Worship, or Jealousy (3)
"Th-those people... Red Pink, Girl's People Friend, and... My Berry! Three of JM Entertainment's flagship girl groups!! And on top of that... Kyaaaaaaah! That blonde with the blue eyes...! Juni! It's Juni! The real Juni is standing right in front of me!"
It was as if the perfect person had arrived as reinforcements, ready to scratch exactly where I itched.
The celebrities Jung Yun had been wailing about over her beer — the ones who hadn't been at the broadcasting station — had suddenly appeared all at once. Along with several people who looked to be their managers, most likely.
"Ah, th-that person... I've seen her on TV. Y-yeah, the idol who won some kind of arts award a while back!?"
"Oh, that name does sound familiar... Is that really Juni?"
"Aaaah...!"
Sora, Mina, and Seyeon all fixed their eyes on Juni, then raised their voices in agreement as if chiming in on cue.
Behind them, Yeji and Seonhye were staring at the woman called Juni with wide rabbit eyes of their own, clearly just as stunned. Only Jung Miju remained indifferent, quietly distributing relief supplies to the others without so much as a glance.
"...Haa. Yes, that's right."
The woman called Juni didn't deny our guesses. She simply let out a hollow sigh and offered an awkward smile, as if this kind of reaction was all too familiar.
Even I, who had never paid much attention to Korean idols, found the name Juni fairly familiar. One of my friends had been obsessed with the girl group she'd led — Tranche something-or-other.
According to him, among all the female idols in the country, Juni was the one who had held the top spot for five straight years without ever slipping. She'd displayed unmatched skill and leadership within the group, carried them through their golden age, and even after going solo in her third year, she'd thrived.
What made it even more impressive was that she hadn't just been a top star in Korea — she'd broken into Southeast Asia, Japan, and even the United States, racking up serious success along the way. That much, at least, I'd caught on the news.
It was only then that I'd actually seen her face, and I remembered sniping at my friend's gushing with something like, Well of course she does well overseas looking like that with the blonde hair and blue eyes. But is she even Korean? According to him, she had European blood on her father's side or something.
Talent, looks, and the charisma of a group leader. Even now, with the apocalypse well underway and the world in ruins — even dressed in filthy clothes and looking the worse for wear — this idol named Juni still radiated a fraction of the charm she'd had in peacetime.
And that was the person leading this group of survivors. Remarkably enough, still alive.
Not everyone had been standing or sitting on solid ground when they heard that absurd announcement.
Some people had been out at sea, aboard ships, staring up at the enormous text scrawled across the empty sky. Others had been high above in airplanes, forced to endure that irritating voice and the giant timer stretched across the heavens.
And among the countless aircraft cutting through the open sky, there was one plane carrying several idol groups returning from overseas tours, along with the entertainment company staff supporting them.
Numbering in the hundreds, they had been chatting cheerfully aboard the passenger jet, enjoying the flight home to Korea — until that uninvited voice made them frown and crowd against the windows, staring out into the void.
And nearly every single one of them started talking with the same thoughts in mind.
"What the hell was that voice?"
"Is the world actually... ending? For real?"
"Come on, no way... You really buy that? How many times have we fallen for hidden-camera pranks?"
"They're probably just cooking up some weird stunt for airtime again!"
A good number of them were entertainers who'd been burned by the broadcasting industry's cheap tricks more than once, so they tried to laugh it off. Even the staff from the entertainment agencies insisted it might be some massive TV program that was fooling them too, desperately trying to deny what was happening.
Of course, after they landed at Incheon International Airport... the moment the clock struck 00:00 on April 1st, they began experiencing a reality that blasted the words "hidden camera" into the farthest corners of their memories.
"Uwooooogh...!"
"Aaaagh, stay away! Stay away from me! Kyaaaaaaah!"
"Jinhee, why are you— Kraaaaaagh!"
"S-save me! Somebody save me!"
Zombies. And monsters. They came crashing down without warning and tore people's lives apart.
The perfectly normal person standing next to you turning into a zombie and sinking their teeth into your throat took only an instant. Hordes of zombies clogged the airport corridors, hunting humans and turning the place into pure pandemonium. To put it simply: hell had opened its gates.
Faced with a situation like that, a group of entertainers who had never once fought for their lives... were seized by despair in the blink of an eye. Already, half the people who'd been on the same flight had either become zombies themselves or been caught by zombies and monsters, reduced to prey with their lives snuffed out.
"Everyone... pull yourselves together! We can still make it! Think about the message that appeared a few hours ago! We've been given the power to survive this!"
In the middle of that deranged, rock-bottom reality, there was someone who soothed the others and held their mental fortitude together.
It was Juni. Real name: Min Ju-won. From the moment of her debut, she'd been praised as a genius — a woman who bloomed with idol talent and carried herself with a maturity far beyond her teenage years.
