Walker Suit
The Shelter’s level-up turned the tragedy that had been bearing down on us into comedy in a single stroke.
The first Muscle Armor variant — the thing that had tormented us for more than ten days and left us shaking with terror — was now nothing but a formless bloodstain. The unfinished variant, cowed by that overwhelming display of force, must have sensed the danger; it turned tail and fled far away. For the first time in a long while, the Support Room’s massive screen showed a quiet, peaceful view of the outside world, free of any immediate threat.
“Wow… this really feels like a dream.”
Nam Jin-ju murmured, her face pressed against the Support Room window. A tremor of lingering wonder still clung to her voice.
“We’re actually safe now, right? Those monsters can’t touch us anymore, right?”
“At least for a while.”
Yeong-ju answered briefly, taking a sip of coffee, but clear relief was threaded through her voice.
We savored that peace as we began to tour our renewed Shelter — slowly, and with a flutter of excitement — to see with our own eyes every change the level-up had brought.
“Where should we go first? The bedrooms? I really want my own room now!”
Nam Jin-ju said it with a child’s giddy excitement, but Yang Jin-ju steered her firmly.
“No. The most important thing first. Somewhere that might be directly tied to how we live.”
The first thing we found was a room that had newly appeared beside the Power Room, labeled Resource Processing Room.
When the door opened, a rush of cool air from the massive machinery hit us, and our eyes fell on a colossal apparatus filling one entire wall. At its center sat a conveyor belt that looked like an intake chute, and beside it a giant touchscreen glowed with a faint light.
“What… is this machine even for? It looks like some kind of factory.”
Yang Jin-ju touched the screen and scrolled through the list — and a gasp burst from her lips.
“Wow! Oh my god, look at this! Clothes, shoes, furniture, even simple tools… It’s a machine that automatically manufactures anything on the list as long as you feed it the required materials!”
At her words, Yeong-ju and Nam Jin-ju both rushed to the screen. Their fingers flew across it in a frenzy of excitement.
“Wow! It’s real? Toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap — everyday essentials! And… oh my god, sanitary pads!”
Nam Jin-ju cried out in a voice that was nearly a sob. For the past few months, that had been a problem for the women every bit as desperate as survival itself. She ran her finger over the words on the screen — Sanitary Pads (Medium / Pack of 20) — again and again.
“Unni! Look at this! Cosmetics too! Skin toner and lotion! We can live like actual people again!”
“Look at this. Hiking boots and combat uniforms, too. As long as we have the materials…”
Yang Jin-ju scrolled the list with wonder-struck eyes.
“And where are we supposed to get the materials? That machine isn’t some alchemy box that turns rocks into clothes.”
Yeong-ju doused the excitement with her trademark cynicism, but a faint smile still tugged at the corner of her mouth. The simple fact that, with nothing more than the rocks and metal lying around us, we might once again enjoy the conveniences of civilization we had forgotten — that was a change that would fundamentally transform the quality of our lives.
We left the Resource Processing Room in high spirits and walked the corridor.
“Okay, next! Where’s next?”
A thrilled Nam Jin-ju urged us on. Then Yang Jin-ju pointed toward the Power Room door.
“Wait — let’s start there. Earlier, in the Support Room, the maximum power capacity doubled. We should check why.”
We opened the Power Room door and stepped inside — and were astonished all over again. Where a single transparent cylindrical pillar had once stood alone in the center of the room, two now stood side by side. Inside each pillar, a fist-sized silver sphere spun on its own, radiating a blue light. The room was filled with a pleasant, low whirrr of machinery.
“Whoa! There’s two of them now!”
Nam Jin-ju pressed her face right up against the glass pillar, marveling.
“So that’s… that’s why the power doubled.”
I stared at the two energy cores with wonder. This wasn’t just a change in numbers. It was proof that the Shelter itself was physically growing and evolving.
“It’s not a software update — it’s hardware expansion. This Shelter… it really feels alive…”
Yang Jin-ju murmured, her voice full of awe.
The second change was a newly appeared staircase leading upward, in a place that hadn’t existed before, right beside the Support Room. Curiosity pulled us up the steps. At the top, a dome-shaped room appeared — a massive hemispherical shell of transparent glass, like an igloo, covering the Shelter’s ceiling. From there, every view outside the Shelter unfolded in a full three-hundred-sixty-degree panorama.
“This is… some kind of observation deck? Nice view.”
I muttered, pressing my hand against the curved glass wall — and suddenly the glass in front of my eyes transformed into a giant screen, displaying the outside landscape magnified dozens of times. Beneath it, the words Manual Attack System appeared, along with a crosshair and a fire button.
“The auto-fire is already that good — why would we even need manual? Doesn’t it just burn extra power for nothing?”
I was saying it with a note of disappointment when Yang Jin-ju, as a test, locked onto a zombie shambling around far beyond two hundred meters — roughly three hundred meters out — and pressed the fire button.
A low, resonant thoom sounded, and a small explosion bloomed on the screen where the cluster of zombies had been. With a sharp bang, five or six of them scattered like dust in every direction.
Manual Attack System
Maximum Range: 300 m
“Whoa… the attack range is so much longer.”
Confirming the status window’s information, we were stunned once more. Under manual control, the maximum range was a full hundred meters longer than auto-fire. Now, even if a variant appeared loitering near the perimeter, we held an overwhelming strategic advantage — the ability to strike first.
