Digging Up a Grave
There were several reasons I had urged Homebody Darling to enlist.
First, now that we had been transmigrated into an apocalypse game, learning how to handle a firearm was non-negotiable. In the game you only needed to mash the space bar to shoot. Reality was going to be different.
Second, players started as orphans by default. No one to look after you. Nowhere to go home to. Enlisting was the cleanest way to secure food and a roof over your head.
The Cola Safe Zone's relatively low difficulty existed for the same reason: the faction running the place was a military warlord outfit.
Enlist, and at least the basics are covered.
Of course, in an emergency you could always get drafted as a soldier and dragged into something deadly. The world was split into nine Safe Zones for a reason—to preserve humanity against the alien creatures that thrived outside them.
The First Apocalypse, the Ice Age, had begun with a colossal meteor falling from the sky, and from that meteor the alien lifeforms had spread. That was the lore. So every zone except Beer, which had fled beneath the sea, and Unicorn, which had lifted its entire territory into the sky, regularly sortied to clear the alien creatures massing around their borders.
Join the army and you would inevitably be pulled into those purge events. Survive them, and you could climb the ranks all the way to commander. Fast promotion also came with the risk of being branded a coup threat and executed by the commander's own hand—but that particular problem would solve itself once I was recognized as the commander's illegitimate son and named his successor.
"Enlist… fine. Whatever."
Enlistment was such a standard strategy that Homebody Darling accepted it without much resistance. Lucky for me he was still a civilian. If he had already completed his service, he never would have agreed to do the military twice.
Enlisting in the Cola Safe Zone was not difficult. Anyone who could hold a gun—even a ten-year-old—was welcome. That was simply how children survived the apocalypse.
I meant to get him signed up before launching my own strategy in earnest. Then two problems appeared.
The first, unexpectedly—or perhaps entirely expectedly—was that this world had no Korean patch.
Safe Zone: Apocalypse had never received a Korean release. The only reason strategy posts thrived on the community boards was that people translated the scripts while writing their guides. I had taught myself English solely so I could post those guides. So the lack of a Korean patch should not have been surprising.
Still pretty cheap to drop us in here without even a translation skill.
Thanks to a transmigration that showed zero regard for web-novel ethics, I had to speak English with the NPCs—that is, with the people of the zone—and fill out the enlistment form in English. Homebody Darling could not manage English, so I had to write it for him.
Watching the soldiers take no interest whatsoever in the two of us conversing in Korean, I realized something else. After the apocalypse, people of every nationality had poured into the zones, and the setting that multiple languages were in use had apparently carried over into this world. In the game it had only been flavor text; every NPC spoke English.
Homebody Darling was outraged.
"You dump us into a game and don't even give us a Korean patch?!"
Whoever had shoved us in here clearly wanted to watch us suffer.
"I can't speak English… how am I supposed to survive military life?"
"Once you enlist, you're going to be a yes-bot. You won't need English."
He would not literally say nothing but yes, of course—but looking like a ten-year-old was a genuine advantage here. Even if he mangled every sentence, people would cut him some slack.
The second problem was that the enlistment form required a name.
"Never even thought about needing a name."
In the game you simply went by whatever nickname you typed in. Walking around introduced as "Dopamine Addict," "Homebody Darling," or "T-balnom" after being transmigrated was… a little much. I could use the name of Hayden Goodman's illegitimate son as written. Homebody Darling, on the other hand, would have to invent one.
He shook his head as if even thinking about a name was too much trouble.
"It has to be an English name anyway, right? Just pick something for me."
"…Fine."
I had no time to waste on naming Homebody Darling either. Without a second thought I scrawled a name onto the form in a single stroke and submitted it.
Approval would take a little while, so we used the wait to talk through the plan.
"Once you enlist, we won't be able to move together for a while. We'll rejoin after each of us has secured a foothold in this zone."
"What's the standard for 'foothold'?"
"Hmm… once I'm recognized as the successor, I'll send for you. I'll tell the commander I had a kid who was like a brother to me back when I was a street orphan, and get you brought into the commander's residence."
I added the warning carefully.
"Work hard in the army. Even if I want to call you up, I can't drop a parachute under someone who's dead weight."
"You're assuming I'm going to be dead weight, aren't you."
I ignored his perfectly reasonable suspicion and pressed on.
"And since this place seems to run on English the way the game did, write anything about the apocalypse—or any important information—in Korean. Always."
"That much I can handle."
Hmm. Which raised the question of what the other players in the other zones were doing right now. I had no idea when I might run into another player, so I needed rules of engagement ready from this moment on. Best case, they would cooperate as readily as Homebody Darling. Worst case… there would be players who would not.
"Are you seriously going through with the illegitimate-son route?"
Homebody Darling asked, anxiety plain on his face—whether because he truly doubted the strategy or simply did not want to enlist alone was hard to say.
"Couldn't we just enlist together? You speak English, and you seem smart. You asked if I was a civilian, so I'm guessing you've already served… you'd handle military life better the second time around, right?"
