All-Out War
"Leaving already?"
The words pushed past Yeong-sik's lips, thick with reluctance.
Three years and six months. That was how long it had been since the apocalypse broke and the world came crashing down.
Ordinary people turned into zombies overnight. Society collapsed. Neighbors eyed one another with suspicion, and the days blurred into an endless cycle of killing and being killed. Six thousand years of human civilization stood on the brink of annihilation in less than four.
Humanity had tried to rally around its awakened abilities users to hold back the endlessly evolving undead, but even that proved easier said than done. Envy, jealousy, greed, and distrust refused to die even in a dying world. If anything, they grew fat on the chaos and gnawed away at what remained of mankind.
How bad had it gotten? Even Yeong-sik, who had a rough idea of what the future held, had been exiled from his own group and thrown out penniless.
But hope is a wondrous, slippery thing. It refused to die, clung to life, and in the end, it bloomed.
It had appeared like a comet, trailing thunder in its wake.
Survivors hiding deep underground to escape the zombies would hear the sky-splitting roar and, one and all, resign themselves to the end.
So this is it. This cursed life is finally over.
But before long, something felt wrong. An eerie silence would settle in after the commotion died down.
Zombies? Awakened? Shelling? Curious about the source of the thunder, the survivors would crawl out of their hiding places — only to find a battlefield ravaged by bullets and shells, a landscape of utter devastation.
And yet not a single zombie remained in sight. The streets, swept clean, left them speechless.
Yeong-sik looked back on the months he had spent at Hyperion's side. Truth be told, he had endured a schedule that could only be called a forced march.
Still, he had pressed on without complaint — because he knew that the harder he and Hyperion worked, the more people out there could finally breathe easy.
Though, if he was honest, what he actually did amounted to little more than menial errands. Meeting with survivors now and then to relay Hyperion's messages, taking whatever measures were needed, carrying out whatever tasks Hyperion assigned him.
But the reason he could smile was the sheer, staggering miracle Hyperion had accomplished.
Months of hunting down and sweeping away the undead.
Not a single zombie remained on Earth.
It seemed impossible, and yet Hyperion had proclaimed the end of the apocalypse and granted humanity its freedom.
The freedom to live without fear.
"Heh heh…."
Yeong-sik had once wondered at the way Hyperion hunted the zombies so relentlessly, like a person avenging a murdered parent. Now, he understood.
Hunting down and exterminating the undead, bombing the calamity known as the Zombie Wave out of existence — with each passing month, Hyperion's form had continued to change.
Changed so much that Yeong-sik saw it with his own eyes and still couldn't quite believe it.
A flicker of self-loathing crossed him — had his imagination really been this lacking? Hyperion had grown without limit, mounting weapon upon weapon.
Around that time, Yeong-sik had very nearly convinced himself that Hyperion intended to blow up the planet. By the time it had finished with both Koreas and Japan and pushed into China, calling it a spaceship would have been embarrassing.
It was simply a flying fortress — no, you might as well have called it a flying city. And in the wake of that flying city, bristling with every weapon imaginable, no living zombie was ever found.
That wasn't all. With an almost supernatural knack for sniffing them out, Hyperion had tracked down the Slatters and personally delivered a rain of fire upon their heads.
After all, this was the being that had combed the earth for zombies and Slatters alike with the tenacity of someone settling a blood debt.
"Haha…."
Yeong-sik remembered it well — the time, after sweeping through China, when a massive research complex had been erected atop Hyperion. That was when China's largest survivor collective had come calling.
"The zombies are citizens of the Chinese People's Republic — and property, besides. Your wanton aggression has robbed our people of their rightful assets, and we demand compensation."
Yeong-sik had been dumbfounded.
What exactly do these people believe in, that they can strut out here so boldly? Are they not afraid of Hyperion at all?
"If you would grant us residence in your flying city as well, surely we could prosper together? You will be needing workers, no?"
Yeong-sik, who had been polishing Hyperion's outer hull at the time, looked at them and understood.
These people had something badly, catastrophically backwards in their heads.
Hyperion was not a city, and there was even less reason to take them aboard.
He tried to talk them down gently.
"I can ask, but I wouldn't hold my breath—"
"A mere cleaner dares stand in our way?! I said bring me a high-ranking administrator, not a lackey like you!"
And what became of them, once they'd finally drawn their blades, you ask?
Yeong-sik shook his head.
A handful succeeded in boarding Hyperion. The rest were incinerated under its rain of fire.
Boarding… if you could even call it that. If anything, Yeong-sik pitied them.
The ones who made it aboard now spent their days beside the Blue Demon — which had since become Hyperion's mine — their abilities siphoned away until the day they died.
And it wasn't just them. Every ability user who had ever directed their greed at Hyperion met the same fate. Including Byeong-tae, once his comrade.
After several assassination attempts, Byeong-tae had at last slipped into an endless, dreamless sleep, quietly surrendering his power to the siphon.
