Back Where I Belong
Beep—
A cold mechanical chime rang out, and a wind even colder than that sound brushed past my cheek.
I drew a slow breath, and the thick stench of blood and corpses that already felt strangely foreign stabbed at my nose. The time I had spent in the lab already felt like a lie, so alien did it all seem now.
Krrk, kigigik—!
I ignored the distant zombie noise and looked up at the sky. It was growing darker by the moment; the sunlight was being pushed back, and one by one the stars began to embroider the deep blue-black expanse.
“Nice weather.”
It had still been daytime when I went in. Apparently I had burned a lot more time inside the lab than I thought. Even so, after everything I had gone through yesterday, today felt almost manageable by comparison.
The bag on my back was heavy, but for some strange reason my heart felt light as a feather.
“Kieek, kigigik, krrak!”
Yeah. Light enough that a zombie walking right up in front of me didn’t even faze me.
“Hup!”
Crack!
The axe came down in a single instant, splitting the zombie’s skull clean in half. Black blood sprayed up and stuck to the white lab coat I had only just put on, then slowly began to drip down.
“Hoo… If I keep going like this I’ll definitely stand out.”
I deliberately wiped the blood from the axe onto the coat, staining it black. Getting new clothes was nice and all, but wandering around this world in pure white fabric that still smelled new was more dangerous than walking straight into a zombie field.
I would have liked to walk around looking a little cleaner myself. Circumstances just weren’t cooperating.
Getting marked as raider bait number one? No thanks.
Besides, whether I wanted to or not, I was going to run into plenty of zombies on the way down the mountain.
Crrk.
I tensed my left arm hard against any possible ambush and stepped into the forest as night closed in.
I’m surprisingly quick to admit things, for what it’s worth. Feels awkward saying it myself, but it’s true. And the reason I’m saying it now is that the time has come to admit something.
Crunch.
A zombie’s body went limp. The head clamped in my left hand crushed without mercy under the grip strength, blood squeezing out like juice from a fruit.
On the way from the mountain to my base I had taken out three groups of zombies. None of them had been the running kind. And while killing them I had taken zero damage of my own.
Yeah. Let’s admit it.
Jompari is broken as hell.
Status Window? Cheat skill? What good are any of those? It reacts to threats on its own and carves zombies apart; the only real inconvenience is getting clothes on. Just looking at pure zombie-killing power, it already outclasses every other weapon by a mile!
The downsides are that it looks a little—no, a lot—disgusting, that I never know when I might turn into a zombie myself, and that I can never separate from it under my own power. Just those minor little bugs.
…Fuck.
Yeah. Being good at killing zombies is already more than I should ask for, damn it.
The white coat Noona Seohee had given me was completely covered in black stains by the time I went down into the subway station that served as my base.
And there…
What the hell are these?
“Ugh…”
My two-car subway hideout. Right in front of the door, two solidly built men were collapsed on the floor, letting out pained groans.
Clatter-clatter!
Squeeeak—
While my eyes were still on them, the cabinet right beside me slowly opened and Baeksooni stepped out.
“Gwoo…”
“You’re coming out even without me telling you to now, huh.”
But something about Baeksooni’s state was off. It wasn’t the usual vacant, dumb-looking face. She narrowed her not-particularly-sharp eyes hard and walked toward me.
“Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me just because I changed clothes?”
No—looking closer that didn’t seem to be it either. Jompari wasn’t reacting, and even though her face was blank I somehow got the illusion she was full of complaints.
“Gwooo…”
Baeksooni grabbed the blood-blackened researcher’s coat tight and tugged hard at the collar like she was trying to express something. I wondered why she was suddenly acting like this, but I couldn’t exactly stand around chatting leisurely with people collapsed right in front of me.
This came first.
“…Ugh… kuh… ah, shit, my head…”
“Ugh… Where is this… Why the hell am I tied up?”
After a while the two who had been down started coming around. Both of them were bound wrist and ankle to old chairs with thick rope. Completely trussed up, they still didn’t understand their situation and thrashed, trying any way they could to get free.
I watched quietly from behind for a moment, then spoke.
“Shh. Let’s you and me have a little talk, friends.”
“Wh-who the hell are you?!”
“Ha… damn it.”
When I rested the axe on one guy’s shoulder as I spoke, he hung his head in resignation. The other one jumped and started throwing a fit.
I was half-certain these were raiders. Weirdly enough, survivor groups never clearly mark what kind of group they are. Raider groups, on the other hand, often paint their own symbols somewhere for the sake of internal cohesion—like the irezumi tattoos of street thugs. In other words, pure empty swagger.
Because of that, survivors who weren’t raiders often proved they weren’t by deliberately not painting any mark. An ironic situation. Of course, some people used that fact to lie too.
