The Beast Trainer
“That's not what I made those accounts for, so don't look at it that way.”
“Were you trying to build a real, legitimate shelter? Not a Black Shelter?”
Jeon Hye-ji asked the question, staring straight at Won-goo.
“That's right. I ended up helping those bastards out without meaning to, but still.”
Everyone wore expressions of understanding.
And had Won-goo turned out to be connected to the Black Shelters, none of them would have pressed him any further anyway.
They all knew what surviving the apocalypse actually meant.
Be purely good, and you become a sucker. Be purely evil, and you become a target.
The line between good and evil had eroded to the point that arguing over where it lay felt absurd.
Erased, perhaps, wasn't the right word. Blurred together, maybe.
After clashing a few times with monsters that saw humans as prey, everyone learned that goodness and wickedness meant nothing.
That was when it dawned on you: good and evil were meaningless — what mattered was good things and bad things.
Go one step further as a veteran, and you understood something else.
Bad things, less-bad things.
And the simple truth that only worse things existed.
Won-goo had lived through all of it — and then sunk a level below even that.
Which was why his pet phrase had always been the same.
Survive first. Everything else comes later.
“The executive managing this area is the Beast Trainer. Everyone's memorized the executives' profiles, right?”
“Um, excuse me.”
Suwon raised his hand for the first time in a while.
“What is it, Suwon?”
“Wh, what does 'memorized' mean?”
“You don't know what memorized means?”
“W, well...”
“It means did you read the profiles carefully.”
“Oh, I read them.”
“That's what memorized means. Remember it.”
“Y, yes, sir.”
They set their first objective as tearing into the Black Shelter's infrastructure.
Infrastructure sounded like it meant actual facilities, but it didn't.
For a Black Shelter to operate, people were an absolute necessity.
Survivors, specifically, who held the Gifts required to run it.
Everyone providing an essential capability was an executive — and killing those executives was the goal.
So they'd chosen their first targets from among the well-known executives, each picking whoever suited them best.
The one Won-goo chose was Neverland.
A survivor with a Gift for taming and enhancing animals.
The nickname Neverland came from his history of working as a beast trainer at a place called Neverland.
Won-goo had once hoped his own Trainer would grow into someone like Neverland.
But the Trainer had been far too soft-hearted for life out in the wasteland.
Heavy investment in mental resistance could have fixed that softness to some degree, but there had been neither the resources nor the reason to invest that much in him.
Still, I need at least one beast-trainer slot...
Won-goo's thoughts drifted briefly to the Trainer.
He knew he would need one, because he knew how the apocalypse would unfold.
But that was a problem for another day.
“Cheol-su. When's the rain coming?”
“Soon, sir.”
“You're sure this time?”
“I was only wrong at the beginning, sir. I've been right ever since.”
“True enough. I trust you.”
“Thank you, sir. Please do.”
“Hyun-sung. Break out the snacks. We'll eat while we wait.”
“Yes, Hyeong-nim!”
Lee Hyun-sung pulled a box of Choco Bars from his pack.
Crunch!
Once the crew started eating like soldiers going over the top, the box didn't last ten minutes.
Everyone knew the rule: eat as much as you possibly could before a fight.
They'd already filled up back at base, but with time to kill, they filled up again.
And then, as if on cue, the rain came pouring down.
It didn't start as a drizzle and gradually thicken — it burst out of the sky all at once, like a sprinkler system had blown, hammering down in sheets.
Without anyone needing to say a word, they advanced.
“Hye-ji.”
“Yes, Director.”
“You see that bastard who just walked out?”
“Yes.”
“Can you hit him?”
“I can.”
“Not the crossbow. Use the harpoon.”
A survivor had stepped outside the trailer for a smoke.
A woman in a dress, with a slightly round, wide face and a large mouth.
She wore nothing underneath the dress.
Which meant she was carrying no weapons.
This was exactly why surprise attacks mattered so much in combat.
