Chương 87: Chapter 84: The Pincer Movement

After saying my goodbyes to my wife with a long kiss, a tight hug, and a solemn pinky promise to return safely, I left our quarters to meet the deployment teams assembled in front of the administration building. Parked in the staging area was the heavy passenger van Frank and I had liberated on the night we originally fought our way back into town, flanked by two larger eighteen-passenger transport vans.

The core dungeon team, alongside Zack, Tony, and twenty-eight fully armed and armored settlement guards, were standing in clusters around the vehicles. With the overarching marching orders distributed, the units split up. Zack climbed into the first transport van with fourteen guards, while Tony claimed the second van with the remaining fourteen. In total, we were rolling out with thirty active guardsmen supporting the five members of the primary dungeon team, who were currently piling into the lead vehicle.

I slid into the driver's seat, adjusted the mirrors, and glanced to the rear. In the crisp glass reflection, I could clearly see the two massive transport vans idling behind us and the sleek shapes of our surveillance drones mounted to the roofs. I extended my arm out the window, spinning my index finger in a circling motion before snapping it into a firm thumbs-up.

At the signal, the drones hummed to life, lifting high into the morning air to chart an advanced path as our small convoy rolled out toward the cemetery. The two dedicated operators—one stationed in each guard transport—navigated the drones along a predetermined aerial reconnaissance route. Within minutes, their voices crackled over the tactical radio, reporting a zombie horde moving north on Fourth Street, rapidly approaching the I Street intersection.

Leaving a hostile cluster to wander freely through an active housing area was out of the question, and since the position sat directly along our route, we made the immediate executive decision to intercept and eradicate the threat. We were traveling eastbound on H Street from Seventh when the targets were confirmed, prompting us to cut our engines and dismount half a block shy of Fourth Street. It gave us the perfect window to form a clean tactical line and assault the horde.

The primary dungeon team and I took point, advancing down the center of the street as we wheeled left onto Fourth Street, immediately bringing the moving mass of rotting flesh into visual range. Zack instantly directed his element down the left sidewalk, while Tony crossed over to the right side of the street with his detachment.

With our perimeter secure, we opened the engagement by launching a steady hail of arrows and localized spells into the densely packed center of the horde, softening up the front ranks until the monsters closed within melee distance. Once the distance closed, the actual hand-to-hand engagement lasted barely a minute. There were only a few dozen walkers in this particular group, anchored by a lone undead necromancer. They simply weren't a match for our veteran guards and the main dungeon team.

Armed with our brand-new wyvern scale armor and vastly superior attributes, we cut straight through the core of the horde like a hot knife through butter. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. As the final target collapsed, a quiet wave of system alerts rippled across our screens, confirming the team had successfully exited combat. I didn't receive a notification for a level or skill increase as a direct result of the skirmish.

The system required thousands of raw experience points to push my profile from level 39 to 40, making the progression a heavy, intentional grind. I could, however, feel the phantom pressure in my core signaling that my status bar was sitting right on the precipice of the threshold. Dismissing the lingering interface screens, the squads quickly re-boarded the passenger vans and resumed our advance toward the spawning grounds.

We didn't encounter any further resistance along the remaining blocks, and roughly ten minutes after the initial skirmish, our vehicles were safely parked and concealed a couple of blocks away from the cemetery grounds. The drones maintained a high-altitude orbit, streaming a crystal-clear, bird's-eye view of the cemetery layout directly to the operator's handheld slates. There was an undeniable presence of undead milling aimlessly around the central stone mausoleum.

The overhead feed indicated dozens of active targets—likely hitting close to a couple hundred undead scattered across the headstones. While it certainly looked like a formidable gathering at a glance, compared to the sheer, overwhelming scale of the first zombie siege and the massive waves we had weathered afterward, this cleanup detail felt remarkably manageable. Still, operational safety and tight tactical security remained our paramount concerns. We needed to maintain a decisive tactical advantage.

With that philosophy in mind, we divided our forces into three distinct elements. The core dungeon team and I would mount a direct, frontal assault on the cemetery grounds from the north. Zack would lead his guard detachment through the adjacent residential block to secure a flanking position on the eastern side, while Tony navigated his team around the block to establish a matching containment line on the western edge.

To the immediate south of the cemetery lay nothing but wide, open, un-defendable farmland—an exposed area that offered zero tactical cover for an approach. A synchronized, three-way pincer movement was our best option. Mike Tyson once famously noted that "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." In the post-system world, that sentiment had proven itself to be an incredibly accurate, painfully visceral absolute.

The three separate elements moved out exactly as planned, safely navigating to their designated staging areas. The guardsmen took up secure firing positions behind a scattered maze of broken-down vehicles—cars and trucks left entirely abandoned by initial system interference or burned down to the frames by desperate survivors during the early days of the apocalypse.

The rusted frames, alongside piles of shattered concrete and debris strewn across the perimeter, provided excellent defensive barricades to cover behind. Once every squad was in place and waiting for the signal—ready for a sweep that should have been relatively elementary compared to the absolute hell this team had already survived—the universe decided to punch back and all hell broke loose.