Chapter 130: The Moron Coach

Andrea blushed furiously when she heard him.

The blood surged to her cheeks with dizzying speed, turning her fair skin a deep, helpless crimson that crept all the way up to the very tips of her ears.

For all her confident swagger back in the warehouse—and her bold demands about staking her claim for the night—hearing him say it so bluntly in a crowded bus made her entire composure instantly melt away.

She pushed his face away from herself, tips of her ears red.

"Go be shameless somewhere else," she said shyly, burying her face into his shoulder for half a second before swatting playfully at his chest, "Wait till we get inside the hotel at least."

Fredrinn laughed heartily at her shyness, the deep, rich sound rumbling against her frame, and turned his eyes back out toward the front windshield to continue watching the fight.

It wasn’t just him.

Practically the entire bus was pressed against the glass.

The earlier gloom, thick with the mourning of Christine and Sarah, had been temporarily overwritten by the sheer, desperate thrill of survival.

The civilians, huddled in their seats or standing on their tiptoes in the aisle, watched the three men battle on the blood-soaked asphalt below like spectators at a modern gladiatorial arena.

Whispers and hushed chatter broke out across the rows.

"Damn, brother Max’s lightning abilities are so cool!" a teenage schoolgirl gasped in pure fascination, clutching her friend’s arm as azure arcs lit up the darkness in brilliant, jagged flashes.

"Ash isn’t doing that bad either, though it’s quite weird seeing him put his blade in the zombie skull and then going motionless!" another girl added with a mix of awe and sheer exhaustion, her eyes wide as she tracked the glowing beam of light slicing into the undead pack.

"Never thought I would see that retard saving our lives..." a boy sitting two rows down muttered under his breath, shaking his head at the bizarre sight of his annoying classmate fighting like a sci-fi hero.

"Jacob’s the only one without powers down there, haha," Harry chuckled lightly from a middle row, pointing a finger as he saw Jacob swinging a lead pipe with frantic, desperate swings, hitting and killing zombies one by one.

Naturally, Jacob was the slowest of the bunch.

He possessed no flashy elements, no crackling electricity, and no humming pillars of mana.

At the very least, Ash could guarantee an absolute kill every five seconds once the beam bored through, using his boots to kick the nearest bodies back to keep a safe buffer.

Jacob, on the other hand, had to rely entirely on his modest, level-five Awakened physical stats. He was bashing skulls in with raw muscle, panting hard, and struggling to keep his ground without an offensive trump card.

Jenny watched the skirmish from the doorway, her arms folded tightly beneath her chest.

She briefly wondered if she should join the party and crack a few skulls herself, but after checking the dwindling supplies in her pockets, she decided against it.

There was simply no point in burning through precious bullets over a low-tier pack.

Earlier in the collapse, everyone had been wasteful.

They had treated firearms like unlimited safety blankets, spraying lead at shadows and blowing through magazines without realizing how desperately rare and irreplaceable ammunition would become in a dead world.

Only now they were realizing how precious those were.

Up by the entryway, Aadav had completely abandoned his driving seat.

He stood casually leaning against the inner frame of the open hydraulic door, crossing his arms and gazing at the ongoing battle with an air of complete, detached superiority.

Taking a deep breath, he cupped his hands around his mouth like a drill sergeant on a field day.

"Jacob, attack on the right, man! The zombie you’re fighting is already dead! Stop wasting energy like a retard!"

He didn’t stop there. He shifted his eyes to the giant discharging sparks into the street.

"Max, stop shooting out your electricity like a fucking moron! Save mana!"

Then his gaze drifted to the glowing beam.

"Ash... I don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing. Just do better, dude!"

He was offering his suggestions in a leveled, calm, and deeply intellectual tone, sounding like a high-level tactician breaking down a chess board.

But his suggestions would have sounded leagues better if he wasn’t liberally peppering them with insults, speaking down from the safety of the stairs in a voice that clearly implied he was ten times better than the ones actually getting covered in black viscera.

Down in the mud and gore, Max’s patience snapped instantly.

"You brown bitch, come down and fight with us instead of yapping!" Max was the first to retort, his deep, booming voice cutting over the snarling mob as he drove his boot into a walker’s chest.

