Expansion
Civilization had been finished off by the apocalypse, and with it every scrap of light. Streetlamps and fixtures stood as empty shells, not a single glow left in them.
Once the sun went down, the world offered only two choices: either tend to your survival by moonlight alone, or simply close your eyes and pretend reality wasn't there.
It was unavoidable, but it had become an ironclad rule of the post-apocalypse — an unwritten law. Don't try anything at night. Not if you still hoped to live.
Unlike the zombies that hunted humanity primarily by sound, people depended far too heavily on their eyesight.
And ever since a few days ago, when the corpses of beasts had started wandering around as well, that taboo had only grown more absolute.
So whenever the sun set, the city would always sink into silence…
"Gyaaaaaaah!"
Tonight, though, it was about to get extremely loud — because of me.
No. If you really thought about it, it was that bald bastard's fault, not mine.
Kuuuung—
I landed on the asphalt with that thought still in my head. The weight of the crescent blade in my hands compounded the impact, driving it home heavier than usual.
I didn't care. A few seconds and everything would reset the same as always.
The moment I jumped from the railing, the thing that had been screaming and trying to grab me shoved its face over the edge to check on me. Our eyes met.
It was at least a four-story drop, and I was fine — too fine. The thing just stared, apparently stunned. I gave it a line.
"Quit gawking. If you're going to jump, jump already. Weren't you the one who wanted to play?"
"…Grrrk."
Its mouth twisted into a grotesque grin, and it turned its head to sweep the surroundings. Red eyes glinted back from the darkness once more.
Then the bald one pointed at me with an arrogant jab of its finger, and they began to gather slowly.
"Ggggk, gggk."
"Grrrrrlk."
Normal zombies, each of them broken somewhere. Aside from the glowing eyes, they looked the same as always — except for one thing. Their gait was wrong.
They dragged their feet as if someone were hauling them along by force, slowly surrounding me.
I watched the spectacle with the crescent blade in hand, then casually rolled the shoulder of the arm holding it and spoke.
"Let's see what else is different. Whether those LED eyes of yours are actually worth the price of the skin."
"Gyaaaaaaah!"
As if screaming Tear that arrogant bastard apart right now!, the bald one let out a vicious shriek — and more than a dozen zombies ringed around me lunged in perfect unison, without so much as a one-second delay.
I shifted the crescent blade from one hand to two.
I planted my lower body, twisted at the waist, then fed power sequentially through both shoulders and arms, multiplying the centrifugal force at the end.
Huuuuuuung—!
That single strike, swung with total disregard for my muscles and joints and focused purely on raw physical force, obliterated my own body along with every corpse in front of me.
Whether they caught it in the side, the thigh, or the chest — all eight of them were swept up in that irresistible mass and sent flying like shredded paper, reduced to tatters.
And the ones behind me? They were already hanging off my back.
I'd swung too big in the excitement, and the load on my body hit harder than expected. The creaking kept me from shaking them off immediately. The result was fatal.
Ah — fatal only if I'd still been an ordinary human, of course.
Kkuddeudeuk—
Kwaduk—
Zombie teeth punched straight through my clothes. Three of them all went for the same spot, tearing away nearly half my neck, blood pouring out in sheets.
At the sight of me like that, the bald one — who'd been staring wide-eyed after my attack — finally settled down and curled its lips back up into a smile.
Jjeojeok—
Jjeojeojeojeok—
Even for an absurd monster that treated humans like less than dogs, this kind of grotesque spectacle was apparently a first.
A fatal wound regenerating in real time in the blink of an eye — and the zombies that had touched my blood freezing solid in an instant, engulfed in crimson frost like they'd been dunked in liquid nitrogen.
Even I, the one responsible, had to admit it was pretty ridiculous.
I forcibly pried off the corpses one by one — still frozen with their teeth in my neck, locked up like broken robots — then crushed their chilled jaws with pure grip strength while addressing the bald one watching from above.
"Running or fighting. Decide. Fast."
"…."
The face of the thing standing dazed on the rooftop had gone rigid, as stiff as a human seeing a zombie for the first time.
