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Disclaimer: I own no source material.
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Chapter 9: Highschool of The Dead part 4: The Training Montage. Finally.
Truth be told, learning how to fight was both simple and not.
Alfred was a decent teacher for spear arts, but he was no expert. So, that left him with learning by doing. Experience would be his greatest teacher.
It also helped that he had an unending horde of targets to practice on. Targets who were slow and unthinking.
The first month, being his fourth month in the world and the fifth since the apocalypse began, of his spear training involved Alfred teaching him the basic stances.
How to use a spear as a spear and not a baseball bat. Although, Alfred put greater emphasis on slashing than he did stabbing for whatever reason, but the Chitari spear he stole from Loki was sharper at the point then along the blade the point was connected to.
He was strong, stronger than a regular human for sure with his Animagus form influencing him but slashing through a human skull was still more stamina consuming than stabbing.
Even Alfred couldn't complain about that part, but he reminded him to never forget to practice the forms for slashing as well.
Jafar was no weapon master, martial artist, military man, or anything of the sort in his first life. He did some swimming at the gym, ran track in high school, and fought imaginary enemies with a stick when he was eight, but nothing from back then helped him now.
No, it was just his twisted mind that found everything about his situation amusing and living in the moment that pushed him on like a kid in a candy store.
Not to mention the three months of fucking around he got out of his system before that. Those months were just as much about killing zombies as it was getting a feel for who he was as a person. His trip through five worlds and everything that happened in less than a full day was so wild, he didn't feel like he had an identity when he first arrived.
He was Jafar, and Jafar was him. Beginning, middle, and end.
It was just that simple.
He was not normal. He was not sane. He fit no mold. He was chaotic. Chaos magic bloomed inside him. His mind made a madness curse and a demon react violently on simple periphery touch.
He could become an elephant sized tiger lion with ape like arms, taloned hands, and a fifteen foot long ribbon like tail. And it could teleport.
There was nothing normal about that and he loved it. Well, he would love it more if he could actually control it but nevertheless, he loved this new him. This new life.
He felt free.
Now he just had to take the cards dealt to him and run with it. All the way till the end.
The fourth month of his new life, he focused on the basics. He stabbed forward and pulled back. Once, twice, a dozen times, a hundred times, a thousand times.
He stabbed and he pulled back.
He slashed and he pulled back.
Over, and over, and over, until even his enhanced stamina ran out and he had to rest.
The fifth month was likewise the same. Rinse and repeat.
Albeit with some fun mixed in here and there. Just because he was being serious didn't mean he couldn't hit zombies with a potato gun or go full tactical Rambo mode with paintball weapons.
Turns out even zombies got mad when you shot them in the eye with an airsoft bullet. Who knew.
Month six continued the pattern, with some flair and dramatics cast in to amuse himself between kills.
Stabbing zombie brains got awfully stale after a while.
Stab one, you stabbed a thousand.
By this point even finding ways to amuse oneself with zombies began to get stale and Jafar turned his gaze elsewhere.
Ever since he arrived, there had been the issue of finding things to eat.
Without power, most perishable food perished within the first month.
Most unperishable food was either ransacked by people who panicked at the start, torn into by rats and other small critters and insects, or just flat out not tasty.
Jafar liked tasty things. Everyone likes tasty things.
But there were no tasty things to eat! It was preposterous.
The zombie virus may have actively avoided targeting wildlife, but that didn't meant it didn't affect it. According to Alfred, it was both a virus and a curse. The virus took over the brain and killed the body while the curse corrupted the soul and made the body seek out more of what it recognized as its own kind.
So what happened when a carnivore munched on zombie flesh? You get a zombie animal that targeted its own species.
A few occurrences here and there and suddenly most animal chains are affected. You never really lived till you saw a zombie rabbit try to savagely bite you while shamble hopping.
The wildlife fought back of course. Hell, Jafar had seen more than enough examples of the Australian animals ripping apart their zombie brothers and sisters and leaving them to rot. Watching Kangaroo's curve stomp a zombie was always amusing.
The idea of zombie animals everywhere would be more terrifying if it weren't for the fact that they too will end up cannibalizing themselves after the one year mark. Great way to cut down on mice issues.
But that left a major problem. The only source of edible meat was the Australian wildlife that wanted to eat him as well.
And they were not tasty looking. A scorpion is not his ideal concept of BBQ fun no matter what Australian cook books said.
So what did that leave him with? Jafar had no intention to be a farmer. Rake one, seed two, was not him.
