As helicopters carrying battered survivors veered toward the sanctuary of GDA headquarters, their flight path twisted abruptly, drawn toward the epicenter of a brutal, one-man war. Below, atop a towering mound of twitching corpses and shredded limbs, stood William Black.
Drenched in a grotesque mixture of blood, sweat, and torn viscera, he resembled not a man, but the wrath of a forgotten god.
His chest heaved with each breath. Every inch of him was drenched in gore, his black suit barely discernible beneath the grime. In his hand, he gripped a sword radiating a sinister, blood-red glow. The weapon thrummed with malevolence.
Without warning—
WENG!
William's blade hissed through the air, slicing an airborne zombie clean in half. The creature's torso spiraled one way, its head the other. A heartbeat later, both halves hit the ground, twitching.
The sword's glow flared, pulsing in rhythm with William's pounding heart.
I'm not done. Not yet. Not until they're safe.
His bloodshot eyes fixed on the horizon, where the next wave of shambling death loomed like a rotting tsunami. Too many. Again.
He grinned.
A terrible, feral grin.
With a sudden flourish, William raised the throbbing sword overhead. Flames of pure orange erupted along its surface, only to be consumed by a crimson mist that bled into the fire, twisting it into something wild and unstable.
They want chaos? I'll give them an apocalypse.
RUMBLE.
The earth quaked beneath the stampede of the undead horde, but William stood firm, an immovable monument of rage.
He took a step.
Then another.
And then—
He vanished.
A blur of motion, too swift to see.
WHOOOSH!
BOOOM!
The arc of crimson-orange energy screamed through the battlefield, carving a sweeping crescent like a scythe born of hell itself. It tore through the horde and into the city beyond, cleaving the undead like a dark, malevolent version of Moses parting the Red Sea. Flesh evaporated. Screams vanished in the deafening roar of the blast.
Windows shattered for blocks around.
A distant building crumbled under the shockwave's force, collapsing in on itself and burying dozens of infected corpses in its rubble.
From the cockpit of the lead helicopter, a GDA pilot stared in stunned disbelief.
"Dear God… is that a man?"
In the command center, Cecil watched the broadcast, frozen in silence. He didn't blink. He didn't breathe.
That sword… What are we even looking at?
Back on the battlefield, William's chest heaved, steam coiling from his body. His shoulders shook, not with exhaustion, but with barely-contained fury. The air around him shimmered with the heat of his killing intent, making the very atmosphere ripple.
But this time, rage didn't consume him entirely. This time, he controlled it.
Harnessed it.
"More..." he growled, voice guttural, teeth clenched. "Give me more!"
If I stop swinging, they'll overrun us. So I won't stop. I'll burn them all.
The hair on his head began to glow, each strand radiating like molten metal from a forge. His sword ignited in response, flaring with even greater ferocity.
WHOOMPH.
He launched forward, a blur of destruction, his blade spinning in a ruthless, calculated arc. Infected fell on either side as he carved through them with precise brutality. Blood spiraled through the air as he tore a path like a whirlwind of fire and vengeance.
Moments later, he skidded to a halt at the far end of the massacre, standing alone amidst the smoldering remains of his foes.
Still not enough. I can't stop until there's nothing left.
Above, a survivor gazed down from the helicopter window, face pale and eyes wide with shock.
"That guy... He's not one of them, is he?"
A wounded GDA agent sitting beside her gave a shaky nod, voice trembling.
"He's scary, right?"
The silence that followed William's last strike was deafening.
Smoke wafted from the still-burning corpses at his feet. His body steamed like a forge left in the rain. Crimson mist curled around him, drawn in slow spirals by the unnatural gravity of his sword. For a heartbeat, the battlefield was still.
Then—
SKREEEE!
A new wave surged from the alleyways and side streets, twice the size of the last. Dozens. Hundreds. Crawling, sprinting, leaping, pink-eyed aberrations that had once been human now swarmed like insects, shrieking with feral hunger.
