An Impossible Hoard in the Apocalypse
He swallowed.
A message window granted only to the awakened. It was the first time he had actually seen one, and the letters that surfaced were sharp, unmistakably real.
"Potential EX, on top of that? Don't tell me I had talent all along?"
The higher the potential, the better. It raised the odds of receiving a good trait, and even the same trait could vary wildly in effect depending on it.
...Maybe it's all right to hope.
He waited for the next message. Not every awakened was the same; the trait decided the role. Those who received a combat trait were a minority, and awakened who received a genuinely good trait were rare to begin with. Whatever came up would decide his fate.
"...Status window."
Name:Lee Minhyung
Trait:Porter
— You gain a space in which objects can be stored.
He read the text slowly, chewing over every word. A moment later his mouth opened on a hot breath.
"It's garbage..."
He had wanted a combat skill if he could get one. Failing that, a production skill would have done. A craftsman or a cook was worth more than some half-baked fighter. But Porter?
"This is way too much."
A support skill of the plainest kind. He couldn't fight zombies with it, and he couldn't make anything either. All it let him do was store a lot of things. Nice to have. Perfectly fine to live without.
"...Damn it."
The bigger the hope, the deeper the letdown. Wasn't this supposed to be the moment a cheat skill showed up? Traits were random, sure, but even so. Would it have killed them to hand him a single enhancement skill?
"If this is all I get, don't bother calling it EX."
On the off chance, he tried the ability. A small space opened in the empty air. He tossed an object in, and it slipped inside without resistance. Beneath it, an icon appeared, game-like. He pressed it, and the object popped back out with a little bounce.
"...That's it?"
Storing something didn't make him feel its weight. Whatever he put in, he could take back out as he pleased. Put another way, that was the whole of it. A skill whose entire purpose was moving objects.
"Still, the uses are pretty much endless."
Hide a weapon and draw it for an ambush. Keep gathered evidence somewhere safe. At the very least, hide something. He could even haul a whole pile of supplies in a single trip, just like that.
"The old me probably would've liked this better."
Even so, he couldn't help the regret. What he wanted right now was combat power.
"Anyway. Maybe it's too early to sit here moping."
He would have to study, carefully, how to put the thing to use. His revenge had to move forward one step at a time regardless.
For the first time in a long while, he was out on a mission as part of a raid team. Shin Wijun's team, no less.
"Ugh, what a pain. Mission? What mission."
"I'm glad to be out for the first time in ages, though?"
"Is your head a flower garden? Zombies could show up any second, and you're glad?"
"......"
Listening to Yang Ayun and Choi Ari chatter, he walked at the very back. Counting the one currently in the hospital, the team was five in all. Shin Wijun strolled with a woman on either arm. Lee Minhyung was always last. Once, that had been to cover the rear. Now the larger part of him simply wanted as much distance from them as he could get.
I wanted to blow the evidence open without even coming on this mission.
Yoo Hina's death had changed things. The nominal purpose of this mission was, in fact, the search for the fallen Yoo Hina, and he hadn't wanted to refuse that.
"Hey. You are actually watching our backs, right? You're not about to stab us from behind, are you?"
"If you know that much, watch yourselves. You never know when an axe might come flying at the back of your head."
"Ugh! Seriously. I don't know why Wijun even dragged that guy along."
He found that part a little strange himself. The man had forced him onto the mission with an air that was half a threat.
Well. If he wants me right beside him, that suits me fine.
At a glance the outside looked more dangerous, but it wasn't. In the apocalypse, people had always been scarier than zombies. There was no telling when Shin Wijun might decide to kill him. If the inside and the outside were equally dangerous anyway, then a situation like this—one where anyone could see the chance to kill him—was the better of the two.
And I can put the ability to use while I'm at it.
Every time they searched or rested, he kept busy. Things he would normally have left behind because of the weight—objects, resources—he could take every last one of them. Naturally, the fact that he had an ability like this stayed a secret.
"Hmm. How about we rest here for a bit."
Shin Wijun pitched a tent in a secluded spot. The diligence of spreading a tent for nothing more than a rest. There was no way that bastard was doing it without a thought in his head. What he was after was something else entirely.
"We'll head in, then. Keep a good watch."
Shin Wijun took his women into the tent, and they followed with flushed faces. Calling it a tent was generous. There was no soundproofing, and the outlines of their bodies showed straight through the fabric.
"Ahn... Wijun... that tickles..."
"Haa... nnh... right there, just like that... ahn..."
Lewd sounds soon drifted out. The women's moans, and the sound of skin. His orders were to stand watch in front of the tent and listen to it.
The more I think about it, the more he's a piece of shit.
He gets to fuck, and his friend gets posted outside to keep watch. What kind of lunatic in the world comes up with an idea this unhinged—and in an apocalypse where a zombie might lunge out at any moment, no less.
