Chapter 83
Chapter 83
The line on the other side of the phone suddenly erupted into chaos.
[Intruders! All personnel to combat positions!]
Yoon Imsu’s urgent shout rang out. But Picker (speaking as Thunder) responded in an extremely relaxed tone.
“Calm down. They’re not intruders. They arrived right on time. They’re allies—open the gate.”
“Allies?”
“Yes. The first residents of Mapo Police Station Shelter.”
Yoon Imsu frowned and lowered the phone.
Allies?
The Representative hadn’t mentioned anything.
But Thunder was the Representative’s proxy. His words couldn’t be ignored.
“…Cease fire. Open the gate.”
Creeeak—
At Yoon Imsu’s hand signal, the engineers slowly opened the massive front gate reinforced with 30mm compressed steel plating.
The moment the gate opened, a cloud of dust billowed outward.
Through it appeared an armed group in full combat gear.
New-model K-2 rifles, tactical vests, tactical helmets.
They were not a ragtag band of raiders.
They carried the bearing of well-trained regular soldiers.
There were troops like that in Mapo?
Behind Yoon Imsu, Director Han Daeman swallowed nervously and tightened his grip on his welding torch.
The engineers also swallowed dryly in tension.
The armed group on the other side looked equally wary after seeing the heavily fortified police station and the [Atlas Guardian] turrets positioned across the roof and walls.
A tense standoff.
The first to break the silence was Yoon Imsu.
Adjusting his glasses, he stepped forward with a polite yet unyielding posture.
“Nice to meet you. I am Yoon Imsu, Executive Director of Operations at Atlas Industries.”
He extended his hand.
The helmeted man leading the group flinched slightly.
After staring at Yoon Imsu’s face for a moment, he slowly removed his helmet and grasped the offered hand with his rough one.
“…Nice to meet you. I am Yoon Sungjun, Tactical Director of Atlas Industries.”
This time, Yoon Imsu’s eyes widened.
Tactical Director?
So the Representative had already assigned titles to key executives.
Behind them, both engineers and armed soldiers began murmuring.
Both groups belonged to Atlas—and even held matching titles.
But the two men did not release their handshake.
No—neither of them could.
Yoon Imsu’s gaze traced the scar near Yoon Sungjun’s eye and his strangely familiar features.
Yoon Sungjun also stared at the eyes behind Yoon Imsu’s glasses.
In a trembling voice, he asked in disbelief:
“…You’re Imsu, right? The Imsu I know?”
At those words, Yoon Imsu’s eyes shook.
“Sungjun… hyung.”
After the two groups merged, the police station became chaotic.
The engineers busily introduced the shelter to the newcomers, while the armed soldiers unpacked their supplies.
A short distance away from the commotion, in one corner of the yard—
Yoon Imsu and Yoon Sungjun sat side by side in camping chairs.
Their eyes rested on the massive iron gate standing tall ahead of them.
A steel wall symbolizing absolute safety—one that wouldn’t scratch even if a truck crashed into it.
Yoon Sungjun’s gaze shifted to the yard.
Instead of hard concrete like before the collapse, the ground had been covered with soft soil.
There, Sungjun’s daughter Yebin and two children from the supermarket survivor group were crouching together playing in the dirt.
“Hey! That’s mine!”
“No, I picked it up first!”
“I’ll give you mine.”
The children’s innocent laughter echoed within the fortress walls.
A peaceful scene unimaginable in the outside world.
Watching them warmly, Yoon Imsu casually asked:
“What’s her name?”
“Yebin. Yoon Yebin.”
“She looks like you.”
“They say the eldest daughter resembles her father.”
“That’s true.”
Silence followed.
Yoon Imsu, thirty-four.
Yoon Sungjun, thirty-six.
They were cousins.
Until high school they saw each other during holidays and ancestral rites.
But once they became adults and grew busy surviving, contact gradually faded.
Then the world overturned.
Ten years—the time it took for mountains and rivers to change—passed over hellish ruins.
It wasn’t an exaggeration that they almost failed to recognize each other.
With a bitter expression, Sungjun looked at his daughter playing in the dirt and asked:
“Uncle and Aunt… they’re still alive, right?”
“…I don’t know. I kept searching after the collapse, but I never found a trace. They’re probably gone.”
Yoon Imsu answered calmly.
In this world, no news meant death.
“What about my father?”
“He died. That day.”
At the weight contained in the words that day, Yoon Imsu fell silent.
The Day of Descent.
Everyone had lost at least one family member that day.
Trying to change the mood, Sungjun switched topics.
“How did you meet your wife?”
“I met her while working in a hunting squad at Ahyeon Shelter. She’s a good woman. Married a man with nothing and suffered because of it.”
Sungjun smiled faintly.
Then he realized his cousin sitting beside him was still single.
“What about you? Thirty-four isn’t young. These days people marry even in their teens.”
“I’ve been too busy surviving to notice time passing. In a world where clocks and calendars are rare, romance is the last thing on your mind.”
Yoon Imsu chuckled.
Many children of the EZ Generation didn’t even know their own birth dates.
Celebrating birthdays and counting age had become a privilege reserved for those who remembered the world before the collapse.
“True. We’re busy just surviving, yet here we are talking about marriage. Feels like a family holiday gathering.”
“Exactly.”
Both men burst into laughter.
The relief of meeting blood relatives in the ruins—and a strange sense of kinship.