I frowned at the dark-red, blood-painted mark on their headscarves. The resigned one seemed to know me; the one next to him was probably a newbie. A newbie in the cutthroat raider industry was a rare case.
“What did you come for? Who told you about this place?”
“…Just by chance. We were wandering around and came in.”
“Fuck, untie this! You wanna die? Do you even know who we—”
Crack!!
The axe buried itself in the back of the yelling one’s skull. His head sagged forward under the weight, and the black headscarf he wore slowly turned red.
There are always people who raise their voices and mouth off without even understanding the situation they’re in. Raiders who robbed, killed, or did worse to weak survivors were especially like that.
They were intruders who had invaded my base—and maybe this was the correct thing Noona Seohee should have done to me. This world was just like that. Law and order had collapsed; if you didn’t move first, you got hit.
“Hoo…”
I felt, only then, like I had finally returned to my proper place as I roughly yanked the axe free. A little blood and brain matter splattered in the process, but in a situation like this it only helped put more pressure on the guy next to him.
“One talking mouth is enough, right?”
“…Fuck. If I talk… if I tell you, will you let me live?”
Finally we could have a conversation. Good. I wasn’t a torture expert, and I didn’t know any clever ways to keep someone alive while still hurting them.
“Everything. How you got here, why you were knocked out, and who sent you.”
I wiped the axe—red blood this time, not black—on his shoulder and rested it there. The last remaining raider, clinging to a faint scrap of hope, spilled everything.
“The School… people from the School came…”
“They said they were going to hit the Rooftop Market, but they didn’t have enough people, so they asked us to lend them some men… The School guys would only take the people; we’d get all the supplies. Deal was made.”
“But… Axe-Hand… you go back and forth to the Rooftop Market a lot. They said you might get in the way, so they pointed out this area and told us to keep you busy…”
“I honestly didn’t know this was your base. Really. They just said this was roughly the area you got seen in a lot, so we came down by chance.”
“We came down, saw the subway, and just wanted to check it out. We really didn’t know anything—we only meant to look—and then suddenly something hit us in the back of the head and we blacked out…”
I answered him with nothing but silence. Sometimes silence put more pressure on a person than reacting to every single word. It worked; the raider kept babbling on and on—how many raiders were in his group, his personal connections, even pitching his useless raider résumé like he was dropping off a job application and claiming he could be helpful.
“So, so Axe-Hand! I can help you, okay? I’ll go and lie that I captured you… huh? Make them drop their guard and then go for the heads first? Huh? Ghk—!”
While the raider was noisily monologuing, I decided nothing more useful was going to come out.
Crack!
I split his crown open with the axe.
Active self-promotion is nice and all, but I prefer to survive alone whenever possible, so I couldn’t take him along. And once someone knew the location of my base, I couldn’t just let them walk free either.
“…They tailed me.”
The School. A place I already had deep bad blood with. I had been careful, but I never thought they would track me this far.
The terms of the deal with the raiders were weird too. Manpower mattered, but the more people you added the more supplies you burned through. Handing all the supplies over to the raiders for free was suspicious as hell.
I rested the axe on my shoulder and tapped it while trying to organize my thoughts, but no answer came.
Loyalty? Trust? Go save them? How was one guy supposed to topple an entire group? If the conditions and situation lined up, sure, it wasn’t impossible—but I felt zero obligation.
Survivor groups appeared and collapsed every other day in this world. It was simply the Rooftop Market’s turn this time.
Tap-tap.
“Gwoogaah…”
Baeksooni, who was still tugging at my collar, pulled a little harder and made a sound. The part about getting hit in the back of the head and blacking out was probably her work. But how?
I wasn’t curious about her knocking out two grown men. I was curious why a zombie hadn’t killed them.
I shifted the axe to my left hand and stroked Baeksooni’s cheek with my right.
“Baeksooni.”
“Gwoo.”
I already knew she wasn’t an ordinary zombie. If she had been, I never would have brought her here and raised her in the first place. Baeksooni was a mutant too. Same as the left arm stuck to me. I hadn’t confirmed it, but I was almost certain.
“Let’s eat first.”
“Gwooo…!”
A zombie that showed no hostility toward living things—or rather, no hostility toward me alone. Was that leftover influence from her previous life, or the learned behavior of a tamed beast that got fed?
Ssshk—
I took artificial cultured meat out of the bag and fed it to Baeksooni.
“Gahp, hap…”
Clutching the raw meat in both hands and tearing into it with relish, Baeksooni was unmistakably a zombie. I let out a hollow laugh at the fact.
“Should I go save them?”
The way you saved me.
“Even though I might die.”
You did the same.
“I think I can manage it somehow with the left arm.”
You didn’t even have any strength.
