I Got Reincarnated as a Zombie Girl

Four days. Ninety-six full hours since the first tremor that awakened one hundred and forty-two Colossi on the dead continent, not a single second passed without the whistle of blades, magical explosions, or the death roars of ancient giants.

In the graveyard dimension where the sky never knew sunrise or dusk, time was measured only by the number of fallen giant fossils and how many times the mana reserves within their cores were drained to the very brink of emptiness.

The surrounding landscape had completely transformed. The ancient mountains of bone that once stood in silence had been pulverized into a sea of fine, flour-like white calcium shards, mixed with pools of thick black miasma fluid smelling of rotten copper. Thousands of craters hundreds of meters in diameter, left by the impacts of gravity cannons and the explosions of the Spear of Longinus, scarred the skeletal continent like severe wounds on the body of a dying planet.

In the midst of an eerie, momentary silence, three figures shuffled and dragged their feet across a canyon of bones newly formed from the collapsed body of a six-horned Colossus.

The condition of the three appeared like a cruel parody of the concept of immortality.

Sylvia’s proud silver cloak, once lined with high-tier protective runes, was now so severely shredded that it was nothing more than a collection of tattered rags stained with dried black blood and magical soot. Her combat boots had been destroyed since the second day, forcing her to walk barefoot over sharp bone fragments. Stacia’s Grimoire tactical uniform had lost half of its left sleeve, while Alicia’s royal holy vestments appeared scorched in various corners from obsidian sword slashes and blasts of gravity lasers.

However, the most horrifying aspect was the contrast between their utterly destroyed clothing and their physical condition.

There was not a single slash mark on their skin. There were no burn scars on Alicia’s shoulders, no bruises on Stacia’s wrists, and no puncture wounds from bone spears in Sylvia’s abdomen. Every time their skin peeled or their bones fractured from the physical blows of a Colossus, Sylvia’s undead regeneration law and the instant holy healing blessing from Alicia’s Sanctuary of the Dying Light forcefully stitched their bodily cells back together in a matter of seconds. Their skin remained smooth, pale, and completely spotless without the slightest blemish.

Yet, physical regeneration could not heal scorched nerves or souls torn apart by extreme exhaustion.

"I... hate... this damn place," Sylvia growled in a voice so hoarse it sounded like two coral rocks grinding together. She walked while dragging the Rapier of Night, its blade tip touching the ground and tracing a small trench in the fossil dust. Her crimson eyes, which usually burned with vitality and madness, were now dim, veiled in bloodshot veins from not sleeping for four days and four nights. "Mother Persephone... is truly a devil. She doesn’t want to kill us... she wants to see how long our brains can hold out before we start eating ourselves out of madness."

Beside her, Stacia did not even have the energy to reply with her usual mathematical sarcasm. The thirteen holographic screens that always orbited her body had now shrunk to a single palm-sized screen flickering unstably. The Grimoire in her hand felt as heavy as a one-ton block of iron.

"My mana circuits... feel like they’re filled with hot sand," Stacia whispered, her breath short and trembling. "Every time I cast even a basic-level magic formula... it feels like a needle is being stabbed into my cerebellum. My data overload reached critical levels twenty hours ago."

The biggest reason the three sisters were on the verge of mental collapse was not merely the individual strength of the Colossi, but the resurrection cycle that seemed to defy the laws of conservation of energy.

During those four days, every time they succeeded in taking down a group of giants and tried to sit down to restore their mana reserves or simply close their eyes for five minutes, the ground beneath them would shake again. The Ancient Mana Network binding the Grave of the Titans acted like the immune system of a giant organism; it constantly detected the presence of foreign entities namely the three of them and summoned new tomb guardians from deeper layers of the earth.

On the second day, they were surrounded by waves of parasite-type Colossi capable of self-destructing into acid storms. On the third day, twelve Titans clad in eternal crystal armor charged at them simultaneously from underground, forcing Alicia to burn nearly eighty percent of her holy mana reserves just to maintain a protective dome so Stacia and Sylvia wouldn’t be crushed to pieces.

Sylvia had indeed gained an absurd amount of experience from the relentless slaughter.