“So how did you end up here? Tactical Director and all.”
“Don’t even ask. I used to be a non-Awakened.”
Yoon Imsu scanned him with his Administrator trait.
He seemed like a high-grade Awakened.
“The Representative… that Bomb Maniac made me like this.”
Sungjun calmly began telling the story, his voice filled with reverence.
Their first meeting at Hyochang Park.
The moment when a rope of salvation fell from the sky as raiders nearly killed his family.
And the miracle when the man injected a syringe into his neck and forcibly awakened him.
“…Can you believe it? After awakening, the world looked different. A three-dimensional grid spreads before my eyes, and enemy movements become obvious. To me, that man is practically a god.”
Yoon Imsu’s mouth fell open as he listened.
He himself had awakened from a single injection from the Bomb Maniac—but he hadn’t realized combat-type Awakenings could also be artificially created.
“And you? I heard you’re from Guro Foundry.”
“Similar story. I thought I’d spend my entire life working like a dog under Choi Manseok. But the Representative recognized me…”
Yoon Imsu shared his story.
The humiliation of rising to second-in-command despite being non-Awakened.
The overwhelming technology and vision the Bomb Maniac displayed—ten years ahead of everyone else.
And how he awakened with the Administrator trait.
“The Representative said he would ‘rebuild civilization.’ At first I thought it was madness. But… look at this place.”
Yoon Imsu gestured toward the high walls and rooftop automated turrets.
“This was built in just a few days.”
“…Ha. So those turrets were his work.”
“Yes. In his mind already exists a world beyond what we can imagine.”
Yoon Sungjun shuddered as he looked up at the turrets.
Combining the power he had witnessed with the technology Imsu described made Atlas’s scale feel overwhelming.
“Don’t you think he might really change this rotten world?”
“Yes. That’s why I decided to bet the rest of my life on him.”
Their gazes met.
Something deeper than blood ties was forming—camaraderie forged by belief.
“Kyaaa! Daddy! I built a castle with dirt!”
At that moment, Yebin waved her muddy hands at Sungjun.
He smiled and waved back.
“Right. A place where children can run freely like this. For now it’s just this police station…”
“Someday it will be all of Mapo District—no, all of Seoul.”
Yoon Imsu said with firm conviction.
Safety and peace unimaginable outside.
Protecting and expanding this place—
That was the burden the two directors now carried willingly.
“Excuse me, Directors?”
A combat engineer cautiously approached from behind.
“Team Leader Lee Mira is looking for you. If you’re finished talking, she asked you to come to the situation room on the third floor for the full briefing.”
Yoon Sungjun and Yoon Imsu stood simultaneously.
Brushing dirt from their clothes, they exchanged grins.
“Let’s go. Time to work.”
“Yes. We have to earn our meals.”
Their steps held no hesitation.
“They were cousins? I thought they looked alike.”
—Seems so, sir.
On the monitor, Yoon Sungjun and Yoon Imsu were still talking emotionally.
But that wasn’t important.
On the desk sat a crude steel box.
A package the Machine Society’s sergeant had sent, claiming it contained useful information.
“Let’s see if it’s worth anything.”
I released the lock and opened the lid.
Inside were only two items.
A crumpled old map.
And a glass bottle sealed with wax, filled with a black liquid.
I casually picked up the bottle and broke the wax seal.
The moment I did—
“Ugh—!”
A terrible stench stabbed my nose and made me turn away.
Picker, hovering nearby, recoiled in horror.
[AAAGH! Boss! What is that smell?! Chemical warfare alert! Chemical warfare alert!]
“Stop overreacting. You don’t even have a nose.”
[My sensors feel like they’re burning! It smells like rotten blood mixed with waste oil! Did that sergeant try to chemically attack us?!]
“As if the Bomb Maniac would fall for chemical warfare.”
But Picker wasn’t wrong.
The smell was horrific.
The foul gas of rotting corpses mixed with sticky machine oil.
Holding my nose, I shook the bottle.
The liquid was thick and viscous.
Pitch black—almost absorbing light.
“Let’s check the map first.”
When I unfolded the map, I saw a red X marking a point somewhere underground near the boundary between Yeongdeungpo and Mapo.
There was a note scribbled beside it.
“This is crude oil mined by the Machine Society?”
That was shocking news.
“Picker, run an analysis.”
—Yes, sir! Running it with a virtual nose plug!
You don’t have a nose.
Why are you becoming more human by the day?
Whir—
The analyzer spun and displayed a component graph on the monitor.
[Analysis complete]
[Primary component: Hydrocarbon mixture (88%)]
[Impurities: Organic residues, sulfur, nitrogen]
“Hydrocarbons…? This is really oil?”
My eyes widened.
Oil.
The black gold that had sustained human civilization before the collapse.
But after the collapse, all refineries were destroyed, making it an almost extinct resource.
According to Yoon Imsu, the military occasionally imported small amounts from the United States.
Considering the Capital Defense Corps expeditionary forces still operated tanks, that guess was likely correct.
Oil occasionally appeared for sale on Union Market as well.
That was the reason Porter and Shadow could still run vehicles.
But the liquid in this bottle was astonishingly similar to crude oil.
—Boss! Look here! DNA has been detected!
The secondary screen Picker displayed flashed red warnings.
[Detected DNA: Giant Rat, Contaminated Wild Dog, Sewer Alligator…]
“Mutant DNA?”
Don’t tell me…