Jacob swung his pipe with gritted teeth, ducking under a decaying arm before taking out the creature’s kneecap. He was already exhausted, struggling to maintain his polite mask under the physical strain.

"Brother Aadav, if you weren’t higher-levelled than me, then I would’ve respectfully beaten you up," Jacob called out with a stressed, wheezing voice while fending off two oncoming walkers.

Ash, entirely absorbed in his five-second drilling process, didn’t even dignify the words with a glance, directly ignoring the retarded, wannabe coach blabbering from the top step.

Aadav merely laughed at the retorts, entirely unbothered, and a few of the younger civilians behind him let out quiet chuckles.

For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the suffocating, paranoid dread inside the bus had cracked. The mood was genuinely improving.

It was obvious that their front line of Awakeners, messy as they were, had the situation under control.

Of course, that confidence only held because there wasn’t a single Tier 3 or higher abomination lurking within this particular cluster.

If an agile, hyper-evolved hunter had pounced from the shadows beneath the nocturnal buff, the chaotic skirmish would have turned into a bloody massacre in seconds.

Thankfully, the local pack was mostly mindless Tier 1 walkers and a handful of sluggish Tier 2s.

In just five minutes, the bulk of the horde lay scattered across the driveway in motionless heaps.

Seeing that the worst was over, Aadav finally stepped down onto the tarmac to help clean up, and Jenny decided to give a hand as well.

Unwilling to soil her clothes with rotting blood, she grabbed a long curtain rod scavenged from the back and skewered the few crawling stragglers from a safe, comfortable distance.

Once the area was thoroughly cleared, the fighters dragged their weary bodies back up the folding stairs.

The bus erupted into hushed praise.

Civilian students and teachers hurried forward with genuine gratitude, handing out bottles of water and offering whatever crackers and dry rations they had on hand.

Several people eagerly vacated the prime front-row seats, insisting that the exhausted fighters take their spots to rest their trembling legs.

Aadav stepped over the threshold, wiped the grease from his brow, and dropped into the driver’s chair.

He turned the key, and the heavy diesel engine roared back to life.

With the road cleared of bodies, he tapped the throttle, carefully rolling the bus up the short circular ramp and parking it flush against the shattered entryway of the hotel.

The bus’s broad yellow side blocked off half the open air, providing a crude, temporary barrier against the street.

Aadav cut the engine, setting the handbrake before turning his head toward the Awakeners.

"Should we all go in first to make sure if it’s safe?" he asked, his earlier humor vanishing into practical caution. He wasn’t underestimating the zombies in the slightest.

It was a sensible caution. In this world, a single scratch or a surprise bite from a concealed closet meant an agonizing, immediate death.

Nobody wanted a repeat of what had happened to Dickens.

"Yes, good idea," Jenny said, stepping up to take command. She rolled her shoulders and nodded firmly at his request, then turned her sharp amber eyes straight toward the back of the coach.

Her gaze landed squarely on the handsome bastard lounging comfortably with his arms spread across the vinyl seat. "Fredrinn, you’re coming along this time."

As she stared at him, a completely inappropriate, shameful thought suddenly flashed through her mind—Maybe we can split off and check some of the upper suites together...

But she hastily suppressed the thought, not wanting to let anyone know of her perverted thoughts.

"If you say so," Fredrinn chuckled smoothly. He unfolded his long legs from the seat and rose to his feet, casually reaching down to take Rose by the arm.

Rose didn’t need to be asked twice. She purred softly, rising with serpentine grace and slipping her cool hand into his grip, pushing herself forward to walk right beside him down the aisle.

Although nobody had specifically invited the crimson-haired demon to join the scouting party, almost every civilian on board breathed an audible sigh of relief at the sight.

Her terrifying presence inside the enclosed cabin had been like an unexploded bomb waiting to go off.

Having her step outside not only guaranteed overwhelming firepower on the clearing team, but it also got her terrifying, heart-shaped eyes far away from the fragile humans left behind.

It was killing two birds with one stone.

Thus the party was arranged, everyone was given more than 10 minutes for an ample rest before they got ready.

Rose asked Charlie and Selene to accompany her, serving as meatshields while Maya, Aadav and Jacob stayed behind in the bus to protect it.