Fourteen consecutive levels in four days was an achievement that would make every elite adventurer in the outside world bow down in disbelief. Yet for Sylvia right now, the numbers on the system display were nothing more than a blinding visual nuisance. New levels granted physical stat increases, but did not automatically erase the mental lactic acid and deep disgust toward the stench of decay.

"We can’t go on like this," said Alicia, walking at the very rear to protect her two younger sisters’ backs. Her exquisitely carved royal magic staff now had two hairline fractures in the middle of its shaft, proof of how fiercely she had to endure the clashes between holy energy and pure gravity over the past days. "If we are forced to fight one more wave with our manaspheres below eight percent... our regeneration won’t have time to work before the gravity attacks crush our heart cores."

"Then where should we go, Sis?" Sylvia asked with a hollow laugh that grated on the ears. "This whole wretched dimension is flat and open. There are no caves, no trees, no blind spots. Every time I try to dig underground, we just end up waking a sleeping fossil."

"There is one place," Stacia suddenly cut in. Her footsteps halted.

Sylvia and Alicia turned in unison toward their middle sister.

Stacia raised her faintly flickering holographic screen, pointing to a coordinate roughly two kilometers north of their current position.

"Four hours ago, when I scanned the gravitational waves from the six-horned Colossus’s attack... I noticed an anomaly in the sound wave reflections," Stacia explained, her eyes narrowing as she fought off dizziness. "There is a half-square-kilometer zone to the north."

"A blind spot?" Alicia’s eyes widened slightly. "How could there be a blind spot inside this graveyard matrix?"

"Not an ordinary blind spot," Stacia answered, swallowing hard. "Based on its mass density calculations... there is a single skeleton of an entity whose size far exceeds standard Colossi. So massive that the surrounding Colossi fossils instinctively seem to steer clear and refuse to approach. The residual aura from that skeleton acts as a natural signal jammer against the Ancient Mana Network."

Without wasting a single second, Sylvia immediately turned her body north. "Then let’s run there right now. Before those damn rocks wake up again for breakfast."

They mustered the very last remnants of strength in their leg muscles to sprint through the thickening storm of bone dust. Behind them, the grinding sounds of the earth indicating the awakening of a new wave of Colossi began to rumble once again in the distance.

This time, however, they did not look back.

After crossing a steep ridge of bone canyon, the sight before them caused the three sisters’ steps to falter for a moment in speechless awe.

At the bottom of the deep valley lay embedded an extraordinarily titanic fossil structure. If the Colossi they had fought over the past four days averaged eighty to one hundred meters in height, then the skeleton before them consisted of the ribs of a creature at least four kilometers long. Those curved ribs, two hundred meters tall, pierced the earth like giant white pillars from an era before the universe had a name.

What made the place truly different was its atmosphere.

The moment Alicia’s foot crossed the boundary of the giant ribs’ shadow, the howling sounds of the wild miasma wind outside suddenly fell silent. The hundredfold gravitational pressure that had relentlessly tried to crush their spines for ninety-six hours instantly vanished, returning to a normal gravity level so light their bodies felt as if they could float.

Moreover, the air beneath the ribcage of the ancient skeleton felt warm, free from poisonous decay particles, and filled with a concentration of pure mana as tranquil as lake water in the morning.

"Eluded... we’ve truly eluded the graveyard’s sensors," Stacia whispered, her voice trembling with immense relief. She stared at her Grimoire’s screen; the red warning dots of enemies on the radar had entirely vanished the moment they entered the area of this giant skeleton.

"This place... what kind of entity died here?" Sylvia murmured, looking up at the holy bone arches above their heads. "Even after thousands of years of becoming a fossil... its aura still terrifies the giants out there so much they wouldn’t dare set foot within a one-kilometer radius."

"That doesn’t matter right now," Alicia said with a tired smile that could finally blossom on her lips. "What matters is... this place is safe. We’ve finally found a sanctuary."

The word "safe" seemed to act as a spell that severed the last marionette strings supporting Sylvia and Stacia’s bodies.

