Chapter 338: Breaking Out (1/2)

“What’s the status?” Alea asked with a tired sigh, looking over at Ilvere.

The rugged warrior didn’t have his usual boisterous attitude after entering the town hall that had been turned into a temporary command center for the war efforts of Port Atwood. He rather looked a bit helpless as he scratched his hair, with multiple new scars adorning his arms.

“They keep pressing forward,” Ilvere said. “They’ll be here in a day or so if they keep their usual pace. No matter what we do they won’t be deterred.”

Alea shook her head and looked down at the map with confusion. The last week had been a true exercise in futility.

Initially, everything had gone as planned. The combined forces of Port Atwood and Sino-Indian Alliance met the sea of zombies at the predetermined location and slowly started to whittle down their numbers from the flanks.

The horde didn’t seem to care about the losses and kept stumbling forward in the direction of the Zone rife with human and Ishiate settlements. For every ten meters they progressed they left dozens of destroyed corpses behind as the living continuously peppered them from the sidelines.

Of course, the horde wasn’t completely helpless. Now and then large groups of elite Zombies would break out of the swarm of low tiered undead, charging straight into the ranks of the two armies. These Zombies were not intelligent like humans, but they weren’t like the braindead zombies that only mindlessly stumbled forward.

They were like a pack of wolves, and their bodies were extremely durable. They shot into the ranks of Port Atwood and the other humans, causing some murder and mayhem before rushing back into the safety of the horde. Port Atwood was generally able to rebuff these raids with the help of the powerful demons and superior equipment. But losses were unavoidable, with hundreds of soldiers already having fallen.

Of course, that was nothing compared to the losses of the Sino-Indian Alliance. They possessed large squads that mainly relied on their old world weaponry, so when the elite zombies pounced them they were like foxes let loose in the hen house. The alliance suffered disastrous losses until they rearranged their ranks to protect the normal soldiers with cultivators.

But even Port Atwood was starting to feel the pressure. Gear was getting destroyed and defensive treasures expended at a rapid rate. For now, only recruits had fallen, but their core warriors would start dying soon as well unless they turned the situation around.

But the most baffling thing had happened two days ago. The large horde suddenly changed course and was currently heading in a direction that would lead them dangerously close to their base camp. When such a thing had happened until now there would always be a swarm of zombies that splintered off from the main horde to cull the population of the nearby town. It was a way to bolster their numbers while they marched, or perhaps just have an outlet for their blood lust.

She didn’t believe the reason was to bring the fight to them. They would teleport out long before the slow-moving horde managed to reach them. Besides, even if they managed to take down this place there were mostly non-combat personnel and logistics based here. Most warriors were already trailing the horde.

That wasn’t the only odd thing. While the horde that the Marshall clan fought kept their original direction apart from a few odd detours, the third horde had veered off-course as well. It was now heading into a mountainous region that was almost completely devoid of people.

That whole sector had long since become a haven for strong beasts, and there weren’t just one or two evolved beast kings prowling those mountains. Heading there with a bunch of dumb Zombies would simply turn a large number of them to food for the animals.

Their scouts had also spotted dozens of smaller hordes of one to five million zombies leaving the Dead Zone, and their initial fear had been that they moved to bolster the larger swarms just as they started to reduce their numbers. But the smaller hordes moved in irrational patterns as well, and less than a fifth of the smaller hordes had joined up with the three large ones.

“Start packing up. I don’t know why they want this place, but let them have it. We’ll relocate to basecamp two,” Alea said.

Ilvere nodded in confirmation, leaving the command center to make preparations. Alea stayed behind and looked at the map as though she was in trance. She needed to figure something out to turn things around. If they just kept nipping at the sides of the swarms they would slowly expend their people and resources, creating a pyrrhic victory.

So far no matter how hard they had pushed the horde just wouldn’t splinter, and they unhesitantly sacrificed any small groups that were separated from the flock. If things continued in this manner they would never be able to starve them out, since the innumerable zombies kept spewing out a storm of miasma that tainted everything and obscured their vision.

That cloud of miasma, in turn, stopped them from daring to push too deep into the hordes for a decisive blow. They still had no idea what lurked in the middle of the sea of Zombies. If they cut too far into the horde they might find themselves without a path of retreat.

Her lithe fingers slowly ran across the map as the minutes passed, following the paths the hordes had taken during the past weeks. When her finger reached the small wooden soldiers representing the separate horde’s current positions she started again with a different group, over and over. But suddenly she froze, and she quickly got a thick marker to draw out the paths they had walked.

“They’re drawing an array!” she blurted out with some terror in her eyes.

It was still in the early stages, but judging by the paths of the hordes the Undead Empire was drawing a massive fractal with their pathing. The three larger hordes were the main veins of the fractal, with the smaller parties creating assisting pathways.

Her thoughts immediately went to the fact that the huge horde stopped for an hour or two every now and then. They had assumed the leaders of the hordes let the weaker Zombies rest, but what if they only stopped to plant array flags into the ground under the cover of the miasmic cloud. With millions of zombies stomping the ground afterward there would be no way to tell that they had dug up the ground and left something.

She blankly looked down at the map for a second, her mind reeling at the concept of just what kind of effect such a monstrous fractal would have. If it was completed it would span a greater area than most kingdoms, its lines running thousands of miles.

She needed to report this to Lord Atwood and Ogras immediately. This was too terrifying a prospect, something of this magnitude could never be allowed to be unleashed on a planet. She was no expert on arrays, but judging by their pathing she guessed that they would have drawn out the whole fractal in just a month. There was no way they would be able to grind down the main horde within that time.