"Sehee. You remember, right? We promoted the same game! And you, Jiyoon! Your agency was a promotional ambassador for that game too, wasn't it? A while back. You installed it on your phones. That's why you got the system. So don't just give up — think about how to use it!"
She and the entertainers with her, along with the staff from the entertainment companies, shared a surprising common thread. They had all done TV commercials or radio spots promoting Brave Saga Online, and most of them had at least nominally created accounts for the game.
Of course, the majority had poked around for an hour or two before quitting — but some had gotten deeply hooked and reached high levels.
And among those high-level players was Juni. As if in reward, she had been granted a class and a system. And not just any class — a rather rare one.
Warrior — Magic Warrior.
A hybrid class that used both physical and magical attacks, notoriously difficult to level in the early game. But the higher your level climbed, the more it showed its true worth — a late-bloomer class that plenty of Brave Saga Online players raised as an alt...
...or so Sora explained to me. Directly. Right — my companions and I were hearing Juni's whole story in real time. And I'd naturally(?) made up with Sora enough to actually talk to her again. Hallelujah!
Anyway... Juni was one of the rare breeds in that game. In other words, she'd stubbornly stuck with the unusual class she'd picked at the start, pushed through every hardship, and seen it through to the end.
Armed with that class, and wrapped in the kind of charisma that could lead her comrades, Juni managed to escape the airport. She crossed the bridge connecting the island to the mainland and somehow managed to take shelter in the city.
During that time, enormous hardships crashed down on her and her companions. Day and night without rest, zombies, goblins, orcs, and countless other monsters — along with those who had once been human — picked off the huddled survivors one by one. A group of (former) entertainers that had numbered nearly in the hundreds was reduced to mere dozens in no time.
They endured and endured through the grief, and then a tiny stroke of luck found them. The number of monsters decreased.
Of course, that was the result of the Area Boss — the Vampire Lord — drawing countless monsters from Seoul and Gyeonggi Province up toward Gangbuk. Juni and her party finally caught their breath and set about securing a solid building to use as a survival base. Until things settled down and everything went back to normal, they told themselves. That was the condition they set.
But another trial came crashing down on Juni's group. There was a faction that left deep wounds on both their bodies and their minds.
People they had trusted with good faith turned around and inflicted serious torment on Juni and her companions.
Not monsters. Fellow humans.
"We thought that once those grotesque monsters and zombies disappeared, things would be okay. If we gathered the other people nearby and bolstered our numbers... we figured we'd manage somehow. We thought everyone would share the same desire to reach out and help each other. Of course, every last bit of that was completely wrong. Once the monsters vanished... it was humans who started threatening other humans' lives. And in ways so petty and vile I don't even want to put them into words..."
Carefully sipping the warm tea and bottled water we'd handed out, a blanket draped over her shoulders, Juni — leader of this group of entertainers — laid out a lengthy explanation without stumbling once. The other survivors, too, were finally starting to pull themselves together, finding some comfort in the relief supplies we'd brought from Seoul.
"Originally, we were heading for northern Gyeonggi Province, not Seoul. Seoul had those dark clouds hanging over it, and... the Administrator had even dropped a hint that an Area Boss was stationed there. Of course, that choice... handed us the absolute worst outcome."
Whenever an apocalypse or some massive social disaster hits, there are always people looking to profit off other people's suffering. And the fact that most of this survivor group were entertainers only made things worse.
Villains drawn to good-looking people tried every method they could think of to suck Juni's group dry. Some approached with coaxing and persuasion. Others came with outright violence. A few even tried intimidation through open kidnapping attempts and sexual demands.
The fortunate part was that both sides were low-level survivors at best... but that advantage only meant the wounds to Juni's group's minds and bodies were inflicted slowly, gnawing away at them over time.
In particular, one incident after the Area Boss fell was what solidified their resolve to head for Seoul.
"In northern Gyeonggi Province... there's a truly garbage human faction running wild. Absolute trash. They must've banded together with people just like themselves — randomly beating people, stealing food and supplies, and any decent-looking women they found... they..."
Shudder...!
I could see Juni's hand trembling as she gripped her cup tighter. She must have been recalling those scenes — her face was flooded with barely contained fury.
"...Those bastards prowled through Gyeonggi and Incheon, kidnapping our people left and right... ambushing us whenever they got the chance... Every single day was agony. Before that, we'd managed by moving our base around, but... once those bastards started harassing us, it just wasn't sustainable. And right then, a notice went up that a Sanctuary had been created in Seoul... so we finally decided to leave our hideout. Even if we couldn't get inside... everyone figured being near Seoul would be far better than staying there. Myself included."
Of course. The deeper an apocalypse goes... the more people discard any consideration for others and start actively causing them pain, chasing material and psychological pleasure without restraint.
