece of heavy-duty nylon utility rope in her right hand. And trotting contentedly right beside her knee was a massive, skeletal Husky whose red, infected eyes were bulging from its skull—an active, reanimated mutant hound.

Ling Lang: “…”

The squad: “…”

Long Yan was the first to break the absolute, stunned silence, bursting into a loud, echoing laugh. “Where in the world did you manage to harvest a pet like that?”

“I simply recovered him from a logistics ditch along the trail,” Pei Xiqing explained smoothly, scratching the thick hide behind the canine’s ears.

“Fascinating… the biological wiring of its brain has completely accepted your authority. It’s showing zero signs of predatory aggression,” Long Yan noted, crouching down to fearlessly stroke the matted, frozen fur of the hound’s skull. “I haven’t seen a domestic canine profile since the initial ground-zero outbreaks five years ago. Everything out here has evolved into a hyper-violent monstrosity. Stumbling onto an obedient creature like this feels entirely surreal and ancient.”

“Yeah, exactly my thoughts. I ran a couple of baseline compliance checks on the navigation back, and I only cleared him to enter the camp limits after confirming his jaws remain locked against human tissue,” Pei Xiqing smiled.

Perhaps the natural, structural idiocy of the Husky breed was completely impervious to viral degradation. Even as a reanimated corpse, the animal’s cognitive processing refused to trigger standard zombie aggression.

The skeletal canine circled her knees, its tail giving a rigid, clicking wag as it sniffed the elite vanguard armor.

Ling Lang stepped into her personal space, his eyes drilling into hers. “Are your vitals stable? Did you take damage?”

“I’m completely fine. I’ve established multiple times that the standard virus cannot penetrate my cellular defenses. The infected literally treat me like a phantom.”

“Hmph. I calculated that you had permanently abandoned the unit,” Ling Lang muttered, a massive, unbidden sigh of relief escaping his chest as he turned back to the operatives. “Re-secure the logistics crates. Prepare the column for immediate transit. And drag this bleeding S1 commander along with us.”

Pei Xiqing walked toward the settlement gates, the skeletal Husky trotting obediently at her heel. Her steps slowed as she noticed Duan Xiaolin standing silhouetted against the morning light. She paused, stepping out of the rank to approach him, a soft smile playing on her lips. “Brother Duan… did you successfully absorb the regenerative serum?”

“I did,” the High Representative replied, his tone entirely level.

“Good,” she murmured, her gaze softening. “I was running an immense wave of anxiety that my mutation had permanently compromised your cells, that I had transformed you into a monster.”

Pei Xiqing slightly tilted her chin up. Her windbreaker was heavily dusted with ashen soil, and the vivid, luminous quality of her beautiful eyes dimmed by a fraction. “To be completely transparent… I’ve been running a series of internal calculations along the trail, and I’ve reached a definitive conclusion. I need to sever my connection to this unit. I am an active zombie; my biological baseline deviates entirely from your squad’s metrics. You are a High Representative of Franlun—your administrative codes cannot tolerate the presence of a biohazard within your inner circle. My insertion into this convoy was simply a volatile, spur-of-the-moment anomaly. A strategist of your caliber has absolutely zero utility for a liability like me. For the survival metrics of both our timelines, it is infinitely more efficient if I fade into the wilderness alone.”

“But I refused to execute a silent evacuation,” she whispered, looking up through her dark lashes. “I didn’t want to leave your board without a formal declaration, causing your scouts to waste valuable tactical resources tracking my coordinates. So… I wanted to deliver the notice face-to-face.”

Behind the gold-rimmed lenses of his glasses, the man’s deep green eyes turned instantly to absolute, crushing ice. Standing with his back entirely to the mounting dawn light, his ink-black pupils looked predatory, dangerous, and radiating a suffocating, lethal pressure.

“A spur-of-the-moment anomaly?” he repeated, his voice dropping to a terrifying, raspy whisper that cut straight through the morning air. “Is that truly the conclusion your human mind managed to calculate?”

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