My turn to smile, then. I let out a short laugh at that expression and rolled my now-pristine neck once around.
Doing this over and over was starting to feel pretty good.
A little later, I looked down at the bald one sprawled across the rooftop with its upper and lower halves separated, and checked my condition.
One won per kill, plus 0.1 percent growth.
It was dust, but dust that had piled up quite a bit by now. Money came and went until it barely meant anything — physical improvement was different.
If I kept hunting and hunting, past a hundred, past two hundred, until the unit of measurement itself got left behind…
I might be able to swing this crude crescent blade as freely as a reed, and crush that Beta bastard flat without so much as a scratch on me.
The problem is time.
Before that mummy could pull whatever other stunt it was cooking up and completely wreck the planet, I had to get stronger somehow.
I couldn't just coast on Na Sehee clearing out the zombies for me, or skip the cleanup around me because it was a hassle.
I stowed the crescent blade into the tattoo, sorted my thoughts, then pulled a pair of binoculars from my coat and sat back on the rooftop railing.
Unlike before, the thick reek of blood from every direction had become familiar enough to ignore. I checked the factory, then put the binoculars away almost immediately.
Can't see a damn thing anyway. What's the point?
I was about to raid a den of lunatics, and showing up in broad daylight felt wrong, so I'd come at night — which left the carefully packed binoculars looking a little embarrassed.
…What time is it even?
A little before nine. The full moon overhead was grinning cheerfully, completely indifferent to the fact that I was about to walk into a cannibal-infested abandoned factory with zero information.
Whatever. Come what may.
I hadn't had a real plan when I fought that Beta bastard either. I'd just charged in knowing I couldn't die, and he was the one who ended up dead first.
This time, pure recklessness seemed like the answer again. I wasn't some special forces operator. There was no way I could cook up a slick plan in a situation like this the way protagonists did in movies and novels.
…Still.
Might as well put on a show of it.
I narrowed my eyes and stared steadily at the grim, forbidding main gate of the factory.
"A zombie got in?"
Dinner was over and everyone was resting when a man came up to the second floor of the factory without permission and spoke to Shin Dogyeong.
"The howling's been getting on my nerves for a while now. Then I started hearing it right under our noses. Checked just in case — it's crawled in past the entrance. Mind if I go take care of it? Hard to sleep with that racket."
"You came upstairs just to say that? Without permission?"
"You said if I go off on my own and get caught, it won't end well. So I came to report."
"…Fine. I'll let it slide this time."
Even with the upper and lower floors divided to enforce rank, Shin Dogyeong wasn't so rigid a stickler that he'd nitpick over a variable like this without any flexibility.
The problem was the man's demeanor.
Under a single person's command, the factory had scoured the surrounding area and swept up every fighter worth scouting. The numbers were naturally small — they'd only combed the outskirts of one city — but it was enough to roughly replace the personnel who'd died screaming here and there.
In the process of absorbing those people, every bit of hierarchy enforcement and mediation of friction among the newcomers had fallen to Shin Dogyeong. Everyone except Gu Sunchang and Han Jimin, who lived on the upper floor, had already experienced his skill directly or indirectly.
That ghostly knife work — invisible even when you were standing right in front of him — left anyone who felt it wary of him, without exception.
…He's calm.
Unlike the bulked-up lumps who'd come in most recently, this man had finely defined muscle, and he met Shin Dogyeong's eyes without the slightest reaction. He even openly radiated a competitive edge, the corner of his mouth twitching — looking for all the world like he was itching to cut loose.
In my experience, the ones like this usually have the skill to back it up.
The kind that carried both madness and patience — two atmospheres that shouldn't mix.
"Do as you like. Clean up the zombies or don't."
"I'll report if anything special comes up. I'm a well-behaved newbie, after all."
"…."
Shin Dogyeong watched the man saunter back downstairs with that oily grin, then dismissed him from his mind.
But not even a few minutes later, the man came back up.
"Something special just came up. The idiot who lost at rock-paper-scissors and went out looking for the zombie is gone."
"…What?"
Shin Dogyeong had no choice but to frown.