With animal life not an option, and vegetable fields rotting or overrun by pests without care, he turned his eyes toward the ocean.
Funny enough, the zombies couldn't swim.
Because the virus was biological in nature and the curse only directed them while corrupting the soul, their brains would be destroyed by over exposure to water and die.
Likewise, any fish that ate them would die soon after as well without having a chance to carry on the virus.
That left the fish that still lived as perfectly good food sources.
And Jafar took to that much better than anything else.
With his trusty spear and a net, he took off from the coast and failed spectacularly.
Then he got annoyed and tried casting magic again, spectacularly destroying his ship in a fiery explosion with him still inside it.
A very crispy and unamused Jafar was left to fish the slow way with a rod. It wasn't easy, he didn't like standing still very much anymore. But with time he oddly found it meditative in a way.
His life was like a powder keg that kept on burning, but when he fished he could empty his mind and flow.
He tried cooking the fish at first, but he was no chef. He bought most of his food when he lived in Japan. But being a proper Japanese citizen, he had a love for raw fish and at least knew how to make simple Sashimi. If he really felt like it, he could add rice and make it Nigiri.
Fish was the staple meal of his day, day after day. His physique and magic burned brightly with the food source and nutritionary needs seemed irrelevant. Even a tier 0 human could survive on fish alone for up to a year, but Alfred had said that once a base tier 0 human gained power and moved into tiers 1 to 3, specific nutritionary and sleep needs lowered. As long as you had a staple source of energy rich food, you could keep powering on without issue for a long time, and raw fish was packed with nutrients.
And once you hit tier 4 those needs lowered even more.
Just by having mana, Jafar was tier 1, his chaos magic wouldn't let him die so easily. Through training and time, he could easily reach tier 3 in a few years with his physical body.
And when the first year passed and tier 0 zombies become tier 1 ghouls and banshees, he would have more than enough enemies to focus on to grow with.
By that point, the enemies would be both stronger and no longer have the risk of changing you by a simple bite. The first evolution group didn't convert anyone.
In the second evolution, lesser vampires became a risk but even then you would only turn if you didn't die after they brutalized you.
By tier 3 is when intelligence really started to shine through in undead and whoever was left would have things to truly fear.
Back to the fish though, Jafar had become something of a connoisseur on good Sashimi after eating it multiple times a day for six months straight. How fresh it was, its gender, the thickness you cut it at, the part you cut, how you cut it, there were quite a few things to learn about the process he never thought about.
Seafood was rich in diversity, and he only kept the ones he could eat raw. Sea bass, tuna, mackerel, blue marlin, swordfish, yellowtail, salmon, trout, eel, abalone, squid, clams, ark shell, sweetfish, scallop, sea bream, halfbeak, shrimp, flatfish, cockle, octopus and crab.
His ring space, or better just called his inventory in his mind, kept everything fresh once placed inside and he could store shrunken crates without an issue.
Salmon and Tuna were especially his favorite catches. Every time he bit into some fatty tuna; his mind fantasized about Japanese Bluefin. And there was nothing better than salmon that melted in your mouth.
He wouldn't be getting any awards anytime soon, but he had become just a bit addicted. Alfred's realistic concerns were all lies. Jafar was adamant his Animagus form was influencing his taste buds because he really loved fish now.
By month seven, his spear began shaping into his own original style. It was unrefined and lacked proper instruction, but it was methodical and lethal, always aiming for the head or crippling blows to the limbs to reach the head.
His body grew stronger with each passing week bathing in blood. His senses grew sharper. His wasted movements decreased. He fought longer. He moved faster.
He was chaotic, he was a storm, he was….getting dangerously bored.
By the end of the seventh month he lost his shit.
He crashed a car into the front of a liquor store and kicked open the door.
"FUCK THIS SHIT I'M GETTING DRUNK."
{"Is that the best idea? You can only regrow a limb a few more times."}
"I don't care! I'm bored."
An interesting thing to note was that increased stamina and having mana meant increased alcohol tolerance. Another interesting thing to note is that it takes time to understand what your tolerance limit is. A final note, when you finish a bottle of Jack Daniels and realize you're not drunk yet, you tend to drink three more out of spite.
"WOO! LETS FUCKING GO!"
{"How much did you drink?! I'm fucking feeling woozy and I don't even have a body. Is this what being drunk feels like?"}
"ALFRED, PLAY MY TRACK!"
{"FUCK YOU! PLAY MINE THIS TIME!"}
Considering Alfred was connected to Jafar's soul through their bond, he realized he could give verbal commands to the grimoire just as much as Jafar that day.
