The Benchmark
"I'm fine, mister. You can let go of me now."
"...Ah. Yeah. Right."
The woman slipped free of the man's arms and did what she could to smooth down her disheveled hair, all the while glancing sideways at me. I had already given her an answer, but she still kept the possibility of being abandoned at any moment carefully in mind — and at the same time, she was naturally sizing up the mood of our little group out of the corner of her eye.
Whether that caution had always been part of her personality or something she had learned simply to stay alive, I couldn't say. Personally, though, I was inclined to give her a positive score. Watching her sit still and swallow that old man's obsessive, smothering protection whole would have been a lot less pleasant to look at.
Anyway — with the zombies all driven off, I walked over toward Na Sehee, who was sitting quietly on top of that miserable mutt, the dog still cowed and wilted from the scolding it had just received, waiting for me. Along the way I traded a brief introduction with the two of them.
"...Um. About that young woman, though..."
"You don't need to worry about her. Not for now."
At my answer, the woman who had given her name as Shin Sujeong could only nod without another word. It might have come off a little cold, but I had no interest in fretting over how to explain Sehee and making the whole thing more of a hassle than it needed to be.
The two of them edged closer, then caught sight of Na Sehee's eyes and froze — neither of them able to react, both of them suddenly doubting their own vision. Watching that, I leaned down and whispered to the mutt under her.
"You play ordinary mutt, not zombie. Those eyes and that bulk? Just say we fed you something weird."
"...?"
The look it gave me — pure, insolent side-eye — said What the hell are you talking about, you idiot as clearly as if it had spoken the words. I let it slide, already thinking about dog stew again. Even if converting animal zombies into meat cost a fortune, if it meant I could turn this worthless excuse for a dog into a meal, it would be worth every coin. I was just convincing myself of that when Na Sehee poked me and held up her notebook.
— Who?
"Just a couple of street-hire candidates."
"...??"
Naturally she didn't understand a word of it and floated a question mark over her head, but I didn't bother explaining. I turned instead toward the man still crawling across the ground on ruined knees, desperately trying to reach a weapon.
"Your shopping trip's going to have to wait a few minutes. Something more important just came up."
"Kya-u."
— Not a fan. The man. Keeps wandering off.
"It's give-and-take, pure and simple. I brought you here to shop, so wait your turn."
I finally grabbed the legs of the bastard who had managed to pick up his broken baseball bat and dragged him off toward the alley the way they do it in slasher movies. His screams climbed another octave as he thrashed.
"Aaaargh—!"
"Shut your mouth before I tear off those snapped knees and shove them down your throat."
Sujeong, hearing the casual brutality in my mutter, swallowed hard without meaning to. The strange light in her eyes was probably just my imagination.
A few minutes later.
Right before a yawning Na Sehee could come looking for me out of boredom, I timed it perfectly and stepped out of the alley alone, shaking the blood off my hands.
The bastard had been stubborn as hell — finger-breaking with raw grip strength, tearing into his thighs, the usual repertoire hadn't even made a dent — so I had to cross a few lines before he finally started talking.
...Th-the factory... the factory! That's the base! Me and the rest of them — we all live there!
Then why didn't you just say so when you could? What a pain.
I—I told you! So stop— AAAAAAGH!
Same trick I'd used on a zombie once — dig a finger into the eye socket and gently scrape the nerves behind it with a nail. He loved that. His real mistake had been failing to notice that I was every bit as much of a lunatic as they were.
Still, he had answered, so I kept my word and left him alive. One-eyed and crippled in both legs, sure — but breathing. He could figure out the rest himself.
Ten minutes, tops?
One of the running zombies, drawn by his screaming the way a food critic finds a good restaurant, came charging at me as I stepped out of the alley. I caught it, flung it deeper into the alley as a matching gift, and walked back toward Na Sehee.
Kang Yundo couldn't hide his wariness at the sight of my blood-soaked hands and took a step back. Shin Sujeong, on the other hand, actually came a step closer, pulled something from her clothes, and held it out to me.
A handkerchief, as it turned out — though its condition was anything but ordinary. Blood, sure, and some unidentifiable fluid as well. For a second I wondered if it was some new kind of prank, but the look on her face said the gesture was genuine.
"Um, Sijun-ssi? Is something wrong...?"
"No. Thanks, for now."
Something about her felt different from Ye-jin, though. I couldn't put my finger on what the difference actually was, which left me vaguely unsettled...
I wiped the blood off my hands, handed the handkerchief back, and tilted my head inwardly. No idea what this feeling was. So I decided to stop thinking about it.
Whether I was trying to hide Na Sehee's true nature or not, she was openly playing with a zombie sparrow perched on her finger for anyone to see. She turned her head toward me.
— Done? Playtime?
"That wasn't play. That was business."
— What. Or is play. Tormenting. The weak?
"Yeah. I already know your tastes, so leave me out of it."
Looking only at her eyes, you could have believed she was a ghost and not been wrong — and the way we communicated was strange enough that Sujeong stared at us for a long moment before carefully speaking up.
"...Um. Does that young woman... not speak?"
Na Sehee glanced at her once, then ignored her completely and wrote in the notebook with a blank expression.
— Another one already. Another girl?
— Impressive. Sijun is.
