I took the collapsible bike back from the Swimsuit Class Rep, rested it on my shoulder, and pulled her into a nearby multi-tenant building. I didn’t want to stay on the ground floor, so we ran up the emergency stairs.

The Swimsuit Class Rep glanced out the window and commented on the scene outside.

“Wow, it’s already started.”

“Yeah, an elephant’s already shown up.”

“And people’s very skeletons are being crushed beyond recognit-..”

“You don’t have to report all the details! If you have the resources for that, then use them to read me a porn novel! And do it in the Class Rep’s strict voice!!”

“After being pushed back onto the cheap bed, Kyouko looked up at the man’s face as he leaned in close. The breath that left her red rouge lips was as sweet as-..”

“Wait, stop. I don’t need that vision mixed into this grotesque scene! And where did you get data on a porn novel!?”

The inviable wall of rusty-smelling “pressure” was far stronger than before.

I shut all the rooms’s windows as hard as I could.

This was bad.

What was bad, you ask? The zombie people were being crushed as much as anyone else. Sometimes the ferocious beasts butted heads and got into fights and I could tell their rampage was crushing cars and motorcycles.

It was all so insane I felt some inappropriate laughter coming on.

That was how unrealistic it all was.

If a bear or lion had shown up first and started chomping on people, we might have gone pale and trembled. But an elephant? Just by stomping through the shopping district, the people who were supposed to be there seemed to have been transformed into mere “things”. It was too much to actually imagine the pain for myself.

There were also plenty of rhinos and hippos.

The twitching masses of blood being thrown around..were unlikely to be survivors. That vitality could only belong to zombies. Just like at the school, they had no unity whatsoever.

And it seemed like my little sister was going through an herbivore-loving phase. "Oh, no. She might be holding a grudge for our argument over the strongest animal during that trivia show we were watching. But Onii-chan still thinks that pyramid wouldn’t exist if herbivores were unbeatable."

“This is strange.”

“What is?”

“Aren’t those animal zombies a lot more beaten-up looking..that is, injured than Ayumi and the other human zombies? With a lot of them, I can see their bones..”

The zombies were only walking around, so they would not end up that way at the normal pace of decomposition. Ayumi had supposedly only attacked the zoo a moment ago.

I wondered if it was due to the fighting between animals, but Maxwell provided a different explanation.

“It may be an issue of compatibility.”

“?”

“Miss Ayumi is a slender girl who could probably do gymnastics or figure skating, but the animals are all masses of muscle. The Acute Zombie Powder allows them to surpass their upper limits, but that risks an increase in their speed of self-destruction.”

“So everything has its downside, huh?”

I groaned.

Rotting without healing was just how it worked with zombies.

In that case, the elephants and rhinos would probably be knocked out of the fight fairly quickly after their giant body’s strength was increased beyond its limits. They would be taken out by their own weight and power.

That said, we couldn’t just wait around for the giant ones to destroy themselves. That was like waiting for a time bomb’s battery to die because you didn’t know how to disarm it. Odds were pretty good it would blow you up first.

“So why are the rhinos and hippos so aggressive? If the zombification increased their hunger, wouldn’t they be fighting over the grassy empty lots or the river water?”

“They may just be fighting back as the human zombies bite them. But the animal zombies cannot distinguish the normal people from the zombies, so they go after everything with a human-sized silhouette. They are attacking that fried chicken mascot as well.”

“What a pain-in-the-ass combination!!”

I could generally tell which animals were on the biggest rampage due to the blood splattered on them like marks on a plane for each enemy shot down. The African elephant was at the top. Nearly its entire body was red and it had flattened silhouettes stuck to it that almost looked like nothing more than skin. Had those been normal people or zombies? Could they still move like that? I seriously doubted it. At any rate, I wanted to avoid joining them there.

“As the simulation has yet to end, I can deduce that she is fine, but isn’t it possible Miss Ayumi has been crushed by one of them or ended up inside one of their stomachs?”

