Deliver Us From Evil (7)
The space was so narrow I could feel my sister’s breath and the brush of her skin against mine. Even so, I remained tense, swallowing hard. I gripped the machete tightly so it wouldn’t stab us or shove the closet door open, peering through the narrow gap. Two people. A man and a woman. The man was handsome; the woman, a sharp-featured beauty. Normally you couldn’t judge someone by looks alone, but here it was different. The man was the cult leader’s male concubine. The woman was one of his closest aides—the public face who handled the church’s external affairs and acted as his proxy. All the radio broadcasts, public television appearances, and YouTube channels for the New Heaven Rapture Mission Church were hers. She was a major player. Male concubines were usually the politically gifted ones, so I was surprised this one had survived when the world had gone to hell. Weren’t they supposed to be useless pricks who should have died long ago? I’d always thought they were nothing more than the leader’s trained lapdogs, existing only to mimic his tastes and preferences.
Holding my breath, I listened. Footsteps were approaching. Why were they coming? Had they brought more food for the cult leader? Or was this a routine patrol? Either way, the situation was bad. The cult leader’s skull was already split open. Without some kind of resurrection, he wasn’t coming back. There was only one entrance. Could we slip out unnoticed? As I lowered my gaze while still looking outside, Kang Ahyeon was staring up at me. My sister gave a small, meaningful glance. Her gentle eyes pointed toward the shotgun. Right—we had a gun on this side. And there were questions I needed answered. I met her eyes one last time, then looked away.
“He should be finished eating by now, right?”
“Probably. I don’t want to stay long, so whatever it is, we should retrieve it.”
“It’d be nice if it was actually food. We have plenty of water and supplies, but the food donations are never—”
“Huh?”
“C-Cult leader…?!”
“Who the hell—”
My sister left the closet first. Thanks to her stealth, she moved without a sound. She drew the shotgun in complete silence and kept it quiet even as she raised it. I wasn’t nearly that skilled. Instead I stepped out with the machete in hand. Before my footsteps could register, I heard the sharp intake of breath, the frantic attempt to process the horror. By the time my steps became audible, my sister had already been in position for a while.
“Who—”
The man tried to turn and shout but froze the instant he saw the shotgun barrel aimed at him. He swallowed his words.
“It’s loaded. Don’t try anything stupid.”
She deliberately worked the action, letting one shell clatter to the floor. There was no clearer proof than that. The woman’s hands rose higher. I stepped forward with the machete resting on my shoulder.
“…What do you even say in a situation like this? Surrender?”
“Oppa, you have to tell them to drop their weapons too.”
“Ah, right. Drop everything. If we find anything when we search you, you’re dead.”
My suggestion drew shock from the man and pure outrage from the woman.
“How did you even get this far…”
I could guess what they wanted to say. There was only one entrance, and from the sound of it there were plenty of guards outside. The fact that we had strolled into the penthouse so boldly seemed to stun them. If they’d been watching the exterior they might have seen us coming, but the Serpent of Eden made that too dangerous. Still, I wasn’t about to tell them exactly how or where we had crossed over. We needed at least one escape route.
Taking my silence as she pleased, the woman spoke.
“The cult leader… did you kill him?”
I glanced at the body. The zombie lay sprawled with its head split open. Could we even call that thing the cult leader anymore? It was just another corpse.
“Yeah. I split his skull with this.”
I admitted it without hesitation. And then—
“You… you bastards…!”
The man who had stayed quiet until now drew a knife and charged. The distance closed in a rush. I widened my eyes and thought, I still didn’t know exactly what Advanced Combat was capable of. Same with Strength 9. If I was going to test it, now was the perfect time.
I dropped the machete and raised my fist.
“Kang Ahyeon, stay out of this.”
“Okay.”
The man came at me. The knife in his hand looked like a typical cleaver. It sliced through the air with a vicious whoosh. I twisted my torso just enough to let it pass. When he retracted the swing and thrust again, I twisted once more. He was aiming for my stomach—a big target. The blade missed my collar by a hair. Any sane person would have realized the gap in skill by now, but the man only gritted his teeth, recovered, and swung again. Eyes, head, neck, torso, arms—he tried to stab anywhere he could reach. The sharp edge was intimidating, but not impossible to evade.
The combat knowledge that had seeped into my mind guided every movement. It felt like the instincts had soaked into every muscle fiber. “Fuck! Fuck you!” The blade he swung while screaming never touched me. Every twist of my body, every shift of my ankles, every tilt of my head made his attacks miss cleanly. Advanced Combat was third from the top—two steps below Master. At least professional level, maybe semi-pro. And the difference between a semi-pro fighter and an ordinary person was night and day.
I kept dodging until—
Thud.
“Oh.”
My back hit the stairs and I stopped.
“Dieeee—!”
He thrust the cleaver with a scream. I couldn’t dodge anymore, but I calmly watched the amateurish way his body, knife, and feet all moved at once. Then—
Crack!
