Starting the Faction Smash-Up Now (1)
Ho-jun sent me a party invite.
'Paramedic' has revealed their identity.
'Kang Ho-jun' has proposed a party.
If you form a party, a certain portion of the points you earn will be shared with party members.
There wasn’t anything special about forming a party.
It just meant we could take a set share of the points each of us earned.
As for that part, both Ho-jun and I had set each other to 0%.
We weren’t poor enough to bother splitting points, anyway.
Besides, even though he had money, Ho-jun barely ate at all.
From what I’d heard, he donated most of it and lived on canned food every other day or so.
"You should spend a little on yourself."
"I hardly ever went around North Seoul to begin with, so I’m always short on points."
"Ah... fair enough."
"I’m busy enough just dividing things among the survivors. There are zombies to spare south of the Han River too."
Come to think of it, if you weren’t gambling your life, there was no reason to force your way into North Seoul just to farm.
Even Gangnam was mostly unusable land now, so, well, zombies were everywhere.
Seoul had a population of ten million before the disaster, and the survivors across Seoul and Gyeonggi numbered only around a hundred thousand.
Most of them had died, sure, but it still wasn’t a population you could realistically cover with whatever points the factions were earning.
In that situation, seeing Ho-jun spend his money so he could keep even one person fed made me feel a little sorry for him.
Well, awakened people could get by eating less, so it wasn’t like it would kill them.
"We should raid North Seoul."
"Because while we were at it, we kept stopping looters from murdering decent people and using them as meat shields."
"Ah."
"We don’t have the stamina left for much else."
I nodded, then found myself hating the System even more.
It wouldn’t hurt to lower the prices on the supplies a little.
It was a strange thing, forcing everyone to risk their lives just to farm in North Seoul.
At this rate, weren’t the only ones benefiting the looters hiding up there, while the normal survivor groups got shut out?
I thought A-class hunters would be a little different. Guess not by that much.
I, a mere C-class hunter, could get by well enough by leeching off donated rice and wandering around muttering something like “rice, rice, rice,” but...
Thinking about an A-class hunter not even having time to eat, running around trying to secure food for the rice goblins, made guilt creep in around the edges.
Right then, while I was making a bitter smile, Ho-jun said, "I’m thinking maybe we should form a faction."
"...A faction?"
"Yeah."
Ho-jun brought up the idea of a faction.
A faction, huh...
There were ten people in Seoul City who were active with the chief moderator’s A-class certification badge.
Of those ten, the remaining seven, excluding the three of us, had all built factions of their own.
It was easiest to think of them as an extension of a party, something like the guilds that existed before the catastrophe.
Of course, the survivors and the future zombies called them the official looters.
Because, well.
"They’re full of that elitist bullshit, aren’t they? How the hell are you supposed to go under people like that?"
“...”
They were packed with lunatics who reeked of pure supremacy.
Most factions only accepted C-class and above, calling everyone below D-class awakened or non-awakened people “future zombies,” and then gouged them with the points they earned.
And the chief moderator just watched without any real intention of dealing with them.
"Then why leave them alone?"
"Because it isn’t a problem for the Gallery."
"..."
"The chief moderator only cares about issues that belong to the Gallery. They may be the strongest, but they’re not a leader. It says so in the notice."
After saying that, Ho-jun asked whether I even read the notices.
I only looked away.
"...You really should read them."
"I’ve never violated one."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because I haven’t been banned."
"..."
At Ho-jun’s remark that there were probably plenty of people who had put me on their block list, I scratched my head awkwardly.
Ho-jun let out a sigh, then brought up the faction topic again and sighed once more.
"And I’m not saying we should go under some faction. I don’t like that either."
"Right."
Up to now, Ho-jun hadn’t joined under any faction.
He’d probably gotten all kinds of invitations, and there must have been plenty of people who wanted him to come under their wing, too.
"Why not?"
"Because there wasn’t anyone with the same goal."
"Same goal?"
When I tilted my head, Ho-jun slowly looked me over and nodded.
"People who want to turn this world back, even a little, to what it was before."
"That’s totally me."
"Exactly. Sol, you have the same goal as I do."
I did want to see even a little of the world before the catastrophe brought back.
Looking out over the barren city center, I nodded.
