Seongwon City (4)
I started by using the axe I had brought from the ship—the Breacher—to gather as much metal as possible from around the building I was currently using as my base. Abandoned cars, broken bicycles, rusted shutters and fire doors, air conditioner outdoor units, scrap from Tin Can Zombies, and everything else I could find. Fortunately, metal was scattered everywhere. Seeing it all drove home just how abundant this world had once been. At the same time, I steadily cut down any zombies that wandered into view and cleared the area.
Analyzing targets' remains for collectible resources.
Surprisingly, my collection ability worked on the zombies. No options appeared like they did with other targets; instead, random items a person might have carried simply materialized. The range was surprisingly wide, from useless junk to cans from before the collapse. One interesting detail was that using the ability on zombies didn’t make their corpses disappear. With other prey, the entire body would break down and vanish. With zombies, it felt more like the ability generated new objects on top of the existing corpse. I would need more experience to understand the exact mechanical difference.
The work would have been exhausting alone, but the tools from the ship made it far easier. While I labored, I naturally ended up telling Nia stories about this world. Explaining what each object was and how it had been used led to heavier topics—why people had lost their minds and turned into monsters, how the world had fallen apart, and how survivors had lived in the ruins afterward.
After listening to it all, Nia gave a calm nod.
Nia’s antenna stood straight up, as if trying to absorb the surrounding data even more carefully.
"…Yeah. Thanks."
Working with Nia brought back memories of the days when I had many people by my side. Back then we had comforted one another just to keep surviving. It all felt like something from a distant past now.
I shouldered the heavy backpacks and returned to the building I used as my base. I had gathered quite a lot of material, so I cleared the important supplies out of the warehouse where I had been living and piled the scrap metal inside the main room instead. The molecular reconstruction printer would now endlessly break down the materials in the warehouse and convert them into cartridges.
"What do you think? Is this enough?"
Nia projected a blueprint onto my terminal. Several components blinked in red.
I couldn’t make much sense of the blueprint itself, but one name written on it stood out.
"Core Strider?"
She had already given it a name. It seemed she had prepared the title while revising the design. As expected of a competent android.
"Changing the blueprint and even coming up with a cool name—Nia, you’re amazing."
The moment the praise left my mouth, the sensor lights around Nia’s eyes flushed red. The whirring sound coming from her seemed to spin at a slightly higher speed than usual.
Even though she was an android, she was still weak to compliments. It was pretty funny how she tried to act cool while failing to hide the red glow of her sensors.
"So we need more electronics, right?"
The area around this building was run-down and modest; there were no more electronic devices to be found. It looked like I would have to leave the base and scavenge farther out. That meant the chance of running into other survivors was inevitable. If I walked around openly loaded with equipment from the ship, I would definitely stand out.
I immediately started camouflaging my gear. The materials were the ragged clothes I had just stripped from zombies and some crude plastic parts I had printed in a hurry. I left the performance untouched and simply covered the exterior to make everything look as filthy and worn as possible. I managed to make the Nailer and Breacher axe look like rusty old metal tools, but the sleek-bodied laser rifle was impossible to disguise that way.
"Guess I’ll just have to wrap it up…"
I tightly bound the laser rifle in oil-stained rags until it looked like nothing more than an unidentifiable metal pipe or blunt weapon, then strapped it firmly across my back. Finally I pulled on a dirty cap that had been lying on the floor and added a black mask that covered my face. When I checked the mirror, it was perfect. From any angle I looked exactly like a typical survivor of Seongwon City—someone barely scraping by day after day in this hell.
"Nia, is it stuffy in there?"
A small voice answered from inside the worn jumper.
In that condition, I started moving farther out. The closer I got to the once-bustling downtown area where many people had lived, the greater the number of stronger mutated zombies and regular ones became. A four-lane road was packed solid with rusted, motionless vehicles, and between them wandered zombies with cloudy eyes.
Nia’s voice came quietly from inside my jacket. She gave precise briefings for the route I should take without even using her eyes. In truth, the minimap provided by my ability had poor detail for terrain and obstacles. It simply dropped dots for the enemy’s rough direction, position, and distance, so it often caused more confusion than help in a complex urban environment with blocked sightlines. But when Nia’s briefings were added, everything became clear. My own vision, sense of distance, and the data she provided synchronized in real time, illuminating the map like it was updating live.
Wait—could the map update itself by receiving external data? The surrounding terrain and routes within the map’s radius appeared with perfect clarity, as if I had launched a reconnaissance drone in a strategy game. With visibility this good, I didn’t even need to take out the Nailer or laser rifle. Punching straight through with firepower was one option, but using firearms in a place swarming with this many zombies was the worst choice. Since I wasn’t clearing the area around my base, I had no intention of making excessive noise.
Following Nia’s briefings, I avoided zombies I could slip past and used the axe to silently erase only those whose paths overlapped with mine. Before I had gained my ability, I had survived in this hell with nothing but my own body, always moving exactly like this. There was nothing new about it. If anything, the difficulty now felt like it had dropped to easy mode compared to back then.
With a dull thud, the Breacher’s blade split a zombie’s skull cleanly in two. Thanks to the harness I wore under my clothes, the sensation of swinging and retrieving the axe, or kicking off the ground to leap, felt light as a feather. I wondered if awakened ones lived in the world with these superhuman senses all the time.
Before long I stepped inside the building I had chosen as my target. It was a small bank. Not many zombies remained inside. Why? Because in the early days of the outbreak, countless people had rushed here to loot the money and had cleared out all the infected. Of course, years later, paper bills were now nothing but trash useful only as kindling or firewood.
My reason for coming to the bank was different. I was after the row of ATMs lined up in the corner and the various bank office machines. After the world ended, no one had any reason to haul away these heavy, sturdy devices. In other words, they were a gold mine likely to contain intact electronic components.
As I had expected, only two regular zombies wandered around inside the building with unfocused eyes. I dispatched them in an instant with the power of the harness and the sci-fi alloy axe.
Thud. Crack.
I ripped out the ATM’s circuitry and stuffed it into my bag.
"How about this?"
How many more places would I have to visit? Where should I head next? I was thinking exactly that when a new type of dot I had never seen before appeared on my map. At the same time, a vibrating whirr came from inside my jumper as Nia’s antenna trembled.
"I felt it too."
I shouldered the bag containing the circuit boards again. Then I drew the pistol I had tucked into my waistband.
Click.
I hid my body behind the ATM and aimed the gun toward the direction where the dots on the map were approaching. Even though I could see where they were coming from, they moved slowly without making a single sound. I could sense the presence of veteran survivors.
I took a slow breath and opened my mouth.
"Stop right there. There’s already someone here."
I kept my tension at maximum and placed my finger on the pistol’s trigger.