[Kardian’s point of view]

Not long after our small chat in the dark, both me and Nataly went to bed while Xerya kept watch with the help of her sensors. If any Nano-Z got too close for her liking, she would wake me up right away to go deal with it. Luckily for me, it didn’t happen, so I was able to get a good night’s sleep.

When I woke up the following day, I saw Xerya practicing basic movements with Nataly’s body. The awkward thing about this situation was the fact that Nataly herself was still sleeping, and you could see this on her face, but her body was moving around as if awake.

At one point, noticing that I was staring at her, Xerya spoke to me directly into my ear.

“I believe that I am ready to participate in my first fight. This body is quite flexible and durable. Unlike yours, it can also be repaired faster.” she explained, but was that last part supposed to be an insult?

“Sorry that I’m too squishy for you, but... are you sure about that?” I asked her, raising an eyebrow.

“Definitely. Your body does not have the internal implants that this one possesses. Her breasts can also be used as an extra body armor.” she explained in a most serious tone of voice.

“Not that! The other thing, about you being able to fight.” I pointed out.

“I am certain. Movement is at least at the same level of a Rabid Mode Nano-Z.” she replied.

“Alright, if you think you are that able, but just to be sure, we’ll practice with an isolated Nano-Z. The last thing I want is to see you struggling in a horde of them.” I remarked as I stretched my arms and then got out of my sleeping bag.

“You have little faith in me.”

“I’m just worried about my friend.” I shrugged.

“Technically, nothing will become of me even if this body fails and become unable to sustain its own body functions.” she declared.

“Then I will be losing a potential friend, so no... let’s make sure Nataly gets through this in one piece, and yeah, I know that technically you won’t die... It’s just... well...” I scratched the back of my head trying to come up with a good sounding reason, but nothing came to mind, so I shrugged and then said “It’s a human thing.”

“I will make a note of this... ‘human thing’.” she told me.

“Yeah, that might be good...” I nodded and then proceeded to make two portions of cup noodles.

Nataly woke up while I was still boiling the water and found her body in the middle of moving around in weird ways. She just looked back at me, and I shrugged then she let out a heavy sigh.

After our breakfast, we grabbed our bags and got off the Refiller Station. It was not even 10 AM in the morning, so the air was nice and cool, although the stench of death and rotting corpses still persisted ever so strongly. We moved from there and headed towards a nearby neighborhood where we could scavenge some clothes for Nataly as well as some new tools and maybe weapons other than my retractable blade. I wanted a machete or a big hunting knife which I could later pretend to have been using against the Nano-Z.

Usually, during a zombie apocalypse, the last place you would want to find yourself in would be in the middle of a residential area or any other location that previously was a gathering place for a lot of people like a mall. The reason for this was quite simple. After they got infected, a lot of the people either fled back to the safety of their homes and died there or ended up trapped inside with tens of zombies roaming just outside their doors. Eventually they would have either ventured out to scavenge for food or died inside of hunger and thirst waiting for the rescue that would never come.

If this was a regular zombie apocalypse the nanobots inside our system would have safely targeted and destroyed the virus before it would have caused any real damage. As for the magical type of zombies, alien, or temporal ones, the cyborgs and automated defenses would have taken care of them. The reason why they weren’t of much help in our city was because the Nano-Z were still recognized by the tech as ‘living humans’ thus they were unable to shoot them, while the cyborgs just ended up mutating faster if they got infected.

The Zombolik Virus was a nightmare for the modern man and an impossibility for a civilization predating nanobot tech.

Instead of just rushing into the first building we came across, we first took a look at it from outside. If there were signs of battle, it could have already been looted or everything was destroyed to the point of being useless. Getting the bloodstains off of our clothes was a bit difficult when you didn’t have access to a washing machine.

The place we picked still had a bunch of Nano-Z lurking around at the entrance, and there were just a couple of windows broken. Scanners indicated a good number of them inside too, just enough to restore our current supply of nanocores.

“Can you kill most of them but leave one for me?” Xerya asked before I went in to attack them.

“Alright, I can do that!” I replied and then unsheathed my Retractable Blade.

