NOVEL WEB Chapter 9: First Kill
William checked his backpack and belongings for the fifth time.
"Rope... here... flashlight... here..."
Finally, he zipped up the bag and slung it over his shoulder.
"I think I'm ready now."
Even though he could buy everything in his bag from the system, he didn't want to take any chances.
Before checking his backpack, he had snacked on something from a can. He calculated how much he needed to eat each day to maintain his current diet and physical strength.
"At least 4,000 calories."
He enjoyed eating, but not canned food. Therefore, he would prefer to consume canned foods containing as much pure meat as possible to reduce his meal size. If possible, he would stop by a few houses along the way and try to find some food there. Of course, his priority was still canned food.
William took a deep breath.
He walked to the door. "Come on... come on... come on..."
His hand went to the door handle, but he hesitated for a few seconds before opening it.
His heart was beating faster than ever before; William had never felt his pulse rise so high, even when exercising.
"I have to do this..."
William turned the door handle with his trembling hand.
"Click."
The door opened with a minimal sound.
It was early morning. It was naturally a bit chilly outside. The grass in the garden looked wet, covered with dew.
As soon as William stepped out, the slight cold made him shiver.
He looked to his right and left and saw no zombies.
His target was the female zombie in the neighboring garden. She had been there for a few days, standing as if dead, staring at the tree.
William turned and left the door open, just in case.
William walked slowly, crushing the dew on the grass. Even the faint "squeak squeak" sound of his shoes seemed very loud to him. He gripped the metal baseball bat tightly with both hands, but his fingers were trembling. He tried to take deep breaths, but each breath felt like a barbed wire was stuck in his throat.
The female zombie was still in the same place. Her head was tilted slightly to the side, her eyes fixed on a spot in the tree. The white dress she wore had turned gray and red with stains. Her feet were bare. She stood motionless on the ground, as if she were part of the tree.
When William got within five meters, he stopped. His heart was beating so fast his ears were ringing. "Hit and run. Hit and run," he muttered to himself. But his knees were still locked. He raised the baseball bat to head height, the muscles in his arm tensing… and took another step.
Two meters...
One last breath.
And...
"HAAAAAH!"
He swung the bat with all his might, screaming like a madman, and brought it down on the zombie's head. The sound of metal striking rotting flesh was dull and sticky. The woman's head jerked to the side... but she didn't fall.
The zombie suddenly turned around.
Its eyes looked into William's. Something came alive in those empty, lifeless eyes: hunger.
"Damn, I hit it too weakly." William took a step back, but his foot slipped, the dew on the grass caught him off balance. He tried to raise the bat again, but he was too slow. The zombie attacked with a growl, its arms reaching out toward William.
William screamed involuntarily, "AHHH—!"
The woman's hands grabbed his shirt, her breath smelling like rotten flesh and mud. William panicked and swung the bat to the side, but the blow landed on its shoulder. The zombie was still standing, its growls rising even louder.
In the excitement of the moment, William pushed the zombie away with the head of the baseball bat while lying on the ground.
The zombie was not as strong as he had expected. With the power of William's adrenaline rush, it was knocked back far enough to hit a tree.
William took the opportunity to get up.
He then gripped the bat more tightly, and the one-meter distance between them was enough for him to deliver a solid blow.
This time, the power behind the bat was tremendous. It was more than enough to kill a Level 1 zombie.
"Bang!"
The metal bat exploded the zombie's head the moment it hit it.
The brain fluid that splattered from the exploded head was scattered between the tree and the grass.
"You killed a zombie." [EXP: +120]
"Huh, huh, huh." William looked at the zombie's shattered head, panting. His eyes lingered there for a long time.
The bat in William's hand was still in the air. His arm muscles were tense, as if all the signals to his brain had been canceled. His breathing was fast and irregular. His throat was dry. His eyes were fixed on the zombie's smashed head, but it was as if he couldn't see anything.
Time had frozen.
As his chest rose and fell like a bellows, a single sound echoed in his ears—the beat of his own heart.
