Minus
The moment Chaeyeon got back to the gym office, she collapsed onto the long plastic chair like a puppet with its strings cut.
...God, I'm wiped.
She hadn't taken a single injury, but the mental strain of pushing herself to the absolute limit — and the tension finally bleeding out of her — left her body drained of every last drop of strength.
Soeun wordlessly handed her a paper cup mixed with supplement powder. Chaeyeon took a shaky sip, then muttered under her breath.
"I told you, didn't I? I don't say things I don't mean."
With that, she closed her eyes and went completely limp. Soeun could only manage a weary smile.
"Yeah. You're amazing. You little bitch."
Honestly, she was still plenty pissed — but looking at Chaeyeon like this, so uncharacteristically weak and floppy, her heart softened enough that she couldn't bring herself to keep chewing her out.
Just take care of your own damn life. Since when did you start playing the hero...
Soeun watched her with complicated eyes — the same Chaeyeon who'd charged out so full of confidence, now back and so exhausted she was already snoring softly.
She gently wiped the blood from her friend's cheek with her school uniform sleeve, then turned to Hyeonmin, who was watching the two of them in solemn silence.
"...For now, she pulled off something huge, so let her rest. I'll go check on the kids more carefully. Senior Hyeonmin, mix two more cups of the supplement, please."
"Got it. I'll make them right away."
Hyeonmin nodded and pulled out two paper cups, pouring water into them. Beside him, Haejun had been watching for his cue, and finally spoke up.
"Hey, Kang Soeun. Don't I have anything to do?"
He'd said it with real enthusiasm, spurred on by Chaeyeon's dazzling performance and wanting to contribute somehow. Soeun just glanced at him and delivered a single line.
"You stay away from those kids. Stay inside this office."
"...Wh-what? Why me?"
"You already know the reason better than anyone."
"Hey! Even so, I'm not that kind of trash! What the hell would I do to kids like that—"
"That, and your face just looks shady. Bad for their mental health."
"....."
Leaving a speechless Haejun behind, Soeun took the two paper cups Hyeonmin handed her, opened the office door, and walked over to the sisters.
Haejun stared after her retreating back with a look of pure shock, then turned to Hyeonmin.
"Senior, does my face really look shady?"
"...Uh, I wouldn't know."
Hyeonmin laughed awkwardly and avoided meeting Haejun's narrow, slit-like eyes.
Honestly, even Hyeonmin had to admit — Haejun's face was... pretty much the textbook delinquent look.
Maybe it was the sitcom of Haejun grumbling while staring out the door and Hyeonmin halfheartedly playing along beside him, but a small smile tugged at the corner of Chaeyeon's mouth as she lay there.
The next day. Day three of the apocalypse.
Up through last night, the mood had been warm.
Chaeyeon was completely fine, not a scratch on her, and the two new girls — exhausted as they clearly were — never once showed it, answering every question the group asked without fail. Hard to dislike people like that.
But after waking up and mixing the same strawberry supplement for breakfast, they discovered a serious problem.
"...We're almost out of water."
Nobody had worried when the bundled water bottles were still sitting in the office fridge.
They'd figured that much water would easily last until they escaped the school — but mixing the supplement into water for every single meal, the bottles had drained in no time.
Everyone stared grimly at the empty bottles. Soeun spoke first.
"Doesn't matter. We were planning to escape today anyway. We're just moving the timeline up a bit."
"Why not just stick to the plan and leave at lunch? Waiting a few hours without water isn't going to kill us, right?"
The original plan had been to attempt the escape around one in the afternoon, when it was brightest and warmest — ideal conditions for moving around.
But Soeun shook her head at Haejun's question.
"It's not just a few hours. Kang Haejun, you might still feel fine, but most of us are already at our physical limit. Keeping even a slightly better condition for the escape is the most important thing."
"...I'm not exactly fine either. But yeah, you're right."
The group had gone more than two days without a proper meal, barely filling their stomachs with protein powder alone.
Until now, the life-or-death extremity of their situation had forced them to wring out every last scrap of energy and keep going. But if they slipped even a little further, it wouldn't be strange at all for someone to collapse.
If they delayed just because it was a little warmer and a little brighter, they might not even get the chance to attempt an escape. Soeun reached her conclusion: they had to get out of this school right now.
Of course, reaching a conclusion didn't magically produce a method for actually escaping the school.
Chaeyeon turned her palm over, examining the scabs that had formed where she'd gripped her sword hilt too hard the day before, then spoke.
"Don't expect me to go wild like yesterday when we escape. Right now I can barely hold a sword, let alone swing one. Just carrying it feels like it's going to kill me."
"...If you're in that kind of shape, shouldn't we put this off even longer?"
"I've said it a dozen times since last night — if we drag this out any further, zombies are going to blanket the whole area and we'll be stuck waiting to die. We leave. Now. Immediately."
Chaeyeon leaned weakly against the wall, but her voice was absolute. Silence settled over the group. Hyeonmin let out a long, heavy sigh, then spoke with a serious expression.
"I'll get us as prepared as I can. We didn't haul all this stuff here just to become monster food without even using it."
