Clash with the Scavengers
Ji-yun kicked off the ground and launched herself at the bastards. Startled by her blinding speed, the enemies froze for a split second. In that moment, her club whipped toward the one at the front carrying a baseball bat.
A chilling whoosh cut through the air as the club swung in a wide arc. The guy barely managed to raise his bat to block it.
Thud! “Kyaaaaah!!”
The bat shattered into splinters. The impact sent him flying backward, tumbling across the floor. He somehow staggered to his feet, but both arms hung limp at his sides. They were clearly broken.
“What the hell is this?!” The others stared at their fallen comrade in disbelief, eyes wide with shock. Even the machete-wielder who had been hanging back frowned deeply as he locked his gaze on Ji-yun.
“These aren’t ordinary bitches. How the hell did she do that in one hit…”
The machete-wielder growled and barked orders at the rest of the trash.
“Me, Seong-tae, and Squinty will take the club bitch. Chang-nam and Baldy, you handle Ju Si-eun. They look like they’ve got pretty high levels, so watch yourselves. I’m taking back everything I said before. These aren’t women we can go easy on.”
Whoa. So he wasn’t a complete idiot after all.
The moment they received their orders, the bastards charged. Three on Ji-yun, two on Si-eun. Ji-yun weaved between their swinging weapons, lashing out with her club whenever she saw an opening. The enemies knew better than to meet her weapon head-on; they focused entirely on dodging, refusing to clash directly.
These really weren’t ordinary thugs. Their movements were sharp. Whether they’d been fighting goblins or humans, it was obvious they had hunted hard. No one moved like that without experience.
Still, Ji-yun had been grinding through close-quarters combat with goblins for a while now. Even outnumbered three-to-one, she didn’t look particularly strained. Her stats were high to begin with, after all.
Si-eun, however, was a different story. This was her first real taste of melee. Her movements were so clumsy it was almost embarrassing to call it combat. Still, her stats weren’t completely hopeless, so she somehow kept dodging the attacks.
Then the guy attacking her with the wooden sword suddenly shifted into a strange stance. He drew the sword all the way back. A sharp whistle split the air as the blade shot forward like a bullet and sank deep into Si-eun’s shoulder.
Damn. That was fast. Had to be a skill.
“Kyaaah!!”
Si-eun collapsed. The scythe-wielder who had been about to finish her off suddenly froze.
“You idiot, what are you waiting for?!”
“B-but… it’s Ju Si-eun. It’d be such a waste…”
The scythe guy never finished his sentence. Si-eun’s spear had already punched straight through his chest.
“Chang-nam!!”
“Keheuk… fuck…”
The man called Chang-nam toppled backward, dead before he hit the ground. Si-eun yanked her spear free, breathing hard, and forced herself up. Her stabbed shoulder burned with agony. She could barely move it. Still, she steadied her breathing and turned her eyes toward the remaining enemy.
Ji-yun was completely focused on evasion. Every time she dodged one strike and tried to counter, another attack immediately followed. The enemies slipped away from her occasional swings with ease. The four of them continued their tense exchange, neither side managing to land a decisive blow.
Then the baseball bat guy’s footwork tangled. A clear opening appeared. Ji-yun’s club flew straight into it.
Crunch!
The club smashed squarely into his face. It didn’t explode like a goblin’s would have, but there was no question he was dead. In an instant, one more was gone.
As the body fell and Ji-yun relaxed for a fraction of a second, the machete came slicing through that tiny gap. Wrapped in faint white light, it carved down into her shoulder and bit deep toward her chest.
“Kyaaaaaaaaah!!!”
Ji-yun dropped to her knees. The bastard smiled in triumph. That was when black smoke suddenly erupted from her wound with a violent hiss.
“What the—?!”
The panicked machete-wielder waved his hand to disperse the smoke. In that moment, Ji-yun’s club swung again and slammed into his ribs.
“Keheeeuk!!”
The machete guy was sent flying. He smashed into the wall and flopped lifelessly to the floor.
Only one enemy left.
“Hiiik!!”
The last bastard screamed and swung his bat at Ji-yun’s head. She took the hit directly and answered with her own club at the same time. It was a mutual exchange, but the results were anything but equal. Ji-yun collapsed to the floor. The man who took her club strike vomited a huge gout of blood and flew backward.
Ji-yun writhed on the ground, groaning in pain.
“Ah… it hurts…”
She had taken down three in the blink of an eye, but now she was down too. The wooden-sword guy facing Si-eun finally realized he was the last one standing. He dropped his weapon and raised both hands.
“I-I surrender! Please, I surrender!”
Si-eun pressed her spear against his throat.
“Back off. Now!”
The guy stumbled backward. Si-eun immediately ran to Ji-yun.
“Ji-yun!! Are you okay? Oppa! Please help!!”
At her cry I rushed over as well. Ji-yun’s condition was obviously critical. Her face was massively swollen from the bat strike and leaking black smoke. The machete wound on her shoulder was split wide open, the inside completely visible. Any normal person would have died long ago. But since she was already dead, she could only writhe in agony.
Looking up at me with desperate eyes, Ji-yun pleaded.
“O-oppa… it hurts… it hurts so much…”
“It’s okay. Just hold on a little longer. I’ll heal you.”
Siphon Hand
The black smoke that flowed from me was sucked straight into Ji-yun’s wound. The injury closed up almost instantly.
Whoa. The room was spinning. That wound must have been worse than it looked. My life force had been drained hard. As dizziness hit me and I staggered, Si-eun gasped and quickly supported me.