“I want to believe not even Ayumi is that dumb, but then again..it is Ayumi.”

With Ayumi, I couldn’t be 100% certain that wouldn’t happen.

Unlike Erika, she was unpredictable in a negative way. She would say she had bought some underwear even more adult than our older sister and end up with some kind of cute and frilly girl’s loincloth shipped in from overseas!

“And they do not seem interested in entering the buildings.”

“I wonder why not. Maybe the elephants and rhinos are afraid of small spaces like this. The ceilings are low and there are all sorts of store shelves inside. You see them sleeping under trees, but you don’t really see them escaping into cramped caves.”

“Even as zombies?”

“I’ve never seen animal zombies before, so I don’t how they’ll act.”

Normal zombies continued walking upright even after abandoning all rational thought and that was a very human trait. Just as zombies didn’t start running around on all fours, ones based on other animals might continue following their primitive instincts.

That said, our safety was not assured up in the building. The elephant seemed to be the biggest one, but Ayumi would have prepared some other animals. There had to be a mixture of herbivore and carnivore, big and small. When debating over the strongest animal while watching TV, what was it Erika and I had said that made that herbivore-supporter cry? At any rate, there might be some that could enter the building and climb the stairs or maybe even climb the drain spouts like they were trees.

Was it cheetahs that could climb trees? Or leopards? Wait, no. Jaguars???

At any rate, I had to watch out for the big felines!!

Although if those carnivores were out there, I was pretty sure they would be chowing down on the normal humans and zombies alike, but then what happened inside the animal zombie’s body? It was hard to picture things on the microscopic scale, but the odds of infection likely grew when more of the virus was present. They were dangerous regardless, but would they gain an infection boost when they bit someone?

Increasing the power of a bite with viruses and bacteria reminded me of the Komodo dragon’s fangs.

'H-huh? Am I restricting myself with this pointless trivia? An idiot like Ayumi wouldn’t give it that much thought and once I’m bitten by the animal, it doesn’t much matter whether I make a pretty zombie or one that’s falling apart.'

“User, what will you do now?”

“Hmm. I don’t want to stay put, so let’s see if we can move between rooftops.”

Heading down to the surface would be suicide. Once the animals locked onto us, we couldn’t escape and the color red was splattered everywhere. Plus, I couldn’t tell which of the half-crushed remains had been humans and which had been zombies. Even a corpse too flattened to move on its own could be dangerous and zombies were indistinguishable from normal corpses if they couldn’t walk around.

That meant it could be a minefield.

I didn’t want one of them to stand up while we were running through the sea of blood.

The animal zombies being powerful didn’t weaken the normal zombies any. A single bite would turn me into a zombie regardless. The more of them there were, the more hopeless the situation was.

I wanted to go for an elegant midair stroll using the buildings packed in so close together.

“Also, pay close attention to the lighter on the desk there.”

“I’m not one to talk after all the stuff I took at the hardware store, but it looks like you’ve finally learned how to loot too, Maxwell. Then again, I kind of want to see that serious Class Rep turn into a shoplifting girl, so I say go for it.”

“No, it's that isn’t it possible the animals will keep their distance from a fire?”

“Yeah, you do often hear that animals are afraid of fire. But..”

“But what?”

“To be honest, it’s more of an urban legend, so I’m not sure how credible it is. I could understand if they’d run afoul of a forest fire in the past, but are animals really afraid of fire? I feel like they’re more likely to gather around something bright. Y’know, like bugs around streetlights.”

“..”

The Swimsuit Class Rep silently set down the lighter she was toying with.

Instead of trying to take them on, we had to find a safe way to escape. To kill an elephant, we would need a magnum round or a shotgun slug. It was far beyond what a handmade stone-throwing weapon could accomplish. I pulled out my smartphone and spoke to the Class Rep next to me.

“Maxwell.”

“What is it? Should I pose for a photo?”

“No, you can do that later!! What happened to the balloon drone flying around up above? This says it’s right above us.”

“Sure.”

I looked to the screen.