We are ready. They are not.
The advantage that gap created was more than enough to overturn even the worst odds.
Hye-ji quickly pulled the harpoon gun from her backpack.
It looked like a compact, unremarkable speargun — but its effective range was bizarrely long.
Because it was enchanted.
Its one drawback was that the enchantment had to be recharged after a few uses, but on its own merits it was a highly versatile weapon.
Used well, it could reel an enemy straight in for a clean kill.
Their coordination was flawless, as if they'd drilled this exact moment a hundred times.
When Jeon Hye-ji raised the harpoon gun, everyone dropped low so her sightline stayed clear — even their breathing stopped for an instant.
Pishoong!
All those hours at the practice range had not been wasted. Jeon Hye-ji proved it.
Thud!
The harpoon struck the woman squarely in the hip.
In the same instant, the crew hauled on the line attached to the harpoon.
With everyone throwing their weight into it, the pull was tremendous — the woman came skidding toward them, dragged through the mud without even managing a proper scream.
It wasn't that she never screamed at all.
She did.
But the sound was simply swallowed by the vicious, sudden downpour.
Skated across the ground like a sled, reeled in without a hitch, the woman lay before them — and Won-goo, checking her up close, smiled.
“What a catch, Jeon Hye-ji.”
“Sorry?”
“She's here. Hey! Grab her arms first!”
Won-goo wasn't the only one who recognized the woman.
Mu Beob-sa recognized her. So did Lee Hyun-sung.
Which was why both of them moved almost before Won-goo finished speaking.
Hyun-sung drove a knife from his belt straight through the woman's hand, while Mu Beob-sa seized her other arm.
The scream that tore out of her was muffled by Won-goo's palm, close against her mouth.
“I told you 'someday,' didn't I? That if you lived, we'd meet again. Been a while, Gu In-seon.”
“Who are you?”
“You don't remember me?”
“I really don't think we've—”
Gu In-seon put on a face of genuine incomprehension.
But Won-goo didn't buy it for a second.
“Oh! Is that so? Then your name isn't Gu In-seon either, huh? And losing your wrists wouldn't bother you at all, then? Hyun-sung. Cut them off.”
“Yes, Hyeong-nim!”
“Stop! Okay! It's me!”
“It is you, then. Shaman Gu In-seon.”
“Did you come here to hunt me down?”
“We're not exactly on good terms, you and I. But I wouldn't go through this much hassle over a grudge. You're just a bonus.”
“Do you even know where this is?”
“I do. A Black Shelter.”
“You're insane...”
“Do I actually seem insane to you? Tell me how many are inside, and who's in there.”
“You'll spare me?”
“I can spare you.”
“Don't bullshit me. You're not going to spare me.”
“Stay silent, and I torture you. Talk properly, and I'll take you to a shelter instead. Whether you survive there is on you.”
Gu In-seon's eyes wavered. She hesitated a moment, then laid out everything happening inside the shelter — in surprising detail.
“Good. I'll take you to a shelter. Try to stay alive, why don't you. Cut her wrists.”
And so Gu In-seon's wrist came off in one clean stroke.
Ughhaaaagh!
She shrieked, but the others clamped down on the scream before it could carry.
Hyun-sung cut off her other wrist as well.
“Why her hands, sir?”
Jeon Hye-ji asked.
“Some shamans channel their spells through their hands. The hands are the trigger. Not all of them work that way, but plenty of shamans do.”
The crew bound her with practiced efficiency — wrapped nearly mummy-tight and lashed to a tree.
“Mark the spot well. That one's a valuable trophy.”
“Yes, Director.”
“Is there a bounty on her?”
“Most people in a Black Shelter have one. But the amounts are small, petty stuff. Gu In-seon's is a decent size.”
With Gu In-seon's mouth sealed completely shut, the crew moved toward the trailer.
No commotion had been raised yet — which meant the other teams hadn't opened their assaults either.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
Hyun-sung stepped up and rapped on the door, and a man who looked no different from any vagrant appeared.
