I hefted the car wheel and walked to the edge of the building. Not easily, mind you. My strength wasn’t superhuman, just top-of-the-line human. Probably. It was difficult to tell. I was strong enough that it looked incongruous for my wimpy body to lift a whole car wheel.

The survivors had been of the opinion that we didn’t have time to disassemble an entire car into missile-worthy chunks of junk. They had reckoned without Cloridan and his darksteel daggers. Cloridan had carved up the vehicle in much the same way as Dad used to carve up the Christmas turkey.

I paused to take aim, although it wasn’t necessary. Zombies were piled up three ranks deep all around the building. Pushing, shoving, pounding on the walls. I couldn’t really miss. The wheel smashed down, crushing one and knocking two more to the ground. They were trampled down by their neighbours, but zombies are tough. They’ll get back up again.

You have inflicted 2400 damage!

For killing a Zombie, you have earned 7500 XP

One of them wouldn’t.

What struck me as strange was that the System had stopped acknowledging my party. Everything had gone back to individual accomplishments. Was that something that Axel could control? Was it a subtle message that we were all on our own in the zombie apocalypse?

Or was there some other reason? I’d been put in a party with the kobold soldiers before, so it wasn’t that I was fighting on the side of monsters. I racked my brain, but I couldn’t think of what the reason could be.

I picked up a jagged, heavy piece of metal and threw it down, taking out another zombie. It would have been too dark to see, but I had lit the exterior with a [Light] spell on each corner, jacked up to maximum output. They were low enough that a few zombies were trying to eat them, but the spells were immaterial, so I wasn’t worried.

What I was worried about was that there were still zombies arriving. The survivors were insistent that the zombies wouldn’t stop, but Axel had to run out at some point. Right?

I hadn’t been serious about zombies dropping down from the ceiling, but once it got dark, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d ended up putting some Phantasmal shade pavilions up for us to work under. There wasn’t any sun to cool down from, but they’d break the fall of any suicidal zombies.

The rest of the survivors were up here with me, dutifully tossing junk down and taking out zombies. There was plenty of room for it, even with the huge pile of junk. The firemen had apparently used this level for rooftop parties. The furniture and the barbeque equipment had long since been tossed over the edge, but I could imagine hunky firemen relaxing up here.

Felicia was downstairs, resting, maximising her mana regeneration. Something that we’d been discussing, behind [Privacy] spells, was having her cure another zombie.

The reason we were keeping it a secret was that the notion was freaking out the other survivors. Even Marcus. The idea that one of the slavering monsters outside could be turned into a normal person with a single spell was disturbing, to say the least.

Travis hadn’t yet accepted that we could. He was watching over Marcus like a hawk, waiting for the spell, and Marcus, to revert. The others had accepted that Marcus was human now. They were slowly coming to the inevitable conclusion that led to. Namely, the monsters outside shouldn’t be killed. Every one they killed was one they didn’t cure.

For us, the math was a little different. We were turning a Threat Thirty monster into a non-hostile Threat Ten. Clearly a win, if an incredibly costly one. The reason we were considering it was that we were fairly certain we were going to need the survivors for something, at some point. We could probably afford to lose some if Axel was playing fair, but making new ones would give us an extra buffer of lives.

That reasoning was breathtakingly sociopathic if you happened to think that the survivors were people. Since the survivors certainly did, we kept that reasoning from them. The rest of us got to struggle with the notion. Fortunately, our goals were the same in both cases. Regardless of whether the survivors were real people or story tokens, we needed to keep them alive.

Cloridan was patrolling the building, keeping us linked with Kyle. We did have the phones— and weren’t the locals surprised at phones that worked, somehow, with magic—but Kyle needed both his hands to fight monsters, so he might not be able to call in the event of an emergency.

Borys was up here with me. For now, he was dropping things like the rest of us, saving his mana for phase two.

“They’re starting to climb,” he reported.

“I noticed. Do you want to start now, or wait?” I replied.

We’d been warned that once a few ranks of zombies gathered around the building, they would start to climb. It seemed that they only realised they could once their path was blocked by enough zombies. Once there were zombies above them, they got the idea of taking an alternative path.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

They weren’t great at climbing. They could cling to any handholds they found, but they had trouble finding new ones. The problem was that a zombie clinging to a wall made for a whole set of easy handholds for other zombies.

“I’ll wait for a bit,” Borys said. “If they get higher before I knock them off, they might get damaged.”

I nodded. We didn’t have to wait long. Zombies didn’t climb fast, but the distance was deceptive. Ten metres up seemed like an insurmountable distance, but a runner could cover it in two seconds if it was horizontal.

“Stand back!” Borys ordered the others. He was comfortable with his control, but the edge of the roof was going to get quite uncomfortable for a bit.

This time, the storm that formed was more like a hurricane. We were contained within the large eye while the icy winds scoured the building of zombies and replaced them with ice. I would have said that the eye was much larger compared to the wall of wind outside it, but I couldn’t honestly say how far the winds extended. Between the sleet, snow and whirling ice, I couldn’t see five feet into the darkness.

