Chapter 120
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 120
Chapter Title: April Vengeance (9)
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To reach the bridge, they had to descend two more floors.
The staircase was sealed off by a thick barricade. It was piled high with all sorts of materials, but far from sloppy. The investigator motioned for the boy officer to take a look. It was bound with wire and nailed down securely. Thick enough to fill the stairs completely—it would take no small amount of time to dismantle.
Bullet marks scarred the walls. Winter traced them with his finger, gauging their depth and caliber. These were traces of full-automatic fire.
Dozens of corpses lay scattered around, in gruesome states. They had been torn apart and devoured. Psssh. Rotten gas leaked from an anus, and maggots writhed across the skin.
The investigator flipped over a corpse. The eye sockets were blackened. Black pus oozed from the mouth. The skin was mottled and ruined all over. Frowning and covering her nose with the back of her hand, Agent Gibson prodded the body with her machete. Stab. Stab. She sliced and scraped, searching for something.
Swarms of jet-black flies buzzed about. They clung everywhere, a constant annoyance to the FBI agent. Winter waved them away. Then he asked quietly.
“What are you looking for?”
“Just a moment... Here it is.”
Dangling from the tip of her blade was a small, sticky metal fragment. A shattered bullet. She easily located the remaining shards. She roughly wiped her blade on the carpet, then removed her glove and touched it with her bare hand. As if sensing its temperature.
Now the female investigator offered her expert opinion.
“The variants’ skin didn’t rot. No exceptions. It’s proof the infection spread so rapidly there was no lag between individuals. This corpse, though—judging by its body temperature and rigor mortis, it’s been dead at least eight hours. The barricade is suspicious too. If the infection spread that fast, they wouldn’t have had time to build something this solid. Just a possibility, mind you.”
Her implication was clear. This ship had seen human fighting human. The infection outbreak was a disaster that struck amid the chaos. She spoke softly again.
“People armed to the teeth like a military unit executed civilians. If they needed a barricade like this, the battle must have been on a large scale. Meaning it wasn’t a one-sided slaughter.”
Winter nodded.
“We’ll need to brace ourselves for fighting humans.”
“Yeah. Better safe than sorry. This is getting a real headache.”
The investigator let out a heavy sigh. She shot the boy officer a sidelong glance. This rescue operation had essentially started on one person’s stubbornness. The boy managed an awkward smile.
But she voiced no complaints. It was the restraint expected of a field agent. Complaints were pointless. Only suggestions mattered. The investigator wasn’t considering withdrawal yet.
“We’ll have to find another way. No telling what’s on the other side of that barricade.”
“What about the elevator?”
It wasn’t a suggestion to ride it quietly. Finding another staircase would mean heading to the center of the passenger liner. There had been an escalator, but according to the schematics, it led to the grand buffet at the ship’s core—an exposed route, extremely dangerous.
‘Perfect spot for a variant pack to lie in wait.’
Even at Atascadero State Hospital, the variants had chosen their ambush spots carefully. Attacks on humans were ultimately about gaining hosts. Overwhelming with numbers was an effective way to minimize their own losses. And that required wide, open spaces.
“Sounds good. Let’s move.”
The investigator agreed. Winter took point. She followed in his footsteps. Only one set of footfalls echoed. It was a level beyond genius, just stepping into the superhuman realm—essentially Winter’s current limit. Anything more would consume resources too severely.
‘In a worldview where even mastering a single skill isn’t enough...’
Winter was the outlier, repeating the same worldview twenty-seven times. In a world where limits could be surpassed, few endured the grind of repeated failures.
The control personality informed him of this.
Winter occasionally raised a fist. While the investigator stayed alert, he searched the cabins. Looking for any possible clues. But after rummaging through six rooms, all he found were hanging corpses. The variants had eaten from the most convenient heights first. From the waist to the thighs, only bones remained.
The corridor widened. Cabins lined both sides, with six elevators in the center. Every car was stopped at deck 5.
“All in emergency stop. What’s on deck 5?”
Recalling the blueprint at the investigator’s question, Winter benefited greatly from his intelligence correction.
“Grand theater, atrium, casino, two dance clubs, a café, restaurant, and five bars...”
All tied to indulgence. A luxury cruise wouldn’t have anything else, but deck 5 took it to the extreme.
‘Building an atrium at the ship’s center...’
An atrium was an open-sky space. To mimic that openness inside a sealed vessel, how vast a void would be required? It was the height of extravagant waste, even for a cruise ship.
Agent Gibson tilted her head.
“No idea. Probably means something, but no clues.”
She muttered that survivors were likely holed up there, at least.
“Let’s open the doors first.”
Winter slipped his fingers into the door gap. Thanks to his enhanced combat prowess, it opened without much effort. The FBI agent, puzzled, pushed the door fully open. She looked at the boy officer with even greater bewilderment. It had been a brief waste of time.
“Wait a sec. Rappelling down is easy, but even you’d struggle to pry open a door like that.”