With a few good chops and stabs, the seven Nano-Z at the entrance were reduced to just one. I avoided his attacks and then lured them towards Xerya, who was already preparing to fight against him.

“I’m also quite curious to see how well you will do with my body.” Nataly said.

“Here it comes!” I told them as I dashed past Xerya.

The AI was calm in the face of this enemy. She observed his movements and stopped his hands then she... headbutted him.

“Heh?” 

“Ouch?! What the?! Hey!” Nataly cried out.

Xerya ignored us. She pushed the Nano-Z back and then punched him in the guts. He stumbled back and then she punched him in the face. The Nano-Z was about to fall on his back, but he managed to grab her arm and then pull himself towards her. Xerya reacted by punching him with her other hand in the face. The damage was minimal at best. She then kicked him in the shin and shook off his hand. With another kick to the neck, the Nano-Z fell back.

“Target is down. I am now going to use a knife to eliminate him.” Xerya declared as she unsheathed a knife she kept at her waist.

“Isn’t that the knife I used a while back?” I wondered and then continued to watch her battle from the side.

The Nano-Z tried to get up, but Xerya kicked him in the stomach once and again in the chin. She took the blade and with a quick stab to the back of his head, she killed him.

Pulling the knife out, she looked back at me and then announced “Target is now ready for nanocore extraction.”

“Yeah, I can see that...”

Meanwhile, Nataly remained silent and only looked at the events with a small frown on her face.

There wasn’t anything to loot from the Nano-Z and the few apartments that were on the ground floor had already been looted, so we proceeded to the next floor. Here, we found just a few Nano-Z in the hallway, which I killed swiftly and then continued to look for clothes, food, and things that we might use. The biggest disadvantage our modern-day world had was the fact that not everyone kept household tools laying around.

If we ever had a problem that needed to be fixed, we just sent a message to the Automated Repair Center, which would then send a drone over with a FixerBot. If we wanted to change the aspect of our rooms, we had to do the same thing. Manual repairing or building was left only for the few who treated it as a hobby.

On the bright side of things, unlike how it happened in the movies of the old, this type of apocalypse wasn’t enough to send us back to the Stone Age as some would guess. The structures on this planet were relatively recent, so the builder bots had yet to be moved off the planet. There were probably enough materials there to build another city alongside scientific laboratories and completely automated factories of all sorts.

At least, that was my guess. In the end, I could be very wrong about this and in a couple of decades, we would be lucky if we could restart our civilization from the Medieval Age.

While we were looking for stuff, at Xerya’s request, I did leave one or two Nano-Z for her to spar with. It took her a long time to finish them off when compared to me, and every time she engaged with the enemy, I could see Nataly frown.

Upon reaching the fourth floor, we took a break in one of the cleaner apartments. Among the food, tools, and two blunt weapons that we found, we also gathered some clothes that Nataly might like. Actually, she expressed her opinion on the matter and rebuked Xerya’s idea of simply using two sets of clothes that she could use through rotation when one got dirty.

“That blouse is nice, it matches with that pair of pants over there. I just wonder if they aren’t a bit too skinny for me.” Nataly said while she looked at the clothes spread on the bed.

“I find it unnecessary to use so many clothes.” Xerya objected.

“I find it boring to use the same clothes over and over again.” she scoffed.

“It isn’t efficient.”

“It’s not supposed to. It’s a preference. Having more clothes is a matter of pleasure. You feel good when you are wearing something that suits you!” she declared and then added “Also, don’t you dare say that I’m too old to be thinking about fashion! A woman’s sense of style and fashion does not die out with age, it evolves, it becomes more refined and elegant, like a good wine.”

“I didn’t say anything.” I told her.

“It’s good that you didn’t.”

“Xerya, just let her be... you can think of it as a means of camouflaging herself among the survivors.” that reason just came to my mind, and I said it without thinking too much about it.

“...” Xerya remained quiet for a moment and then said “Sounds logical. Very well, I approve.”

“Thanks, I’ll make sure to ‘camouflage’ myself well!” Nataly giggled a bit at the end.