As soon as the realization that they no longer needed to swing their weapons in the next few seconds sank into her brain, Sylvia’s legs instantly buckled. She collapsed forward, falling to her knees on the expanse of soft, cool bone sand inside the ribcage of the eternal skeleton. The Rapier of Night in her hand faded into particles of black shadow that dissolved into the air, as she no longer had enough mental focus to maintain its physical form.

"Ah... dammit," Sylvia grumbled, her face burying directly into the white sand. Both her arms sprawled out beside her tattered body. "This ground... why is it so soft... It feels like a goose-feather mattress..."

In less than five seconds after her body touched the ground, Sylvia’s chest began to rise and fall rhythmically. Soft, heavy snores escaped her lips. The Slaughter Demon who had laughed maniacally for four days and four nights while tearing apart the hearts of eighty-seven Colossi was now instantly fast asleep like a child exhausted after running in the yard all day.

Beside her, Stacia was in no better condition.

She tried to sit cross-legged to activate the automatic cooling procedure on her Grimoire, but her hands shook so badly that the magic book slipped out and fell into her lap. Stacia’s blue eyes, usually cold and analytical, were now completely dim.

"Big Sis Alicia..." Stacia whispered, her eyes beginning to close on their own as her head slowly tilted and rested against the left shoulder of the sound-asleep Sylvia. "...fifteen minutes... wake me up..."

Before her sentence was finished, Stacia’s breathing slowed as well, following her older sister into a deep, dreamless subconscious state. Their bodies leaned against one another beneath the shelter of the eternal ribs, looking so fragile in their shredded clothes, contrasting with their perfectly clean, woundless skin.

Alicia stood quietly a few steps away from them, gazing at her two younger sisters with a heartwarming look of tenderness.

In truth, Alicia’s condition was not much different from her two younger sisters’.

Her head throbbed violently as if struck repeatedly by an iron hammer due to her holy mana consumption remaining constantly in the red zone for four days. Her legs and back felt numb, and her wrist holding the magic staff was so stiff she could barely straighten her fingers. If she allowed herself to sit down and close her eyes right at that moment, she would surely sink immediately into an equally deep slumber.

However, Alicia was the eldest among the three of them.

She knew the first rule of survival in unknown enemy territory: an entire group must never fall asleep all at once, no matter how safe the place appeared. Even if this eternal skeleton repelled the approach of the Colossi, there was no guarantee that other dangers weren’t lurking in the crevices of these ancient fossils, or that Persephone wouldn’t suddenly change the rules of this dimension unilaterally.

Alicia took a deep breath, forcing a beam of warm golden light to flow once again from her exhausted holy core throughout her nervous system, just to fend off the drowsiness trying to drag down her eyelids.

She stepped slowly toward Sylvia and Stacia, then planted the lower end of her magic staff into the white sand around them.

"Divine Ward: Silent Sanctuary of the Vigilant Shield," Alicia whispered very softly, almost without a sound.

A transparent dome of light ten meters in diameter materialized, enveloping the area where her two younger sisters slept. This magic was not a high-tier defensive spell that consumed immense mana, but merely an acoustic and thermal isolation barrier, a barrier that blocked all residual rumblings from outside the valley and kept the temperature inside the dome warm and stable so their sleep would not be disturbed in the slightest.

Alicia then knelt before her two sisters. She placed her magic staff in her lap, and with very careful and gentle hand movements, she brushed away the dust-caked locks of hair covering Sylvia’s sleeping face, before adjusting the position of Stacia’s head so she could lean more comfortably on her older sister’s shoulder.

She gazed at their utterly ruined clothing tattered rags revealing pale, woundless skin underneath. Using the remnants of her creation-type holy mana, Alicia slowly spun thin golden threads of light from her fingertips, beginning to mend and patch up the severely torn parts of their cloaks so her sisters’ bodies wouldn’t be struck by the graveyard’s cold air when they woke up later.

"Sleep well, Sylvia... Stacia..." Alicia whispered with a genuine, motherly smile beneath the dim golden glow of her staff. "You have fought so exceptionally over these past four days. Not a single goddess in the heavens or titan on earth could deny your strength."

Alicia turned her gaze beyond the boundary of the giant ribs, looking toward the gray fog at the end of the valley where the silhouettes of Colossi still stirred restlessly in the distance, waiting patiently outside the borders of the sanctuary.