Encounter (3)
Shuaaaaak—
The raging wind up here was nothing like anything on the ground, and it kept slapping against my face. My field of view stretched far wider than it ever had from a rooftop — SOS signals scrawled across building tops, thick acrid smoke pouring out of structures still burning, a hospital crawling with zombies even from this distance, and the sporadic thunder of explosions and gunfire. I climbed a little higher, and the whole of Incheon spread out beneath me at a glance, reduced to scattered dots.
And among those dots, certain ones stood out clearly — squirming, converging on a single point.
A zombie wave.
It was a tide so massive that anything I'd faced before couldn't even be called a comparison. I traced the movement paths of the larger clusters, and — no, it didn't even take prediction.
"...They're heading for the shelter."
Every zombie in Incheon was flowing toward the soccer stadium. In that moment, pure curiosity stirred in me. How was movement that systematic even possible?
Well, I'd stopped expecting things to make sense back when I watched a mutant punch a tank to pieces, but the way this horde moved was definitely unnatural. Was it the noise from the army's defense drawing them in?
As I stroked my chin and observed the wave, I noticed one of the streams had ground to a dead stop, jammed in place. I lowered my altitude toward it and immediately understood what was happening.
"Kyaeeeeeeek!"
A desperate battle was raging between the zombie wave and the soldiers trying to hold it back.
"Claymore! Blow the claymores, NOW!"
KWAANG—
The ground shuddered, and the fragments erupting from the claymores quite literally shredded the zombies at the head of the charge. The problem was the even greater swarm stampeding in right behind them.
Tat-tat-tat-tat—
"Don't ration your ammo! Empty everything you've got!"
With the commander's furious roar, the charging zombies crumpled and peeled away in droves. It still wasn't enough.
Keuraaaaaaa—
A hulking mass of muscle came barreling through from the rear, trampling even its own fellow zombies underfoot. When it swung its arm, the abandoned cars the soldiers had been using as barricades went flying in an instant.
"Gyaaaaagh! Sergeant! My — my leg!"
"It's a mutant! Kill the mutant first! Grenades, anything — throw everything you have!"
This time every ounce of firepower converged on the mutant as it hoisted a car overhead with both hands, like a man winding up a grenade throw.
KWAANG— KWAANG—
Grenade blasts thundered one after another while a K-3 machine gun spat fire without pause.
Tu-da-da-da-da-da—
Keuraaaaaa—
It seemed even this much firepower couldn't be ignored; the mutant's body began to stagger and shake as wounds bloomed across it. It tossed the car in its hand carelessly aside and crossed its arms in front of its face to shield itself.
But the soldiers weren't aiming only at the mutant. As their firepower concentrated on it, the suppression fire holding back the ordinary zombies naturally evaporated. Seizing the moment their wall of lead vanished, the zombies closed the distance to the soldiers' faces in the blink of an eye.
"Kyaeeeeeeek!"
"Ugh — uaaaagh!"
At that crushed-together range, firearms alone could never stop a wave. The soldiers on the front line went down one after another, and the line began collapsing like dominoes. From that moment on, it was a one-sided massacre.
Keuraaaaaaaa—
While the mutant pounded fleeing soldiers — soldiers who'd thrown down their rifles — into the ground with its fists, one man who seemed to have given up on everything cast his gun aside and looked up at the sky.
And his eyes met mine.
"...Huh?"
The soldier's eyes widened, and a small sound of wonder escaped him.
"Sav—"
"Kyaeeeek!"
The zombies swarmed the man even as his mouth opened toward me. Tears streamed from the eyes of the soldier pinned beneath them. I didn't need to hear the rest to know what he'd been about to say. Save me. Obviously.
Floating in the air, I extended my hand toward the mutant. I figured I'd try concentrating telekinesis on the back of that skull as it swung military vehicles around like weapons.
Keuraaaaaaa—
"...Can't do both at once, huh."
The instant my mana started draining away, I knew. Simultaneously maintaining levitation and striking a target with telekinesis was still beyond me. I gathered my mana back in and lowered my arm without a shred of regret. Then I resumed flying toward my original destination.
I could feel the soldier's final gaze boring into my back. But there wasn't a single reason in the world why I had to save him.
Swwiik—
After an hour, my feet touched solid ground again. It was the rooftop of an ordinary mixed-use commercial building. I could feel my mana had thinned noticeably from when I'd set out — sightseeing the zombie wave had delayed me far longer than planned. I needed a little time to recover.
I could see the long stretch of Yesullo road and, to its left, Jungang Neighborhood Park. A place that used to bustle with strolling pedestrians and flowing traffic.... Now the asphalt where cars were supposed to run was soaked dark with bloodstains baked dry by the sun. To my right, a five-minute walk away, stood the Incheon Metropolitan City Hall. Directly beneath that city hall lay my destination — the library.
Let me fill my mana at least halfway before moving.
As I pulled an energy bar from my inventory and ate, I spotted something walking toward me in the distance. If it had been just another zombie, it wouldn't have caught my eye like that.
Something with stubby little limbs was toddling down the middle of the road.
"...That's a kid, isn't it?"
Elementary school age, I could understand. Even with the world ending, if your luck was absolutely stellar, maybe — maybe — you'd still be alive. But... that one was way too young. Three years old, tops. A toddler strolling serenely down the center of the road as if it had wandered in from another world entirely.
