Word on the street was they’d let anyone drop and eat ass on command
I’ll be honest—when I first saw it, I had to laugh out loud.
It was the day I got the mode pack from my buddies on Kaogal.
One of them leaned in with this weird little smile and said, “Try it, bro. Real addictive.”
That line came with one compressed file and the setting document for this world.
At first I figured it was just the usual lore dump.
But the deeper I scrolled, the stranger the feeling got.
It wasn’t like reading a game manual. More like reading an actual official report.
After the monsters started showing up, the concept of “school” had basically died in this world.
The place where kids were supposed to learn had turned into a shooting range.
Desks were covered with disassembled rifles instead of textbooks, and attendance sheets had been replaced by bullet-count tallies.
Education still existed, but it had gone full demonic.
Here, “learning” wasn’t about stacking knowledge anymore—it was about learning how to survive.
So nobody called it school. They called it **Survival Training Base**.
A world where tomorrow was never guaranteed.
You’d better have a gun in your hand before you learned to hold a pen, and you’d better pull the pin on a grenade before you cracked open a book, or you might not make it to the next sunrise.
Boy soldiers weren’t criminals anymore.
The government had legalized it. Parents had gone quiet.
The kids carrying guns weren’t making choices. It was pure instinct.
Everywhere you looked, military posters stared you down.
**If you’re not a genius, pick up a gun instead of a pen!**
The slogan had started as a joke, but now it was just government policy designed to boost humanity’s survival rate.
And yet the word “school” still lived in people’s mouths like a stubborn tumor.
Hope will do that to you.
Even in a world with no clear end in sight, humans wanted to keep at least one place where they could still be taught.
Soldiers or civilians, adults or kids—everyone had to be a soldier just to wake up tomorrow morning.
That exact line had floated across my screen the day I first triggered the mode pack.
**[Chaos Beast – Humanity’s Last Simulation]**
Translation: the only rule left in this world was **survive**.
“…No way monsters are showing up at some school, right?”
The moment the quest window popped up, I knew.
Inside of seven days, the last scraps of hope humanity still clung to were going to be snatched away.
Monsters appearing at school.
One line and my brain turned to ice.
Monsters smashing cities was just Tuesday. School? That was different.
That was the last visible scrap of what it meant to stay human.
And the target was the most elite military high school in Korea—the one everyone called the top of the line.
Short name: **SAHS**.
It wasn’t just a school. It was a military-style private academy that turned out future generals.
If regular soldiers fought monsters, these kids were the tacticians who would give orders.
One of them, one future commander—could die.
The thought made my fist tighten on its own.
Taking away the only education allowed to these kids… that was genuinely crossing every line.
***
The map showed the coordinates. I let out a quiet breath of relief.
At least the distance was safe.
I could reach the underground hideout I’d just made from here.
But there was still one problem.
I knew the location.
So what?
The quest only said “monsters appear within seven days.”
No clue where, when, or how big they’d be.
Which meant the objective was simple:
**[Clear Condition: Survive the arrival of a monster inside SAHS for at least seven days.]**
Seven-day infiltration mission.
Monsters popping up on schedule. Pure stamina-hell difficulty.
Honestly, at first I had no clue how a guy with a GED who’d been on the streets for thirty days was supposed to slip into a military academy.
No test to take. No application to submit. And definitely not teacher-level access.
So I sat there for a while, then suddenly understood.
I wasn’t just any hero.
I was a mode-cheated cheat sorcerer. The only dark hero left in this world.
One answer.
**[Cognitive Dampening Mode activated.]**
**[Description: Basically just, if you’re clearly not supposed to be here, turn it on. Everyone will treat you like furniture. Just don’t make yourself too obvious if someone already knows your face or you’ll get detected.]**
“Sir, hello~!”
“Ah… hello.”
The second the words left my mouth, the whole schoolyard felt like it had been switched to background mode.
My voice was still stiff, but the students walked right past like I was completely invisible.
The only elite school left that still did actual lessons even after the monster apocalypse.
