The three options hung in the air.
I studied them. My hands were still shaking, still slick with whatever black fluid passed for blood in a walking corpse, but the part of my brain that had pushed through three hundred waves of Z Royal Defense was already running the next steps.
Reinforced Barricade. In the long run, that was the best pick. Barricades scaled. They stacked with other defensive bonuses, synergized with Structural Reinforce, and once you had three or four of them choking entry points, entire waves bled out against your perimeter without ever reaching you. At wave one-fifty and beyond, barricade-heavy Engineers were nearly untouchable.
But I wasn't at wave one-fifty. I was at wave one. And if I didn't survive the next few hours, the long run didn't exist.
Handgun. Useful, sure. Twelve rounds in the magazine, thirty-six total. Moderate damage. But even in the game, pistols were common drops. You could loot them off dead NPCs, pull them from supply crates, find them in abandoned buildings. In the real world, this was a city of eleven million people. There were gun stores. Police stations. Military installations. Sooner or later, I'd find a firearm. Spending a wave reward on something I could scavenge felt wasteful.
Turret Efficiency Module.
I focused on it, and the description expanded.
Fifteen additional seconds of deployment time. Permanent upgrade. That took my Emergency Turret from forty-five seconds to sixty. A thirty-three percent increase in uptime from a single selection. That kind of multiplicative buff was the type of thing you never saw offered twice. In the game, Turret Efficiency Modules didn't appear in the reward pool until wave forty at the earliest, and even then the drop rate was miserable. Getting one at wave one was either a gift or a trap.
Thirty-three percent. That's a lifeline.
In the fight I'd just survived, those extra fifteen seconds would have meant the turret clearing all ten zombies before I ever had to pick up the broomstick. At wave five, wave ten, wave twenty, when the zombie count doubled and tripled and the variants started showing up, every second of turret uptime would be worth more than the last.
And if I ever got the ability to deploy multiple turrets simultaneously, which the rewards allowed at higher levels, this upgrade would apply to all of them.
Short-term survival. Medium-term power spike. Long-term scaling.
I selected C.
The blue box pulsed and dissolved.
I flexed my hands. Wiped them on my jeans. Looked at the wreckage of my apartment, the splintered door, the bodies, the black smears on the tile.
I didn't wait.
There was another mechanic in Z Royal Defense that most casual players never learned about, because it required a particular kind of ruthlessness that the average person playing a tower-defense game on their couch didn't possess. But the competitive community knew it.
PVP.
The waves weren't synchronized. Every player's timer was independent. Some people got their first wave early. Some got it late. Some were still fighting when others had already collected their rewards and were sitting in a cleared zone. And during that gap, during those precious minutes between your wave ending and the next one starting, you could move. You could enter someone else's territory.
And if their wave was still active, you could kill their zombies.
Out-of-wave kills. The game tracked them separately. They didn't count toward the other player's wave completion. They awarded bonus salvage, and sometimes rare drops that never appeared in standard reward pools. It was, mechanically speaking, the single fastest way to level in the early game.
It was also, in the game's community, universally considered a dick move. Forum threads raged about it. Kill-stealing during someone else's active wave was the kind of thing that got you blacklisted from clans, reported, flamed in chat. People called you a vulture.
This isn't a game. Nobody flames you for killing the thing eating their face.
At least, not anyone who hadn't played Z Royal Defense.
I checked my cooldown. The turret timer was ticking down. Forty seconds left until Emergency Turret was available again.
I moved to the kitchen. Stepped over the body of the woman in the nightgown, her remaining eye staring at the ceiling, the broomstick still jutting from the other socket. I pulled open the silverware drawer.
At the end of the drawer was a chef's knife. Eight inches, stainless steel, the one decent thing I'd bought when I moved in because I'd had some delusion about learning to cook.
I pulled the chef's knife out and tested the edge against my thumb. Still sharp.
Okay. Weapon.
I looked around. The broom closet was empty. The bathroom had nothing useful. The kitchen—
My eyes landed on the stockpot hanging from the hook above the stove. Heavy-bottomed stainless steel, big enough to boil pasta for four people, which was ironic because I'd never cooked for more than one. I lifted it off the hook, turned it upside down, and set it on my head.
It sat there, heavy and absurd, the rim resting on my ears, the curved bottom rising above my skull like a dome.
I look like an idiot.
I looked like an idiot who might survive a bite to the head.
I shrugged on my heaviest jacket, a canvas work coat I'd bought for the warehouse job. I zipped it to the throat. Swapped my shorts for jeans, the thickest pair I owned, stiff dark denim. Laced my sneakers tight.
The world's most pathetic knight.
I checked the turret cooldown. Ready.
I stepped over the bodies, through the ruined doorframe, and into the hallway.
Seven bodies lay in a grotesque pile at the stairwell door where the turret had stacked them. Black fluid pooled beneath the mass, creeping across the tile in slow, branching rivers.
I didn't look at them too closely.
I moved down the hallway, staying close to the wall, the knife held low and forward. My sneakers were quiet on the tile. The stockpot shifted on my head with every step and I pressed my free hand against it to keep it steady.
The building was full of sound. Distant crashes. Thumps that traveled through the walls and floor. Somewhere far below, a car alarm was wailing. And above it all, threading through the gaps, the screams.
Most of them were distant. But one at the end of the hallway was not.
It was a woman's voice. Coming from the last apartment on the floor, the corner unit at the far end of the corridor. The door was open.
