The grim procession wound its way towards the decaying heart of Atlanta. Stitch-Wire lurched at the rear of the convoy, its electrical hum creating a bubble of eerie quiet. Walkers shambled near the roadside, only to shudder and veer away as if repelled by an invisible fence of pain. Inside the vehicles, the silence was just as profound, broken only by the static of a dead radio and Shane's low, seething breaths.
From the passenger seat of the RV, Ainz observed the crumbling cityscape. His mind, a supercomputer of cold calculus, processed the data.
[Strategic Assessment: Urban environment provides superior tactical cover for ambush, but linear roads create fatal funnels. Group cohesion deteriorating at an accelerated rate due to psychological stress variable "Shane." Resolution may be required prior to objective insertion.]
He turned his gaze inward, reviewing the fragmented data from the bunker's hard drives, which he had absorbed with a [Data Extraction] spell. Most was useless: personal logs of despair, incomplete equations. But one phrase recurred in the final, frantic entries: "Wildfire is not a pathogen. It is a tuning fork. It resonates with something... older. A base frequency in the biomass."
A tuning fork. The metaphor was illogical, yet intriguing. It suggested the plague was not an end, but a means—a catalyst aligning living tissue with a pre-existing state. The concept of a "base frequency" resonated uncomfortably with certain lower-tier necromantic theories in Yggdrasil. Was this world naturally predisposed to undeath? The thought was… concerning.
The convoy ground to a halt three blocks from the CDC. The streets were a labyrinth of abandoned cars and silent buildings. The distant, collective moan of thousands of walkers echoed through the concrete canyons like a foul wind.
"We go on foot from here," Rick said, his voice hoarse. "That building up ahead, the one with the blast doors. That's it."
Ainz scanned the facility. [Life Detection] showed no human signatures. [Undead Detection] pulsed with a low, thick fog of presences—dozens, perhaps hundreds, trapped inside the sealed building. But there was another reading, a faint, persistent energy bleed from the sub-levels. Not magic. Not electricity. It was akin to the "frequency" the dead researcher had mentioned, a subliminal thrum in the very fabric of the local reality.
"The primary objective is the central server bank," Ainz stated. "Stitch-Wire will create a perimeter. The Death Knight will lead the breach. You will follow and secure the route."
"Just like that?" Shane barked, stepping out of the truck. "You gonna have your monsters clear out a whole CDC full of walkers for some computer files?"
"Yes," Ainz replied, the simplicity of the answer a weapon. "Efficiency dictates it. Your role is to document the environment and identify secondary resources."
Shane shook his head, a bitter laugh escaping him. "Resources. You keep sayin' that. We're people. Or did you forget what those are?"
Ainz's skull tilted. "The concept is not relevant to the current operational parameters. Your biological and social needs have been factored into the logistical plan. Sentiment is a variable that degrades survival probability."
The red pinpricks of his eyes seemed to intensify, focusing on Shane. "You are a high-output source of this degrading variable. You question, you rage, you create friction. In Nazarick, such a flaw would be excised or repurposed. Here, your utility as a capable fighter currently outweighs your destabilizing influence. Do not force a re-evaluation of that calculation."
The threat was absolute, naked, and delivered with the tone of a librarian discussing a mis-shelved book. It stripped away the last pretense of partnership. Glenn looked at his feet. Daryl's hand tightened on his enchanted crossbow. Lori pulled Carl close.
Shane's face went through a journey of rage, fear, and finally, a terrible, clear resolve. He looked at Rick, and in that look was a goodbye. Then he looked back at Ainz. "Yeah. I'm a flaw. And I'm done."
He didn't go for his gun. He did something far more catastrophic. He raised his shotgun and fired a single, deafening blast into the air.
The report smashed against the silent buildings, echoing and re-echoing. For one second, there was silence. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the distant moaning focused, intensified, and began to move. A slow tide began to shift toward the sound.
"You goddamn fool!" Daryl yelled.
"If we're gonna burn, we burn them out!" Shane screamed, backing away from the group, toward an open side street. "Let him deal with his resources!"
Ainz observed the chaos with dispassionate speed.
[Variable "Shane" has enacted a termination protocol on his own utility. Primary objective now under direct threat from massed hostiles. New priority: Asset preservation and data retrieval.]
He pointed at the charging Shane. "Death Knight. Execute."
The black-armored giant surged forward, its greatsword rising. But Shane was already moving, ducking behind an overturned bus. The Death Knight's sword cleaved through metal, not flesh.
And then the walkers arrived. Not a trickle, but a river of rot pouring from side streets, drawn by the gunshot and now the living presences before them. The neat perimeter collapsed. Stitch-Wire's painful hum was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of bodies; walkers stumbled through its field, twitching but driven by a hunger stronger than discomfort.
"To the CDC doors! Now!" Rick roared, firing his revolver.
