Silence Isn't Golden—It's a Scream for Survival
The stench of rot stabbed into his nostrils, making it feel like his lungs were melting. Ban pressed his body against the dimly lit corridor where moonlight barely reached.
The moment he opened his mouth, the disgusting mud-like smell of Eve's camouflage cream flooded in, nearly making him puke.
Ha, fuck. I'm gonna hurl.
But making any unnecessary noise right now was absolutely off-limits.
Chzzt—
A faint burst of static crackled in his earpiece, followed by Yui's voice.
[Ban, you there? If you can hear me, tap your earpiece once.]
Ban tapped the earpiece in his ear once with his index finger. A tiny mechanical tick vibrated against his eardrum.
[Okay, signal's good. Right now there are three Walkers clustered together in the lobby ten meters straight ahead. They're tangled up with each other, so crawl along the wall. And whatever you do, don't speak.]
Like I didn't fucking know that, you bitch.
Ban swallowed the curse and scanned his surroundings.
The floor was littered like a minefield with shattered glass shards and Walkers whose limbs had been severed so badly they could only crawl in place.
Normally he could have sliced them apart while scratching his balls with one hand, but not right now.
If he fucked around here and even one of them let out a scream—or if a gunshot rang out—hundreds of those "track-and-field athletes" sprawled throughout this shithole would come pouring in.
Ban slightly bent his knees and relaxed his body.
Then he began dragging his feet in time with the rhythm Walkers usually made.
Scrape. Thud. Scraaaape. Thud.
Oscar-worthy acting.
It looked completely idiotic, but the Walkers shambling nearby didn't notice a thing.
Eve's camouflage cream was pumping out the stench of their own kind, and his perfectly mimicked Walker footsteps completed the disguise.
It looked like he'd be able to pass through the first floor without much trouble.
What the hell? This is easier than I thought.
[Mr. Ban, freeze for a second.]
This time it was Haze's voice. Ban stopped dead in his tracks like a statue.
[Look at the pillar at eleven o'clock. It's a mutated variant.]
Ban only moved his eyes, scanning the pillar.
Aw, fuck. Talk about shit luck. Of all things, it's an eye-mutation variant.
Unlike the other Walkers blankly staring at the floor or walls, this mutated bastard was clinging to the pillar and staring straight ahead.
Its abnormally enlarged eyeballs were bursting with blood vessels, and its unnaturally smooth skin made it look even more disgusting than the regular ones.
[I can't provide covering fire from my position. Shooting inside the building would make them go berserk from the noise... Yui, explain it to him.]
I already know, damn it.
[Got it, sis. Ban, I've calculated the exact timing when that thing turns its head. When I say "now," sprint immediately. But you have to kill the sound of your footsteps. Got it?]
Are you bitches insane? "Kill the sound of your footsteps and run" my ass. You make it sound so fucking easy.
Ban swallowed the string of curses rising all the way to his throat.
There was less than twenty minutes left before the camouflage cream expired.
[Ready... Now!!]
The instant Yui gave the signal, Ban kicked off the floor.
Silently. Explosively.
In the brief moment the mutated Walker twitched its head, Ban hurled himself behind the massive sculpture in the lobby.
Thud!
"...!!"
Unfortunately, a half-rotted Walker was lying right where he landed.
Ban stepped on its head and chest, barely catching his balance before he could fall.
The sickening crunch of its bones echoed through the lobby.
At that sound, the mutated Walker clinging to the pillar twisted its head 180 degrees, staring directly toward Ban.
[....!]
Even the breathing of Yui and Haze over the earpiece stopped dead.
Ban froze, still standing on the rotten corpse, holding his breath.
His lungs felt like they were about to burst, but he didn't let out a single puff of oxygen.
That suffocating silence felt like it lasted an eternity.
But the eye-mutated variant's gaze was relentless. Without dropping its suspicion, it slowly began crawling down from the pillar.
Every time its grotesquely long, bony limbs touched the floor, a nauseating scraping sound of tick, tick clawed at the air in the lobby.
