The Proper Way to Clean Trash Is to Do It All at Once
The motorcycle roared like thunder. The bike that had smashed through the gas station barricade tore apart the pitch-black darkness and raced toward the coastal lowlands.
When Ban first visited this camp, the trip had taken over thirty minutes. Now, with the throttle pinned wide open, he covered the same ground in barely ten. Jin’s jeep, trailing behind, had long since fallen out of sight, completely unable to match the machine’s insane speed.
From the moment they left until now, Ban hadn’t spoken a single word.
Not even a curse. The silence—lips bitten tight, throttle gripped so hard it might snap—felt suffocating. It was the complete opposite of his usual carefree, bouncing energy, and the weight of it pressed down like a lead blanket.
The lid had well and truly blown off.
Eve, clinging tightly to Ban’s waist with Haze’s outdated rifle slung across her back, stayed quiet as well. She had to be terrified, yet she endured the bike’s violent rattling without complaint. Good girl, Eve.
The motorcycle carved deep gouges into the sand before skidding to a halt. They had reached Anna’s survivor camp, tucked into a crevice along the coastal cliffs.
“Haa…”
A harsh breath tore out of Ban as he dismounted.
It was a slaughter. The sturdy scrap-metal wall Blackhead had helped erect was smashed to pieces. The shacks where people once lived were devoured by roaring flames.
The smoke clawed at his nostrils. The sickening stench of burning human flesh filled the air.
Without a word, Ban walked straight into the heart of the burning camp.
Familiar faces lay scattered across the ground. The gaunt adults who had greeted him with bright smiles on his first visit were now cold corpses.
His steps halted beside the collapsed remains of a brazier. One gruesome, blood-soaked bundle lay there.
The white-haired elder who had served that Michelin-star stew—disgusting as it tasted, it had been filled with genuine warmth. Anna’s grandfather.
Ban stared down at the body in silence.
The old man hadn’t been allowed a clean death. Every fingernail and toenail had been ripped out. His fingers were twisted and broken. His emaciated torso was covered in cigarette burns and marks from heated metal. In this fucked-up world, a genuinely kind old man like him had been tortured to death for one of two reasons: the thirty cans of pre-apocalypse preserved food Ban had given Anna a month ago, or simple sadistic amusement. The nauseating possibility that his own casual act of goodwill—his damned capital—had pushed these people into hell clawed at him.
Ban’s jaw muscles locked tight. His face showed no expression, but inside, a filthy cocktail of guilt and rage had completely obliterated his reason. He turned and strode toward the warehouse district where the flames burned hottest.
“Masteeeer! It’s dangerous! The flames are too fierce—it might collapse any second!”
Eve desperately grabbed his sleeve, but Ban ignored her completely and began tearing through the warehouse debris.
“Ah, seriously! So stubborn!”
Eve stamped her feet in frustration before finally gripping the rifle on her back and cautiously following behind him.
The camp was literal hell. Ignoring the fire, Ban ripped apart every corner of the food storage warehouse and living quarters.
Nothing remained but corpses.
The precious pre-apocalypse canned food he had given them, along with the daily necessities and water they must have traded for, had been stripped clean. Not a single hair was left behind.
Ban dusted the ash from his hands and muttered coldly.
“Confirmed. This was the work of those plunderer bastards.”
A harsh beep cut through the air. Ban slowly switched the device to speakerphone.
“Yeah. You find anything?”
His voice was completely flat. Dry as dust scraped from the middle of the desert.
“Argh, seriously! Ban! We’ve got a problem!”
“I swept the whole area with the satellite net, but it’s nighttime. Anything inside buildings or caves is just a blurry mess on thermal too. I can’t pinpoint ‘it’s definitely here!’”
“There are five possible scavenger hideouts around here where Anna might have been taken. I can’t narrow it down to just one!”
The briefing came through the speakerphone loud and clear. Jin and the mercenaries heard every word.
“Five locations?” Jin’s face twisted in dismay. “Even if they’re just a bunch of ragtag looters, searching five separate camps one by one will take too long. We have no idea what they might do to Anna while we’re split up looking. This is bad.”
His cold, realistic assessment hung in the air, but Ban’s expression didn’t change at all.
“Why is it bad?” Ban said flatly into the terminal. “Yui. Send all five sets of coordinates to my device.”
“Huh? They’re not even confirmed—what are you planning to do?”
“If they’re not confirmed, I’ll just kill everyone until I find her.”
That single sentence left Jin speechless, Eve who had been holding her breath speechless, and even Yui on the other end of the line speechless.
“They’re trash whose very act of breathing is a nuisance to society anyway. If we don’t know which one, we’ll just wipe them out from the first to the fifth in order. She’ll be in one of them.”
It was insane. To claim he would annihilate an unknown number of enemies in a single night with nothing but one bike and one jeep.
“Scatter to search? That sounds like it’ll take too much time to clear them one by one,” Jin challenged, repeating Ban’s earlier words.
It was a logical concern—if they went in sequence, they might be too late to save Anna.
“No. Yui will send the coordinates.”
Ban walked back to the bike and kicked the engine to life. The savage roar of the motor hammered their eardrums.
“My bike is twice as fast as that scrap-heap jeep of yours. I’ll go ahead, check if the kid’s there, then move straight to the next target. You guys just follow my trail and clean up whatever’s left.”
