Chapter 84 A Moment of Life and Death!

Magnus Vane immediately pulled out his building hammer and dropped two wooden frame blocks onto the floor. Using the remaining wood stored in his system backpack, he reinforced both frames until they became sturdier, then stacked them on top of each other and climbed onto the narrow platform. It was one of the oldest early-game survival tricks in 7 Days to Die—a crude fighting platform that placed a survivor just high enough to keep ordinary walkers near the limit of their reach. Against a few dead, it would have been more than enough, but Magnus only had to look at the hordes pressing toward him from both ends of the corridor to know this platform wouldn’t last long.

“Way too many.”

Magnus turned toward the passage leading to the recreation yard. Walkers were still flooding through the open gate, and he had no idea how many more were packed outside after the Howler’s scream had carried across such a large portion of the prison. Staying where he was would only result in both hordes crushing together beneath him until sheer weight destroyed the wooden frames. “No. If I stay here, I’m going to end up as the filling in a walker sandwich.”

There was no time left for hesitation. Magnus bent his knees and drove himself upward, launching from the makeshift platform and catching the metal framework surrounding the ceiling lights almost ten feet above the floor. Rows of long fluorescent fixtures ran down the corridor, protected by perforated steel cages sturdy enough to support his weight for the moment. His fingers locked around the framework, and Magnus began moving hand over hand toward the route he had originally entered from while the walkers below reached uselessly toward his boots.

The horde seemed endless.

Magnus had already moved a considerable distance when he looked down and still couldn’t see where the mass ended. Then several unusually pale, swollen bodies beneath him caught his attention, and his stomach tightened immediately. They were the same type of Exploding Walkers he and Shane had encountered outside the control room, except there were several clustered together directly underneath his current position.

That is very bad.

The bloated walkers hadn’t noticed him yet, but Magnus remembered exactly what had happened when the previous one detonated. Its body had ruptured from the inside, throwing rotten tissue, bone fragments, and hardened splinters outward like shrapnel. One exploding corpse had already been dangerous enough from behind a heavy steel door; several detonating directly beneath him while he hung from the ceiling could turn the entire corridor into a killing zone.

Magnus swallowed.

If those walkers exploded upward, he had nowhere to dodge.

The ceiling itself could trap him in the blast path.

“Easy… nice and easy.”

He deliberately slowed his movements, trying to reduce every scrape and vibration from his boots and hands against the metal framework. His heartbeat seemed louder than the walkers beneath him, but the swollen dead continued wandering without looking up. Magnus moved one hand forward, shifted his weight, and carefully brought his other leg across.

Then he heard something.

Rustle.

Scrape.

Rustle.

Magnus froze.

The sound was disturbingly familiar.

It was coming from ahead.

And getting closer.

He slowly lifted his head.

His expression changed instantly.

Another Walker Centipede was racing toward him across the same overhead metal framework.

This one appeared to contain seven or eight connected corpses, their arms and legs working together as they crawled upside down along the ceiling. Magnus’s pupils narrowed. At its current speed, the creature would reach him within five seconds, while he was still directly above several Exploding Walkers and surrounded by an enormous horde below.

For the first time since the Howler screamed, Magnus genuinely felt trapped.

This is bad.

There was no room to swing his Stone Sledgehammer properly while hanging from the ceiling, and dropping to the floor meant landing directly among dozens of walkers. Even with Strength Lv10, he couldn’t fight forever; his Level 24 stamina still had limits, and a horde this size could bury him through numbers alone. Worse, the ordinary dead weren’t the only problem anymore—the crowd contained Exploding Walkers, another Walker Centipede, and possibly other system-altered monsters he hadn’t even seen yet.

“What do I do…?”

Cold sweat ran down Magnus’s face.

The Walker Centipede closed in.

Four seconds.

Three.

Magnus clenched his jaw.

“Fine. Screw it.”

His system inventory opened.

A nearly full case of high-proof liquor appeared in his hand, leftover supplies scavenged from the small town east of Hershel’s farm. The group had opened some bottles during their earlier celebration, but most of the case had remained untouched. Magnus didn’t have time to carefully prepare anything, so he simply dropped the entire case toward the group of swollen walkers below.

Glass shattered across heads and shoulders.

Liquor splashed over multiple corpses and soaked the floor.

Several broken pieces embedded themselves in decaying flesh, but the walkers barely reacted.