Which meant that I couldn’t see if it was working. Borys, too, was looking at the darkness with a frown on his face.

“I’ll give it another five minutes!” he yelled over the howling wind. “Don’t want too much ice to build up!”

I nodded again. A little bit of ice would make the walls more slippery, but if the ice was thick enough for the zombies to drive their fingers into it, it would make it easier to climb.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Cloridan, who’d come up from below. He gestured at the stairs.

I looked around to make sure everything was in hand before I went down. The survivors were huddling under one of the pavilions, staring at the howling gale. We’d shown them magic, but this was something else.

I gave them a thumbs-up and headed down. The noise dropped and the temperature climbed as soon as the stair door closed behind us.

“Kyle says that there’s something going on with the sewers,” Cloridan said.

“The ice hasn’t melted yet, has it?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, but there’s noises.”

When I got down there, I got to see—or rather, hear— what he meant. There was a crunching sound coming from the grate. It was muffled, but it was definitely a crunch. It sounded like…

“Are they eating the ice?” I asked.

“Maybe?” Kyle said. “They’ve been pounding on the walls, but everything’s stayed secure. This—” he pointed at the grate, “Is something different.”

“It’s too loud, though,” I said thoughtfully. “There were three zombies jammed in there before, but they could hardly move, let alone make all this chomping noise.”

As I spoke, the ice under the grate started to tremble. We all took a step back, and Kyle drew his sword. A few more chomps and the head of the zombie responsible was visible.

[Identification]: - Gnawing Zombie - Threat: 30 - Properties: Gluttonous Bite, Diseased Blood

“It’s a different type!” I exclaimed. “Kill it!”

Kyle’s sword was thin enough to fit through the grate, and the zombie couldn’t dodge. A few stabs in the head and it stopped moving.

“Did you get a notification?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s dead.”

Suddenly, the corpse jerked and withdrew, as if it had been pulled backwards. More crunching sounds followed.

“There’s more of them,” Cloridan said. “Should we get the gas of lyne?”

“We moved it upstairs in case the climbers got out of hand,” I said. “Using it outside seems like a better idea than using it in here.”

“Then…?” Kyle said inquiringly.

“Then, this,” I said, kneeling down and casting [Stone Shape] The remaining ice in the shaft crumbled as I squeezed it with constricting stone. Then I released my grip and let it tumble down. The crunching stopped, briefly, and then was muffled more effectively as I sealed the shaft entirely. I had to use the concrete of the floor to do it, creating a dip in the smooth floor. I left the iron grate where it was for additional reinforcement.

“There,” I said. We stared at the depression for a second.

“Will that be enough?” Cloridan asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The survivors didn’t know anything about variant types. I was looking outside before and only saw standard zombies.”

Kyle knelt and put his hand on the lowest part of the depression.

“It’s vibrating,” he reported. “A zombie is gnawing on it.”

“How quickly is it getting through,” I wondered.

“Faster than teeth normally would,” he said. “But how much faster, I don’t know.”

“One way to find out,” Cloridan said fatalistically. Outside, we heard the storm die down.

“Cloridan, go upstairs and fill Borys in. Kyle, see if you can hear any other gnawers working their way up. If they can gnaw through stone, the walls are in danger.”

Both boys nodded, leaving me to watch what had once been a sewer entrance. It seemed like forever before they came back, and it must have been some time because, by the time they did, I could hear the crunching of concrete quite clearly.

“I can hear it,” Kyle said. “All over. It’s faint, and slower than this is, but I think they’re gnawing at the foundations.”

“Borys says it was partially successful,” Cloridan said. “Most of the zombies were blown off, and a lot were frozen solid, but some of them are stuck to the wall, and the newcomers aren’t waiting to stack up before they climb. He’ll be putting the storm up again in ten.”

Another crunch sounded, louder than before. Looking down, I saw the first small hole in my barrier. Another crunch sounded, and now the head of the gnawer zombie was visible.

“Hold on a second,” I said as my companions readied their weapons. “I want to see how it works.”

The zombie opened its mouth… and kept opening it. Its head split in half, revealing that its entire head contained only a mouth with jagged, inhuman teeth. Then it lunged forward and down, crunching down on the concrete that was restraining it.

“Is that enough?” Kyle asked.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little sick. He didn’t hesitate, slicing the head off. The thing jerked and struggled, and then got dragged back. The next one wouldn’t be long.

I glanced at my phone. It had a timer function.

“It took it fifteen minutes to get through a foot of concrete,” I said. “How long do you think it will take for the rest of them to undermine the foundations?”

Kyle thought about it. “Not as long as I’d like. Four, maybe six hours?”

“And we can’t attack them through the foundations,” I said. “That would just be doing their work for them.”

I looked at the hole in the floor. Something was already wiggling up into the light.

“We’re going to have to take the fight to them,” I said. “And hope that all the gnawers after us got here via the same sewer system.”