[The Offspring - Army of One]
The city of Perth became host to a strange event for almost five straight days as Jafar and Alfred had a music festival and attracted every single zombie in a hundred mile radius to meet the pointy side of a spear, a rubber duck to the face, live mines, toilet paper bombs, invitations to dodgerockets, and Paul.
Paul was the nice one.
Paul was the one to greet a blurry eyed Jafar and Alfred when they finally woke up after drinking for almost a week straight to the sight of a city on fire, a burning mountain of corpses, missing pants, and an itchy leg from where Paul kept biting him and dragging him off to not die from being mauled.
Jafar took one look at the destruction, scratched his leg, lit a cigarette, and got in a car to drive off without a word. Alfred likewise discovered the joys of hangovers that day.
Turned out it was hard for a demon to get drunk; he had mixed feelings about the results.
Month eight returned to his schedule with an added bonus.
During his little stress relief incident, he happened to tap into one of the abilities he couldn't figure out until then.
A Zouwu was a curious magical creature. Despite its appearance and strengths, it had the unique magical ability to teleport great lengths of distance through any defense the magical world of Harry Potter had to stop teleportation.
It was rated XXXXX more for its elusive nature and ability to create chaos then its violent tendencies. It was a giant sized cat with teleporting powers, that's a combination that strikes fear into many hearts. The ability for chaos it held made Obliviators wet their bed in fear of it showing up in their district.
Despite eight months passing, Jafar still had no idea how to turn into his form on purpose. There was no special mental plane when he tried to meditate. There was no inner animal spirit to talk to him. He was stumped and tried to force it by huffing catnip.
Didn't work but he did get high and change a house into a ginger bread home before he regained consciousness though. There was no choice but to eat his way out.
So, it was a welcome surprise when he suddenly found himself capable of teleporting by line of sight. There was a hard limit of fifty meter movements, and it drained him something fierce, but it added a whole new range to his life and combat prowess.
Why walk when you can teleport? He felt a distant bro connection to a certain blue furred demon humanoid with a penchant for pranks.
Month eight was spent more with testing his limits and having a blast like a kid on crack teleporting up into the air and falling before doing it again and again.
It was hard to be precise but that just made it more fun to try.
Month nine he tried to combine fighting with a spear with teleporting. A strange mixture of elements that required a high amount of precision and accuracy to get right.
By month ten, he was moving faster than the zombies could react, teleporting into blind spots and stabbing before moving on.
Trying to move while his spear was still in a zombie would take it with him, and the drain for taking more than himself was heavy and left him panting.
Month eleven he was seeing positive results from his attempts and became a teleporting menace. He also discovered being sober was not required to teleport.
Every bank he could find got a visit as their vaults were no longer obstacles.
Much to his extreme annoyance however, all he found was cash.
There wasn't a single gold coin, bar, or jewel in sight.
"WHY.
CANT.
I.
FIND.
ANY.
GOLD!"
Jafar threw an air conditioner unit off a roof with his roar.
{"Why are you so focused on gold exactly?"}
He huffed and looked down at his ring. "Isn't gold a standard in every world? I realized the other day that I'm technically broke and paper money isn't worth shit if I take it to another world."
Alfred hummed and seemingly nodded his head. {"You're not wrong. But I feel like I should mention something."}
"What?"
{"Do you think the lich doesn't know that?"}
Jafar froze and narrowed his eyes. "Explain."
{"Gold is always valuable. The fucker probably took all the gold it could find for itself. Undead love using the stuff for aesthetics, rituals, mental masturbation, and all kinds of things. Your around a year too late for it."}
"….And you didn't mention this three weeks ago when I started searching because?"
{"It was funny seeing you getting frustrated."}
Jafar's zombie hunting that day involved a lot of punching with his right hand.
After that day, he took to raiding jewelry stores and found to his dismay that the shelves were already cleared.
The lich beat him to the punch way before he even came to the table.
"I'LL KILL IT I SWEAR!"
{"Wasn't that the plan anyway?"}
"NOW ITS PERSONAL!"
Month eleven ended with him venting.
Two weeks before a full year passed since he arrived and he realized he made a mistake.
He arrived in the world a month after things started. Add two weeks for a zombie apocalypse to take over the world and a majority of bodies to be converted and that meant the first evolution began two weeks earlier than he expected.
His spear paused as for the first time, a zombie turned away from him and walked off.
Jafar scratched his head as it shambled away from him. "Um….did I smell or something?"
