Repeat Offender

"Left side's clear!"

"Right side's clear!"

"Keep moving! Watch your step!"

The bright beams of tactical flashlights cut through the darkness. The prison had descended into chaos. Bloody handprints smeared the walls, bits of flesh and blood were scattered across the floor, and even the ceiling was spattered with blood.

Kirk had no idea how that stuff could fly so high.

"During intense exertion and extreme stress, blood can flow at a rate of ten meters per minute. If an artery ruptures, it can spray three or four meters into the air. Nothing strange about this." Mori nudged a mangled male corpse with his foot and grinned. "If a walker bit through the carotid artery in your neck while you were terrified, I bet your blood would spray just as high!"

Little Fatty shuddered at the thought. Kirk was already used to Mori's heavy taste, so he just smiled without saying anything.

They had already broken through the second row of cells in Block B. The walkers weren't as frenzied as they had been at night, but after mutating twice, they still put considerable pressure on the team.

Even Plot Characters like T-Dog couldn't kill a walker with a single shot anymore, not even with a headshot. Mori was still having a relatively easy time, which Kirk guessed was thanks to his high firearm skill.

Little Fatty still only had five points of Strength, and the walkers completely overpowered him. When his steel shovel hit a walker's neck, the walker simply grabbed it and tore it free. Little Fatty had only six points of Stamina; if a walker got close, even one swipe would leave him seriously wounded. If it landed a bite, he'd be out of the game in a flash. So he'd more or less given up on close combat. He only dared to skirmish with the walkers at the edge of his shovel's reach: strike once, retreat, then strike again.

Kirk also faced considerable risk when fighting walkers at close quarters. His Strength had reached seven points, his Stamina eight, and his Health eighty. After mutating twice, a walker had around ten points of Stamina and its Strength surged to ten at night. During the day, its Stamina dropped to eight and its Strength was between seven and eight. That meant Kirk, as the attacker, had only one point less Strength than a walker had Stamina, so he could break through its defense and suffered only a five percent penalty. A walker's Strength was seven or eight, while Kirk's eight points of Stamina held it in check. In a head-on brawl, they were more or less evenly matched.

But Kirk's melee skills had already begun to form a complete system. [Basic Small Blade Mastery] increased the speed and damage of his dagger's slashes and thrusts by five percent. [Riot Police Special Bulletproof Vest] reduced physical damage by ten percent. [Basic Physical Defense Mastery] further increased the defensive power of the vest he wore, and with the skill's additional five percent damage reduction, he could suppress incoming damage by around ten percent. [Basic Footwork Mastery] increased his dodge ability and Attack Speed by five percent. [Basic Melee Combat] added five percent to the damage of melee weapons and improved his weapon proficiency. The [Gonzalez's Feather Boots] on his feet further increased his Agility by two points, his movement speed by thirty percent, and his dodge ability by five percent. On top of that, his Silver rank title, [Walker King], granted him twenty percent extra damage against walkers. Taken together, all this had brought a qualitative improvement to Kirk's ability to survive in close combat and deal damage.

At present, against walkers, his beneficial effects gave him a total of thirty percent more damage when using a dagger, ten percent more Attack Speed, twenty percent less damage taken, ten percent more dodge, and thirty percent more movement speed. Even though his dagger was a Whiteboard weapon with only five points of base damage, all those bonuses added up. If he struck a walker's head—the Vital Part—with every blow and scored a critical hit for double damage each time, he could deal over sixteen points of damage per strike! An ordinary walker would go down after five dagger strikes. The dagger was the fastest weapon for slashing; it traded low damage for a high attack speed. As long as Kirk baited a walker into lunging and leaving itself briefly staggered, he could land several consecutive blows and send it straight to the afterlife.

And don't forget, Kirk had also learned the Advanced Skill [Throat Cut]. Once he used this Killing Move, nine times out of ten the walkers wouldn't pass the Toughness check. Even if they did, with their current Stamina of around eighty points, they still wouldn't withstand four times the lethal damage plus thirty points of Bleed Damage.

Kirk had truly found his groove as an elite special forces soldier: he killed ghosts when they appeared and destroyed Buddhas when they got in his way. He held the front line, trading blows with the walkers, while Little Fatty stayed behind him, steel shovel in hand, striking whenever he could. Both of them favored a slippery, underhanded fighting style: whenever a walker attacked, they dodged, and the other one launched a fierce sneak attack. They advanced slowly, but they were unstoppable and killed quite a few walkers. With last night's haul included, Kirk had now completed 1,457 out of 2,000 kills for his Gold rank title, [Enemy of Walkers]. In truth, the title was a little undeserved. If he hadn't set the Adventure on fire twice, he wouldn't have earned it. The Space knew Kirk was always playing with fire, so the drop rate for Portkeys was ridiculously low.

In the Space, greater risks meant greater rewards. The twice-mutated walkers now earned Kirk ten Survival Points each! As a result, Kirk and Little Fatty kept fighting until they were seriously wounded, only then reluctantly retreating to rest. They were both pretty stoic, too; neither was willing to use any medicine, so they just sat there and slowly recovered their Stamina.

"Big bro, how many did you kill just now?"

"About twelve. What about you?"

"I picked off quite a few of yours and took down four. Walkers are really hard to kill now. One little touch and my Health is almost gone. You were right, big bro. You had the foresight to train so hard in close combat." Little Fatty panted.

"How can my close combat skills be called strong? Look over there." Kirk nodded in that direction.