The scream came again. "No! Please, no! Stop—"
And then a crash. Something heavy hitting the floor. Glass shattering.
I moved. Four apartment doors between mine and hers. All closed. All quiet. Maybe the people inside were hiding. Maybe they were already dead. I didn't stop to check.
I reached the open door and pressed myself flat against the wall beside it.
The apartment was bigger than mine. Much bigger. A corner unit meant twice the square footage, a separate bedroom, maybe two, a real kitchen with a breakfast bar and stools. I could see into the living room from the doorway. Modern furniture, a glass coffee table that was now shattered across the hardwood floor, a flat-screen TV face-down amid the debris.
Three zombies stood in the living room.
They were hunched over something on the floor, something I couldn't see behind the overturned couch. Their heads bobbed with the rhythm of feeding. Wet, smacking sounds filled the apartment, interspersed with the crack of something that might have been bone.
Two of them were standard walkers. One male, one female, their clothes still recognizable, a delivery uniform and a floral-print dress. The third was bigger, broader, a heavyset man in gym shorts and nothing else, his back a roadmap of bite wounds and torn muscle.
The scream came from deeper in the apartment. The bedroom.
Her wave is still active.
A blue notification flickered at the edge of my vision, confirming it.
I raised my hand. Focused on the center of the living room, right between the three feeding zombies, and willed the skill into existence.
"Emergency Turret."
The hardwood floor split open. Polished oak planks cracked and peeled back like the petals of a mechanical flower, and the turret rose from beneath, plates unfolding, barrel extending, the targeting sensor spinning before locking onto the nearest hostile.
It opened fire.
Inside the apartment, the sound was staggering. The hallway had been bad. This was worse. The muzzle flash turned the living room into a strobe-lit nightmare.
The first zombie, the delivery driver, caught the initial burst across the back. Rounds punched through his spine in a vertical line, each impact blowing a fist-sized exit wound through his chest.
The turret swiveled. The woman in the floral dress had turned at the sound, her mouth still working, still chewing, a strip of something pink dangling from her lower lip. The targeting sensor found her and the barrel adjusted. The burst caught her in the sternum. Her ribcage caved inward, fragments of bone and blackened viscera spraying outward in a cone, and she flew backward into the breakfast bar. Her body crumpled at the base of the counter and didn't move.
The big one, the gym-shorts zombie, was already on his feet and turning. He was fast for his size. The turret tracked him as he lunged toward the barrel, and the rounds hammered into his chest, his shoulder, the exposed meat where his trapezius should have been. Each impact rocked him but he kept coming.
The turret adjusted downward. A concentrated burst tore through his left knee. The joint disintegrated, tibia separating from femur in a spray of cartilage and dark fluid, and he pitched forward, hit the floor chest-first, and slid to a stop six inches from the turret's base. The barrel depressed to its lowest angle and fired a final burst into the top of his skull.
The turret hummed, sensor spinning, scanning for additional targets. Finding none, it settled into a quiet idle state.
Forty-three seconds remaining on the deployment timer.
I stepped into the apartment. Glass crunched under my sneakers. The air was thick with gun smoke. I breathed through my mouth and moved toward the bedroom.
The door was half-closed. Through the gap, I could hear breathing.
I pushed the door open with my foot, the knife held forward.
The bedroom was small but well-furnished. A queen bed with rumpled white sheets. A nightstand with a lamp that had been knocked to the floor.
She was on the floor against the far wall, pressed into the corner where the wall met the closet. Dark hair, tangled and wild. A tank top and pajama shorts. Her legs were stretched out in front of her, and she was kicking, pushing herself backward against the wall even though there was nowhere left to go.
A zombie had her by the ankles.
It was crouched on the floor between the bed and the wall, its hands locked around both of her shins, dragging her toward it with slow, relentless pulls. Each pull brought her inches closer. Each pull drew another scream from her throat.
"No! God, please, let go of me—"
The zombie didn't respond. Its head was lowered, mouth already open. It pulled again. She slid across the carpet, her nails raking white lines in the drywall as she clawed for distance.
Nice bonus points. One more out-of-wave kill.
That's what went through my head. I'm not proud of it. I'm not ashamed of it either. It was clean and simple, and it moved my legs before anything else could.
I crossed the room in three strides. The zombie's back was to me, its spine visible through the torn fabric of a white t-shirt, vertebrae protruding under gray-green skin. I shifted the chef's knife into an icepick grip, raised it high, and drove it down into the base of the zombie's skull.
The blade punched through the bone with a sound like a boot going through a puddle. I felt it break through into the softer matter beneath and I kept pushing, driving the steel deeper, angling forward, until the tip of the knife burst through the front of the face.
The zombie's hands spasmed open. Its body locked rigid, every dead muscle firing at once, and then it collapsed sideways, sliding off the knife, hitting the floor with its ruined face turned upward.
I straightened up. Wiped the knife on my jeans. Adjusted the stockpot on my head.
"Hey. It's down. You're—"
The woman stared at me.
Not with relief or gratitude. She stared at me with hate.
Her eyes were wide, the whites showing all around the irises.
She looked at me, and she looked at the body on the floor, and she looked back at me, and the hate in her eyes didn't waver.
"You—"
Her voice broke. She inhaled, a hitching, shuddering gasp that racked her whole body, and when she spoke again it came out in fragments, each one torn from her throat like glass.
"You! You killed my husband."