Yeong-sik had once fought with Hyperion over the matter, but that was ancient history now.
When he watched the harvested abilities actually reshape the world, he found he had no words left.
Powers from every awakened shelter across the land had begun to be installed aboard Hyperion, one after another.
…
Well. They promised to release everyone once the world stabilized, so I suppose I'll have to trust them.
Of course, once freed, they'd have every last drop of their ability drained and would live out their days as ordinary civilians.
"It was fun while it lasted, Hype."
As he gazed up at the sky, a blunt mechanical voice echoed in his ears.
> [Spare me the sentimentality and get back to wiping properly, Human.]
"Huh?"
Yeong-sik spun around in shock. There, floating in the sky, hung a hemispherical mass of intricate machinery the size of a sports stadium.
> [You didn't seem to be dozing off during yesterday's briefing.]
Yeong-sik flinched.
> [Not until every last unit of Karma in this world has been drained. That much should be obvious.]
Didn't he mention getting chewed out by someone terrifying a while back for recklessly burning through his power source…?
> [The main body, research complex included, will remain here.]
He supposedly still had his basic armaments, but compared to what he'd carried before, he might as well have been stripped to the skin.
Then again, even with just the basics, there's probably nothing on Earth that could stand against him….
And that would have held true even before the world ever fell to the apocalypse.
> [Tch.]
Even so, Yeong-sik understood why Hyperion was reluctant to go. He'd had to strip off every last one of those monstrous attack systems and weapons — an unfathomable investment of resources, all of it torn away.
> [The Mk.2 fission-body will drift across dimensions in search of another colony.]
"A c-colony?"
> [Why the sudden fuss?]
"R-right, of course…."
The word colony carried an odd ring to it, but in practice, Hyperion had never actually extorted or plundered a thing.
All he did was rebuild broken civilizations and restore the order the monster called the apocalypse had torn apart.
Either way — one look at people's faces was enough to tell how much the world had changed.
They were harvesting crops, rebuilding civilization, restoring infrastructure. And nowhere in any of it was there a trace of anxiety about safety, or fear for survival.
> [Sector 37-A12B: criminal attempting rape and subsequent murder neutralized. Confirmed kill.]
Hyperion's eyes existed everywhere, and toward criminals, they showed not a shred of mercy.
Those hardened by violence and plunder began to be forcibly reformed. The moment anyone so much as contemplated a crime, a warning would flash directly into their mind — and if they ignored it, they were shot dead.
By that one simple, elegant proposition, the world had run out of anyone who wasn't a model citizen.
Brutal, honestly….
> [By the way — will you be all right?]
"Huh? Oh… that."
Yeong-sik grinned.
"Doesn't bother me. I barely used it anyway. Still, I get to leave one last review, right?"
> [Do as you please.]
Yeong-sik connected to the Interdimensional Integrated Community.
> [W$%#ome to the Dimensi@$&% Inte#&%& Commu^$&#$#nity.]
Unlike before, the text was corrupted beyond recognition.
"Let's see…."
> [@*!&#^& ##^@&@ @%#@]
The letters were garbled from end to end, barely legible, but he combed through his memory and carefully pressed the button to write a new post.
"Not exactly easy."
Soon, he would lose access to the Interdimensional Integrated Community for good.
According to Hyperion, it was an unavoidable side effect of sending a fission-body across dimensions. The research wasn't fully complete yet, so his community channel had to be consumed in the process — something like that, anyway. That was roughly the explanation.
Though he also mumbled something confusing about how a fission-body is, in the end, the same individual.
Either way, Yeong-sik took a photo of the sky and carefully, earnestly composed his post for the community.
Thank you, Galactic Emperor!
Not that I'm sure any of this is actually going to post properly, no matter how hard I try….
Yeong-sik grinned as he felt the darkened sky slowly brightening around him.
Probably doesn't matter.
Hyperion Mk.2, which had blanketed the entire heavens, crossed over into another dimension. Its sheer scale defied belief — the pitch-black night gave way in an instant, as if day had broken at a stroke.
> [Transiting to target dimension.]
Fsssshhhh—
Far more unstable and violent than any standard warp of the Galactic Empire, the Astral Passage churned around Hyperion's hull as it drove itself forward.
It lasted only the briefest of moments — and yet it felt like an eternity before—
KRA-KOOM—
KRA-KOOM—
> [Hyperion, Stages 12–17. Transit to target dimension complete.]
The place where Hyperion arrived was a war in full swing.
Tens of thousands of warships detected Hyperion's presence and slowly began to re-form their formations around it.
Beep—
> [Per Master's orders: selecting targets.]
Whirrrr— K-chunk— K-chunk—
From Hyperion's hull — several times larger than even the Debrans' Terra-class battlefield carriers — a total of 1.28 million gun ports emerged into the open.
A hush fell over the battlefield.
And then, at last, galaxies poured from those muzzles, embroidering the void with stars.
In a single instant, the military might of Debra Planet simply ceased to exist.