The trembling hen hesitated for a moment as her scaly feet shifted on the rusted metal of the upper cage. Surrounded by raw curses and cruel laughter telling her to jump down and become food for the monster, she finally leapt off and landed squarely on the hippo's head. She clamped her yellow claws tight around the grey, sagging skin and pecked down hard. A small, jagged pit appeared in the rotting flesh where her beak struck the bone.
The entire arena burst into a wave of mocking laughter.
"Holy shit, this chicken is crazy! Is it planning to eat the hippo?"
"It looks more like she is scratching it to death!"
Jing Shu ignored the roaring crowd and turned her head toward Peggy. "Have you ever heard an old Chinese saying: 'constant dripping wears through stone'?"
The hippo struggled violently. It was shaking its massive head from side to side and slamming its bulk against the iron bars with a heavy, metallic clang, but it couldn't throw the determined hen off. So it kept repeating the same motion like a broken, rusted machine. It was thrashing and ramming its body into the cage in mindless frustration.
As for the hen, she just went wild. She pecked again and again. Each strike was sharper and more precise than the last, until her beak drilled a small hole through the thick, leathery hide. Then she started eating the grey, rotting flesh inside the opening.
Rotting meat was nothing new to her. She had eaten worse in her life: red nematodes, poisonous snakes, you name it. Thanks to daily doses of Spirit Spring water, she had long since become immune to toxins of all kinds. At home, she was even known by another nickname: "The Bottomless Pit."
She could devour hundreds of kilos of red nematodes by herself without stopping. Her small stomach couldn't possibly hold all that mass, so she ate while pooping. She was a perpetual motion machine of consumption.
Jing Shu genuinely admired chickens. She didn't respect many things in this broken world, but she respected them. They were straightforward creatures. They would eat and they would release; no nonsense involved.
Time crawled on slowly. The dust in the air settled as the crowd started yawning in their seats. Sure, the chicken wasn't powerful in any traditional sense, but she was nimble enough to dodge the hippo's slow attacks. Once she perched on its head, the beast couldn't do a damn thing to reach her. Still, for all that constant pecking, she had barely made a dent in the massive creature.
"This chicken is insane. She is seriously trying to eat the hippo!"
"Give her ten stomachs, see if she can finish it!"
To the audience watching from the tiers, it was a joke. It was like watching an ant trying to eat an elephant. They saw it as the chicken's last desperate struggle for survival. The zombie hippo didn't tire. It just kept swinging its head and crashing around the cage. One small mistake from her, and she would die horribly under its weight.
Honestly, she was only surviving because it was a zombie hippo. If it had been a zombie snake or a fast crocodile, she would already be done for.
At first, everyone was hyped for the kill. The host was doing his best to keep the energy up in the room. He was shouting into his microphone every time the hippo almost flung the hen off or slammed into the cage with a thunderous, bone-shaking clang. Each time it happened, the crowd jumped to their feet and cheered for blood.
But after the third time, the fourth time, the tenth time… even the host was running out of breath. The audience's throats were dry from yelling for a death that wouldn't come.
Ten minutes passed in the dim light. The hippo's head now had a hole the size of a fist. There was no red blood, just disgusting, wriggling grey flesh. It looked like countless tiny bugs moving under the skin. The hen kept pecking and eating, one wet bite at a time. Some of the flesh even fought back. It was wrapping around her neck or sticking to her feathers like small, grey suction cups.
The crowd thought this was it. The undead hippo would finally kill her. But no; she just ate everything that touched her.
Just when the host didn't know what else to say to the crowd, the hen was finally thrown off by a violent lurch. The entire audience jumped up as one. Was the match finally over?!
Of course not.
Maybe she had eaten too much meat, because when she hit the ground, she let out a loud series of wet splats. Then, to everyone's horror, the charging hippo suddenly stopped in its tracks. It bent its head down and started eating her poop from the sand.
The arena went dead silent. Even Peggy nearly threw up her wine.
Once the zombie hippo had something to eat, it stopped being violent toward the bird. The hen, realizing this, looked like she had found the key to victory. She got busy. She was like a frantic worker bee. She would hop down to the dirt to drop a few more piles, sometimes even lay an egg or two, then fly back up to peck the hippo's head again. And so the cycle repeated.
The zombie hippo really was terrifying. It was immune to bullets and immune to pain. It would attack anything that moved in its line of sight. But when it had food in front of its nose, it completely ignored everything else in the world.
Half an hour later, most of its head was gone, yet it still kept eating. Like a programmed machine, it knew only one thing: consume.
The atmosphere in the arena turned strange and heavy. The crowd went from confident to confused, then to dumbfounded, and now to restless, boiling anger. It was a roller coaster of disbelief.
Even Peggy hadn't expected this outcome. Who would have thought the key to defeating a monster like this was just… feeding it? How brain-dead could it get?
Jing Shu hadn't seen it coming either. She hadn't imagined this specific method would actually work against a zombie hippo. Xiao Dou had made history in this pit.
The shouts and curses grew louder from the commoners. People were panicking now. Too much money was riding on this fight for it to end this way. They refused to believe that a hippo, impervious to bullets, could lose to such a ridiculous, low-class tactic.
"No way! That thing weighs tons! There's no way that chicken can eat it all!"
"Even if she does, eating zombie flesh should kill her sooner or later!"
The host's heart was pounding against his ribs. Was this really happening? He had bet just one black market coin at the start of the day. Was he about to make thousands of times that in profit?
Peggy was getting nervous. Her fingers gripped the edge of the sofa. Meanwhile, Jing Shu sat calmly with her legs crossed. She was watching her hen work. Xiao Dou didn't have many talents, but she could eat like nothing else alive.
The crowd's hope drained away as the minutes turned into hours. The zombie hippo's entire head had been eaten clean away. The ground was littered with chicken droppings. The sheer amount she had consumed was monstrous, and she was still eating while digesting nonstop.
The headless zombie didn't fall over. Instead, its skin opened up into millions of tiny pores that sucked in everything around it to compensate for the loss. The hen kept eating too. Three, four hours passed in the arena. The multi-ton hippo was reduced to nothing but white, picked-clean bones.
It was a miserable match to watch for the gamblers. There were no intense clashes and no thrilling kills; it was just a contest of who could eat more. The hippo hadn't lost because it couldn't eat, but because it picked the wrong opponent.
When the skeleton finally collapsed with a loud thud on the sand, the ten-thousand-coin zombie hippo was gone. The match was officially over.
"Alright," the host announced. His voice was shaking with shock. "I declare it official. The battle chicken's ten-match death challenge... is a success!"
The arena exploded with raw curses and total disbelief.
But among the chaos, a small voice shouted from the crowd. "Holy shit, I did it! I won five thousand black market coins! I'm set for life!"