William didn't flinch.
He slowly rotated his shoulders, vertebrae cracking like distant gunfire. Blood still dripped from his face, but his expression remained unchanged.
Good. Let them come.
His blade pulsed, hungry. Alive.
He gripped it with both hands this time.
THUMP.
He slammed the flat of the sword against the ground.
THUMP.
Once more, a deep, resonant echo rippled outward like the beat of a war drum. The vibrations reached the advancing horde, causing them to falter.
But only briefly.
Then they surged forward.
WHOOMPH.
William charged into their ranks, the air ripping apart with the sound of flesh being torn and flames igniting.
He carved through the first ten like they were nothing, his blade sweeping in deadly arcs that left trails of blood in its wake. Heads were severed. Torsos split apart. Limbs spiraled upwards like autumn leaves caught in a whirlwind.
A crawler launched itself at him from behind. He twisted, snatching it mid-air by the throat, and slammed it into the pavement with enough force to shatter the concrete.
Another attacked from the side, too close.
His leg lashed out in a savage kick, crushing its chest. Without even glancing, he drove his blade backward, pinning it to the wall in one fluid motion.
The ground surrounding him became a chaotic blur of crimson.
Above, the stunned survivors could do nothing but stare.
"Jesus Christ…" the GDA pilot muttered, hands trembling on the controls.
Below, William bellowed as his blade ignited once more, burning blue for an instant before shifting to a searing violet that was almost unbearable to behold. With a primal roar, he drove the sword into the ground.
KRAKOOOOOM!
A shockwave erupted outward, hurling zombies like ragdolls, tearing asphalt from the ground, and scattering debris for blocks. Buildings trembled, alarms blared, and streetlights shattered in cascades of sparks.
And yet, they kept coming.
Some clawed their way over the corpses of the fallen.
Others emerged from sewer grates and shattered windows, shrieking like creatures from the abyss. One particularly massive brute, towering nearly eight feet tall with a spine coiled like a scorpion's tail, charged toward him with terrifying speed.
William seized the beast by its jaw.
Crimson tendrils erupted from the hilt of his sword, coiling around the creature's limbs. With a single, brutal motion, he tore its head clean off, spine and all.
He never stopped moving.
I've been broken. Burned. Rebuilt. This? This is nothing.
As if responding to his thought, his sword unleashed a chilling, sentient howl and began to transform. Its blade extended, splitting down the middle to form a double-edged whip-sword of serrated light and steel.
William spun.
The segmented weapon lashed outward, cutting through a dozen enemies in one devastating sweep. Each body exploded into a spray of gore, limbs, and entrails scattering like grotesque confetti.
He retracted the whip-sword into a spiral, intercepting another trio of infected mid-leap. They didn't just fall, they disintegrated, their limbs twitching in midair before hitting the ground in wet, lifeless heaps.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.
The blade segments reassembled into a single form with a magnetic hum, and William surged forward once more.
Every step he took carved a wound into the horde, every strike of his weapon an apocalyptic wave of destruction.
The streets began to quake again, not from the weight of the few, but from the movement of many.
Thousands.
Across the city, the hordes turned.
Sniffed.
Twitched.
Then began to run.
From shattered rooftops and collapsed subways, from tunnels steeped in sewage and alleyways bathed in blood, they surged, not toward the survivors, not toward the sanctuary, but toward him.
Drawn by the heat. The carnage. The will.
Whatever spark of primal instinct they retained, it screamed only one truth, one thought:
This one must die.
Within moments, the battlefield that William had painted with entrails and ash was swallowed by a monstrous tide of shrieking, crawling, sprinting infected. The sound alone was deafening, a tidal wave of snarls, howls, and bone-splitting growls converging from every direction.
William stood at the eye of the storm, sword resting lightly on his shoulder, eyes closed, breathing steady.
They're scared.
They don't even understand why.
He opened his eyes.
