April 1st (1)
8:00 a.m.
"Ugh...!"
A groan slipped out on its own. My head was spinning and my body felt heavy. But the light stabbing at my eyes dragged me, unwilling, up from deep sleep.
I pushed myself upright and looked around blankly. It was still my room. That, more than anything, sparked curiosity and doubt.
I'd figured the end of the world would bring some massive, earth-shaking change — and yet the empty landscape of my room hadn't shifted at all.
The only thing that bothered me was how dim the sunlight coming through the window seemed, even though it was morning. What time had I fallen asleep?
No, wait. What time had I passed out? Where was my phone?
I squinted and scanned the room. Found it — sitting in front of the computer. I snatched it up and hit the power button.
...Ah. Right. I clearly remembered the power going out the moment the day of ruin began. The computer monitor had gone black in an instant, and every light in the room had winked out as if on cue.
But phones ran on their own batteries, so... it should be fine, right?
It lit up with a soft click. Okay. Good. Battery-powered stuff still worked. And hey — seventy-five percent left!
The phone's clock read April 1st, 8:34 a.m. Eight hours and thirty-four minutes since the apocalypse had started.
And yet... aside from the power being out, nothing else seemed different. Wasn't the end of the world supposed to mean earthquakes toppling buildings, fireballs raining from the sky, and the agonized, terrified screams of countless people ringing out around the clock?
But even through the open window, I heard nothing unusual. No tremors. My room was intact. Aside from being a little darker than usual, the first day of the apocalypse looked almost identical to any other day.
There was a faint sense of wrongness rising from my own body, though... wait. Could this be—
Ah— hang on!
This phone... data and Wi-Fi were both disconnected. Did that mean calls were blocked too?
...Better check.
I hit the call button and dialed a friend at random. Yeah — Minsu.
[...]
Nothing. No ringtone. No connection tone. Nothing at all.
That could only mean phone calls themselves were impossible — the kind of dead silence you got deep underground or high up on some remote mountain.
I hung up and opened the messenger app.
Seventy... no, over a hundred and seventy unread messages. I didn't bother reading them all — just scrolled and scrolled down. The timestamp on the last message was...
That was the last one. Judging by how actively my friends had been chatting right up until then, everything — internet, electricity, the works — had been running normally right up until the stroke of midnight on April 1st.
...So the first anomaly this dying world chose to show wasn't the catastrophe I'd imagined. It started by simply cutting the basic infrastructure.
But I couldn't jump to conclusions from that alone. You never knew, right?
I hurried to the window, opened it, and looked outside.
Morning in XX City, Gyeonggi Province.
The neighborhood was nothing but low buildings — three stories was enough to see everything clearly. Well, this was a villa district, so that was only natural. Even the apartments around here weren't particularly tall.
XX City had a sizable population, but most of it was residential, so silence at rush hour was the norm on this street. At most you'd get a few old folks out for a neighborhood stroll making a little noise.
But today's streets...
"Ah..."
Shit...
Yeah. The apocalypse had arrived, all right.
The moment I spotted a person on the street and took in their appearance, I finally accepted it. The apocalypse I was going to survive was a zombie apocalypse.
There was a man near my house, slamming his head into the wall over and over. On any ordinary day I might have written him off as some weird old guy and moved on.
But with the apocalypse here, ignoring that bizarre behavior would have been the strange thing. His posture was wrong. The way he staggered was unsettling. More precisely, it looked like he was performing the same action on endless, will-less repeat.
Ah — he was turning his head. From the window, I'd be able to see his face clearly.
"Uuuuurrrgh..."
Shit. I shouldn't have looked.
His eyes were twisted in their sockets, and blood — not drool — was pouring from his mouth. The gashes on his skin were severe, and no matter how you sliced it, the flesh looked rotten and decaying.
A zombie. The staple of every horror movie. No question.
Aaaaaaaaaah!
The instant I felt it in my bones — that this world had truly ended — noise slammed into my ears. My body reacted before I could think, shrinking down and ducking below the windowsill.