It was coming closer, shaking its ugly fucking face to confirm whether the shadow behind the sculpture was prey.
Five meters. Three meters. One meter.
The rotten breath washed over the sculpture. Ban swallowed every curse he could think of.
[Mr. Ban! It's going to scream!!!]
Haze's urgent voice came from her position atop the rubble outside, scope trained on the creature's head.
Scream.
Exactly what it sounded like—a dog's howl that called its fellow Walkers, signaling the start of a hunt.
At the same time, Yui's voice overlapped.
[Ah, fuck! Run, Ban!!]
The mutated Walker's hideous jaw split open like a snake. It was about to unleash a dog-like feeding cry that would echo throughout the entire building.
Ban kicked off the sculpture and shot forward, skimming the floor.
Shunk—!
Before the creature could even fill its lungs with rotten air, the machete slicing through the darkness pierced straight through its thin neck.
Its vocal cords and larynx were crushed whole. Boiling blood surged backward.
The scream never made it out of its mouth—it exploded into bloody mist inside its throat.
Ban immediately drew the knife with his other hand, completely severing the head, then roughly caught the collapsing bony body with his left arm before it could hit the ground.
It wasn't heavy enough to make the floor shake much, but he did it to prevent any disgusting noise from the glass shards and metal plates scattered across the floor.
He dragged the eye-variant behind the sculpture, laid it down, and pulled out the machete.
Dark red blood splattered, but it was a silent assassination—no scream, no sound of a body collapsing.
[...Whoa. I'll give you that one.]
Yeah, I have to admit it. That reaction speed and judgment. Fucking top-tier.
Yui's impressed voice came through the earpiece. Ban wiped the blood off the blade onto the creature's clothes and cracked his stiff neck.
[Timer at 17 minutes. Ban, hurry! The target is inside the second-floor office.]
He moved silently down the inner corridor on the second floor.
This wasn't just a dusty abandoned building anymore.
The farther he went past the lobby, the clearer the trails of dark, dried blood dragged all the way to the office door became.
The walls were covered in frantic fingernail scratches and bullet holes from large-caliber firearms, riddled like honeycombs.
These were fairly recent marks.
"......"
These stupid fucking Walkers couldn't fire guns.
Right. These were the traces of humans making one last desperate stand against the monsters.
Must be around here.
When he turned the corner, the double doors to the second-floor office were firmly shut.
Or more accurately, they had been barricaded from the inside with heavy metal cabinets and desks stacked layer upon layer.
[I can't see inside from my position anymore.]
Haze's dry report echoed in his earpiece. Instead of answering, Ban peered through the gap in the door.
One of the metal cabinets in the barricade had been crushed and warped by the Walkers' brute strength, leaving a narrow gap just wide enough for an adult man to squeeze through.
He held his breath and wriggled his body through the opening.
His vest scraped against the torn metal with a faint sound, but fortunately there were no Walkers in the hallway.
He stepped inside the office. As expected, it smelled like absolute shit.
The stench of human guts and blood rotting mixed with the usual disgusting Walker odor, creating a vomit-inducing cocktail.
[Ugh... What the hell is this? I'm watching through the screen and I still feel like throwing up.]
Yui, who was watching the feed through the lens on his chest, made a retching sound.
Please don't make puking noises... You're gonna make me puke too.
Six human corpses and several Walker bodies were strewn across the office floor where moonlight leaked in.
The humans had been completely crushed—heads smashed to pulp or spines ripped apart so violently they couldn't possibly rise again even with the Walker virus.
Ban's gaze moved past their gruesome state to the torn bulletproof vests they wore. The black tactical uniforms had the clear emblem of Unchained on the shoulders.
"Unchained inquisitors. Looks like all the Walkers inside here got wrecked too?"
Ban muttered quietly, keeping his voice low.
[What? You acted like you didn't know earlier when I explained, but you knew everything?]
Yui sounded surprised.
"Shut up."