He just keeps handing me reasons to take revenge.
Every minute, every second outside was precious. And these so-called raid team members were spending it screwing. There was no waste of time quite like it, with the added bonus of the danger climbing the whole while.
It's fucked, so show a little restraint—I hammered that into them every single day, and they never listened.
It had always irritated him. Now it was worse. His relationship with them had collapsed long ago, and he was certain, now, of exactly what that bastard thought of him. There had been a time when Wijun at least watched his face when he spoke up. These days he worked him like a servant, openly.
"Well. If I can move on my own, that's better for me."
The order to keep watch, he ignored as a matter of course. Instead he circled the area, searching for anywhere Yoo Hina might be, and picked up anything useful along the way. Even a scrap of metal or a glass bottle was a fine resource now.
I've got the Porter skill. Might as well use it.
The storage was better than he had expected. The ways to use it were, if anything, endless. Just in case, he had a knife hidden away. An enemy who thought his only weapon was that axe would drop their guard—and take a blade that came out of nowhere straight through the body.
Only after he had looked around to his satisfaction did he come back.
"Haa... that was good, Wijun."
"Hold on a second. You like this, don't you? Slrrp."
By the time he returned, having taken everything worth taking, they were finishing as well.
That ended fast.
Maybe even those bastards knew to keep it moderate in a situation like this. Then again, it seemed like they had always been like this. Not that it was any of his business.
The man who came out saw him and let out a thin little laugh.
"Oh. You really were keeping watch. Yeah. You're so much nicer when you behave yourself."
"...If you've got nothing left to do, how about we finish the search."
"Tch! Unbearable bastard, as always."
They must have been so focused they hadn't even noticed he was gone. A shame a zombie hadn't shown up. Not that ones like them would have gone down to that... Still, they couldn't very well have kept their hands on the women in a situation like that.
"Let's move. We're wasting time."
He looked over the surroundings again, slowly, checking their position against the map. The purpose of this mission was to search for Yoo Hina, who had been taken down the last time, and to recover the body if they could.
...Finding her is going to be hard. Very hard.
A raid team taken by zombies could not be recovered. There had been similar missions before, and not one of them had succeeded. The Association was not, to begin with, a romantic organization that would pour resources into someone already dead. This was an investigation for show. A raid team had died, and the propaganda was that they had at least tried to find the body. Ridiculous from the outside, and yet it worked surprisingly well. Whether you did even this much changed the image completely.
"Hey, what are you searching so hard for. Give it a once-over and let's go."
"This is a search mission. Of course we look for whatever we might have missed."
"Mission, my ass. You know better, and you're still doing this? Use some common sense. You really think we can find an awakened who got bitten by a zombie and died?"
"......"
Shin Wijun and the others half-assed the search from the start. They had clearly decided the whole thing was useless, and the reason they had accepted the mission anyway was simple. The work was easy, and the reward still came.
Worthless trash.
It had been a long time since these people had properly put down a zombie. Even in the old days, they barely managed one unless he lost his temper and tore into them. No sense of duty. No drive. All they wanted was to live comfortably on an awakening they had been lucky enough to get. He wouldn't say that was entirely bad in itself. But set against the people grinding themselves down for their sake, it was a conscience that had well and truly burst.
"So how far do we have to go?"
"The Great Cavity over there. Didn't I say that earlier?"
"How am I supposed to remember every little thing like that?"
"You raising worms in that brain?"
"Y-you really...!"
One way or another, they reached the destination while they walked. The Great Cavity. A vast hole opened when the sinkholes first formed. No one knew where it ended, so it had never been properly investigated. Symbolic terrain, in its way, and used as any number of checkpoints.
"Wijun. Mind if we go wash over there?"
"Huh? Ah, go ahead."
"...We're heading back soon anyway. Wash then. Don't waste it."
"Shut up. What would you know about how a woman feels?"
The two of them ignored him and headed for the subway side by side. There was a water tank down there for raid teams, set aside for emergencies.
Bitches, the both of them. As expected.
Water someone had hauled and filled with real effort. And they were burning through something that precious because they felt a little grimy. Rotten from the root, these people.
"Damn. Seeing it like this, the size is no joke. Not a monster in sight around here, either. Kinda feels like this is the real apocalypse, you know?"
Zombies almost never appeared near the Great Cavity. It wasn't an official announcement, but among raid teams it was widely known.
"Hey. Isn't there a legend about this place?"
"Not interested."
"They say if you offer a corpse here, the System takes a liking to you and grants you a new trait."
"......"
He turned his head and looked at him. The man looked back. A face all smiles. The air around it was not. They had spent enough time together. They both knew. This was the end of the line.
"No idea why a rumor like that spread. Could be awakened cooked it up so they could quietly get rid of some asshole."
Had he brought him here meaning to do this from the start? There was no knowing every turn of the man's judgment.
His head's too stupid for me to make sense of it anyway.