No. No! What the hell was I doing, cowering like a coward all of a sudden?
Feeling ridiculous, I slowly straightened up to look outside again.
And I saw her. An unfamiliar woman sprinting desperately down the alley.
She was in bad shape. Blood was running from her shoulder, her clothes were torn in places, and she looked ragged on top of it.
Her face was frantic, desperate, as she fled. And now that I looked closer, one of her legs wasn't right either. She was limping slightly, straining with everything she had to put distance between herself and whatever was behind her.
"Help me — somebody help me...! Please...!"
My chest clenched. The way she screamed, begging for her life with everything she had — for a split second my body nearly threw itself out the window.
Of course, reason slammed on the brakes just as fast.
Why? Jump out a window to save some woman I didn't even know, who wasn't even particularly pretty? Had I lost my mind?
More than that — I didn't even know what she was running from. I wanted to save her just because she was hurt?
While that internal conflict churned, something slowly emerged from the alley.
"Grrrrrrr..."
A zombie. But this one was different.
For one thing, it was standing on all four legs against the asphalt. It was much lower to the ground than an ordinary person. And its face looked nothing like a human's.
No point dancing around it. It was a medium-sized dog. More precisely, a medium-sized dog that had become a zombie, drooling thick ropes of saliva as it locked onto the woman with predatory intensity.
That look... that was the look of something eyeing prey.
That dog saw her as a hunt — and it was about to take her down.
"Ah — aah...! Somebody help me, please, somebody help me!!"
The woman must have realized the dog was closing in on her. She cried out in despair and stumbled backward.
That was her mistake. Her already unsteady foot twisted, and she went down hard.
Thud!
"Grrrrr... woof, woof!"
And as if it had been waiting for exactly that opening, the zombie dog lunged.
"Kya — kyaaaaaaah!"
She screamed — and then the sound cut off.
Her throat vanished into the zombie dog's massive jaws with a wet crunch.
And just like that, she went limp.
I couldn't watch any more. I fled from the window.
I scrambled away and ended up in the bathroom. I'd hit my limit — I needed a toilet or a sink to explode into. The sink was right there, and I shoved my head into it.
"Uuurgh...!"
I threw up. All I'd had the night before was soju, so nothing but yellow liquid came up. It took witnessing two horrific scenes before my body finally rebelled.
Shit... I'd never seen anything like that even in the military — no, in ordinary life you couldn't even imagine something that grotesque. A human turned zombie. A human hunted down while trying to escape. And a zombie (dog) hunting humans.
Yeah. This was the scenery of the first day of a dying world.
And I had to survive this world. I had to live through this.
Why? Because I didn't want to die. No matter how hopeless the situation, I wanted to make it. I wasn't ready to die yet. Dying now would be too unfair to myself.
It would be like a butterfly that had just broken free of its cocoon, burning up like a moth before it ever got to spread its wings. I refused that. I'd only just secured my rights as a survivor — I wasn't about to let this once-in-a-lifetime chance slip away again.
Because yesterday, I—
"System, on...!"
Whoosh!
—had miraculously obtained the privilege granted only to survivors.
Roughly twenty minutes after realizing the zombie apocalypse was real, I became aware of the power I'd been given.
I finally remembered the last message that administrator bastard had thrown at me.
I spoke the words. The incantation.
And I saw it. The system window that revealed the power granted to me.
1. <Your Stats>
2. <Items & Gold>
3. <FAQ>
...Somehow, a window that looked like a plain, no-frills application had materialized in midair.
Apocalypse System. I could only say the naming sense was garbage.
No — they'd clearly decided the name didn't matter and slapped something together. You could tell just from the way that irritating administrator bastard talked. A guy who treated the end of the world like a joke was probably treating survival the same way.
Anyway, there were three options.
The first two I could roughly understand. Your Stats would display the game-character attributes the administrator had mentioned granting us, and Items & Gold would be some kind of inventory window — the kind you saw all the time in games and isekai stories.
But the last one, FAQ... I had absolutely no idea. What kind of menu was that supposed to be?