Soeun turned toward him at that loaded remark, wondering what he meant. Hyeonmin rummaged in his pocket, pulled something out, and said:
"Haejun. Go grab one of the leftover water bottles from the office, would you?"
"...Uh, sure."
Haejun had no idea what this was about, but he obediently fetched a plastic water bottle from the office.
Hyeonmin took it, looked back and forth between the sodium metal in his hand and the bottle, then spoke to Chaeyeon in a grim voice.
"I thought of something last night too. We can use this to lure the zombies."
"...You mean that bomb? But Senior, you said that kind of use wasn't possible."
"That was because we didn't have a container that could properly put the sodium metal into water. Now that we've got this plastic bottle, it is."
It was the plan Hyeonmin had wrung out of his nutrient-starved brain the night before.
Until then, just holding his own mental state together had been all he could manage — but after watching what Chaeyeon had done, he'd sworn to contribute something himself. His brain had been put through the wringer all night long, and this was the result.
"The timing's different from what we talked about last night, but that doesn't really matter. Like Chaeyeon said, our condition is what counts — a little more warmth and a little more light won't make a huge difference. Here. Look."
He pushed up his slipping glasses, then pulled out a notebook covered in English words and a ballpoint pen, and began to explain.
"This square is the gym, these triangles are us. If this circle is the gym entrance... then the layout of our school is roughly like this."
Whether it was because he was the only third-year in the group and the oldest, or simply because he was sharp, the map of the surrounding area he sketched out in moments was, if not artistic, at least remarkably efficient and clear.
The positions and orientations relative to the cardinal directions were essentially perfect. Chaeyeon watched him with open curiosity as he produced the whole thing in under ten seconds, but Hyeonmin was already completely absorbed and pressed on with the explanation.
"And these small circles are the windows in the gym. See? One, two, three... ten total."
He pointed to each window with the tip of his pen, confirming them for his audience, then firmly stabbed the leftmost window at the back of the gym.
"Right here. We'll throw a water bottle with sodium in it and set it off. If we use the whole chunk of sodium, every zombie in the school will come running, not just the nearby ones — so about a third should be enough."
"Once they hear the noise and swarm that way, we come out the entrance, cut right, and head straight into this flower bed. Then we turn here, and here, and we hit the front gate."
"...So we just walk out the front gate in plain sight?"
Soeun asked with genuine interest, but Hyeonmin shook his head, face set.
"No. That's not viable. The whole area is wide open — we'd get spotted for sure — and we have no idea how many are piled up at the front gate."
"...Like the situation we ran into before?"
"Exactly. Yujin and Sujin told us about it, so I could confirm. The front gate route is too dangerous, so I'm cutting it from the start."
"...Then where do we go?"
"Here."
Hyeonmin's pen stabbed so hard it punched through the paper, but nobody cared — every eye locked onto the spot he was pointing at.
"The moment the front gate comes into view, we turn again and follow this wall. That leads to a hill that connects to the mountain. We climb that and go into the back mountain."
"...Ah. Yeah, that would definitely be the safest route."
Everyone looked bewildered at the sudden mention of a mountain — everyone except Chaeyeon, who understood immediately and nodded.
"We climb the mountain, cut this way, and come back down toward the roadside. No matter how I look at it, this is the best option."
Thick tree cover would drastically cut the risk of being spotted by zombies, and being on the mountain side meant any zombies they might encounter would be few and far between.
"...Okay, I get what you're going for, Senior."
Chaeyeon tilted her head slightly, looking unconvinced, then said:
"But looking at the line connecting this whole route... doesn't it seem kind of long?"
"....."
In other words, Chaeyeon was saying it would take far too long just to get clear of the school building.
Or, to put it more bluntly...
"It feels like we're taking a huge detour."
"...Still, there's no other way. This is the best my brain can come up with."
Hyeonmin scratched his greasy hair as Chaeyeon sank into deep thought. A moment later, she spoke again.
"I'm on board with going into the back mountain. But the route to that hill is just too far."
Chaeyeon's fingers — white as chalk — casually plucked the pen from Hyeonmin's hand and scratched out the long, stretched line on the notepad with a few sharp strokes.
Then she started drawing a new route from the gym entrance. Hyeonmin could only stare, mouth hanging open.
"Why bother climbing the hill at all? We just go over the wall and straight into the mountain."
"...Uh. Well. Is... is that right?"
While Hyeonmin hesitated, unable to form a response to the blunt plan of simply scaling a rear wall well over two meters high, Chaeyeon brushed her fallen side bangs back and smiled faintly.
"I'm not saying we should just climb the wall like idiots. I just thought of a method."
"Ahem. Mind if I ask what that is?"
"We drive up. There's always a truck parked behind the cafeteria, right?"
Chaeyeon herself had seen it on her way to school two mornings ago — so it was definitely still there.
Hyeonmin's mouth fell open for a second, then he let out a short, incredulous laugh.
"I thought you were only a genius with your body. Turns out your brain's a genius too."
"Don't hype me up too much. It's embarrassing."
She said it with a completely straight face, which only made Hyeonmin laugh again.