[It looks like the transport team Vanessa sent got pinned down here. They were chased by a horde of Walkers, barricaded themselves in this room, but eventually...]
Just as Haze had analyzed.
In the middle of the room, the desperate traces of them fighting tooth and nail to protect this pathetic little box even as they died remained perfectly intact.
A crude portable generator was humming lowly, and on top of the special cooling device connected to it sat the target listed in the request—a pure white metal box radiating cold air.
Ban approached the cooling device.
But right in front of the box, the upper half of a Walker lying on the floor suddenly jerked its head up.
Fuck, that scared me.
[Ban. Careful. If it screams here, all the ones on the first floor will come up.]
Yui's warning scratched at his earpiece.
Ban lowered his stance.
Right above the Walker's head on the floor were wires tangled with the portable generator.
If he cut it wrong with his knife, he might sever a wire or destroy the cooler, triggering who-knows-what kind of bullshit variable.
Ban gripped the knife in reverse and carefully closed in from the front. The creature sensed his presence and opened its jaw.
Thud.
He stomped down hard on its lower jaw with his combat boot, slamming it flat against the floor.
Its jawbone shattered, its mouth completely sealed against the ground. At the same time, Ban's knife drove vertically through its temple.
A precise takedown without touching a single wire.
The body of the Walker with a knife in its head convulsed twice before going limp.
Finally, he reached for the pure white box on top of the cooling device.
[M-Master... Wait a second!!]
Eve's voice slammed into his eardrum through the earpiece. She sounded quite worked up.
[Can you bring the camera lens right up to the box? I need to clearly see the serial number written on it!]
"Why?"
[Hurry!]
Ha, fuck. What now? So annoying. Is this the weight of being the head of the family?
Suppressing his irritation, Ban leaned over the box. The lens scanned the pure white metal surface.
On the bottom right of the box, instead of the Unchained emblem, a barcode-style serial number was faintly engraved alongside the words Project: Chimera-V.
[...The holy relic my ass.]
Eve's curse came through the earpiece.
This name. He knew it.
[Master, that's not some holy relic. It's a special culture fluid the Red Cross was secretly supplying to Vanessa.]
"What is it?"
[The most concentrated mutation promoter ever made by grinding up the survivors Vanessa sent along with Walkers.]
Haze's voice followed after she'd finished processing Eve's explanation.
[Like an ampoule made by mixing survivors and Walkers? There's no way they'd inject something like that into the Valkyries... She must have wanted to raise some kind of monster on the side.]
[Exactly! That's not a serum, it's a straight-up disaster! If that thing breaks... this entire abandoned building will turn into a nest of mutated variants!]
The earpiece was ringing with noise, but Ban's expression barely changed.
Whether there was human juice or monster blood inside, he couldn't give less of a shit.
After crawling through all this dogshit hardship to get here, what did it matter?
"What do you want me to do about it? We still have to retrieve it and take it back. Are you idiots?"
He picked up the box with an indifferent hand.
The moment the box was pulled from the cooler, a red flashing light underneath it suddenly began blinking rapidly.
"What the hell is this? It's flashing like crazy? Whoa, fuck. I'm not a thief. I came to return it to the owner."
[Ban, what the hell? The Walker bastards are suddenly all rushing into the building? No, even the ones already inside!!!]
"Huh...? Suddenly? What is this?"
Ban's face crumpled mercilessly.
Only the red light kept flashing. The room was eerily, bone-chillingly quiet.
[It must be a frequency alarm device!! Be careful, Master!!]
Eve shouted.
Through Haze's scope, the sight of hundreds of Walkers that had been circling the rubble outside and wandering the first-floor lobby all grotesquely twisting their heads upward toward the second-floor office was captured perfectly.
The silence Ban had felt was only by human standards.
A slaughter frequency that drove these rotten monster bastards insane was now spreading throughout the surrounding area with Ban at its center.
The camouflage timer still had over ten minutes left—plenty of time.
But that no longer meant anything.