She ducked into one of the cabins Winter had already searched and returned with a descender. Winter drew his pistol and fired three shots over her shoulder. Thud. Thump. Thud! A locked cabin. The heads of the silent figures that emerged shattered in sequence.
The agent froze for a moment but didn’t turn around. She pressed on as if nothing had happened, tweaking the descender to allow controlled descent.
“There. Go on down. I’ll cover you.”
Winter rappelled down the rope. The vertical shaft had scarcely any work lights. Only the elevator car waited far below his feet.
Screeeeech—the door screamed in metallic protest as he forced it open. Beyond lay pitch blackness. Even with night vision goggles, there was nothing to see. Finally, he snapped a disposable infrared light and tossed it. The green glow felt feeble against the oppressive dark. It wasn’t enough to illuminate the long corridor.
‘Really nothing at all?’
If there were variants, he would have heard them by now. He signaled the investigator that it was safe to descend, and at last, Winter set foot inside. He discarded the descender and scanned his surroundings warily.
The air was putrid. Even the investigator, who came down quickly after, gagged. Winter advised her.
“Put on your gas mask.”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll adapt in a bit.”
“No need to push yourself... One of us is enough.”
Enough meant for olfactory vigilance. When facing infected variants, scent was a crucial clue. Even if their skin didn’t rot, a variant’s body odor was distinctly different from a decaying corpse. Their metabolism was far more active—reeking, unwashed humans were negligible by comparison.
‘If this were Korea, it’d be different.’
Variants fundamentally inherited their host’s traits upon infection. Functional mutations came later. In a Korean setting, olfaction would matter less. Not useless, but diminished.
Such were his thoughts. No need to worry about that in this worldview.
Winter and the investigator walked the corridor rife with death. Not from disease, but from human malice. Pressing the IR light to the wall revealed what hadn’t been visible before. Nine letters in black.
Vengeance.
With night vision, there was no color. But Winter guessed it was written in blood. Because of the severed heads rolling on the floor. The investigator sighed.
“I hope the lunatics behind this are already dead. What kind of grudge drives you to torture...?”
As she said, the headless corpses were stripped naked. Traces of extreme abuse remained. In severe cases, they’d been boiled alive. Flayed flesh lay scattered haphazardly.
“Who knows. There’s no limit to how much one person can hate another.”
Winter spoke from experience. Humans had limits in every way, but from what he’d seen, hate was the one emotion without bounds.
‘People say love is endless too, but I’ve never seen it.’
Did such a feeling even exist?
The Rose was the exception, perhaps. But Winter had no certainty. It might just be wishful thinking. Expectations bred disappointment. In his past life, the boy had grown accustomed to renouncing what he wanted, what he had, what he could have.
‘But the things I had to have... those I didn’t want to give up.’
Winter snapped out of his reverie. Dwelling on the past, picking at unhealed scabs—it was a bad habit.
The corridor ahead stretched a hundred meters, a gallery of horrors to the end. Scenes of beheadings and executions by gunfire. Traces of fierce combat.
At the entrance to the bridge stood a marble table pocked with bullet holes. Beyond it lay the rotting corpse of a soldier, empty-handed. So where had his weapons gone?
They finally reached the bridge. Cold sea wind blew through shattered windows. It was dark here too, but the terminals glowed with power. The investigator, who had braced for the worst, breathed a sigh of relief.
“Unfamiliar system, but I think I can manage. Speed first.”
“You know how to pilot a ship?”
“Yeah. In narcotics ops, anything can happen. Fight locations vary wildly—land, sea, even sky. Basic piloting for planes and ships is something I picked up. Not required for all agents, though.”
The old world had been quite dramatic. Her perilous career and the records that formed its foundation left quite an impression on Winter. He’d never been this deeply entangled with the FBI or CIA in prior worldviews.
A slight inertia tugged at them. Proof the ship was decelerating.
“Changing course to 0-1-0. At least dodge the typhoon.”
Agent Gibson banked the helm to port. It was unavoidable, but now everyone aboard would realize the bridge had been seized.
As expected, the bridge could connect to all cabins shipwide. The problem was it required over a thousand repetitions. Before attempting it, Winter and the investigator sealed the bridge door and checked the CCTV first. It might cut down the workload for the announcements.
They started with deck 5.
‘Not normal here either.’
Unlike deck 8, power wasn’t cut. That was why the blood staining the atrium shone through unfiltered. Casino corpses were stripped bare. In the bar, variants huddled in place, doing nothing.
“Wait, was that the grand theater?”
The investigator worked the console. The screen that had briefly shown the theater returned to the interior. Countless variants roamed about. But Winter’s gaze fixed on the stage. Severed ropes littered it, yet one variant in particular was bound.
‘A leash?’
That wasn’t all. It was female, but utterly unlike any they’d seen. Immune rejection so severe it was visible. Flesh completely stripped where the ropes bound it. The other end was staked down.
Sensing the oddity as well, the investigator rewound the theater footage.
Winter now understood the meaning of vengeance.