Awls That Pierce Through Pockets
Shunk—
The tip of Chaeyeon's blade punched through the thing's eyeball and scrambled its brain.
Inside the van, the others stared blankly at the corpse hanging limp from her sword like a puppet with its strings cut — dropped in a single stroke.
"...No matter how many times I see it, she's incredible."
Hyunmin muttered, eyes glazed over.
Even a rough estimate of the strength those corpses had shown during the school escape put them in a completely different category from what a normal high school girl like Chaeyeon should possess. The kind of grotesque grip and bite force that would end you the instant you got caught. And yet she chewed through that disadvantage with one clean strike of sword technique — the more you thought about it, the more impressive she became.
She definitely earned the right to be confident.
I watched Chaeyeon flick the blood off her blade with a swing through the air, then habitually slide it into its sheath, before I spoke.
"Don't put the sword away. Keep it out. No telling when or how many might jump us."
"...Ah, yes!"
There was no real praise in the words, but Chaeyeon already understood she'd been acknowledged just from that, and her cold expression snapped back to normal. She even wiped the redrawn blade with a handkerchief from her pocket, smiling so brightly it was hard to tell what she found so delightful — she was a hard one to figure out.
Then I suddenly felt a gaze and turned, meeting Yejin's eyes as she looked between me and Chaeyeon with a complicated expression. She flinched and hurriedly turned her head away. I found it curious, then gestured for the hesitant Jonghun to keep driving.
Clunk—
Rattle—
The vehicle shook as it crawled over roads that had gone to hell over the past few days. In the middle of that alien noise, the accumulating gazes of the dead and the living burned into the back of my head.
...How much longer until we get there.
I scooped up a couple of rocks and chucked them at two corpses crawling out of a left alley, thinking to myself. Ah, for real. I just wanted to get there, wash up, eat, and sleep. I trudged forward under the pure weight of laziness.
By the time the sunset had nearly faded and red and black light mingled across the sky, Chaeyeon had killed four more corpses, I'd cleaned up the remaining eight, and the van came to a stop at the school front gate.
I'd thought maybe, just maybe — but of course some bastard had crawled under the vehicle and started gnawing on the tires, nearly giving me a heart attack.
"I'm sorry, Oppa. I should have finished them off properly..."
"Forget it. Don't worry about it. Just knowing there's a high school girl who casually wrecks five zombies is enough for me."
That alone was plenty. What more could I ask for.
"Looking back, the fact that I ran into you guys this morning was a miracle in more ways than one."
Picking up Yujin and Sujin was one thing, but more than that — out of all those countless high schoolers, I'd found this unique one. Honestly, someone like her was basically a lottery win just by existing, right?
"Aww, I didn't do anything. Compared to Oppa..."
At my assessment, Chaeyeon cupped her cheeks — which weren't even blushing — with both hands and acted bashful. Soeun watched her performance from inside the vehicle with an utterly exasperated look.
Go on, put on a whole show...
Anyway, we forced open the front-gate barricade painted in blood and brought the van into the school grounds. Once we'd parked safely and Jonghun went to cut the engine, he was immediately thrown into a panic.
"Uh, hey. Sijun hyung-nim?"
"What."
"I've been so tense just driving this whole time that I only just noticed... the, uh, gas is completely empty?"
"Don't worry about it. It's been like that since the first time I saw it."
"Ah, I see... Wait, what?!"
I left him even more flustered despite having gotten an answer, and approached the car to look inside. While everyone flinched and averted their eyes, I spoke to Yejin, who alone sat still.
"We'll move the luggage later. First we're going to the fifth-floor broadcast room."
"...The broadcast room? Why there..."
"You'll see when we get there."
Then I noticed Sujin dozing off in Yujin's arms next to Yejin. Three full days of exhaustion piled up under the terror of death — of course she was wiped. I was staring at the middle school girl in her bloodstained uniform with her eyes closed, feeling sorry for her, when Yujin misread my gaze and spoke quietly.
"...I-I'm sorry. My sister said she was so tired... I just told her to rest her eyes for a bit..."
"No, and what exactly are you sorry for."
There was nothing to apologize for, yet apologies just stuck to their mouths. All three siblings, every single one of them. I looked at Yejin in disbelief and gave her a piece of my mind.
"What the hell did you guys talk about while I was gone? You seem even more intimidated by me than this morning."