“Ah, fuck…”
Inside my head, you never lost a single argument. Only a few hours ago I had been chewing grilled meat in a clean room. Now I was forced to accept all over again just how thoroughly this world was fucked.
If only so I wouldn’t have to keep doing shit like this… I was really going to find a shelter, no matter what.
“Stay inside, Baeksooni.”
“Euu… Hi-u—”
While I was dragging the corpses of the raiders I had killed, Baeksooni paused on her way into the cabinet and made another strange cry.
“….”
I turned my head. Black eyes met white ones. My reflection floated in the corpse’s strangely lively-looking pupils.
“Gwooo…”
Squeeeak—
But Baeksooni only looked at me, then went back into the cabinet and closed the door. I turned my head as well and started up the stairs.
“I’ll be back.”
For now, the Rooftop Market first.
Clank! Thud!
“Hey, you bastards, don’t just dump everything—unload them one at a time!”
A shout from the rooftop. Along with the heavy sounds, dust sifted down onto the heads of the two raiders standing watch on the lower stairs.
The School had kept their end of the bargain perfectly. They had really only taken the people from the Rooftop Market and hadn’t laid a finger on the supplies.
“Those School bastards… are they actually planning some kind of merger?”
One raider muttered briefly as he stepped on a fallen corpse. He was the middle-aged man who had talked with Cheon Siwoo coming and going.
“Well, at least we’ll be able to eat a little better now. We’re fine.”
The raider sitting on the stairs took the words up with a short laugh.
“Still, without people it’s a little weird. Been a while since I had meat.”
“That’s how you get yourself killed… Wait, what’s that?”
The other one, who had been scolding the cannibal raider, spotted a blurry shape down by the window.
“What?”
“No, there was some bastard with a ridiculously huge arm.”
“Probably a zombie with Artificial Muscle implants. Shit, don’t stick your head out—stay hidden. If it spots us we’re fucked.”
Is that it…
As the other man said, a zombie with Artificial Muscle implants was more than he wanted to deal with either. With all the noise large and small happening upstairs right now, it was only natural that zombies would be prowling nearby.
The two raiders ducked their heads away from the window and held their breath, waiting for the zombie to pass.
Boom!!
“Hey, cut it out!”
Up on the roof they were still hard at work moving supplies, and the rather loud racket meant the two men never noticed.
That Cheon Siwoo was already climbing the stairs.
“You’re—”
Crack!
I lunged at the one who spotted me from half a flight down and buried the axe in his throat. Blood didn’t spray out—blocked by the blade—only a thin stream spurted and wet my face.
“Kek… kehek…”
“Hey! You fucker! Over he—!”
Even though a raider had just gone down right in front of him, the one sitting on the stairs was diligent about his sentry duty and tried to shout.
Grrrk!
Before he could make a sound I stretched out my left arm and savagely clamped his mouth and face together.
“Mmph…! Mph!!”
Thuk! Thuk-thuk!
Panicked and therefore more desperate, the raider yanked a knife from his pocket and started stabbing my left arm without mercy. But the densely stacked muscle fibers took the knife points without opening wounds. Instead I tightened my grip further, and the raider’s face began to crumple little by little.
Crunch, crackle.
“Kh… ghk…!”
The skull crushed and twisted and broke. Even redder blood poured over the huge crimson arm, and the raider died.
Crrk, krrk.
“….”
The unique muscle of the left arm twitched and writhed, sucking the embedded knives inward. After watching the sentry’s last breath, I looked once more at the night sky beyond the window.
“Nice weather.”
My mouth twisted at the disgustingly good weather.
Boom!
“Fuck, who is it this time?!”
The mechanic who had been trying to detach the Rooftop Market’s generator spat another curse. These crazy bastards only knew how to steal things; they had no idea how to actually move machinery.
But no answer came back to the mechanic’s swearing. The other guys who had been hauling goods also stopped where they were and looked toward the sound.
“…What was that?”
Boom!!
Another huge crash. Listening closely, it sounded like something being smashed with a giant hammer. The noise was coming from the iron door they had passed through to get onto the roof. Looking again, it seemed a little dented…
Bang!!
A third impact, and at last the hinges gave way. The iron door slowly toppled forward.
“Finally got it off.”
Whatever had been inside the doorway stepped out. In the stifling air he spoke those words with perfect calm, and a massive red arm emerged first. Right behind it came a young man with a mild-looking face, casually swinging a blood-dripping axe in his other hand.
He casually gripped the fallen door with that huge arm and lifted it; the sharp fingers punched straight through the steel plate and locked it in place.
Everyone fell silent for different reasons. Some from sheer disbelief, some because they were already reading the situation, some swallowing their breath under the tension.
Then the young man raised the axe to his lips as if to say “don’t speak,” and made a short gesture.