The Swimsuit Class Rep moved close to also look at the screen. She smelled nice even in this virtual world.

“Awaiting instructions..”

“Maxwell, can we jump from rooftop to rooftop? I mean, the buildings look pretty close together.”

“I would have to see the actual scale to judge that. But look at this..”

“Yeah, the city is stained with blood all over.”

Looking down from our eye in the sky, I we could see the horrific state of the zoo. Even from the sky, the roads in the area were colored red like the aftermath of a bizarre Spanish tomato-throwing festival. I could not even imagine how many lives had been used to create that artwork.

“Hey, um, I keep zooming out, but I’m not seeing an end to the gore.”

“The entire place was taken out.”

“Yeah.. I’ve zoomed all the way out and it’s still all red. How many people have to die to cause this?”

“Calculating..complete. Eight hun-..”

“I didn’t actually want to know the answer! ‘Eight hun’? Not a single good answer starts that way!”

It was not limited to the shopping district. I could not view the distant residential and high-rise office districts, but I could see black smoke rising from them.

The stain had begun at a single point, but it was spreading across the entire city.

Our viewpoints were on too small a scale to notice, but eight hundred thousand people were caught in the middle of this.

“Whatever the case, it would be best to escape the shopping district as soon as possible.”

“Even though there’s a herd of animal zombies out there, not to mention the red minefield where someone could get up and attack you at any moment? Moving around at random sounds dangerous.”

“Of course. But the Acute Zombie Powder is not the only virus in the world. With that many corpses rotting, I believe many more pathogens will begin to spread. And some of them might travel through the air. ..No, with that many, the concentration of gases produced in the decomposition process might be dangerous.”

“..”

Amazingly, there were actually worse deaths than being bitten by a vampire or zombie.

What was going through the heads of the people who monitored the city through the Weather Spheres that checked for signs of and damage from tornados and flooding? Eight hundred thousand people were sinking into a sea of blood and there was nowhere to run. That nightmarish scene may have led them to hang themselves.

I didn’t know how long we had, but I had a feeling the zoo animals had more germs than the humans. That meant they would decompose faster and they would spread more biological toxins. We had to make a run for it before those things could run rampant in that red medium.

“Elephants, rhinos, hippos, and..what is that?” I asked. “Were giraffes always that violent!?”

“It is not every day you get to see a panda attack someone.”

“Well, they are a type of bear.”

“Why is the ground moving like that? Is it a group of hamsters?”

“No, it might be moss or something.. That swollen lump there might be modeled after a brain.”

“Does it work on plants too?”

“I don’t have any proof, but maybe that’s why she’s such a glutton and always finishes all of her food. If she doesn’t finish her apple or squash, please don’t tell me it would start to move on its own.”

“I merely inputted the parameters as you requested, but calling this a virus outbreak might drive bacteriology and immunology experts insane with anger.”

“And does this mean Ayumi’s started biting the moss and rocks she sees lying around..?”

“She is making full use of her stupidity (front teeth sparkle).”

“Oh, well said, Maxwell-san.”

Something cut across the drone footage. I thought it was a bird or something, but it turned out to be another drone. However, it did not seem to be piloted by anyone. It was wobbling unsteadily as it continued in the same direction forever.

It seemed to have lost its signal from whoever was flying it from the surface.

“User, this is the footage I found by following the unknown drone.”

“Pin that location and zoom in. ..What’s that? A tour bus?”

A large bus had ignored a one-way sign and drove right through the shopping district. It ignored the corpses collapsed on or getting up from the road and ran them all over to escape the shopping district.

But that was a short-lived dream.

A powerful impact hit the side of the tour bus. It was that African elephant. Its eight ton body charged in from the side of the road and slammed into the bus from the side. Even a truck would flip over from that. And this was an elephant that Ayumi had zombified. Since it was acting so aggressively toward a vehicle, some cars may have already run into it.

After losing balance, the bus crashed into a supermarket for trendy foreign foods.