If she wasn’t someone with contacts in the military and probably decades of experiences, I would have asked her how she could remain so calm after everything she saw since she woke up in this hellish world. The Nano-Z weren’t the only terrible things that lurked around, there were also the silent stories of those who weren’t able to survive.

In each apartment, you could see the pictures of those who once lived there or fragments of someone’s life. In one place, we found a little girl of no more than 14 years old clinging to a guitar. She died of hunger, and her flesh was still withering away. The stench of death filled the room, but her dreams could still be found here. She wanted to play music, and it was her grandmother who encouraged her to do so. The guitar was an old instrument, but it still retained its charm and beauty. She had friends with whom she liked to hang out after school and even a boyfriend she went out with on a few dates. These fragments of her memories could be seen from a picture, a video on her computer, a small old-fashioned diary, and the clothes she kept in her dresser. The room painted her activity and her life, yet soon enough, not much of it would be left in the face of time.

The guitar, although rare, I couldn’t force myself to rip it out of her dead grasp. For this child, this old instrument once meant enough for her to keep it close to her until she died of hunger. As for her parents and older brother, their corpses were in the other room. They turned into Nano-Z, attacked each other and the girl locked herself in her room to keep them away.

In another apartment, we saw the pictures of a married couple who was preparing to welcome their first child. The mother was almost due, but when we found her corpse, her belly had been ripped open and eaten all the way up to the spine. The couple survived until the pain of birth reached her and the monsters outside heard her. Considering the fact that she was eaten without a chance to turn into a Nano-Z, then it was highly likely that this happened at night when they entered in their Rabid Mode.

The city was filled with silent stories like these ones and some of them were even sadder.

While I was thinking about these things, Nataly, almost as if she was in sync with me, asked “You know, I’ve been wondering... but why haven’t we seen any children Nano-Z so far? There were a couple of teenager ones though.”

I looked at her, but before I could answer, Xerya did so for me “Children don’t have enough NanoHeal and TechScope nanobots in them to form a proper core. I estimated that the minimum age for becoming a Nano-Z would be 16 years of age or with at least an average height and build, hence why every other specimen of the human species either becomes a partially mutated Nano-Z or a very dumb and weak one that eventually gets eaten by the adult Nano-Z once they enter their first Rabid state.”

“So, you’re saying that...” Nataly was shocked by this reveal.

“They are either dead, eaten, or if they were lucky locked up in a safe place where they can’t be harmed or harm others.” I told her.

“That’s... terrible...” she said looking down.

“Were you reminded of your own family?” I asked her out of curiosity.

She looked back at me and then, after a moment of silence, she said “I have a daughter, Mercuria... she’s on Earth, thankfully, but she is an adult now. Even so, as a mother, I can’t help but think about what the parents must have gone through when they saw their children being killed off like that... It’s worse than what happened on Planet 6. There, they were scumbags who sold them off into slavery, while here they turned into monsters who ate them.”

“I don’t know what’s like to be a father, yet, but I was a teacher at Resonance High, and I often think about those rascals who greeted me each day before this whole madness began... We are not fighters, mercenaries, or soldiers... we’re just normal humans in the end.” I said with a sigh.

“Mercenaries are also normal humans, they just forgot to smile most of the time when they aren’t drowning their sorrow and traumas with a bottle of alcohol.” she said.

“So, you were a mercenary back then?” I asked her, raising an eyebrow.

She smiled softly and then replied “I was a gang member, a mercenary, a fighter in the arena, and a soldier on the battlefield... I was a lot of things, so that’s why I can tell that... even the crazy badass with a scar over his eye and an aura that would make a monster whine in fear is nothing more than a big teddy bear who wants a hug outside of the battlefield. We are all normal people... but with different jobs.”

“I... I never thought about it that way...” I looked down.

“Nobody does.”

I didn’t press on with this subject and just waited patiently for Nataly to finish picking some clothes from all those we found. What didn’t fit or she didn’t like was left in a bag in the corner of the room for any lucky survivor who was going to stumble upon it later on or as an emergency supply of cloth if we ever happened to need it.