Lonely and Broken?!

[Day 7… What's he planning?]

"Khepri, I'm gonna send you out there to do some scouting since you're the most resilient one out of all of us with your Adapt skill." Abel looked at his shoulder, where the abnormally large roach was standing.

'Okay Mashta!' With a voice that sounded like a little girl's, Khepri answered her Master, as she was determined to help her Master and to prove herself useful to him.

Raising his right hand with his palm facing upward, Abel let Khepri climb onto it as he squatted down and placed his hand gently on the floor, allowing Khepri to climb off and onto the floor.

This display had caused the roach to figuratively blush and lament, as she knew that as a mere bug, she would never be able to be with her Master in a more intimate form.

Before she could fall into a spiral of thoughts, she focused once more on the matter at hand.

She had to complete the task that her master had assigned to her to the best of her abilities.

"Khepri, be sure to only look around from under the door, but if you see a lone zrendza or something weak, you can eat it, but try staying in the shadows and away from groups of zombies, okay?" With worry lacing his voice, Abel told Khepri what to do and what not to do.

'I'll do as you say, Mashta!' With that, Khepri went under the crack of the door.

"I hope she'll be okay…" Abel said worriedly.

—

[Khepri's POV]

'I have to do a good job for the master! I can't let him down!'

Nervously, Khepri spoke to herself as she peered out from under the door to the teachers lounge.

As she looked left, she spotted a few zrendza lurking around as if looking for something, while when she looked right, a new breed of zombies was spotted.

These ones appeared bulkier than normal zombies, but not overly so, as is portrayed in some zombie novels; they just looked like decently built human beings, nothing as special as the zrendza.

Yet when looking further behind them, she spotted fleshy tentacles attached to them that led to a zombie with green pulsing veins coming from its eyes that seemed to be controlling them.

What was strange, though, was the fact that the different groups of zombies just continued their search, not minding the different species.

Next, Khepri looked towards the ceiling, as she knew that there was a possibility for there to be zrendza there too.

Although what she never expected was some type of slimy zombies to be stuck to the ceiling instead of the typical zrendza.

The slimy zombie seemed agonizingly slow compared to zrendza, as their hands produced a suction-like sound whenever they left the ceiling, leaving behind a sickly green hand mark.

The ceiling was covered by these zombies, leaving no place for Khepri to possibly go, although she did wonder how they had gotten there when suddenly one dropped from the roof and landed on its feet.

It then started to walk as fast as a normal human being was capable of walking, which made Khepri realize the zombie had normal feet, excluding the fact that it had the longest and sharpest toe nails that she had ever laid her eyes on.

While its hands were sticky, its feet, with their sharp toenails, were not, which explained how it had gotten there so quickly.

With the current situation outside not being favorable to her, Master Khepri decided she would try her best to draw attention away from this floor if possible.

So along that line of thought, she walked out from under the door and proceeded left towards the zrendza, the opposite direction that the other zombies were going, and also towards something she had at least seen her master deal with more than enough times.

Heading in their direction, she tried to hug the wall and sink into the shadows when suddenly a message appeared in front of her face that had a black background with green words, the same as a certain husk.

[ADAPT HAS RECOGNIZED THE NEED FOR STEALTH… ADAPT HAS MADE THE USERS CARAPACE ABLE TO CAMOUFLAGE INTO ITS SURROUNDING ENVIRONMENT…]

Along with the message came intense itching on her entire body, even her eyes, as she slowly gained the ability to camouflage, although she didn't receive a skill as it was just a function of her body.

Her carapace, which was originally a bone gray, became more of a stone gray, including her piercing green eyes, so as to match the stone walls and gray stone tiles.

Still as slowly as before, she used her camouflage to go undetected as she crawled past the seven zrendza that were sniffing around the hall like a pack of hunting hounds.

Even when one of them laid eyes on her and she came to a halt, the creature could not even notice her, as her life force was too weak for it to notice and it could hardly spot her camouflaged body.

Continuing to walk after the zrendza had looked away from her, Khepri went into an office two doors away from the teachers lounge and proceeded to climb up the desk. Coming to a stop in front of a glass that was holding a bunch of pens that was closest to the edge, she pushed it with her head, causing it to fall off the desk and shatter upon contact with the ground.

Instantly, the surroundings went dead silent. No sound, except for weird animalistic noises outside, was heard.

She only had to wait for less than three seconds before the sounds of nails clacking against the tiled floors were heard coming in her direction.

As the sound approached the office she was in, she could see the zrendza along with a slimy zombie looking left and right as they searched for the disturbance near its source.

When the last zrendza was about to walk past the office door that was left wide open from Abel and companies ransacking, it stopped and looked back inside the office as it noticed the glass that was spread across the floor.

Deciding that it needed to look into this mystery, or that was what Khepri assumed it was doing, it entered the office, completely disregarding its safety as its guard was completely down.

Circling and sniffing the glass, the zrendza placed its back towards Khepri in what could only be considered a perfect assassination opportunity for her, and this opportunity she would not miss as she needed to become stronger to help her master.

Opening the carapace on her back, which was adorned with a spinal cord-like bone down the middle that split apart when she opened it, revealing the writhing darkness underneath that had replaced her original wings.

She activated the skill Consuming Darkness and controlled it so that only one tentacle of darkness was made to go forward towards the zrendza's head, aiming to go for the kill right away.

When the tentacle was just a few centimeters away from the back of the zrendza's head, a mouth that could envelop the entire head split apart from the very end of it.

Quick as lightning—well, maybe not as quick but quite fast—the maw created from darkness engulfed the zrendza's entire head, killing it in one quick bite.

[Corrupted Exp. Gained: 4XP]

Soon after, the corpse of the zrendza was about to fall towards the tiled floor of the once neat office but was halted by multiple tentacles that were made of darkness.

Each of these tentacles had mouths filled with pitch-black diamond-shaped teeth as sharp as sharks along their lengths and at their ends that began to devour the zrendza whole, including its bones.

Khepri walked to the edge of the desk and descended it so that she could trap another unsuspecting foe in her Consuming Darkness skill, thereby lessening the pressure that her Master would receive.

She proceeded to move down the corridor and slowly past the group of zrendza and the one slimy zombie that now had one less member that they were unaware of.

She approached the office at the end of the corridor and used the same method to draw in the group of enhanced zombies by pushing a glass vase filled with dead flowers and water off of a shelf.

Just as last time, there was a dead silence followed by the clacking of nails against tiles.

This time the slimy zombie was the first to walk past, followed by the group of zrendza, although this time they stayed in front of the door to the office, making it difficult for Khepri to snatch one until they suddenly decided to split up, but this time two had come into the office after noticing the broken vase on the floor.

One of them was male, the other female, and as they circled the vase, the male suddenly lashed out at the female for bumping into him, causing her to back away from the male while baring her mismatched fangs towards him.

The female one then decided to check the other side of the room, facing her back towards the male, while the male one also turned his back towards her as if they were a couple arguing with one another.

This situation made it easy on Khepri, as she was able to easily produce two tentacles of darkness that then bit off both zrendza's heads and grabbed them before they had dropped towards the floor.

[Corrupted Exp. Gained: 8XP]

[You have leveled up!]