Ba-dump.Ba-dump.Ba-dump.
He looked at his hands. They were trembling. His fingers still held the bat so tightly that his knuckles had gone bone-white. His arm ached, but he didn't even notice. His eyelids flickered once, then again.
A deep tremor rolled through his body. His stomach fluttered. "This… this actually happened," he murmured without moving his lips. The sound from his throat was muffled, even to his own ears.
He felt the gentle slope of the grassy ground beneath his feet. Suddenly, the flexing of the earth felt threatening. His knees bent slightly. His left leg began to shake involuntarily. He tried to draw breath, but it felt like his lungs weren't enough, as if the air had suddenly grown too heavy to inhale.
"I killed someone."
No… "I killed a zombie," he corrected, but another voice inside him immediately cried out, "That was once a human being!"
His eyes drifted, unwillingly, to the woman's smashed face. She was unrecognizable, but still… There it was: a face. The shape of a person. That image drove into William's consciousness like a nail.
"Did I… really… kill?"
He dropped the bat. The "click" of it hitting the grass echoed. His knees gave out, and he collapsed. He covered his face with his hands. The breaths escaping between his palms were hot and uneven.
He wasn't crying. His eyes were dry. But inside his mind, thoughts splintered into a thousand frantic pieces. "I killed because I had to. But what if… what if my hand hadn't slipped? What if I'd noticed sooner and let her run? What if… what if I'd died instead?"
As he drowned in those thoughts, he noticed blood smeared on the tips of one hand's fingers. Dried, warm, sticky… something that didn't belong to him. At that moment, his own flesh revolted. It felt as if something had seeped beneath his skin.
Slowly, he lifted his eyes, trying to steady his breathing. "Pull yourself together," he told himself. "This is only the beginning. How many more… how many more…"
His voice trailed off.
In that moment, William realized that he hadn't just killed a zombie—he had also killed something inside himself.
And he would never get it back.
William wasn't one of those excited youths you see everywhere. He wasn't one of those people who boasted about what they could do in a zombie apocalypse, or imagined themselves capable of it.
If the system had allowed it, he would have trained at home until no zombie could threaten him.
But there was no need for such a scenario anymore.
William had just discovered that he could kill zombies. And with minimal effort...
The blessing the system granted him—and the strange fact that it was multiplied by ten—told him that by killing zombies, he could reach his desired goal much more easily.
William stood up. The end of his bat touched the ground. He drew in a deep breath."Huuuhh…"His gaze hardened."Grawrr…"
He could hear a zombie moaning in the distance, almost certainly making its way toward him. William stepped off the grass and onto the asphalt of the street.
Behind a car across from him, a zombie in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts was shambling forward. Its sunglasses were still perched atop its head.
[Zombie Lv1]
"Uncle Jake from next door…" William's heart throbbed, but there was nothing he could do. Zombie Jake started toward him with heavy, slow steps—but then, as if scenting fresh prey, he lunged faster.
William gripped his bat tightly. The instant Zombie Jake closed to within two meters, William swung the bat down from above with all his might."WHAM!" Zombie Jake's skull burst like a watermelon. Brain matter sprayed everywhere, a few droplets even splattering William's face.
"You killed a zombie!" [EXP: +120]
William glanced one last time at Jake's remains—lifeless and silent on the ground, sunglasses still resting on his head. In his mind, that image etched the clearest divide between "before" and "after."
He knelt, plucked the sunglasses from Jake's head, wiped them clean, and clipped them to his backpack. Then he tightened his grip on his pack straps and set off.
His destination lay roughly thirteen miles to the northeast: the city's military barracks.
Every step carried him farther from home—and with each step, the world looked more unfamiliar.
For the first few hundred meters, he walked among the broad, well-kept houses of the suburbs. Most still stood intact. Lawns and gardens bore the traces of orderly life before the disaster; some mailboxes remained stuffed with unread flyers.
But the small details whispered that this once-thriving suburb had already become a ghost town...