Then the rhinos and hippos gathered around.

The windows on the other side shattered and several figures jumped out.

They were well-built and dressed in black, but what were they? They didn’t look like police or firefighters.

At any rate, “they” climbed down and then reached up toward the windows to help lower down the normal people that followed.

“The elephant is coming.”

“Ahh, ahh! Wow..Not good! Not good, not good, not good! Wow! Not good!!”

“User, try to say something other than ‘not good’ and ‘wow’.”

“I can’t think of any other words besides ‘red’!! Giving up on their escape and staying inside the bus will only mean waiting for death and climbing on top of the bus now won’t help.”

“They are indeed screwed. The elephant’s nose is like a tentacle.”

The core of my body trembled in fear as I watched the pandemonium of the strange rescue team and dozens of people they had been trying to rescue. Not even a giant mass of steel had allowed them to escape that deadly shopping district, so how could they do anything without that?

My collapsible bike was made of metal pipes, so I could swing it around as a blunt weapon, but it was obvious what would happen if I took on heavily-equipped soldiers who looked like they could raze everything in their path.

At any rate, we used the emergency stairs to reach the roof.

The concentrated smell was like a punch to the nose.

Just breathing in and out struck my entire body with a rusty-smelling wind.

But..

“User, do you think it is possible to jump over the gap?”

“Not a chance!”

That was the only answer I could give.

From the sky, the buildings had looked close enough to easily make the jump if I worked up a little courage, but from the rooftop, it was obvious that the buildings were not all the same height. Jumping to a roof three or four stories shorter would probably break my ankles and there wasn’t even a 1% chance when the situation was reversed.

But as I’d already said, descending to the ground was truly hopeless. A tour bus weighing more than ten tons had been flipped over and I could still hear a great many animal noises. Only a superhuman who could catch a crane’s wrecking ball would be able to break through there. The normal human zombies kept biting at the animals, which essentially poked at the hornet’s nest and made the animals impossible to predict. Not even throwing some canned food or a smelly sock and making a run for it while they were distracted would work here.

Which meant..

“Maxwell, search for a ladder or wooden plank. If we use something that lets us cross over despite the height difference..”

As I spoke, I looked back to the roof entrance we had come through.

I spotted a gigantic snake climbing the stairs.

In fact, our eyes met.

Was it an anaconda?

It looked about ten meters long.

Hey, its eyes are surprisingly cute!!

“..!!!!!!”

Forcing a joke did nothing to erase the fear.

Neither of us had moved, but I already felt a squeezing at my heart. A thick but invisible wall of menace surpassed the limits of the physical world and tried to break my core.

But a moment later, I heard the sound of “something” bursting. It was like the sound of a of soda can being opened multiplied several dozen times over. Then “something” passed me by in midair.

At first, I thought it was a rocket or missile with smoke trailing behind it.

But I was wrong.

Something heavy collided with the giant snake. It had a head, two arms, and two legs. It was a human. What had looked like the smoke of a rocket was actually his body’s surface crumbling into gray dust. If he was turning to ashes in the sunlight..was he a vampire? The tackle had not accomplished much, but the anaconda was distracted by the new target. It ignored us and coiled around the vampire instead.

“Yahoo☆”

A relaxed female voice reached me from a taller building’s rooftop.

I looked up and saw my older sister there.

My older sister?

It was still daytime and she should have turned to ashes in the direct sunlight, but that was not happening.

Why not?

“Wah, wah, waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!???”

“Eh heh heh. Thank you for the over-the-top reaction☆”

Erika stood there elegantly with quite a few men, woman, boys, and girls around her. It was like a jigsaw puzzle using human bodies. Or like a giant umbrella or dome. It covered her and fully blocked out the sunlight.

“She’s done it! She’s finally done it!!”

“User, you are quickly growing incomprehensible.”

“How can I stay calm in the face of such a psychedelic vision!?”

The disturbing umbrella was likely made from my sister’s vampire minions.