This kid had a way of saying terrifying things with a perfectly innocent face.
I was not sure how many hours had passed when a soldier arrived to deliver the enlistment approval and called the name written on the form. Homebody Darling immediately regretted leaving the naming to me.
"Name is Darling Outsider, correct?"
The soldier asked in English, but Homebody Darling clearly understood that "Darling Outsider" was aimed at him.
"Da—Darling… what?"
"You look young… and you're enlisting?"
As the soldier continued in English, Homebody Darling—now Darling Outsider—shot me a desperate look for help. I whispered low.
"Whatever a soldier asks, just answer yes."
"Does that even make sense? No—more importantly, my name is Darling Outsider? Are you serious?"
I considered it a perfect localization of his original handle.
"Better than Darling Hikikomori, isn't it?"
"What kind of garbage is that?!"
Too late. The name was already registered. There was no taking it back.
"You insane bastard… I think that soldier is laughing while he says my name…"
His analysis was correct. The soldier who had called him was fighting a smile, the corner of his mouth twitching.
"Darling Outsider. Your answer?"
I whispered for him to answer already. Homebody Darling forced his reluctant lips to move.
"Ha… damn it… Yes, sir…"
"You are enlisting in the military, correct?"
"Yes… sir!"
"Good. Follow me."
"Yes, sir!"
Homebody Darling—Darling Outsider—faithfully followed my advice, turned into a yes-bot, and left with the soldier. He seemed to have developed a small grudge over the name, but military life would sand that right off.
Well then. For a while, this would be a solo run.
First order of business: find a grave.
The grave of Commander Hayden Goodman's former lover—the pitiable woman buried with the proof of the illegitimate child.
As for Commander Hayden Goodman: he was originally from another zone. A soldier on a purge mission had found him collapsed and saved him, and Hayden had joined the Cola military to repay that debt. His talent proved exceptional; he rose through the ranks with startling speed. The commander of the time, impressed, introduced Hayden to his own daughter. Hayden married her and, without much difficulty, eventually claimed the commander's seat himself. That was the official story.
The rest was not public knowledge.
The owner of the grave I was about to find was Luna Moon—the soldier who had once saved Hayden on that purge.
In truth, Hayden had joined the Cola forces because of her. He had fallen for the woman who pulled him out of the dirt. Luna Moon and Hayden became lovers, and a child was conceived between them. Then Hayden, for the sake of advancement, accepted an engagement to the commander's daughter, leaving Luna with a promise: once he became commander, he would bring her and their unborn child back.
Did he keep that promise after taking power? No. Not because he broke his word—because he never got the chance. Luna Moon simply vanished.
Even during the Safe Zone playthrough, the commander of this zone had still been searching for his lover and their child, never knowing that Luna had died and been buried before the baby was even born.
What mattered was that I knew where the grave was.
After parting from Hayden, Luna had hidden her identity and slipped into the Slums to avoid any possible retaliation. A military doctor by training, she spent her pregnancy treating the people there—which was precisely why a proper grave had been made for her after she died. In the Safe Zones, the dead were normally dumped outside the walls. Monsters beyond the perimeter did not distinguish between living and dead; feeding them corpses kept them quiet for a while. That her grave remained inside the zone at all meant she had been good enough to earn everyone's respect.
The problem was that same goodness turning into poison.
A plague swept through the Slums where she lived. Everyone healthy enough to leave fled. She stayed and tended the sick. Inevitably she caught the disease herself and died. Grateful patients, dragging their ruined bodies, built her a grave on the outer edge of the Slums.
Because she had died of the plague, and because plague victims had made the grave, no one approached it even now. The name on the marker was an alias. A place people avoided mentioning and refused to go near. Small wonder Commander Hayden had never found her.
Tragic—but for a player who needed to dig up that grave, the conditions could not have been better.
I found a suitably sturdy scrap of metal that looked good for digging and hid on the outskirts of the Slums until dark. Even though no one visited the grave, caution was still required. A place no one approached made any visitor stand out all the more. A ten-year-old boy walking alone toward an abandoned grave with a piece of scrap iron in his hand was the kind of image that stuck in memory.
If anyone later claims they saw me heading out to dig up Luna Moon's grave, that becomes a problem. Better to be careful from the start.
Keeping out of sight, I walked the dark road and reached the grave. The moment I ran my hand over the earth, I knew something was wrong.
The soil is… soft.
Dirt over a grave that old should never feel this loose—not unless someone had already dug it open and then packed it back down.
I tore into the grave at once. The ground had already been turned once; my hands were enough. When I cracked open the coffin lid and found the military dog tags missing from around the skeleton's neck, I understood immediately.
Another player got here first.
So there was someone else in this zone besides me and Homebody Darling.
Looks like someone else is running the illegitimate-son route too.
This was getting interesting.
If I went to the commander's residence tomorrow morning, I would almost certainly run into the other player who had come to clear the same strategy.
But I was the one who would succeed.
The true proof of the illegitimate child was still lying inside the coffin.