I started to argue, then thought better of it — she was probably just messing with me again — and shook my head, letting it go. Na Sehee narrowed her eyes and whispered something to the sparrow on her finger.
A moment later, while I was mid-yawn and completely off guard, the thing started pecking the top of my head without mercy. It didn't hurt, but of course I jumped.
"Ah— hey! What the hell is this thing?! You looking to die?"
Right before my hand closed around it, the sparrow calmly flew back to Na Sehee and started preening its feathers. She watched my dumbfounded face, laughed under her breath, and held up the notebook again in a lazy, satisfied mood.
— I like this one. Cute.
— Can I keep it?
"...Don't tell me you put it up to that."
— I only told it. Prove its loyalty. Go on. Prove it.
What the hell did loyalty have to do with pecking my head like a watermelon?
Still giggling, Na Sehee settled the sparrow on her shoulder — then spotted Sujeong trying to approach me again and wiped every expression from her face. That lifeless look said don't you dare interfere so clearly that Sujeong couldn't stand it and retreated toward Kang Yundo.
"Kya-u-ah."
— Good. From now on. Behave. Other women. Know your place.
"...?"
What was that supposed to mean?
Na Sehee flashed that random sentence once, then closed the notebook and gave the mutt a light tap on the rear. The dog — which had been glaring at me right alongside the sparrow — started shuffling forward, and I told the two behind us to follow before murmuring to Sehee.
"By the way, that sparrow. Looking at it, I'm pretty sure it's a male. Same as the dog."
— Why?
"Just a feeling."
I scratched irritably at the spot the bird had pecked and headed for the department store.
Do Wangu was tired, the way he always was.
There was that goddamn anaconda from the utility pole that could slip into the department store without a sound and start eating people whenever it felt like it. There were the cannibal bastards who were almost certainly lurking around the perimeter, waiting for their chance. And then there had been that lunatic this morning who had shown up with a bag of snacks and made a scene demanding to be let in — by now even that felt like a minor inconvenience. He was drowning in stress.
Even collapsing onto his private sofa at lunch and surrendering himself to the women's hands didn't improve his mood.
"Wangu oppaaa~ Does something hurt? Why do you look so drained?"
"Body's fine. It's my head that hurts. My head."
He was half-convinced he was about to go bald. Even the lower half of him, currently being kneaded by the woman beside him, was responding with all the enthusiasm of a dead fish. At this rate, he really was going to fall apart.
The stress relief of groping a woman's chest had long since stopped working. He needed a change of pace — something different. Something that would blast this suffocating feeling out of him in one shot.
I was never cut out to be a boss in the first place. Goddamn it.
Getting summoned every time something went wrong just to clean up the mess — was that even what a boss was supposed to do?
During the meal distribution, Ju Minho noticed how wrecked Do Wangu looked and asked if he was all right. Do Wangu gave him a vague nod, shook off the cooing hands of the women, grabbed a bottle of beer and some dried squid, and went to sit on the windowsill by the first-floor back door — the one with a clear view of the parking lot flower beds — and stared blankly at the scenery.
Then, for no reason he could see, the zombies that had been milling around the area suddenly all surged toward a single point. Curious, he looked over — and shot to his feet.
Because out there among the zombies was the man who had vanished days ago after a half-hearted goodbye and hadn't shown so much as a nose hair near the department store since.
From a distance, the guy was carrying what looked like an absurdly heavy crescent blade, trading a few words with a group of people Do Wangu had never seen before, then casually wading in alone and carving through the zombies. The sheer exhilaration of it loosened the tight knot in Do Wangu's chest all by itself.
...I wanted a rampage like that too. Reality's a goddamn sewer, though.
He gave a bitter smile, walked to the back door, and opened it.
"...Huh? B-Boss?"
"Kid. I told you not to call me that."
He clapped the shoulder of the man on guard duty — a silent good work — then snatched the baseball bat out of his hands and rolled his neck.
"Hyung-nim! Where are you going?!"
"Where do you think? Going to help a friend."
"What? You— you know that guy?"
"Ah. Right. You're the new one."
Do Wangu started to walk, then stopped. He clapped the new guy's shoulder again — the man was still staring, slack-jawed, at the sight of those vicious zombies getting mowed down like weeds in front of a weed whacker — and said one more thing.
"Even when I'm not around, if you ever run into that side, you bow a full hundred and eighty degrees. In this ruined world, he's the one guy running a personal cheat code."
"...Y-Yes?"
"Just take it as it is and move on."
I'm going to go stick my nose in over there and blow off some steam.
Caught between zombies and humans, ground down by every kind of conflict and problem, Do Wangu decided to take his break beside the freest man in the city.
I'm jealous. So damn jealous.
And yet — or maybe because of that — meeting him was always a pleasure.
Thinking that, Do Wangu seized the skull of a corpse lunging in from the side and hurled it with everything he had, roaring as he went.
"Hey, Lee Sijuuuun! Good to see youuuu!"
I had been swinging the crescent blade without a thought in my head. I noticed him a beat late and muttered under my breath.
"What the hell. Why's he making such a scene?"
Anyone watching would think we hadn't seen each other in ten years.
CRAAACK—
Do Wangu's baseball bat and my crescent blade smashed through the skulls of the corpses at the same time.
