Reference Point
Zombies are, more than people realize, a familiar presence to humanity.
Whether through games, movies, or whatever else — anyone who consumes culture has seen them at least once, and more than likely put a few rounds or a baseball bat through their skulls.
If you'd cut your teeth on the genre, even a first-time game throwing zombies at you wouldn't be enough to rattle you. You'd snort, reverse the ambush, and walk away. Experts, of a sort.
The problem was that this wasn't fiction. They had crawled out into real life.
On a monitor, you could take a bite or two and keep going like a tank. In reality, even a scratch stung like hell — so how much would it hurt when a real zombie's filthy teeth sank into you?
And the bigger problem wasn't the pain. It was that you could actually die. A genuine threat to survival.
In the twenty-first century, how often did anyone truly face a threat to their life? A car accident, maybe. If you were especially unlucky, a random stabbing.
The point was this: for modern humanity, enduring the killing intent a zombie radiated was far harder than anyone expected.
Even a fluffy mid-sized dog lunging at knee height was enough to make most people jump out of their skin. This wasn't the age of spearing wild beasts with sharpened sticks. How many people could calmly fight a zombie that was actively trying to kill them?
To fight something that wasn't human, you had to discard a certain amount of your own humanity first.
Which meant that, generally speaking, the ones who thrived in this new world were the lunatics who'd already snapped. More so than ordinary people, at least.
And that was exactly why the men felt a certain pride. If they'd lived clean, never committed a crime, stayed upright and decent — they would have died miserably for it, shambling around without a scrap of reason left.
Better, then, to rape as they pleased. To eat human flesh. To enjoy the apocalypse on their own terms. That had been the right call, by every measure.
But that conviction was starting to crack.
"…Am I so far gone I'm seeing things?"
They had been cutting loose a little too hard lately. Still — schizophrenia was a bit much…
They wanted to be crazy in personality only. Actually losing their minds was never the plan.
Thinking that, one of them closed his eyes and opened them again. The hallucination was still there, crystal clear.
"Why do the zombies still look like they're kneeling in worship? Did that old guy's punch scramble my brain?"
"…Maybe they were cultists when they were alive."
"Does that even make sense?"
Whether the men were confused or not, I paid them no mind and walked forward at a steady pace until I stood in front of them.
I looked them over once, trying to figure out what sort of trash I was dealing with, when one of them turned his gaze on me and spoke.
"Whatever the hell that is — we're taking that woman. Once the old man confirms her power, he'll give us something for it."
"With that kind of ability, we might get our own private whorehouse."
"…Heh. I like that."
The shock of a scene they couldn't have imagined lasted only a moment. True to form for lunatics, they shut it out and sank back into their own desires.
One of them glanced down the alley, grinned, and started toward me — clearly writing me off because I wasn't holding a weapon.
"Hey! Don't just stand there — get back! It's dangerous!"
I scratched my head with an irritated look, ignoring him entirely. A middle-aged man deeper in the alley shouted at me, but nobody paid him any attention.
The man approaching with a fire axe — a weapon that stirred a strange nostalgia — asked instead:
"Hey. Who the hell are you, walking around with no weapon? You with that bitch?"
I didn't answer. He frowned, snorted a laugh, and pointed past me.
"World ends and you really do see everything. A human goldfish, and a woman getting bowed to by corpses. But those rotting bastards don't scare us one bit, you know?"
I locked eyes with Na Sehee, who was staring this way with a blank expression while the corpses paid her homage. The man licked his lips as if the sight turned him on.
From this distance, he probably couldn't see her inverted eyes.
"Rip their throats out and they just flop around useless. You figured that one trick was enough to walk up here unarmed? Thought we'd take one look and clear the road for you?"
He snickered and tilted the axe, giving it a little shake. I studied it carefully — specifically the back of his hand.
…Crow crest, you son of a bitch.
Same mark as those idiots who'd ambushed me when I was with Chaeyeon.
The crow had said it clearly. Information far more important than the fact that their crest was a downgrade of mine.
"Why are there so many of you? You're swarming past the line."
"…What?"
At this point they were more annoying than zombies. Which meant they were starting to push past the limit of what I'd tolerate.