Bang!
Won-goo pulled the trigger without a flicker of hesitation.
This time, no one could fail to hear it.
Gunshots had grown rarer since the apocalypse began.
Shot from point-blank range, straight through the heart, the vagrant staggered backward and collapsed — but he was still alive.
Proof that he was a human who had undergone considerable enhancement.
But the crew didn't care.
They all knew: plenty of survivors didn't die from a single shot.
And in a Black Shelter especially, there would be even more of them.
The crew swarmed the fallen vagrant and finished the job.
Then people came pouring out of the trailer.
“All done over here!”
“Yeah, we're finished on this side too!”
Thud!
A warhammer bit into the skull of a blood-soaked giant.
The number of survivors who came crawling out of the trailer matched Gu In-seon's intel exactly.
More than twenty in all.
The rule was one person per trailer, but in practice two or three lived in each — and when it got crowded, five or more.
That was how the count had come out to over twenty.
“Well done, Jeon Hye-ji.”
“Me? I didn't really do anything this time...”
“You hooked Gu In-seon, didn't you? Gu In-seon was the biggest fish in this whole area.”
“Are shamans really that dangerous?”
“Unusual classes are all dangerous. Gu In-seon casts hypnosis. If she'd hypnotized everyone in there and sent them at us, this fight would have been a nightmare.”
Hye-ji finally understood why Gu In-seon hadn't simply used her shamanic arts right away.
Her craft was only worth anything when there were people around to use it on.
Hypnotize, control, buff.
For that, she needed people nearby — and a party to bind with.
Which was also exactly why a woman with such a powerful ability had fled into a Black Shelter in the first place.
She used that power to join parties — and then, sooner or later, wiped out her own party-mates. A vicious, habitual method.
Her crimes had come to light through the testimony of a survivor who barely escaped with his life.
Had he not, she would still have been roaming the wastes, shopping for parties to join.
Everyone wanted a shaman for their crew, after all. It was one of the most coveted titles out there.
“He'll show up soon. Clean this up and get into defensive positions, fast.”
“Are you certain he is coming? It is possible he will not, is it not.”
Mu Beob-sa asked.
“He's coming. I know Neverland better than anyone. The bastard's flawed in every possible way, and his biggest flaw is that he's too impatient for his own good.”
“He's coming! Hyeong-nim!”
Lee Hyun-sung, up on the trailer roof watching the approach, shouted down.
“See that? Hyun-sung! How many are there?”
“Quite a lot!”
“A lot? His mainstay should be bears, right? Are there many bears?”
“No, it's — monkeys... they look like Bloodfans!”
“Bloodfans?”
“Yes!”
“Looks like the bastard's been farming trash mobs all this time. How many heads are we talking? Ballpark it!”
“Over five hundred, looks like!”
“That's way too many...”
“Director, what do we do?”
Won-goo stroked his chin and thought for about five seconds.
“Hyun-sung, get down. Park the trailer and make a 'U' shape!”
“Is that wise? It could amount to walking into a trap.”
“There's one reason he sends trash mobs in first. To burn through our hand of cards. Once the monkeys are all spent, he'll show himself. Move! Get it set up! Hey! Suwon, not that side — circle around the other way!”
“And what is the plan, exactly. With the rain, fire is unusable, is it not.”
“It's usable. Just inefficient. And I've got another method. That item we picked up recently, remember.”
They arranged the trailer into a U-shape — but instead of hunkering down inside it, the crew took up positions at the mouth of the opening.
The frenzied Bloodfans came charging like something out of a nightmare.
Their speed was staggering.
The moment they spotted the crew, they locked onto them and charged, blind to everything else.
And when they were fifteen meters out, a furious screech of tires split the air.
The trailer — driven by Won-goo himself.
It burst out at a dead sprint and plowed straight through the Bloodfan horde, sending blood spraying in every direction.