By day twelve, Marcus had killed seven zombies.
The methods were all variations on the same principle. His Root ridge on the concrete path accounted for four kills, three of those were clean skull-impact kills, one was a zombie that fell, couldn't right itself due to a pre-existing broken arm, and lay face-down on the path for six hours before Marcus's Absorption skill pulled enough moisture through the zombie's exposed skin to classify as a drain kill. That one took forever and he didn't enjoy it but the EXP was the same.
Kill five was a zombie that walked into the single mature tree near his position, an old oak about two meters from Marcus's trunk, because he had used Pulse bursts in rapid succession to create a sound-mimicry effect that pulled the zombie's attention toward the oak rather than away from it. He had done this four times before the zombie's irregular motion finally brought it to the right angle. It walked directly into the oak's root buttress at shin level, fell sideways, and landed on a section of surface root Marcus had been slowly angling upward for three days. The root spike was two centimetres and caught the zombie in the side of the neck when it landed. Not instantly fatal. It took four hours of slow root-tip pressure to finish, but finish it did.
Kills six and seven were cleaner. He had refined the trap geometry on the concrete path: two root ridges now, staggered, which caught both feet in succession and produced a more reliable forward-momentum fall. Less variance.
His EXP sat at 70 out of 100.
He was close to Level 2 and he had eighteen days left on his survival quest.
The park's zombie population, based on his Pulse surveys, was somewhere between forty and sixty individuals. Most of them ranged widely: across the south fields, up into the zoo grounds to the northwest, east along the lakefront path. Only a fraction passed through his immediate area on any given day. His kill rate was limited not by his methodology but by traffic.
He started thinking about traffic engineering.
The park had a natural funnel: a gap between the lagoon's edge and the tree line, roughly twelve meters wide, that zombies moving east-to-west across the central section had to pass through. His root range was three meters. If he could establish any kind of presence at that funnel, he'd increase his traffic exposure by a factor of four or five.
His roots grew at roughly fifteen centimetres per day under normal conditions, faster if he directed active growth effort, which consumed MP. Three meters was his skill-defined maximum range. He couldn't extend beyond it. But he could densify within it: more roots per square meter of soil, closer to the surface, better coverage.
He spent days eight through twelve on densification. He pushed every spare MP point that wasn't going to Pulse into directed root growth within his existing range, not extending outward but layering downward and then back up: building a root mat across the full three-meter radius, dense enough that no section of the zone had more than twenty centimetres between root strands.
The result was a kill floor. Anything that walked into his root zone was standing on a grid of near-surface roots. It wasn't fast, wasn't dramatic, wasn't visible. But anything that fell in that zone had roots within range to begin drain-absorption immediately, and anything that already had compromised circulation and most zombies did, dead tissue didn't circulate, would begin experiencing root-tip penetration through soft foot tissue within approximately forty minutes of contact.
It was slow. Everything Marcus did was slow. He had accepted this about himself on day three and spent no further time resenting it.
On day thirteen he hit Level 2.
[LEVEL UP]
HP: 65 / 65
MP: 14 / 14
[STAT INCREASE]
VIT +1 → 5
ROT +1 → 3
[SKILL AVAILABLE]
[Passive] Surface Root Lv.1 — Roots may extend to surface layer. Minor obstacle generation. Root range unchanged.
Surface Root. He read the skill description twice. Minor obstacle generation. The system was, in its blunt way, telling him that what he had been doing manually for thirteen days was now a formalized ability. The trip hazards he had been building by hand… by root …over the course of nearly two weeks were now a skill he could activate instinctively and reduced MP cost.
He felt something that might have been the equivalent of a dry laugh. He activated Surface Root immediately and spent the next four hours redesigning his entire kill floor with the enhanced control the skill provided.
The difference was precision. Before, he had been pushing roots by feel, estimating surface depth, hoping his geometry was right. Now the skill gave him a spatial awareness of each root's exact position and surface relationship, letting him angle trip ridges with specific height and slope calculations. He built three new path-edge traps in four hours that would have taken him three days before.
Day fourteen brought heavy rain. Zombie traffic increased: something about the precipitation seemed to stimulate movement patterns, possibly the sound, possibly the moisture activating olfactory function. Six zombies passed through his zone. Two fell on his trip ridges. One fell hard enough for an immediate kill. One fell, got up, and stumbled out of his range before the root drain could finish the job.
Four kills in one day. His highest single-day total.
[EXP GAINED: 40]
[Total EXP: 80 / 200]
He was in the rhythm of it now. Survey with Pulse. Note movement patterns. Adjust trap geometry overnight. Harvest during traffic hours. Repeat.
On day seventeen he encountered his first real problem.
Two zombies entered his zone simultaneously from different angles: a traffic pattern he hadn't seen before. They weren't coordinating. They had just drifted to the same location at the same time. One of them fell on a surface root ridge and went down cleanly. The other one walked into the falling first zombie, which redirected its momentum and pushed it sideways off the trap path. It stumbled, didn't fall, registered the movement of the first zombie on the ground, and stopped.
Stopped, and started making noise.
A low, wet, continuous vocalization. Not loud. But consistent. And within thirty seconds, three more vibration signatures appeared at the edge of his Pulse range, moving inward. Coming toward the sound.
Marcus spent 2 MP on a Pulse burst, tracked the three incoming signatures, and calculated they would reach his zone in approximately four minutes. He had one zombie already on the ground being drained. He had one standing zombie making noise. He had three more incoming. His HP was 65 and his best attack was a surface root that might cause someone to stub their toe.
He needed the standing zombie to stop making noise or to fall down. Those were his options.
He had two surface roots within range of the standing zombie's current position. One was behind it, one was to its left. The zombie was standing still, which meant trip-and-fall required lateral movement to trigger.
He Pulsed again. Targeted the sound this time: four rapid bursts in a directional sequence toward the standing zombie's right side, mimicking the sound pattern of movement at ground level in that direction.
The zombie turned right. One step. Two steps. Its right foot caught the surface root behind its original position, the one Marcus had been using to funnel traffic toward the lagoon gap.
It went down hard. Face-first, same as the others. Concrete edge caught its skull.
[ZOMBIE ELIMINATED]
[EXP GAINED: 10]
The noise stopped. The three incoming signatures slowed, drifted laterally, lost interest without the audio anchor, and spread back out into the park within eight minutes.
Marcus stayed still for a long time after that, processing.
He had two roots and a sonar ping.
He started building a library of zombie behavioural responses. Every Pulse survey added data. Which audio patterns triggered movement. Which caused hesitation. Which caused directional shift. After twenty-one days he had a behavioural model detailed enough that he could predict where a given zombie would be in two minutes given its current heading and speed with roughly 70% accuracy.
On day twenty-nine, one day before his survival quest deadline, a horde arrived.
He felt it before he heard it: a low, spreading vibration across his entire root network, too diffuse to be individual signatures, too consistent to be wind or rain. The pressure built from the southwest and moved northeast, and when the first individual signatures resolved from the mass, he counted them until he lost count somewhere above two hundred and stopped trying.
The horde was four hundred individuals minimum. Moving northeast through the park. His zone was directly in their path.
He had 65 HP, 14 MP, and a kill floor that could drain a zombie in forty minutes.
He had seven minutes before the front edge of the horde reached him.