“Oppa? Are you alright?”
I leaned on her and answered.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Healing you guys uses my own life force, so it just made me dizzy for a second.”
By now Ji-yun’s wounds had fully closed. She looked at me with guilty eyes.
“Oppa, I’m sorry… I made you use your life force on me…”
“What are you talking about? Of course I’m going to heal you. I can always replenish the life force later.”
I walked over to the guy still standing with both hands in the air. He had been staring in blank shock at the sight of Ji-yun, who had been half-split open moments ago, now completely healed. When I got close he flinched violently.
“I-I surrendered!”
Hmm. That voice. Now that I heard it up close, I was certain.
“There’s a guy with them too? What are you going to do about him?”
“Just leave him. He’s mine. Don’t touch him. I’ll be the one to kill him.”
“You disgusting homo bastard…”
“It’s you, right? The disgusting homo bastard.”
“…Pardon?”
I stepped right up to him. Honestly, getting this close to a guy like him made my skin crawl, but the skill I wanted to test only had a range of one meter.
I stared at him quietly and activated Siphon Hand.
Siphon Hand
A powerful sucking sensation hit me as his life force poured in.
“U-uhhh… uheeeek…”
Strength surged through my body while the guy’s face turned paper-white. Then, like a mummy drained of every drop of moisture, he shriveled up and collapsed to the ground. The homo bastard twitched violently for a moment before going completely still.
Remote Siphon was pretty damn useful. It worked without me even needing to touch him.
With my life force completely replenished, I walked over to Si-eun and healed her shoulder as well.
“Thank you, Oppa.”
Si-eun rotated her now-flawless shoulder a few times as she spoke.
Time to finish this.
Out of the six pieces of trash, only two were still breathing: the machete guy who had taken a club strike to the ribs and the one whose arms had both been broken at the very start. The machete guy looked terrible. Blood kept pouring from his mouth while he twitched helplessly. He’d probably die on his own if left alone.
I called out to the guy shivering deeper inside the corridor. He was the one who had survived the early fight because both his arms were already broken. Trembling, he staggered over to us.
“Alright. Answer my questions properly and I’ll let you live. Lie or dodge a single question and you’ll end up like the rest of them. Got it?”
He looked at the corpses around us and nodded frantically.
“W-will you really spare me?”
I slammed my foot into his shin with full force.
Crack!
“Haaaaaaaak!!!”
He rolled across the floor, screaming in pain. That leg was definitely broken too.
“I said answer the questions I ask. Don’t ask any of your own. Do that shit one more time and I’ll kill you on the spot.”
“Yes… I understand…”
He answered through gritted teeth, enduring the pain. Good. No more nonsense.
“First question. How did you know about this place?”
“N-Narrow Eyes told us. He saw women entering this building…”
“Narrow Eyes?”
“Yes. Th-that short bald guy lying over there. That’s Narrow Eyes.”
I glanced at the corpse he indicated. Ah, that guy. The one whose footwork failed at the very beginning and took Ji-yun’s club first.
“He has a skill called Hawk Eye that lets him see distant places as clearly as if they were right in front of him. We just called him Narrow Eyes. He’s usually on lookout duty because of that skill… He told us he saw women going into this building, so…”
“Aha. So you all rushed over here in a big group to fuck the women?”
“W-well, that’s…”
He mumbled, unable to answer. I pressed him again.
“You said he was on lookout. What exactly were you guarding against?”
“There’s a survivor group up ahead. Inside OO Station. We came from there. If you spare me and send me back, the treatment won’t be bad. So please…”
“Shut up. Let me think.”
Hmm. So the place they came from was the survivor camp we were planning to visit tomorrow? I had assumed they were just a random band of roaming trash. Since things had turned out this way, gathering information about the survivor group in advance seemed like a good idea.
I continued the interrogation.
“So the survivor group sent you here?”
“N-no, that’s not it. It was that guy Kang Tae who led us here.”
“Kang Tae? Who’s that?”
“The one holding the jungle knife over there…”
Ah. So the machete guy’s name was Kang Tae.
“Tell me everything from the beginning. The full story of how you ended up coming here.”
When I stepped on his broken leg again, he finally started talking.
“Excluding Narrow Eyes, the five of us were responsible for food procurement in the survivor group. We went outside to gather supplies. Today, after we came back from outside, Narrow Eyes told us he had seen women entering the building across the street…”
“Why tell you guys? Shouldn’t he report something like that to your leader?”
“W-well, normally yes, but…”
“But?”
He shut his mouth again. When I lifted my foot to stomp on the broken leg once more, he flinched and hurriedly continued.
“S-sometimes when Narrow Eyes finds decent-looking women while scouting, he tells Kang Tae. Kang Tae had asked him to report any good women he spotted. Then we would slip out by ourselves and…”
“Rape and kill them?”
“K-kill? We just played with them a little—”
“Cut the bullshit. I heard everything. You said you’d fuck them once and then kill them because you were scared it would reach the boss’s ears.”
“…..”
The trash stared at me in open shock, as if wondering how I knew.
I asked again.
“This boss you keep mentioning. That’s the leader of the survivor group, right?”
“Y-yes.”
“Tell me about him.”
Not much time had passed since the monster outbreak, yet this guy had already gathered survivors, built a hierarchy, and assigned specific roles like guards and food collectors. From the way the trash had spoken about him on the stairs earlier, it was obvious they were terrified of him. Just from that information alone, it was clear the boss was no ordinary man.
“Th-the boss is an incredible person.”
The guy began to speak about the boss, his entire body trembling with fear.