If it were him, he wouldn't lay a hand on himself in a situation like this. Anyone looking would know he was the one who had done it, and that would shake his standing hard. Killing him would cost far more than it gained.
Well. If he had the brains to see that, he wouldn't have pulled this shit in the first place.
His heart went cold. Cleaning up after this piece of shit. Everything the man had done to him until now. All of it had gathered in his chest and settled there as a sharp blade.
"Want to try it?"
They drew at the same time. A sword for him. An axe for Minhyung. Against a combat-type awakened, of course, it was a fight he could not win.
Steel screamed.
His wrist went numb. The sword knocked his axe clean out of his hands, and the man, certain of victory, grinned. That was a mistake. Minhyung let the axe go without a second thought and drew a dagger. Because it had come through the ability, to the other man it must have looked as if it had simply appeared in empty air.
"!!"
A face flooded with shock. He watched it without expression, closed his hand around the dagger, and drove it in all at once.
The blade punched into the man's body. But—
Too shallow.
To finish it, he needed to reach the organs. Accounting for an awakened, even that might not have been enough.
"Ghk! Fuck...!"
A combat-trait awakened, after all. He had missed by a hair.
"Heh—heh! You goddamn bastard! When the hell did you awaken?"
"While you were busy fucking those crazy bitches."
"So it's been a while, then? If it'd been a combat trait, that might've been dangerous...!"
The man swung his arm and sprayed something. In an instant Minhyung's head reeled, and he couldn't draw a proper breath.
"Crazy bastard. You aren't even ashamed to call yourself a raid team?"
A chemical weapon was a vicious thing. It didn't work on zombies. It was a weapon aimed at people and nothing else—so vicious that even in the apocalypse it had been banned, the harm simply too great. The ones who made them and sold them were criminals. So, obviously, were the ones who bought them.
"How long are you gonna act like you're the only clean one! At the end of the day you're nothing but a lowborn peasant who couldn't even awaken properly!"
A fist came straight at him.
The impact thudded through him, and his body rocked. The man seized him as he was and locked an arm around his throat from behind.
"Huh? A little shit who ought to just take it when I hit him...! I don't like that look in your eyes!"
A carotid choke. A technique for dropping a person unconscious in a breath. He grabbed at the arm to break it, but he could not match a combat awakened's strength. His struggling body went limp where it was. Perhaps because he was awakened, he clung to consciousness by a thread, but the strength would not come back into his limbs.
"Hah! Hah! Fuck. A worthless little nobody is wearing me out."
Pained, the man pressed a hand to where the sword had gone in. Choi Ari, who had always healed him, wasn't here. He avoided anything dangerous to an extreme and got treated the moment something went wrong. Maybe that was why he had grown numb to pain.
"Call it fate and accept it. If I get stronger—a combat awakened—doesn't that help humanity too? It's the public-justice principle. The public-justice principle!"
Spouting nonsense, he dragged him along. Minhyung wanted to correct him—it's utilitarianism, you illiterate—but there was no time for that. They reached the Great Cavity, and the man hauled him up. From a height where a loosened hand meant an immediate fall, he glared at him.
"Why'd you have to stick your nose in like that? Dead is dead. It's all the same."
"......"
"You want to live?"
Did he want to live? Of course he wanted to live. From the day the apocalypse broke, his only goal had been survival.
"Our friendship wasn't that short, was it? Bawl your eyes out and beg, and I might even let you live."
Survival had been the goal. Somewhere along the way, that had changed. From survival to revenge. Destroying this bastard had become the purpose of his life. This bastard had made it so. And it was still in progress.
No matter what I have to do. No matter how filthy the work.
This one, he wanted to strip of everything. The moment he recognized that hatred again, a laugh came out of him instead.
As he said it, he raised his middle finger.
"...Yeah. Now that's Lee Minhyung."
The man let go at once. Gravity took his body, and he dropped. The fall went on and on. There was no telling how deep the pit really was.
Can't avoid the fall.
Then surviving came first. He triggered the awakened trait at once and stored not an object, but himself, as cargo. The sensation of falling vanished. A moment later he opened it again, and he collapsed onto the floor in a heap.
"Cough! Cough!"
He had lived, somehow. A relief the gamble had paid off. This way was better. Inside the city, the bastard would have made certain of the body as well.
He let his guard down because it was outside. To him I was an ordinary man, the kind whose death wouldn't look strange no matter when it came.
That was why he had simply dropped him in a place like this. Because the man hadn't confirmed the kill, he had been able to survive. He took out an antidote and drove it into his thigh. He had brought it, but he had never really thought he would have to use it.
"The problem is how I get out of here..."
Checking the survival supplies he had brought in secret, he stopped cold.
"...What is this."
Supplies were piled high before his eyes. Food and resources in a quantity that could not possibly exist in the apocalypse. An absurd amount of them.