To the Start of a New World

2.15

Piercing sirens whirred in Lu Hao's mind.

Kai was a zombie!

He shifted to the side just as a claw sliced through the air next to his heart. The long, black fingernails pierced through the leather gloves.

In a breath, Lu Hao's body coursed with lightning. He grasped the outstretched arm. Hundreds of millions of volts of electric current snapped the atmosphere of the room in half. For a moment, everything slowed down, before a sonic boom exploded and broke everything in a bright flash of light.

The walls of the office collapsed into dust and rubble, and outside came the sound of shouts. Lu Hao quickly glanced and saw the SG members starting to fight in the chaos. He couldn't spare more than a few seconds of attention before Kai recovered and pounced at him.

The triad boss's human veneer had torn off; he was a high-level zombie, but not at the level of the other man. His eyes had become a terrible reddish-black, and when he opened his mouth, the long and inhuman fangs dripped with viscous saliva. A deep hatred filled his gaze as he tried to tear his claws into Lu Hao.

Lu Hao's reflexes were faster. He deftly kicked Kai in the head and cast down another bolt of lightning. The sonic boom shook the entire base, and pieces of the ceiling crumbled and fell overhead. Without waiting for Kai to get up, Lu Hao crossed the distance in less than a second. His eyes turned white with electricity as he readied to tear off Kai's head.

With inhuman speed, Kai dodged. Lu Hao's attack tore off half the skull, but had missed the core. Lu Hao flicked off the piece of jaw in his hand. Kai's face looked more and more ghoulish, but the wounds were already healing in fractions of seconds. It seemed that though Kai didn't unleash an offensive ability when he became a zombie, his physical constitution and regeneration had become monstrous.

The two men traded blows, Lu Hao blasting off pieces of Kai's body with every attack. Yet with every lost limb and piece of flesh, another grew in its place. The sharp claws and fangs nearly tore into Lu Hao several times. If Lu Hao were injured even once, it would be the end for him, so he had to protect himself from the rabid bites and swipes with shields made of lightning.

Lu Hao's power drained slowly; less than a minute had passed, when Lu Hao suddenly realized he couldn't hear any fighting from the outside corridor anymore. With a boom from another hit he had landed on Kai, the entire room rattled, and dust kicked in the air. In that short moment, Lu Hao focused his senses out the room to check on his elite SG guards.

And at that moment.

A cold, chilly aura of dread solidified in the air, aimed straight at Lu Hao's core.

He was suddenly frozen. It was like he couldn't move an inch. Or, more accurately, a force weighed him down, making him feel as though his body was trapped in amber.

A beautiful, ethereal man walked through the rubble. He dragged the corpse of one of the SG members behind him. The body's neck was torn open, the spine visible within the open flesh. The man casually finished swallowing the flesh he had eaten, and wiped his mouth with a blood-stained finger.

Lu Hao could do nothing but watch this horrifying scene. His elite SG, the friends he'd brought with him, had all been annihilated in an instant... His hand trembled, the fury crackling in his eyes as he looked at the culprit. Kai, still healing in his grasp, grinned and laughed mockingly at him.

It was then that the zombie emperor looked up, the black sclera of his eyes like a deep void.

A bloody hand seized Lu Hao by the throat and threw him across the room. The abandoned the corpse of the SG member was left laying carelessly on the ground. The zombie fished Kai up with the other hand, his posture was like picking up garbage.