Magnus immediately produced a lighter.

The Walker Centipede was almost on top of him.

He kicked hard against the ceiling framework and threw himself sideways, releasing one hand just as the connected walkers lunged through the space he had occupied. His body swung outward over the horde, and in the same movement, Magnus threw the lighter down.

Flame touched the spilled liquor.

WHOOSH!

Fire spread across the walkers.

The reaction from the swollen corpses was immediate.

Their bodies began expanding.

Magnus’s eyes widened.

“Oh, hell—”

Two seconds.

That was all it took.

BOOM!

A swollen walker ruptured.

BOOM!

A second exploded immediately afterward.

Then another.

BOOM! BOOM!

The narrow prison corridor magnified the blasts until they overlapped into one violent series of concussions. Bone fragments and rotten tissue blasted through the surrounding horde, tearing into ordinary walkers and knocking bodies against the walls. The Walker Centipede had just crossed directly above the exploding group when the shrapnel struck it from underneath.

Several bone spikes punched through the connected corpses.

The leading walker was hit hardest.

A jagged piece of bone pierced through its body and drove it against the ceiling framework, pinning it there.

The rest of the grotesque creature jerked to a sudden stop.

Magnus, meanwhile, had managed to catch another section of the overhead cage before falling. His body swung violently beneath it for a moment before he stabilized himself. “Jesus…”

He released a long breath.

Then pain stabbed through his left shoulder.

Magnus looked over.

A narrow bone fragment had struck him during the blast and buried itself into the meat of his shoulder. It hadn’t hit him directly enough to knock him down, but the wound burned with an intensity that told him the system had already registered contamination. Blood ran down his arm, and within seconds the fluid around the wound had begun taking on a darker reddish-black tint.

“Damn it.”

Magnus kept one hand locked around the metal framework while opening his inventory with the other. He pulled out two Antibiotics, shoved them into his mouth, and swallowed without water. The system medicine began working, but it did absolutely nothing to remove the bone spike still lodged inside him.

Every movement pulled at the wound.

Magnus gritted his teeth and forced himself to keep moving.

One hand forward.

Then the other.

He had survived worse.

The important thing was getting out of the corridor before something else—

A harsh, almost animal-like growl came from behind him.

Magnus stopped.

Slowly, he looked back.

The Walker Centipede was moving again.

The leading corpse remained pinned to the ceiling by the bone spike, but the rest of the creature began twisting violently. Instead of remaining trapped, the connected walkers tore themselves away from their immobilized front section. Flesh stretched, ripped, and finally separated as the creature abandoned its original head the way a lizard might sacrifice its tail.

The second walker became the new front.

Its head snapped toward Magnus.

Then the remaining creature charged.

“You have got to be kidding me!”

Magnus resumed moving, but the Walker Centipede was much faster across the ceiling than he was. The creature’s multiple arms pulled simultaneously against the protective framework, making the entire metal structure bend downward under their combined weight. Magnus could feel the cage shaking in his hands as it closed the remaining distance.

“Why the hell are you so obsessed with me?!”

The new leading walker lunged.

Its arms wrapped around Magnus’s lower leg.

Magnus’s entire body dropped several inches.

His grip nearly slipped.

The walker opened its mouth toward his calf.

Magnus reacted on instinct.

He tightened his core, pulled both knees upward, and violently twisted his body while kicking against the ceiling framework. Strength Lv10 exploded through his legs and hips, and instead of allowing the Walker Centipede to pull him down, Magnus used its own grip to rip the remaining creature away from the ceiling.

The metal cage snapped upward as the extra weight disappeared.

The Walker Centipede fell.

THUD!

It crashed directly into the horde below.

The sudden drop twisted its leading head aside at the last second, causing its bite to land against Magnus’s Wooden Armor Boot instead of exposed flesh.

Crunch.

The teeth failed to penetrate.

Magnus’s eyes widened with relief.

Then the relief vanished.

The connected walkers hadn’t let go.

The leading corpse remained wrapped around his calf while the others twisted beneath it, using each other’s arms to climb upward along Magnus’s leg. What had fallen into the horde was now dragging itself right back toward him like some grotesque living rope.

One hand reached his knee.

Another grabbed higher.

The snapping jaws rose closer.

Magnus looked down.

His pupils contracted sharply.

“…Oh, you son of a bitch.”

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