Beyond that, just as Nam Jin-ju had hoped, two more bedrooms had been added, so that at last every one of us could have a room of our own. Yang Jin-ju and Nam Jin-ju lingered for a long time in front of the newly appeared Room 4 and Room 5.
“Wow… we’re really each getting our own room now?”
Nam Jin-ju said, her voice fluttering with excitement.
“Looks like it… Nice. We’ll have personal space, too.”
Yang Jin-ju answered with deliberate nonchalance, but a subtle note of regret clung to the end of her voice.
“But… sleeping alone at night might be a little scary… I only fall asleep when I can hear someone tossing and turning next to me.”
Nam Jin-ju pouted.
“Hey, it’s the room right next door. If anything happens, just yell. You’re a grown woman.”
Yang Jin-ju said it while ruffling Nam Jin-ju’s hair, but she, too, was remembering the nights of the past month — and the hellish stretch before that — when they had fallen asleep relying on each other’s warmth. It was a complicated feeling: a cool relief, and at the same time a small, quiet ache.
And the laundry room, which had once held nothing but a single washing machine sitting alone, had been transformed into a Full-Service Laundry and Drying Facility that handled washing, drying, and sterilization all in one go.
“Whoa! This is amazing too! Let’s try it!”
The words were barely out before Nam Jin-ju and Yang Jin-ju dashed to their rooms and came back with armfuls of the Shelter’s standard-issue gray tracksuits and black underwear they’d been wearing. The moment they stuffed the laundry into the machine’s intake, a blue scanner light swept over it once, and with a whirrr the machine started up.
The truly astonishing part began then. The laundry was sucked up through transparent tubes and automatically sorted into tops, bottoms, and… underwear, each vanishing into a different chamber. In particular, the sight of identical black undergarments tumbling together inside the largest, most visible central transparent cylinder before being drawn into the sorting mechanism was, from where I stood, a little… awkward. I looked away without meaning to and cleared my throat for no good reason.
“Well, well?”
Right then Yeong-ju sidled up beside me and whispered low into my ear.
“Hey. You’ve personally taken the underwear off all three of them. What’s with the sudden bashful act?”
At her mischievous words, my face flared hot as if it had caught fire. Yeong-ju watched me and snickered, thoroughly enjoying herself.
And last of all, we discovered the Food Processing Room. Feed food resources into the machine mounted on the wall, and it would process them however you wanted — dried, pulverized, compressed.
The excited mood that had carried us through all these wondrous facilities settled into something quieter in this final room.
“This machine, too… in the end, it only runs if there’s food to process.”
Yang Jin-ju said softly. We all nodded.
“Emergency rations are finite. Those machines in the Resource Processing Room are just hunks of scrap metal if we don’t bring materials in from outside.”
Yeong-ju continued.
“Everything leads back to the Hydroponics Room. If we’re going to keep living here, we have to get seeds somehow and fill that empty cultivation chamber. That’s our top priority.”
At her words, Nam Jin-ju’s face was no longer bright with excitement.
“So… we have to go outside again after all. If we want to actually use any of this.”
Watching their faces — the ones that had been laughing and chattering — settle back into the serious faces of survivors, I finally felt it land. The time had come to step out into the world again.
“So… we really have to go out.”
Nam Jin-ju murmured in a voice close to tears.
“No choice. We can’t live on emergency rations forever.”
Yeong-ju said it with a sullen look, but even her voice carried a heavy note.
And right then, a possibility rose in my mind like a shaft of light.
“…The Walker Suit.”
At my quiet murmur, all three women’s gazes swung to me at once.
“That’s right! That suit!”
Nam Jin-ju was the first to catch my meaning and cried out.
“It said we could use it at Level 2! So we can use it now, right? I completely forgot about it!”
At her words, hope began to kindle again in Yang Jin-ju’s and Yeong-ju’s eyes. She was right. We now had the most powerful, most reliable weapon for stepping out into the world.
“We have to test it — right now!”
“Yeah, let’s go to the Support Room this second! With that suit, gathering resources will be so much safer! We might even be able to go toe-to-toe with that muscle-monster bastard!”
Yeong-ju clenched her fist, a combative smile on her face.
We didn’t hesitate any longer. As if by prior agreement, we all broke into a run toward the Support Room.
When we arrived, the first thing that greeted us was the Walker Suit itself — no longer sealed inside a transparent cylinder, standing in full, imposing glory. Sleek armor in a harmony of black and silver, blue energy lines glowing here and there. It wasn’t mere machinery; it radiated a powerful presence, like living armor.
For a moment we simply stared at that armor of hope in reverent silence.
“…Can we really wear this?”
Yang Jin-ju asked in a trembling voice, as if she couldn’t believe it.
Instead of answering, I stepped up to the suit and ran my hand over its cold metal surface. Then I checked the system window.
◈ Status:Available
◈ Estimated Operation Time:12 hours
◈ Wearable Personnel:1
“…We can use it.”
At those few words, a cheer of pure hope erupted through the Support Room.
“Really? Wow! That’s insane!”
Nam Jin-ju bounced up and down like a child. I went on.
“The energy’s fully charged at a hundred percent, and the estimated operation time is twelve hours.”
At that, Yang Jin-ju’s eyes lit up.
“Twelve hours…! That’s more than enough for meaningful activity outside.”
And once more, hope-filled cheers rang through the Support Room.