"Creepy as hell."
At that moment, the toddler's footsteps stopped dead with a clack— and its head began turning, precisely, toward me.
You've got to be kidding me. It heard that?
Its entire body was folded in layer upon layer of rolls, like the Michelin Man. That went far beyond "a pleasantly chubby child" into outright abnormal territory.
Abnormal.
...A mutant.
The moment the thought formed, the child — which had only been quietly watching until now — opened a mouth entirely devoid of teeth.
"BAEAAAAAAAACK!"
A noise on a completely different tier from an ordinary zombie's roar slammed into my ears. It was enough to make my whole body sway for an instant. Hurriedly, I channeled mana and reached my hand out toward the mutant. Whatever that shriek was about to bring down on me, I wanted that gaping maw shut as fast as humanly possible.
Just like with the cult auntie, my hand trembled violently.
"...Shiiit. We're screwed."
"BAEAAAAAAAAAAACK!"
I tried to wring its neck — it didn't budge an inch. Its arms, its legs, no — its entire body was utterly immovable under my telekinesis. My eyes caught on the rolls of flesh blanketing the mutant from head to toe.
"Is that what they call the legendary isometric compression muscle?"
Further telekinesis was a waste. Whatever happened, I could just blast off into the sky — so I retracted my power and focused purely on recovering mana.
"Ugh — uaaaagh! What the hell is that thing!"
At the same moment, people began bursting out of the building right next to the one I was floating above: a man with glasses, a man taped over head to toe with books for armor, and a woman with her head hung low.
"BAEAAAAAAAAACK!"
Exposed head-on to that thunderous screech, the group's legs shook like aspen leaves. Unless the thing had been born with a microphone jammed down its throat, that was without question a mutant. But was losing its balance for a second by screeching really all it could do? It was almost insulting to compare it to the muscle-mountain mutant. There had to be more. And those people were probably about to show me what.
I settled in to watch them like a man at the movies.
"Wh — what do we do? When is Kang San coming out?"
"Goddammit, it's Kang San this, Kang San that every time you open your mouth. Move it, punk."
Shoving aside the anxious man with glasses, the book-armored man holding a baseball bat charged at the mutant and swung.
WHAM—
With a bone-jarring impact, the bat flew out of his grip, and the book knight began screaming in pure agony.
"Ugh — uaaaaaaaaagh!"
His right hand, bent at a grotesque angle, spasmed wildly.
You idiot. Like that was going to budge something even telekinesis couldn't move.
Behind the man sinking to the ground and sobbing, two more people came pouring out of the building.
"Gyeongmin! What happened?"
"Hy—Hyungnim! Th—that woman insisted she had to go out, threw this whole fu—fucking, fu—fucking fit, and so we..."
A man steadied the stammering man with glasses. Even from this distance, I could feel the aura of an absolute heartthrob radiating off his height and build.
...Should I kill him?
Alongside Mr. Heartthrob, a man in a tracksuit came out and propped up the collapsed book knight. The thick, powerful legs told me he'd been an athlete once.
"San! I've got a bad feeling about this!"
"Mount San! First let's pull Cheolsu back and get away from that thing—"
Kyaeeeeeeeek!
A zombie's howl tore straight through their frantic exchange. With the mutant's cry, the ground itself began to tremble.
There was a sight only I, floating higher than any of them, could see: zombies were sprinting toward the mutant from every direction, from far in the distance.
"Ah... right. The sound."
I could piece together the mutant's role. That bellowing was a kind of siren — a beacon to summon every sound-sensitive zombie in the area.
A mutant that screams the instant it spots a human, calling the whole wave down on them.
Sensing that something had gone badly wrong, the group snapped together into a tight huddle in seconds. The woman pressed right up behind Mr. Heartthrob shuddered, then began whispering something to him. Her voice was so quiet I doubted I could have caught it even with a superhuman body. Whatever she told him, Mr. Heartthrob started whipping his head around, as if checking on something — and the direction he turned was, from my aerial view, precisely the direction the zombies were pouring in from.
"Ayeong says more zombies are coming...."
"Hyung! It's her fault! If she'd just never said she had to go outside—!"
"I told you explicitly to just assess the situation. How did Cheolsu end up like this?"
"I — I, I told him to stay put! I swear I did!"
The tracksuit man checked over the whimpering book knight, then spoke to Mr. Heartthrob.
"San, he's in bad shape. We should fall back to the library."
"Getting to the library doesn't exactly come with treatment."
"Even so, I can at least try to set the bone once we're somewhere safe."
"I know. Let's just move, fast."
While I eavesdropped on the conversation, I waited for the woman to lift her face.
Come on. Please. Lift your head. I need to see your face.
More urgent to me than confirming these people had come from the library was seeing the face of that woman with her head bowed. The woman gripping the hem of Mr. Heartthrob's clothes shuddered once more — and raised her head.
The zombies were close enough now to pick out with the naked eye even from the ground. The moment I confirmed the face of the woman staring at that approaching horror, I raised my voice toward them immediately.
"If you stay there, you're all going to die!"
Every head in the group snapped up toward me. I waved my hand and shouted again.
"Come this way!"