Little Fatty looked. Mori drove his knife straight through a walker's skull, then its remaining momentum carried the blade into the eye of the walker behind it. He lifted both walkers onto his bayonet and viciously hurled them into the crowd. The gunmen from the nursing home, Guillermo and his group of tagalongs, were greatly encouraged. They opened fire in a chaotic barrage, and the walkers toppled in every direction.

Little Fatty stuck out his tongue. "That's not a human. That's a monster more terrifying than a walker."

Walkers were most terrifying during a nighttime horde, when their numbers far exceeded the limits of human firepower. In military terms, it was called a "saturation attack." It forced humans to fight them at close quarters, which caused heavy casualties.

During the day, they were scattered into small groups, making them little more than walking experience points for human fighters. They couldn't pose a serious threat.

Mori glanced over. "Ladies, are you rested? We're heading to the next area. Otherwise, we won't finish the mission before sunset, and I don't want people thinking I'm incompetent."

Kirk nodded, and the two of them got to their feet. The entire formation continued advancing.

As they walked, the prison ahead gradually began to change. The prison they'd seen earlier had been gloomy and frightening, but it still had a small ventilation opening and a little skylight above, allowing a sliver of sunlight to filter in. Now it had become a world of concrete. The walls were thick and heavy; from the corner, they looked to be twenty centimeters thick, and seemed to have been cast entirely from reinforced concrete. Every cell door was made of solid steel, even sturdier than the barred iron doors they'd seen before. There wasn't even a viewing window. Food could only be passed to the prisoners through a basket lowered from above.

"Is this Guantanamo or Fox River Prison? Why is it so heavily fortified?" Little Fatty started complaining.

Kirk realized that Little Fatty was like him in at least one respect: no matter how dangerous things got, the guy never held back from cracking wise. It was probably something the two of them shared as homebodies.

Mori burst out laughing. "Ladies, welcome to America's maximum-security prison! If you were lucky enough to end up here in your ordinary lives, you'd probably never see sunlight again! And you'd have to say goodbye to big-ass babes and thongs, too! You're lucky now, but whether you get out will depend on how you perform in a moment."

Little Fatty started getting nervous. Kirk said, "Fatty, don't be nervous."

"Big bro, you really are a genius. How did you know I was nervous?"

"Because your tactical flashlight is shaking like the studio lights in the opening of a Fawkes 21st Century movie! Stop shining it in my face, you pighead!"

"Mori, this is a maximum-security prison?" Little Fatty's voice was starting to crack. "How are the prisoners here any different once they turn into walkers?"

"Why don't you go in and find out?" Mori said with a smile, then kicked Little Fatty through a door behind them!

His scream rang throughout the entire prison. In the grip of terror, Little Fatty's high-pitched wail could have outdone the harmonies of the world's three great tenors!

Kirk was still concerned about whether Little Fatty would survive, so he and T-Dog hurried inside.

Little Fatty had collapsed in the arms of a dead man, so frightened that he'd lost control of his bowels. He'd been surviving in this hellish world for five days, so he shouldn't have been quite so pathetic. But being kicked into a pitch-black room that might contain vicious, mutated walkers was more than an ordinary homebody could handle.

Kirk hurriedly pulled him to his feet and said to Mori, "Could you stop scaring him like that?"

Mori laughed. "You two looked so serious and tense. I just wanted to lighten the mood."

Shaking all over, Little Fatty took out a notebook. It was a Diary he'd grabbed by accident while fumbling around after Mori kicked him into the dead man's arms.

The prisoners here were all serious offenders, basically waiting to die of old age inside. With nothing to do every day, they'd go crazy, so many of them kept diaries or wrote. It seemed writing was a survival instinct for people trapped in boredom.

Under the beam of a tactical flashlight, Kirk leafed through the Diary and read carefully. The prisoner was actually named Outlaw. He didn't know whether his parents had seen the future when they named him, or whether they'd deliberately cursed their son to end up in prison. Either way, the unlucky kid had achieved his goal of entering America's highest school of crime—or rather, its highest-security prison—to continue his studies and spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Outlaw was fond of writing. In the depths of his boredom, he recorded all the ordinary and extraordinary things happening around him. If he'd been born in Kirk's era and been able to visit a miraculous website called "," there was a good chance he'd have become a bestselling author.

They flipped through several pages. The Diary contained a lot of rambling, trivial entries, but nothing valuable. Mori was getting impatient. He raised his gun and said, "Come on. Plenty of his cellmates are waiting for us to give them some attention. Let's hurry." Just then, Kirk cried out in surprise. He'd spotted a key falling out of the Diary!

"...I heard the noise. I don't know whether it was a gunshot or something else, but a key fell from the dead guard's body. It bounced on the floor a few times and, by some miracle, ended up in my cell. God, could this be the key to my cell door? I clutched it tightly, like I was squeezing the necks of those prostitutes. It was the only metal I'd seen in more than ten years, besides those dog bowls. A lot of people came. They took down that powerful guy. Judging by the sound when he hit the floor, he weighed at least two hundred kilograms. The whole floor shook. I heard the guards say he was the toughest and most dangerous felon in all of America! Then they started searching for the key. I hid it. If they couldn't find it, the treasure would naturally be mine...

"...What a shame. I tried it countless times, and finally concluded that this treasure wasn't the key to my cell door. It belonged to the most dangerous repeat offender, who was locked away in a special prison on the lowest level! He'd never see the light of day again. The door there was a steel hydraulic door one meter thick, with an independent power system. Without this key, even a nuclear bomb couldn't get through that door!

"...I heard the guards whispering that there was also a secret the U.S. government was doing everything it could to conceal. Even after the catastrophe began, some people still came and went by the door. I think maybe this prison wasn't so heavily fortified because of us prisoners..."