One man against a hundred. A crazy declaration that he would tear straight through the heart of a scavenger den and carve a path alone. Jin wanted to argue, but one look at those eyes told him this was neither a joke nor a bluff.
“You heard the man, you bastards! Coordinates received. Don’t lose sight of the captain!”
Jin checked the first coordinate on the terminal and jerked his head at the mercenaries.
“Eve. Stick with the bear crew. They’re more likely to get hurt than I am.”
Ban handed her the first-aid kit and clothing repair kit from the bike’s storage compartment.
“Eh…? But what about you, Masteeeer?!”
“I’m fine. I’m heading out first.”
The bike sprayed sand everywhere as it shot forward at breakneck speed.
Three minutes after tearing through the sandstorm and onto the coastal road, they reached the first coordinate—an abandoned seafood processing plant.
Two scavenger sentries sat in front of the main gate, chatting beside a bonfire.
Ban didn’t slow down. He twisted the throttle harder and slammed straight into them.
“Kyaaaaack!”
One sentry’s head was shredded by the wheel. The bike’s momentum sent him flying. Ban leaped off, combat knife already in hand, and drove it straight down into the second sentry’s eye socket.
At the thunderous noise, scavengers poured out from inside the factory.
“What the fuck?! Who the hell is this guy?!”
Roughly twenty of them. Instead of answering, Ban swung the assault rifle from his back into position.
Ratatatatat—!
The merciless burst of fire tore through the darkness and turned the chests of the ones leading the charge into bloody honeycombs.
“Crazy bastard! Shoot! Shoot him!”
The panicked looters tried to dive behind cover and return fire, but Ban was faster. He slung the empty rifle behind him, gripped the revolver, and charged straight into the middle of the enemy formation.
Bang—!
An armor-piercing round punched clean through the forehead of the man peeking out from cover. The next instant, another bastard swung a steel pipe. Ban twisted lightly, dodged, and drew the machete from his waist in one smooth motion. The blade sliced through the man’s throat.
The head tore away from the body. Using the spurting corpse as a shield, Ban blocked incoming bullets and fired the revolver over its shoulder.
Bang—! Bang—!
Emotionless. Efficient. Nothing but the methodical extermination of vermin.
The usual lazy bum who spent his days smoking and lounging around was gone. Anyone who entered within ten meters of him hit the ground before they could take three breaths.
“M-monster…”
One scavenger, shot in the leg, collapsed and tried to crawl backward. Ban walked over slowly and pressed the still-warm revolver barrel against the man’s forehead.
“You caught a silver-haired little kid today. Where is she?”
His voice was completely void of emotion.
“I-I don’t know! We didn’t even leave the camp today—!”
Bang—!
The revolver fired before the man could finish. There was no Anna in this garbage dump. Ban climbed back onto the bike and raced toward the second coordinate.
Five minutes after Ban left, Jin’s jeep screeched to a halt at the entrance of the first processing plant.
“Get out fast! We hit them from the entrance—huh?”
Jin, rifle raised as he jumped from the vehicle, froze mid-step. The ten Blackhead elites who followed couldn’t close their mouths.
A corpse with half its head ground off by a tire. A sentry with a perfect hole through his eye. Inside the factory it was even worse—bodies with heads torn clean off and chests turned into bloody sieves were piled like mountains.
“Where’s Master?”
Eve, on the other hand, looked completely unfazed. Then again, as a former Red Cross professor, a few corpses probably didn’t faze her. Shell casings littered the ground. The metallic stench rose from puddles of blood that hadn’t even cooled yet.
Not a single scavenger was left alive.
“He… that crazy leader… wiped all of them out by himself… in this short amount of time…?”
Jin felt goosebumps crawl across his skin. This wasn’t a battle. It was a one-sided cleansing.
“No time! Turn the car around—next coordinate, now!”
Shaking off his shock, Jin shouted urgently and climbed back into the jeep.
Second coordinate. A junkyard hideout slightly inland from the coast.
With a savage roar of exhaust, Ban’s bike smashed through the barbed wire at the junkyard gate and launched into the air.
“What the fuck! It’s that crazy bastard!”
Scavengers hiding among the wrecked cars burst out, guns raised. The moment Ban’s boots hit the ground, two grenades with pins already pulled were in his hands. Without hesitation, he hurled them into the center of the junk pile where the enemies were clustered.
BOOM—! KWAaaaang—!
Eardrum-shattering explosions sent scrap metal and severed limbs flying in every direction.
“Aaaaagh! My eyes!!”
Before the flames and dust could settle, Ban charged through the acrid smoke, assault rifle in hand, and opened fire.
Ratatatatat—!
Merciless rounds slammed into the backs of those fleeing behind burning wrecks.
“S-save… please save me…”
A scavenger missing a leg crawled forward, trailing blood. Ban didn’t slow down. He stomped the man’s head beneath his combat boot. A sickening crunch—his jaw was pulverized against the ground.
Another scavenger who had watched the scene up close pissed himself, mind broken.
“You. Silver-haired little kid. Where is she?”
“I-I don’t know! Kehuk! We didn’t do anything today—!”
Bang—!
The revolver bullet punched through the man’s skull. Standing amid the burning junkyard, Ban licked a droplet of blood from his lips with the tip of his tongue.
Then he pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag.
“Next.”
He swapped the magazine and turned back toward the bike.