She had called it “hot” before, but what did it actually feel like to turn to ashes and crumble away while you were still alive? At any rate, the 3D puzzle dome was turning to ashes starting from the people on the outside. But they did not react. It wasn’t clear where they were coming from, but new vampires would jump in to fill the holes. By repeating that process, my sister and their queen remained unharmed.

And..

“Oh, it can still move?”

Erika sounded conversational, but she was looking at the zombie anaconda thrashing about to fight the person scattering ashes everywhere.

And the queen cheerfully snapped her fingers.

“Do something about that.”

Something jumped over her head. The trails of ashes looked like those of missiles or acrobatic jets, but they belonged to the vampires who were being burned away by the sunlight. Win or lose, this kamikaze unit would be annihilated. They stabbed into the anaconda’s side with ferocious speed.

The zombification must have strengthened it because their attacks were all deflected.

“But only from the outside,” said my sister as she smiled below her human parasol.

The anaconda must not have wanted its hard-won flesh to turn to ashes because it began to swallow a living(?) vampire whole.

Not long afterwards, rice-sized caterpillars poured from the anaconda’s eyes like a flood of tears.

“We vampires can transform into a great variety of animals,” said Erika in her dress. “Bats, wolves, rats, moths, and so on. Even if a ferocious beast tears us apart and swallows us bit by bit, we can still transform inside its belly. This one became countless moth larvae and ate through the thick blood vessels to reach the head.”

“Ah.”

“Zombies cease to function as long as the brain is destroyed. That’s how Ayumi-chan and her type work, isn’t it?”

It made my skin crawl.

This was entirely different from having your head beat in with a hammer or tripping on some stone steps and hitting your forehead on a corner. Dozens if not hundreds of small caterpillars would crawl through the inside of your body, reach the inside of your skull, and stir up your brains like clay. And it would not stop until you were dead. It was truly hellish.

And it would be no different for a bear, tiger, or crocodile.

Because their jaws were so strong and they did not need to bite their prey into small pieces, they had plenty of space in their bodies for the vampire bugs to crawl through.

As we watched, the giant anaconda gave a large jerk. Its brain had likely been fully destroyed. The cascade of bugs spilling from its eyes crumbled into ashes as soon as they reached the sunlight.

“Does that mean..a vampire would win in a fight against a zombie?”

“Now that I can’t say. It would be hard to move around after being bitten apart by Ayumi-chan’s small mouth and we might lose control of the flesh after it’s infected by the Acute Zombie Powder. Plus, it isn’t realistic for a vampire to bite a zombie. There are some exceptions like the Upior, but vampires generally only suck the blood of the living. ..And even if I was lucky enough to get an Upior, it would be a waste to use it to fight the Acute Zombie Powder.”

My sister changed the subject there.

“But anyway, if you can blow away a one billion yen tank with a fifty thousand yen rocket, doesn’t that sound a lot better than a tie? We just have to fill those powerful elephants and hippos with bugs to stir up their brains and then use old-fashioned external attacks on the animal zombies that are human-sized or smaller. Then there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The zombie would die and there was no saving the vampire.

Just like using a bullet to kill a target, it was a strategy that assumed some consumption.

“User,” modestly interrupted the Swimsuit Class Rep.

She pointed to the drone footage on my smartphone.

Similar kamikaze units were on the attack on the ground and all over the city. As the sunlight washed over them, multiple vampires would sometimes cling together for something like a three-stage rocket. One after another, they would push through until they reached their ferocious target. They planned to be eaten so they could transform into tiny bugs inside the animal zombie’s body and stir up the animal’s brain. After their job was done, they would be annihilated by the sunlight. It was all meant to perfectly achieve that cycle.

All that deadly violence was worn down in no time.

“..”

The ferocious beasts did not go quietly. In fact, as soon as the rhinos and hippos were taken out, the flattened human zombies stuck to their outer surface began to squirm. Unless the brain was taken out, zombies never died. The vampires who had finished off the giant animals were quickly pinned down.

And this was out in the sun.