Alfred's exasperated voice responded. {"No you moron, it's time for the first evolution."}
"Wait, what?"
He did the mental math and subtracted X from the square root of Pi again to realize Alfred was right.
"Shit! Bob!"
He quickly typed out a message to his friend and told him to let Saeko know as well. The two had spoken a few more times over the months when she could bother Bob enough to give her the phone.
She had taken to traveling with him and his team, being the human face to his group as they took to the fight to the horde and found whoever still lived under the rubble and in shelters. Although the number of survivors they found fell with each passing week.
Half a year after they first contacted him, they had expanded to a few hundred thousand people, many had actually identified as Australians having fled by ship and gotten picked up by military vessels they had on the waters.
There were outliers who didn't believe Jafar's claims, but the work to eliminate zombies increased anyway. Even the naysayers didn't deny the need to kill them off faster.
But none of that mattered as around the world, every surviving group watched in horrid fascination as the zombies that had tormented them finally pulled back and began congregating in disgusting piles, consuming each other one after another like squirming worms until new forms were birthed from the flesh.
Zombies that ate people during the year combined with those who ate nothing and changed.
The equivalent of fifty souls, or fifty empty zombies became a single ghoul. Fiendish creatures with stone like skin, paralytic claws, and superhuman physical abilities. They lacked intelligence and the ability to infect but were much more vicious in hunting prey than zombies.
The more they ate living flesh, the faster they could evolve. Or they would starve for six months and consume their fellows to push past the limit to the next stage.
Their skin was grey, eyes red and bloodshot, and they seemed to smell the air like animals before locking onto his position atop a skyscraper where he was watching like blood hounds.
The ones who didn't form into ghouls turned into banshees. To his gaze, it seemed like one in ten clumps sprouted banshees rather than ghouls.
Ethereal looking ghosts in bed sheets with hooded faces glowing with feminine features covered in blood.
Jafar hummed at he watched the freaky process. "So, what do banshee's actually do? I forgot to ask."
Alfred sighed from the ring. {"I figured you would ask eventually after I told you they could only be hurt with iron. Or rather, iron was your only option since you can't cast magic for shit and minerals like mithril don't exist in this world."}
"But my spear still works."
{"Yeah, that thing is a magical metal. Albeit its seen better days."}
Jafar spared his weapon a glance and absentmindedly nodded. The thing was dented, scratched up, and dulled in a lot of areas. He was no weapon smith and had to actually find a book that told him how basic weapon care worked. But even with that, he was an amateur spear user and spent half a year smashing bone and whatever else he hit trying to learn how to be better.
"The banshees?"
{"Oh, right. They are weak spirits who are more background fighters. They spread an aura of fear that affects weak minds and if they get in close they can drain stamina with a touch. I doubt your fucked up mind will even notice the first part but pay attention to the second."}
Jafar clicked his tongue. "Noted."
Thunder boomed in the cloudy sky as drops of rain began to fall.
He watched as more and more zombies evolved in their gruesome fashion before they all seemed to smell the air and lock onto him. Ghouls ran straight up the walls of the buildings, digging in their limbs to the concrete without issue, while banshees floated a few inches off any surface and moved slowly.
"Why are they so excited? I thought these were just tier 1 undead."
{"Did you forget what I told you? Undead hate demons. I retracted my aura before this started so it's not that bad, but the closest ones will charge straight at you like berserkers. Have fun with that."}
"You're an incredibly supportive friend."
{"Don't call me the F word. It gives me chills."}
"Fuck you too buddy."
{"Ah, much better."}
Jafar chuckled with a roll of his eyes and spun his spear in his hand just as the first ghoul crossed the roof's edge and charged at him with an inhuman screech.
Lightning flashed in the sky and Jafar met it in the middle of the roof with a piercing strike and a manic excited smile on his face.
Two hours later, he vanished in a series of teleports across rooftops to crash on a new building bleeding, panting, and giggling like a schoolgirl. "Holy, hah, shit, hah, this is crazy man hahahaha." He rolled around in apparent joy without a care for his wounds.
Alfred shook his head in amusement at his host. He would never admit it but he was having the time of his life with the moron. And killing undead was his favorite pastime aside from eating souls from screaming mortals and funding spam call centers.
He knew Jafar was getting bored the last few months, but he didn't realize how bored. Fighting for his life against tier 1 undead would become the highlight of his days for the foreseeable future.
Looking at the even more damaged spear on the ground, Alfred thought it was a good thing the one million zombie mark was approaching fast with the ghouls counting for fifty souls each. Not that he would tell Jafar that.
