Chapter 126: Sound Needle

Rose, Jenny, Max, Aadav, Jacob, Ash—every Awakener’s eyes snapped onto Fredrinn the exact moment his Level 9 Magical Circuit flared to life.

To the unawakened civilians on the bus, Max’s crackling, blinding lightning had seemed like the absolute pinnacle of supernatural phenomenon.

It was raw, theatrical, and visibly deadly. Most Awakeners they had encountered possessed far subtler, less flashy traits—Jenny’s silent footsteps, or Jacob’s entirely passive, invisible parasitic ability that remained useless until primed.

Yet even the ordinary humans huddled in the center aisle could immediately tell that something fundamentally unnatural was happening around Fredrinn.

They couldn’t perceive the flow of mana, but within the enclosed cabin, the ambient air pressure plunged. Without a stray draft blowing through the bus, the fabric of Fredrinn’s shirt began to flutter and ripple against his broad chest.

A deep, silent resonance thrummed through the soles of everyone’s shoes, raising the fine hairs on their arms.

Fredrinn slid open a side window near the front, peering down into the boiling sea of rotting flesh clinging to the chassis... The never ending horde of zombies.

The drag force had ground their forward momentum to an absolute crawl. The heavy diesel engine howled in vain.

Although nobody had climbed out to verify, the jarring shudder through the floorboards made it obvious that at least one of the heavy rear tires had been shredded or deflated under the weight of claws and sharp road wreckage.

"Aadav, prepare to accelerate the bus," Fredrinn commanded smoothly, his tone remarkably detached as the compacted mana within his core surged through his nine internal channels.

During his centuries in Apolasia, he had mastered a vast arsenal of esoteric elements.

Even complex affinities like spatial manipulation and layered illusions were within his repertoire, though those demanded precise atmospheric preparation and dense mana reservoirs that Earth’s diluted atmosphere simply couldn’t support on short notice.

Right now, he didn’t need delicate sorcery. He needed a mass displacement spell—something to blow the clinging corpses off the axles, sever the friction dragging them into the dirt, and give Aadav the window to accelerate.

Wind was the instinctive first choice. It was universally available, efficient to cast, and capable of generating a massive concussive gale to blast the mob backward into the storefronts.

The only downside was that a blunt air shockwave offered low lethality, functioning merely as basic crowd control without truly thinning out the persistent nocturnal pack.

Lightning was another lethal option, capable of arcing from target to target, frying nervous systems, and leaving them paralyzed. But Fredrinn discarded it almost immediately.

The yellow bus was a massive cage of steel and aluminum. Discharging an uncontrolled area-of-effect electrical burst right beside the outer hull carried a massive risk of conducting through the frame and electrocuting the civilians huddled inside.

Max had maintained sufficient restraint to blast only distant targets for that exact reason.

’How about sound...?’ Fredrinn hummed thoughtfully, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the writhing bodies below the glass.

Sound waves bypassed armor, penetrated deep into organic cavities, and relied strictly on vibrational resonance through the air.

Still, before committing a massive mana investment to an area-of-effect spell, he needed to verify whether these night-buffed corpses still possessed functional auditory structures to be vulnerable from his sonar attacks.

If their ears were already dead or decayed, there was no point in trying to launch a sound attack.

Leaning slightly out the opening, Fredrinn pointed his index finger at an aggressive Tier 2 runner trying to crawl onto the front wheel arch.

A high-frequency vibrational needle formed at the tip of his finger. Completely invisible, the disturbance manifested only as a tiny, razor-sharp distortion in the air, rippling outward at supersonic velocity straight into the side of the creature’s skull.

The instant the chaotic frequencies drilled into the zombie’s ear canal, its rotten head jerked violently sideways. It stumbled, legs buckling like snapped twigs as it lost total motor coordination, and a thick trickle of black, coagulated blood burst from its ear cavity.

Whether the monster was deafened or had its internal equilibrium completely obliterated didn’t matter in the slightest.

The physical reaction confirmed everything Fredrinn needed... That the zombies were vulnerable to sound.

A faint, predatory smirk touched Fredrinn’s lips. He pulled his head back inside, his gaze sweeping over the bus.

Up in the driver’s seat, Aadav was mashing the accelerator with white-knuckled desperation, but the tires only screeched in agony, burning against the pavement without gaining traction.

Thick, acrid plumes of white smoke drifted past the wheel wells, carrying the pungent stench of scorched rubber mixed with the sweet, sickening odor of churned rotting meat.

"Everyone... kindly shut your ears with both your hands as firmly as you can. Don’t blame me for what happens after if you don’t listen to my warning," Fredrinn said.

His voice wasn’t raised, yet by weaving a subtle thread of the sound element into his vocal cords, the words echoed with unnatural, crystal-clear volume all the way to the very back corner where Andrea and the others were braced.

A collective shudder ran through the passengers. Catching the dark promise behind his words, everyone frantically slammed their palms against their ears, ducking their heads down between their knees.

A heavy, breathless quiet blanketed the interior. Nobody dared to utter a peep, terrified that a single loose finger on their ears might leave them bleeding and deaf.

Seeing that the passengers were obeying without question, Fredrinn gave a sharp snap of his fingers.

In the unseen space hovering before his eyes, a complex, geometric array of transparent runic lines flickered to life.

His lips moved in a silent, practiced intonation, calling upon the raw sound elements dormant in the air to align to his will.

The chant was ancient, but with centuries of ingrained muscle memory, the entire incantation resolved in less than a second.

The spell completed its matrix.

Fredrinn’s eyes snapped wide, his posture solidifying like stone as he brought both palms together in front of the open window.

CLAP!