The orange glow within focused to a fine point and appeared like a pupil within his pupil.
"Come on, then," he muttered.
And the sea crashed upon him.
The first wave hit like an avalanche. William vanished into it, nothing but a smear of shadow and crimson sparks. Limbs flew. Heads rolled. Teeth shattered against the flat of his blade.
He ducked under a leaping corpse, driving an elbow upward into its chin. Bone exploded through the top of its skull. Without missing a beat, he pivoted, twisting the blade in a perfect arc that cleaved four necks in one movement.
There was no pause. No mercy. No hesitation.
Only motion.
Only war.
A shrieking child-sized aberration scrambled onto his back. William reached behind and ripped it free, hurling it skyward before slashing it into mist mid-air. Blood rained in hot arcs across his face. He welcomed it.
"YOU THINK THIS IS ENOUGH!?" he roared.
A response came, not in words, but in escalation. From the east, a monstrous stampede of four-legged, eyeless freaks thundered toward him, jaws splitting in unnatural angles.
William met them head-on.
The ground beneath him cracked as he sprinted. His sword elongated again, forming a brutal halberd with a head of twisted flame. He speared the first beast through the mouth and flung it into the horde behind, bowling over dozens like pins.
He spun the polearm, carving a perfect circle of death around him.
Each rotation left corpses in pieces. A shrieking mutant lashed at him with tentacle-like arms. He sidestepped and severed all four in a single downward slash, then kicked it into the jaws of another.
An instant later, he was airborne, riding the force of his own shockwave upward like a missile. As he rose above the battlefield, the scope of the horde became visible.
It was no longer a mob. It was a continent of flesh.
"Jesus," the pilot muttered again, helpless in his circling chopper. "They're all heading for him…"
Cecil watched the feed from HQ, jaw clenched.
"He's drawing them in… All of them."
Back on the ground, William landed like a meteor, sword first, driving it into the concrete. The earth split open in a straight line, erupting in volcanic force. Zombies were vaporized. Cars flipped. Windows blew inward for blocks.
But the horde closed the gap.
They were unending.
They didn't care about tactics. They had no fear of death. They climbed over their own dead to get to him.
The earth groaned under the relentless crush of countless feet, a tide of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, drawn to him like moths to a deadly flame. The undead poured forth from every shadowed alley, every shattered corridor, clawing and scrambling over debris and each other in their desperate hunger to reach him. Somewhere deep within the hive-mind that controlled them, a primal instinct roared:
Destroy him.
William raised his sword, and it answered.
The blade, a fiery crimson-orange, pulsed with power, its edges distorting as if the very fabric of reality strained to contain it. Luminous bronze veins crept up his forearm, melding man and weapon into a singular embodiment of destruction.
"I showed mercy before," he growled, his voice trembling with unrestrained fury. "This time… I won't."
He launched himself skyward.
CRACK-BOOM!
The ground where he'd stood detonated, sending a plume of debris sky-high as he ascended. Then he plunged.
With a battle cry that seemed to tear the heavens apart, he plummeted into the heart of the horde like a blazing meteor. The impact unleashed a fiery shockwave, vaporizing hundreds in an instant. Limbs and bodies scattered like macabre confetti. Flames swept outward in a ravenous wave, igniting the battlefield and casting William's flaming silhouette against the inferno.
Mid-swing, his sword transformed, stretching and expanding into a colossal, burning cleaver that carved a trench the length of a city block.
"BURN!"
The blade erupted.
A cataclysmic explosion engulfed the battlefield, a dome of radiant bronze energy surging outward like a second sun descending upon the earth. From above, it resembled an atomic blast, silent, golden, otherworldly.
In the aftermath, silence reigned. Then the wind returned, scattering ash like black snow.
At the center of the massive crater, William knelt, his breath ragged, his body still.
Ash fell softly around him, and then he rose.
"…Next wave?" he murmured, a feral grin spreading across his face.