"And if you want to protect the only comrade you’ve got, it’s probably better to have a faction."
"..."
"For one thing, we need numbers if we want to stay out of the chief moderator’s way."
Paramedic gave me a deadpan thumbs-up.
I snorted, and he scratched his cheek, looking a little embarrassed himself.
Still, it didn’t sound bad.
"And while we’re at it, we can clean up the trash, too."
"Yeah. That’s not bad either."
I tossed the empty cola can behind me and asked Ho-jun, "Is the chief moderator really that strong? Haven’t I beaten them before? If I just get one spell off, even a calamity-class thing goes boom, right?"
"At the end of the day, they inherited the System’s authority. Who was it that turned a national-level power into calamity-class?"
"...The System."
"Exactly."
Ho-jun nodded.
If the Wave didn’t drive me insane, the System would probably use every means at its disposal to push me out.
Then why the hell did you even give me a second awakening?
I suddenly felt wronged.
Who asked for this?
I puffed out my cheeks, and the Paramedic walking beside me flicked my forehead.
"Ow."
"It doesn’t even hurt."
"It hurts in spirit!"
"..."
Ho-jun looked at me with the face of someone who’d just eaten something rotten.
That made me go red with embarrassment.
What, was it going to kill him to play along a little?
"So, do you have a plan?"
"Of course. If we just fight the factions head-on, how do you think we’ll look to ordinary people and most awakened people?"
"They’d think we’re the same."
At my answer, Ho-jun nodded immediately, then stopped walking for a moment and began writing on the side of a building with his axe like it was chalk, using the wall as a blackboard.
The word he wrote was public opinion warfare.
"Public opinion matters."
"...Hmm."
"Right now, Seoul is split between seven factions that are dividing up the city and pressuring the survivors."
"True. Most of them are strong."
Whatever the public opinion, these factions maintained their systems through force.
It wasn’t as if they only donated things out of kindness.
Even if half of them were awakened, the other half of the survivors were ordinary people.
They were the poorest of the poor, people living lives where they couldn’t even farm for themselves.
The factions sold the things they scavenged at fairly steep prices, too.
They got points, sure, but what they mostly took was labor in the case of men and their own bodies in the case of women.
And in plenty of cases, the labor they collected was just used as meat shields against zombies.
Fear and hunger were the easiest tools for handling the weak.
That was what let the current system hold together, and if there were no internal conflicts among the members, it could probably keep going forever.
In the end, the reason their absolute power existed was because the rest of the survivors existed.
Even if you told them to fight, they wouldn’t rise up.
And right now, I was in no position to act openly anyway, with the chief moderator blocking the road, someone who could at minimum inflict serious injuries on me even if I didn’t know the limits of their force.
"Neither you nor I are exactly the type to use our heads, are we?"
"Guess not."
"Do you know what the second stupidest method is, now that fighting, the stupidest one, is off the table?"
After hearing Ho-jun, I flashed a grin.
Points Owned: 1,247,700
"Money."
Money it was.
Ho-jun nodded at once, wearing a mean little smile.
"How much do you have?"
"One million two hundred forty-seven thousand and seven hundred."
"I’ve got about four hundred thousand."
"Damn, we’re ridiculously rich."
There was only one reason we needed public opinion.
After all, us survivor-scum weren’t going to start a proper riot.
Still, even if their customers simply turned their backs on them, the factions would start to wobble.
They’d come back from killing zombies already exhausted, and then lose the meat shields they needed to face zombies with, along with the labor needed to process the materials they’d scavenged.
And the one pleasure left in a ruined world, prostitution, would disappear too.
Once their efficiency dropped, the people above would start cutting off the supplies flowing downward.
Slowly, the cracks would begin from inside.
Once a fracture bursts from within, there’s no answer for it.
And the moment they tried to use force, they’d hand a reason to intervene to a faction that already had a powerful Paramedic, even without needing calamity-class force.
"Checkmate."
I stroked my chin with a satisfied smile.
"I can guarantee that much. I saw the fall of the provisional government with my own eyes."
Ho-jun suddenly started telling a sad story, so I gave him a look and headed into Survivor Gallery.
And at that very moment.
"What is this...?"
"Huh."
Once again, the broken Survivor Gallery welcomed us with open arms.
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