Even if the human zombies could not deliver a decisive blow, the vampires would turn to ashes if they were delayed even a little.

For a normal human, this would have been like having nightmarish jack-in-the-boxes spring all around them in the moment of relief after defeating a powerful foe.

And if the zombies could still move after being flattened that much, was it possible some of them were still moving inside the carnivores’ stomachs? No, given the width of the esophagus, it probably wasn’t possible for them to be swallowed without destroying the brain. But the more zombies the animals ate, the greater the concentration of pathogens. Erika had sad they might lose control of their chunks of flesh if the Acute Zombie Powder infected it, so it was still possible those swallowed zombies could lead to an unexpected comeback. A large percentage of moth larvae could be wiped out in a microscopic attack.

But..

Even so..

My older sister was only thinking about cost performance, so she was ignoring her own side’s losses. It was like ignoring the soldiers clinging to a tank for transportation and blowing up the tank itself first. As long as they could pursue and hunt down the scattered and fleeing soldiers, these losses did not harm the vampire side in any significant way.

The rocket had blown away the tank.

They just had to load their launcher with an identical rocket and target the fleeing grunts.

If a single tactic worked across the board, the different varieties of enemy did not matter.

“There we go.”

My sister in the gothic lolita dress hopped down to my rooftop so elegantly she seemed weightless. The queen smiled as her many minions sizzled and vanished just to grant her selfish desire to move around under the sun.

“It’s nice to see you again, Satori-kun. I really am a bit of a clean freak, so I’m not too fond of this zombie outbreak business. But I’m willing to put in some effort for you. Kyah☆”

“..”

A distant look entered my eyes. Was my aesthetic sense really okay with a human parasol girl fidgeting and covering her face with her hands?

I was growing more and more confused by her definition of “clean freak”!

But did that mean that both Erika and Ayumi were idiots to the core!?

“But you’re so mean, Satori-kun. I was working so hard, but you ran the other way as soon as you saw me.”

“You look gentle at first, but are you actually a huge S?”

“Eh heh☆ It was fun slipping into human society while pretending to be human, but I felt I was hitting a limit there and decided to reveal my true form. I even helped you out by destroying Ayumi-chan’s advantage and showed up to cheer you on, so I was hoping you’d be more excited.”

“Your..true form?”

“Yes. At the city council, the police stations, the broadcast stations, the newspapers, and all the other places where mankind was putting up their final resistance while hiding behind barricades, I consumed them from within to expand my control. I had already taken over their chains of command, but now everyone meant to maintain law and order has been wiped out. Well, there might be a few police officers who were out on patrol, but they can’t do much without the power of their organization, right?”

Erika gave the beaming smile of someone seeking praise by showing off their piano contest trophy.

“Also..oh, right. I’ve set things in motion at the chain-reaction spots where the civilians were gathered in theatres and stadiums. A third of the city’s population and all the important institutions will belong to me and my vampires!! Kyahah☆”

“This is not a ‘kyahah’ kind of issue, Onee-chan!!”

I had always wondered whether zombies and vampires were really all that different.

But they were different. Completely different.

Zombies like Ayumi tore down law and order. They destroyed the city, smashed the bonds between people, filled the streets with the dead, and brought civilization to a screeching halt. That was their brand of horror.

But vampires like Erika were the exact opposite.

They created law and order. They entirely ignored the civilization that humans had built up and filled the city, the country, and the world with a new order with their queen at the top. Yesterday’s rules no longer applied and we were all thrown into an insane vampire’s world.

They were both part of the horror genre, but zombies and vampires were entirely different.

I started to think that no one could defeat this.

But..

“Urp.”

“Erika?”

As my older sister elegantly held a hand to her mouth, she turned away from me for some reason.

“Wait just a moment, Satori-ku-.. Ugh, urp. If I take a deep breath, I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, honestly. This is what happens when you force yourself after eating such tiny lunches all the time.”

“No! You can’t, Satori-kun! Rub my back that gentl-->>

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