“Ugh?!”
I snapped a kick into his knee. With Agility 7 and Strength 9, my reaction speed was far faster than his. The knee bent backward with a sickening snap. Before he could even scream at the grotesque reverse joint, I stepped forward, pivoted on my planted foot, and drove my fist into his face.
Thud!
It was a hook, I think. The punch caved into his features. His face crumpled, teeth flying out in a bloody spray. I’d swung intending to kill, but the man didn’t die. He simply flew backward, spewing blood and teeth, smashing through a chair by the bar before rolling across the floor.
Tsk. A little disappointing. So Strength 9 still couldn’t match the Preacher master’s insane power? It was disappointing, but not unacceptable. The Preacher was a true Master of combat; I was only Advanced. In other words, he was at the pinnacle while I was at the supreme peak. Still, I now knew that with bare fists I wouldn’t lose to ordinary humans or zombies. I humbly accepted the result and retrieved the dropped machete. Kang Ahyeon had simply kept the shotgun trained on the woman the entire time. She really did listen well.
“Ugh… u-ugh…”
The man clutched his ruined face and groaned. I looked at the trembling woman and pointed the blade at her.
“Hey.”
“Y-Yes?”
“Go stand next to him.”
“N-Next to…?”
“Next to the cult leader. Or do you want to get hit too?”
With a frightened gasp, both of them shuffled toward the cult leader’s corpse. The man’s leg was completely broken and he could barely walk, but when I glared and tapped the machete against my shoulder he hurried over and collapsed beside the body. Their reactions once they reached it were polar opposites. The woman recoiled from even touching the corpse, while the man wept and clutched it like a lifeline.
“Leader… my leader…”
Did he actually love the man? Well, they did say passionate attachment existed. Thinking this could have been a future I might have reached made my skin crawl, but I kept my face blank, dragged a chair over, and sat down in front of them. My sister remained standing, shotgun steady. She even picked up the fallen shell and reloaded without ever letting the muzzle waver. Intermediate Firearms indeed.
“So then…”
The cross the cult leader had been tied to sat on a slightly raised platform. The stairs leading up to it were so shallow they barely deserved the name, but the elevation let the cross be seen from anywhere. Sitting in front of it, I could rest my chin on the hand holding the machete just by leaning forward. With my chin propped like that, I spoke.
“I have some questions.”
No answer came. That was fine. Fear was the perfect tool right now, and I needed it.
“Answer properly and I’ll spare you. To become the new cult leader, you need to know how to control people, don’t you?”
My sister knew my lies as well as I knew hers, so there was no need for any signal.
“N-New cult leader…?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
When I hardened my expression the woman went deathly pale and lowered her head again. Leaving the man—who didn’t look capable of answering anyway—I continued.
“This Rapture… how exactly did you pull it off?”
Would they even know? Or had the cult leader kept it secret?
“I was genuinely impressed. The scale of it. There are things worth learning from…”
At the insincere praise, the woman looked at me. A faint spark of hope flickered across her face.
“Will you tell me how you did it?”
I fed that hope a little more fuel and her expression brightened.
“W-Well… the virus the cult leader obtained… we weaponized it into two forms. One was an aerosol for airborne transmission. The other was injectable. We selected twenty-four of our most loyal members—people willing to die, people the cult leader trusted. Among them, the twelve we called the Apostles willingly injected themselves and headed for the airport. The incubation period was forty-eight hours. They boarded their flights. The remaining twelve dispersed the aerosol in crowded places like Gangnam Station. By then the Apostles had already left the country. A virus with no symptoms during incubation—what border control would stop ordinary travelers for that? Planes made emergency landings, outbreaks erupted in even more populated areas once the incubation ended. The world realized it was the Rapture amid the chaos. That was the plan.”
What they hadn’t anticipated came in two parts.
“…We never intended to cause a real Rapture.”
First, they never imagined the entire world would collapse. They only wanted to expand their influence by showing the threat of the Rapture. And second—the variants.
I glanced toward the tinted windows and the parking lot beyond. The world had ended. Government quarantine had failed. All because of these pathetic cult lunatics and the variants their virus had created.
“B-But…! Thanks to that, the church’s unity became stronger than ever! E-Even if the Serpent of Eden now blocks our path…”
“Oh?”
“Y-Yes, so… p-please, spare us. Please!”
The woman seemed to have read my lie in my tone. She began to sob and beg.
“I-I’m useful! I can make you feel good! I know so many things—”
Crunch!
Ah, I still had more questions. My sister’s kitchen knife buried itself in the woman’s eye. She twitched violently, then collapsed dead. The toothless man swallowed hard and clung to the cult leader’s corpse like a security blanket. I pulled the knife free and handed it back to my sister, then looked at him.
“You can still talk, can’t you?”
The man nodded desperately.