The smell of detergent mixed with dust, the gray tiles lining the corridor, and the training bell that rang at least fifty times a day.
Between the dust and the bells, I melted right in.
I pushed the cleaning cart along, swept the floor, and passed through classroom door gaps while the same phrase echoed in my ears.
“Next drill is urban combat simulation! Class A, move to the live-fire range!”
And no one noticed a single extra cleaning guy.
Security cameras, entry AI, everyone just filed me away as “another janitor.”
‘Yeah, well, my Kaogal buddies really knew how to mod this game.’
That’s what I thought as I prepared to just clean and wait until the monster arrived.
*Click-clack.*
Boots echoed from the end of the corridor.
They were oddly clear. Not the usual sloppy footsteps. Sharper. More deliberate.
I stopped the cart and looked up.
And.
“Been a while, SAHS.”
A woman’s voice, calm but somehow aimed straight at me.
Instantly my brain flashed.
**[Warning: Cognitive Dampening Mode detected ‘visual focus’ on target]**
**[Caution: Target’s memory now contains user image. Mode efficiency reduced. (Cognitive efficiency +48%)]**
“…Huh?”
***
“Welcome, students. Starting today, I’ll be your special instructor for the next seven days—Captain Ha Min-ah, future officer. Thank you in advance.”
The woman standing at the podium flipped the entire classroom atmosphere.
Every student’s breathing stopped in perfect sync.
Golden hair caught the fluorescent light and fell like liquid.
Every time the strands moved, the straight creases of her uniform jacket shifted.
Even though the uniform was neat and military-perfect, the silhouette underneath was strangely magnetic.
Her eyes were the color of sunlight—warm but unyielding.
When she smiled, the light softened for just a second, and she looked less like a commander and more like an actress on stage.
Ha Min-ah.
By name, she was flashy and sharp at the same time.
A face where strength and elegance sat in perfect balance.
Every time she tilted her head, a silver earring in her golden hair caught the light and silently said, *This person is special.*
She was closer to a goddess who had romanticized war itself than a soldier.
“…A goddess?”
“Yeah! You don’t know Captain Ha Min-ah? She’s practically a legend. A living legend. You still haven’t seen those insane real-combat videos?”
“I heard she graduated from SAHS, but I never thought I’d actually meet her in person. Damn, I wish I could get a selfie…”
The woman I’d just met—the one who’d introduced herself to the students—turned out to be way more famous than I expected.
I’d thought the mode was weakening because of the “familiar” glance, so I’d tried to trail her at a distance.
When I snapped back to reality, I was already sitting inside the janitor club with the rest of the cleaning crew.
Not just my class. Every other class had spilled out into the hallway.
Even the teachers had rushed over to see the legendary woman in the flesh.
Apparently, she was being called the face of today’s South Korean military women.
Cool exterior, but she’d personally commanded the Decoy Unit—hundreds of monster incidents, always right at the front.
Her battle videos had spread on SNS through the death cams attached to her combat suits, and every single frame played on people’s feeds like pure hope.
Kids grew up imitating her. Military academy students dreamed of becoming her.
*The only hero who exists in reality that future officers want to be like most.*
“Ah, so that’s why I was there that day.”
Watching her deliver the speech so calmly at the podium, the memory clicked.
The day I’d first stepped onto the stage as the **Dark Hero** in this world.
The day a monster’s body had burst through an apartment wall and I’d saved a woman who was about to fall off the fourth-floor balcony.
She was the same woman.
Even then I’d only thought, *Damn, that woman’s something else,* but she really was something else.
…But something felt off.
Back then we’d both been wearing helmets and masks.
We’d barely brushed faces. How was that enough to leave an image in someone’s memory?
It didn’t make sense.
What was certain was this:
Right now I could never let myself get close to this S-rank woman, Ha Min-ah.
Getting tied up with her could completely break the mode.
So I told myself we’d just be the janitor and the guest instructor. We’d never cross paths.
At least, that was the plan.
“Cheers!”
“Cheers!”
*Clink!*
…Just not yet.