He let Jafar enjoy himself for half a minute before speaking up. {"Get up and heal yourself jackass. You got five minutes tops before they find you again."}
Jafar wiped away tears with a happy smile and sat up looking like his typical hobo self after getting into something stupid. "I really needed that. Ghouls are way more fun than zombies. And the banshees were like angry schoolgirls."
{"What were all those names you kept calling them?"}
"Past girls I hooked up with. It was cathartic to stab them with a different kind of spear you know?"
{"Say no more."}
He pulled out some potions and sprayed himself. "Think Bob is doing alright?"
{"I wouldn't be worried about him. Can't say anything about the rest though."}
"That's fair. I guess its survival of the fittest from here on out."
{"Isn't that how life always is?"}
"It was before hot weapons came around."
{"Fair, but they still work on tier 1 undead."}
"If they listened to us."
{"If they listened to us."}
Inhuman screeches reached their ears and the time for talking was over. He stood up and cracked his neck as he looked for a new song to play.
Meanwhile, over with Bob.
"FIRE!"
"DON'T STOP!"
"PUSH THEM BACK!"
"STOP THOSE MEN! THE FEAR ISNT REAL! GET BACK IN FORMATION!"
Bob hovered over the base he was in charge of with a hum. The foolish ones who rejected his trainers warnings were all moved to the farthest base while the ones inspired by his great speech wisely acted and were prepared.
The living ones were giving all they had against thousands of the new dead ones. A rain of metal from one side fell on the screeching and running forces on the other.
They asked him to remain back at the start to test the waters themselves and Bob agreed. He had Cleo with him with her enhanced soldiers, already the seventh generation since her first dead fighting forces.
Her requests for him to give her stronger offspring weighed heavily on his shell. He didn't know how much longer he could reject her advances. She was a beautiful ruler and woman; he didn't want to hurt her.
He had a mission, a holy quest. He couldn't let himself be distracted by such things. Although, looking to the side where she majestically stood tall examining the battlefield, he felt his shell flush. The knowing look she sent him had him look away in embarrassment.
There was no time for distraction….he would have to speak to his trainer about this. He would know what to do.
For now, he had a job to do. He buzzed to Cleo and told her to signal the rest of their team stationed around the three bases on the east coast the living ones retreated to.
The humans were being pushed back by the ghost types among the dead ones. It was time to step in and do what he was born to do.
"Shed."
"Cleo."
His eyes widened as Cleo rushed ahead with tittering laughter trailing behind her.
Hmph, he wouldn't fall behind so easily.
[Gusts] blew the enemy lines back before he unleashed a [Hyper Beam] and sped into the enemy lines with [Gust] blowing him through, throwing [Shadow Ball] and [Will-O-Wisp] out as fast as he could.
His [Shadow Balls] made the enemy ghost types screech and break apart on contact and his [Will-O-Wisp] lit the dead ones faster and easier than the previous dead ones lit on fire.
From the corner of his eye, he caught his companion fighting with a spear of her own, tearing through the enemies and inspiring her men with an unstoppable zeal.
From the other side, he caught a glimpse of steel and nodded with approval at the sight. The strange human female who went into heat every time she spoke to his trainer was acting like a proud steel type at the moment.
He had long gotten used to her excreting crazy amounts of pheromones while she fought. It wasn't targeted at him so he didn't mind. Although, at the beginning Cleo seemed to have had a word with the female human one day and his shell shivered at the dark aura covering his ally.
Something told him he shouldn't ask questions that day.
Maybe he should ask his trainer for advice sooner.
A dead one tried to get in his face and got his attention.
Right, forget deeper thoughts. It was time to unleash holy retribution.
He would carve the name of Bob into the dead ones souls.
He raised his limb up high and shouted loud enough for all the humans to hear. "FFFFFFFFRRRRRRREEEDDDDDDDDOOMMMMMM!"
His allies heard him in their heart of hearts no matter the distance. Dozens of miles away Tom and Tia roared in approval from their side and renewed their ferocious charge. Tom especially becoming the worst nightmare to every ghoul in sight. And dozens of miles in a different direction, Phil laughed to the heavens as a mountain of undead were attracted to his presence and tried to pile on top of him only to get roasted by the two leggers who knew he wouldn't be hurt by their weapons.
Of course, no human understood Bob's cry, but the cheers that rose when the humans realized Bob and his team were at the front shook the undead to their core.
If their angel and guardians were out there, what right did they have to retreat?
Moral hit an all-time high at that moment and the Undead did not win the first night.
Chapter End.