Pandemonium erupted. The group became a shrinking island in a rising sea of the dead. Ainz stood at the center, a calm eye in the storm. He began to cast, not with grand gestures, but with lethal precision.
[Icy Burst]. A fan of frost exploded from his fingertips, flash-freezing a dozen walkers into brittle statues that were shattered by the press of their own kind.
[Wall of Skeleton]. A barrier of animated, interlocking bones erupted from the asphalt, creating a temporary choke point.
Each spell was chosen for maximum crowd-control efficiency, minimal mana expenditure. He was not fighting to exterminate, but to enable a retreat. The survivors fought with desperate brutality, Daryl's paralysis arrows dropping walkers in their tracks, Glenn firing the mana-rifle in panicked bursts that seared glowing holes through the ranks.
They reached the CDC's main entrance—a sealed, reinforced door. "It's locked! It's always been locked!" Rick shouted, battering his fist against it.
Ainz placed a hand on the metal. [Analyze Structure]. "The locking mechanism is internal and failed. The barrier is purely physical." He stepped back. "Death Knight. Breach."
The knight stepped forward and drove its shoulder into the door with the force of a battering ram. Metal shrieked, bolts popped, and the door crumpled inwards, revealing a dark, stinking atrium filled with shuffling shapes.
"Inside! Seal it behind us!" Ainz commanded.
The survivors scrambled through the breach. The Death Knight and Ainz entered last. As walkers pressed in to follow, Ainz gestured, and Stitch-Wire was flung through the doorway by [Telekinesis]. The abomination landed just inside, its humming field now concentrated in the enclosed space, causing the pursuing walkers to recoil from the entrance. Daryl and T-Dog wrestled a heavy reception desk in front of the mangled door, buying them a moment.
They were in. But they were not alone. The faint emergency lights illuminated a scene of horror: white coats stained black, bones in corners, and the slow, steady movement of walkers who had been trapped in here for months, feeding on the last remnants of the staff.
Ainz ignored them, his senses locked on the subterranean thrum. "The servers are below. This way."
He led them down a stairwell, clearing it with blasts of negative energy that simply extinguished the unlife within the walkers they encountered. They reached a sealed laboratory door, this one with a keypad. Ainz dissolved it with a [Disintegration] ray.
The room beyond was pristine, untouched. Rows of black server towers stood silent, their status lights dark. But in the center of the room was something else: a large, transparent isolation chamber. Within it lay a single, perfectly preserved walker, its body covered in a lattice of fine sensors. Above it, a monitor displayed a single, continuous, sinusoidal wave—a pure, unwavering frequency.
The thrum was strongest here. It vibrated in Ainz's very bones.
"The source sample," Ainz murmured. He approached the chamber. The walker inside did not react. It was as if it were in stasis, a broadcast antenna for the silent signal that now filled Ainz's mind.
He placed his hand on the chamber's terminal. Instead of attempting to access the data, he cast a spell he had not used since coming to this world: [Reveal Essence].
The spell wasn't meant for biological analysis. It was a high-tier divination meant to uncover the true nature of magical artifacts. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the world shifted.
Ainz's perception didn't see a room, or a walker. He saw the frequency made manifest. A pulsating, intricate web of faint golden light, woven through every atom of the infected body in the chamber, and by extension, through the air, the walls, the very city outside. It was old. Immeasurably old. And it was not native to this world. It was an echo, a scar, a leftover resonance from something that had passed through the dimensional fabric long ago. The "Wildfire" pathogen was merely a key that had stumbled into a lock, tuning the biology of this world to harmonize with this ancient, dormant echo of… what? Creation? Extinction?
[Critical Data Acquired: The undeath here is a passive environmental condition, activated by a biological trigger. This is not a plague. It is a planetary state of being, now awakened.]
The implications were staggering. This wasn't a world that had fallen to undeath. It was a world that had, at a fundamental level, always been capable of it. He was not studying a disease; he was studying the base code of reality here.
A sharp, electronic crackle broke his concentration. The monitor above the sample flickered. The pure wave distorted, and a face, gaunt and desperate, flickered onto the screen—a pre-recorded message from a man named Dr. Edwin Jenner.
"...Day 194. If anyone is seeing this… the cause is not viral, not bacterial. It is a primal re-alignment. The brain stem doesn't reanimate; it simply… continues, tuned to a frequency that disregards the body's death. There is no cure. Only a different frequency could perhaps… overwrite it. But the energy required… it's astronomical. It would take a… a new sun, or…"
The transmission dissolved into static.
A new frequency. A different tune.
Ainz, the Overlord, the master of death, the ruler of a tomb of unparalleled power, stood in the silent, dark server room of a dead world. The red lights in his sockets glowed steadily as he processed the final, monumental piece of data.
He could hear it now, clearly. The song of this dead Earth. And he realized, with the cold clarity of supreme intellect, that with enough power, with the right spell…
He could change the tune.