Securing the Base (2)
— Clack. Clatter. Clunk.
They had found the medical room, but the inside was caked in blood and filth.
After sending the others out for a while, he set about renovating the place as cleanly as he could, leaving every medicine he had already gathered lined up on the shelves.
Ordinarily he would have had to scavenge scrap metal and wood, cobble together a makeshift workbench, and tear apart about twenty crates just to grind Construction skill levels — but a Crafter came with the ability built in.
— Clink.
He collected the broken tiles and reassembled them through the crafting kit. A simple talent for gathering “waste” materials and repairing with them. Where other classes had to hunt down specialists and put in requests, a Crafter could handle it alone.
“Good. That should finish the tiles.”
He laid a detergent-soaked rag over the grime-blackened covers. The way his body moved on its own was still strangely fascinating. The reek of old blood that clawed at his nose. Spiders, zombies, and even a Hammerhead — three fights already. He had been hauling heavy loads and moving for hours on top of that. The moment he stopped working, he was certain he would collapse. Yet like a character he had pushed right up to the edge of sleep, his body kept wiping away the bloodstains without pause.
— Scritch, scritch.
In an apocalypse world, infection was the most terrifying disease of all. Rooms that unsterilized people filed through constantly. Patients left in filth and blood — it would not take long before every kind of sickness set in. They would waste away and die. Antibiotics would have been nice, but those were hard to come by, and even basic pharmaceutical work needed several people trained in pharmacy. Unless you lucked into multiple pharmacists by chance, you had to build a school first… none of it was easy.
“Alright. Done.”
But if you treated a wound before infection took hold, that was enough. With a clean medical room and a decent grasp of medicine, patching someone up was not that difficult.
— Rumble. Chug-chug-chug…
As if on perfect cue, someone had managed to get the generator running. The incandescent bulbs on the ceiling began to flicker slowly to life. There was a sink inside the medical room, but that required checking the water tank first, so it was off-limits for now.
— Slap.
He pulled on the rubber gloves from the emergency medical kit and kicked the door open with his foot.
“How is she?”
“…A lot better. Aside from the yellow fluid that keeps seeping out of the wound.”
“Looks like the antidote is working. Alright, then. Let’s get her in.”
He lifted her onto the cot and set a metal basin under her leg. The moment he pressed near the wound, a rush of blood-mixed fluid welled up and spilled free.
“…We’ll need to leave it like this until most of the poison drains out. She’s going to be weak, so we should cook up some porridge for her.”
“I’ll look for canned goods.”
“Not right now. Things will come looking once they catch the blood smell and the sound of the generator. Without even a basic barricade, Ms. Sarah will be in danger.”
“So, the metal furniture?”
“Exactly. Blocking the hallway with unused metal drawers would work fine for now.”
Curtis, who had been holding Sarah’s hand for a moment, slowly parted his dry lips.
“There are plenty of welders nearby. You’ve probably figured it out, but this bunker is ‘almost’ finished. In the sections where the living quarters and electrical work aren’t fully done, tools like that are everywhere.”
Then they were lucky. Being able to weld from the very beginning would harden the barricades and raise the durability of improvised weapons too.
“…And.”
As Hyunwoo emptied the drained neurotoxin into a nearby plastic bucket and brought the basin back, a hand settled on his.
“Sorry about earlier.”
Hyunwoo tore a handful of gauze from the emergency kit and pressed it to the seeping wound. Using the rare alcohol swabs here felt wasteful — but once they built a brewery, they could produce as much as they wanted.
“I understand. Family matters.”
Characters bound by blood almost always had extremely, extremely high affinity for one another. Even a slightly hostile action could send them into extreme reactions — sometimes to the point of bloodshed. There had been times he tried to recruit a survivor with excellent traits, only to discover they were family to a raider he had already made an enemy of, and the resulting reunion had been tears and blood. Of course, treat them well and the whole family would try to repay you in kind.
“Do you have family?”
“An entire family making it into a bunker isn’t exactly common.”
“…Right. Sorry.”
Once the bandaging was finished, Hyunwoo handed Curtis a bottle of ibuprofen he had found on the shelf.
“If the pain gets too bad, give her one with water.”
“Painkillers?”
“Yes.”
“…Alright.”
Hyunwoo tossed the rubber gloves and the metal basin into the plastic waste bucket. In the game, disposal had just meant throwing things into a fire. Here it was probably going to get a little… more complicated. In the countryside people burned plastic and vinyl together, but the stench was absolutely foul.
“As soon as Mr. James gets back, I plan to head out and work on the barricade.”
“…You’ve pushed yourself hard enough. Rest here. I’ll take the watch.”
“No. Tomorrow I’m not going to be able to move anyway.”
Originally everything was supposed to be split and paced carefully. With a Fatigue system in play, combat demanded proper rest. Overexertion demanded proper rest. Mental shock demanded proper rest. Skip that and the debuffs to Strength and Agility hit hard and direct.
— Creeeak.
He turned toward James as the man opened the door and came in, then lightly blocked him with an arm as he tried to rush over while dropping his gear.
“We just finished treating her. I wouldn’t recommend touching the wound with unsterilized hands.”
Oil and grease were smeared all over James’s hands and arms. His eyes found Hyunwoo, but they were not as rough as when Hyunwoo had been brewing that “suspicious” medicine.
“….”
Sarah was breathing easily now, fully asleep. James flinched a few times, then bowed his head.
“…Thank God.”