"...I'm sorry."
"That's exactly what I mean — stop saying you're sorry..."
I was about to sigh at Yejin's weakly bowed head when I pulled my head back out of the vehicle. In that moment, Sujin opened her eyes, met mine, and yelped in terror.
"I-I'm sorry! I really tried not to fall asleep but my eyes just closed on their own..."
"....."
"Pfft!"
At the third consecutive apology like some sitcom and my lukewarm expression, Haejun couldn't hold it in anymore and burst out laughing.
"Is it funny?"
"...I'm sorry, hyung-nim."
"Are you mocking me?"
"Huh? Ah, no... that's not..."
I glared at him as he stammered and broke into a cold sweat, then let out a small sigh and reached out. I placed my hand on the crown of Sujin's head as she flinched and shrank back, then looked at Yejin.
"Scratch the broadcast room stop. First we make a place to stay, move the luggage, and set up somewhere to rest."
"...Sujin's fine. Just do whatever Oppa wants..."
"What I want is this, so just get up."
I took my hand off Sujin's head and went straight to the van door, yanking it open. Then I jerked my chin at the still-hesitant Haejun and Hyunmin beside him, and the two hurriedly got out and started gathering luggage.
"Hold the bags and wait. I'll clear the area first. Im Chaeyeon. Keep watch with the guys."
"Yes, Oppa! Leave it to me!"
In contrast to her energetic reply, the men stood awkwardly staring at me blankly. I was starting to feel real regret about why I'd saddled myself with these deadweights. The women at least had some entertainment value to watch. These guys, though...
"Ugh."
I sighed quietly once more, then headed toward the main building's front entrance. As I crossed the athletic field, the sprawled corpse of an orangutan caught my eye.
The sun had fully set and night had fallen.
In that time, I'd thoroughly searched the first floor of the main building alone, smashed the heads of every corpse whether standing or lying down, and stuffed them all into a storage room. The first floor was the only place clean enough to live in.
Given the nature of a school building, the first floor had no classrooms and almost no suitable space for lodging... but there was one optimal spot.
"How is a middle school book café this big?"
"The middle school I went to barely had a library, let alone a café..."
Haejun muttered as he looked at the facilities — clean without a single drop of blood, as if they still existed in a time before the apocalypse. Yujin passed by him and said in a small voice.
"There's a real library on the third floor. This is just for show."
"...For show? So nobody actually uses it?"
"They open it sometimes during lunch, but only a few times a month."
"So that's why it's this clean."
I passed by Haejun, who stood dazed as if moved by this space of pure peace with zero traces of zombies, and thought to myself.
Of course it's clean. The locks on the school facility were double-locked — I thought they'd sealed zombies in there or something.
I'd picked up the key from the security office and unlocked it. Later Yujin told me the school boys had somehow broken in and wrecked the place, so they'd double-locked it.
Anyway, it was a book café in name only. There were books scattered around but no food or drinks in sight — still, I was reasonably satisfied. A space this comfortable, this spacious, with special flooring for bare feet and even cushions laid out for napping — you wouldn't find one like this in this school, or practically anywhere in the whole city.
In this pleasant situation, I turned to Yejin, who was standing quietly beside me with a somewhat softened expression.
"Come with me. Luggage's all unpacked, so let's go to the broadcast room together — just the two of us, for a nice little chat."
"Okay, got it."
Instead of her, who nodded blankly without reacting to my joke, Sujin's eyes went wide as she looked back and forth between me and Yejin, then clapped a hand over her mouth and scurried over to Yujin.
"I need to hear why she's been looking so miserable this whole time."
"....."
After roughly telling the others to lock up properly, I took Yejin's wrist and opened the café door.
"We're heading over now."
"Hurry up! My mouth's itching to gossip — I've got so much to talk about!"
"I wasn't planning on a long conversation."
"Eugh, well of course Master would say that! But our new face is a different story, isn't she?"
At those words, Yejin looked at me with a bewildered expression as I muttered to myself. I met her gaze.
Well, from what I know, she doesn't seem like the chatty type either.
Either way, I needed to finish assessing the situation as fast as possible and go eat. With a lightweight baton in one hand and her still-slender wrist in the other, I climbed the stairs with long strides. Yejin glanced back and forth between my profile and the wrist I was holding, then bit her lip and hung her head.