"Fine. I was going to leave it alone, but I should go check the estimate myself."
I kept muttering under my breath with deliberate weight. The man finally snapped and raised his foot to kick me in the stomach.
"You keep running your damn m—!"
Grab—
Instead of his filthy shoe, I caught his ankle. I pressed my left hand against the crow tattoo on his shoulder joint and said:
"So you can get lost."
Not far from this world — all the way to the next one. I only needed one mouth left to spit out information.
A massive crescent blade erupted with a heavy shunk, and the man's eyes flew wide in shock.
He scrambled to yank his foot free and set his stance, but he couldn't break my one-handed grip. All he managed was thrashing.
"You son of a— let go of— urk?!"
Crash—
Before he could grit his teeth and swing the axe from that position, I shoved his arm and sent him sprawling to the ground.
Then, before the other man — who'd been watching the alley and only now turned this way — could rush over, I raised the crescent blade high with one hand.
"W-wait, wait, wait—!"
The blade dropped toward the throat of the man thrashing like a madman.
I offered my sincere thanks to the volunteer who'd so generously offered himself for the crescent blade's inaugural performance test.
A sneer came free with it.
"Smile. Even if you're dying, you should go out pretty."
Not that a little smile was going to improve that thuggish face.
Before the big guy charging over to stop me could finish shouting, the blade carved through the man's neck.
"I said stop, you son of a—!"
Whoosh—
Thud—!
"…."
Mm. Performance was more than satisfactory.
No force behind it — just the weight alone. That was enough to put a serious dent in an orangutan.
I roughly kicked the head rolling at my feet, then beckoned to the remaining man staring blankly this way.
"…You son of a bitch!!!"
Sometimes a bad temper that refuses to run is convenient.
A short while later, I met the baseball bat he swung in a rage-fueled arc with the crescent blade and shattered it. Then I swept his knee joint the way you'd clear a floor with a broom.
He hit the ground without even managing a scream. Two people — a man and a woman — stared back and forth between me and him in stunned silence, then edged out of the alley on unsteady feet.
Before their expressions could become completely indescribable at the sight of Na Sehee still surrounded by zombies, I asked a question.
"You can find your own way home, right?"
"…Excuse me?"
"I don't care who started the fight, so I won't ask. That's all."
I picked up the fire axe, checked its condition, then tossed it far away and started to leave. The middle-aged man called after me in a rush.
"W-wait! Just a moment! Let me ask you one thing!"
I could let the formal speech slide — he was old enough to be my father — but the desperation in his voice, more urgent than even the fact that he was still alive, made me turn. He kept propping up a woman who wasn't even injured as he spoke.
"I-I heard there's a school near here! But no matter how much I walk around, I can't find it! If you know where it is…"
"…A school?"
I frowned, trying to read his intent, but I wasn't a mind reader. Looking into someone's eyes didn't tell you whether they meant well or meant harm.
"Why do you need it? More importantly, you should head home and regroup first."
I said it while noting how intact he looked compared to his torn clothes, but the man shook his head hard.
"No! We don't even have a base to go back to! Our original home was in Gunpo, so…"
"…??"
Had I misheard?
So what this man was saying was that after the apocalypse, he had walked all the way here from Gunpo for some purpose.
"My daughter… my daughter's school is nearby. But even after wandering the city for days, I still can't find it…"
And after arriving, he'd spent several more days circling the city. I wasn't one to talk, but the fact that he was still alive was impressive.
Setting the tragic circumstances aside — if the story was true, a middle-aged man who'd survived every hardship to make it this far was inherently interesting as a survival specimen…
But my blank face showed none of that interest, and the man grew more desperate. He had no other options. Nothing to offer, and no useful information whatsoever.
That was when the blonde woman behind him — hair a mess, head bowed the whole time — finally spoke.
"…Please help us. I'll do you once later."
"…?!"
She'd been glancing at the corpses deeper in the alley in shock only moments before. Now she'd pulled herself together enough to say that, and the middle-aged man nearly jumped out of his skin on her behalf.
I was thrown by the completely out-of-nowhere offer myself — then registered just how desperate they were, and nodded.
"If you're going to put it that way… follow me for now."
Well now. Free honey, huh?