He staggered, dropped to his knees, and leaned against his gun as tears hit the floor. No way he could take him along for work like this.
Hyunwoo quietly picked up the waste, stood, and closed the door.
Barricade materials meant wooden scrap or scrap metal. The scrap metal was needed for tools right away, so the only option was to smash the supply crates lying around nearby.
— Crunch.
He scored the weak points with a knife several times, then pried the pieces free. A few more rounds of that and the planks came cascading down. He dumped them into the crafting space he had marked out in white chalk, and his body took over from there — stacking the boards in the right places, driving in nails scavenged from the broken crates. The idle thought of how strong thin planks could really get was cut off by the waist-high barrier that had already taken shape.
“…Looks pretty solid, actually.”
“Ah.”
James set down several sheets of steel plate and a few bundles of planks beside him.
“Brought some materials for reinforcement. And… I heard you were looking for a welder.”
It was exactly the portable welder combat engineers carried in the game. With this, he could push development up another full tier. A few steel plates, wooden boards, and about eight nails — that was enough to build a proper workbench, not this jury-rigged portable crafting kit. And from a proper workbench, a few materials could spit out military firearms. Only civilian models, and single-shot at that — but still. Magazines and rifle rounds too. Critical tools.
“…Sarah. That girl is my one and only daughter.”
“If you’re trying to apologize, I’ll take it in the form of that welder.”
“No. I feel like I need to say this.”
Still gripping the welder, James sat down and smoothed his thick beard once.
“My father is a war hero. Before everything went to hell, the government used to invite him places. He toured the old battlefields doing interviews.”
“Normandy.”
“Normandy. Yes. Not that Father was ever that proud of succeeding as a soldier.”
He had called survival pure luck, hadn’t he. A killing ground where countless men were chewed up by machine guns. The blood and bullets that punched through the defenses and built a beachhead. There were reasons he did not remember it fondly.
“But the son of a successful soldier naturally ends up admiring his father, and everyone around him pushes him down that same road… so I enlisted too. Same unit as him.”
He cleared a tight throat with a cough, pulled a water bottle from behind him, and wet his mouth. Hyunwoo had no reason to refuse when it was offered. He was exhausted too.
“I went to Iraq when my daughter was six. Came back alive from a battlefield of shells and bullets. Some people call it an easy war, but goddammit. There’s no such thing as an easy ‘battlefield.’”
“People getting shot.”
“Comrades screaming. Machine guns dumping brass like crazy. Pulling the trigger at targets you can’t even see.”
James took the bottle back, finished it, and tossed it into the waste bucket. The quiet corridor rang for a moment.
“That much was fine. Whatever anyone said, it was a war for my country, and I got to come home alive to my daughter. But.”
“But?”
“Around the time Sarah was ten. I got a message that her mother was doing something weird with a restaurant employee.”
“…Ah.”
“Whether it was because she was growing up sharp, or because it was revenge against a mother who neglected her every day… that little kid just snapped photos on her phone at random and sent them all to me.”
A long sigh. The mood sank.
“I quit the military at forty. After that I focused only on my kid. I can swear to God I never neglected her again, but something my father said stayed driven into me like a nail.”
“…What did he say?”
“That the military uses the sweetest word of all — patriotism — to make you give up the most precious thing you have.”
“….”
“You have no idea how horrible it is for a child to sit there while her parents tear each other apart in court, shoving words at her she can’t even understand. And even so… that girl was smart enough, brave enough, and proud enough to know what was right and what was wrong…”
Two tears dropped onto his beard. A hairy arm wiped his eyes.
“Thank you for saving my daughter, Mr. Hyunwoo.”
His composed, deep voice filled the corridor.
“If there’s any way I can repay you — anything at all.”
This kind of attitude almost certainly meant affinity had broken past a certain threshold. From freshly accepted into the community to fully recognized as one of them, maybe. In that case…
“If we want the barricade to stop bullets, I need several more steel plates. Nails and boards too.”
“…Is that enough?”
“Well, it’s not like I can ask you for money, right?”
“There’s a small diamond on my wedding ring.”
“Eugh.”
“If you want it. I clawed one of them back from that bitch anyway. Completely useless now.”
What good was a diamond going to do in an apocalypse. Hyunwoo caught the hand that had actually started digging through a bag.
“…No. Really. That’s enough.”
“But getting caught up in my daughter’s condition—”
“Helping people in the same community is the natural thing to do. Isn’t it?”
Hyunwoo pulled the mask hanging from the welder and settled it onto his head. A sudden memory of his character going blind because he had skipped the welding mask the first time he cleared the tutorial and reached the welding stage.
“So me helping your daughter was natural. You bringing me materials right now is natural too.”
“….”
“There’ll come a day you save me. That’s enough.”
He left James standing there without a word. Muscle pain was starting to creep in. He needed to finish the work before he could not move.
He lowered the welding mask and lit the welder. A blue flame flared and lit the darkness bright.
“Go grab those steel plates for me. I can tell you want to get back and rest with your daughter.”
His body moved on its own, gathering a few scraps of iron to form the mounting points that would join the plates to the barricade. A shadow fell over him for a moment, as if someone were watching.
— Pat.
A light clap on his back, then footsteps heading down the rear corridor.
— Tss-tss-tss. Tss-tss-tss-tss.
He started feeding the wire. Bright sparks leapt up.
Earning this much trust already. How much more were they going to freak out once he started turning out rifle rounds on a proper workbench?