Plunder, arson, murder, rape. A group that committed those acts without shame had finally come into existence. The bandit gang we'd run into in Gangnam would look like a bunch of sweethearts next to these bastards.
...Honestly, if I'd gone even a little off the rails in the early days of this collapse, I might have ended up committing the same kinds of atrocities, drunk on my own power. I had a completely different system from everyone else, and I was strong enough to casually smash zombies and goblins.
I felt the tiniest flicker of gratitude toward Lawful Good. Without that goddamn hao-che speech filter, that value system would have been something I'd carry for life. Well — I couldn't exactly claim those values were absent from my actions and beliefs even now.
"Hmm. A violent group operating between northwestern Gyeonggi and Incheon... Threat level set to 'High'..."
Kim Seyeon was taking Juni's testimony seriously enough to carefully jot down notes.
In practice, I was the one patrolling the boundary line inside and out, watching for any monsters that might come crashing into the warehouse, while Kim Seyeon and the others handled looking after the rescued people.
"Ehehehe... I get to collect signatures from every member of Red Pink, My Berry, and Girl's People Friend! Hoooh, living this long really does pay off! Ah, I've got to brag to the kids when we get back!"
"Unnie Yun... I haven't seen you this excited in forever."
"When else am I going to get something like this, Mina? But you really don't want any?"
"I'm fine. Besides... never mind."
Jung Yun, bantering back and forth with Mina, was genuinely over the moon. She was openly handing out relief supplies to the celebrities and collecting autographs in the process.
But where had she even gotten that paper? Ah — she was peeling the stuff stuck to the walls of this warehouse. Then where'd she get the pen?
Wait a second... someone's missing. Not among the rescued people — among our group. Seeun. Park Seeun. I couldn't see her anywhere in the warehouse.
I asked Mina about Seeun's whereabouts.
"Ah, Seeun? You know that other building you sent people to hide in earlier, Orabeoni? She went over there to deliver relief supplies."
"Wait, she went alone?"
"Actually, she volunteered. Said that at times like this, the person with the most stamina and nothing to do should be the one putting herself to work."
"Hmm..."
I was a little uneasy, but I understood how Seeun felt, so I had nothing more to say. Ever since we'd started taking on serious work like dungeon raids, the division of roles in our party had gotten a bit... unbalanced.
When we went into dungeons or faced powerful monsters, Han Sora handled sniping, Yun Mina handled sniping and casting various spells, and Kim Seyeon handled recovery and buffs through holy magic.
But the role Park Seeun filled left her with far too little to do compared to the others. Put generously, she was my support. Put ungenerously, she was little more than a spare as long as I didn't die.
Thinking back on the major fights we'd been through, Park Seeun truly had little or nothing to do. At best, her biggest contribution was slamming the ground to pin monsters in place.
Earlier, too, I'd stopped her when she tried to step up and only given her the minor job of assisting Sora and Mina. Her body must have been itching for action.
I was worried, but I wasn't going to stop or scold someone who'd volunteered to help. When she got back... I'd at least give her some praise.
Hmm. Actually, maybe I could use this as a chance to have a frank talk with Seeun. That might bring us closer. Of my four women right now, my relationship with Seeun was the most distant and awkward.
"I was wondering what that was... so you made a door like this?"
"Ah, Seeun!"
"Seeun, welcome back!"
Speak of the tiger and it appears.
Park Seeun stepped into view through the wall I'd smashed open — or rather, the door. The rescued survivors flinched slightly at the sight of her walking in so casually.
Apparently they'd had some rough experiences with uninvited guests barging in without warning.
"Whoa, she's... really pretty too."
"She's in athletic wear. Maybe she was in sports?"
Ah, never mind. They were just surprised by Park Seeun's looks. Not to brag, but my women's appearances had been growing more dazzling by the day.
Anyway, I approached Seeun with the intention of giving her some encouragement after her big job(?).
...I absolutely would have done exactly that — if Seeun's expression hadn't been frozen in something that looked distinctly unpleasant.
"Good work, Seeun. I heard you helped the survivors hiding in the other building... Did something happen?"
"Ah, yes. Well..."
Even after I spoke to her, Seeun's expression didn't soften.
"...Hoon oppa. Just a moment."
Seeun suddenly grabbed me and pulled me over to a corner of the warehouse. I didn't resist her touch, letting myself be led along. Park Seeun glanced blankly at our other companions — who looked baffled by her behavior — and at Juni's group, then locked her gaze on me.
And in a lowered voice, laced with a fair amount of hostility, she whispered into my ear.
"You're planning to go meet the survivors gathered at that other building... the gas station, right, Hoon oppa?"
"Yeah, for now. I was the one who rescued them."
"...Don't. No — the people gathered here in the warehouse seem fine, but... the ones hiding at that gas station? I think you should just leave them. I mean it."
It was a coldness I never would have expected to hear from Seeun — far too frigid for comfort.