A Special Weapon

Coming down the mountain, we ran into a few of the usual crises. A handful of monsters that had fallen behind their swarm, and one booby trap hidden with care. I read their habits off the way they were built and slipped past them, and I spotted the trap in time to keep from stepping in it.

All of it, of course, was my doing.

All the Physiognomist did was hoist both hands into empty air and clap without a sound every time I cleared an obstacle.

Was this man ever going to be good for anything?

And so we came down off the mountain, and at last—Incheon. The Physiognomist knew the view in front of us at a glance.

"Incheon Grand Park!"

Somewhere along the way he had gotten his wind back. Ever since we had parted from Kim-ssi he had stayed quiet, which I had appreciated. Now his volume was climbing again.

"Quite a crowd. Really sells the park atmosphere."

"Doesn't it! Shall we go mingle with that lot?"

"You do that. I'll be on my way."

"Kid, you really can't take a joke."

Zombies packed the park solid. Once they had been human, warm blood running through them the same as mine, until a monster's bite twisted them into something grotesque. They say the old world had a thing called zombies in its movies and novels, and these happened to look much the same, so people took to the name as if they had all agreed on it beforehand.

In the movies, one bite and you turned. Our real zombies have no such talent. Only a monster can make a human into a zombie. They simply charge anything that looks like an animal, eat it, and scrape a little longer out of the energy. When there is nothing nearby to eat, they stand where they are, stiff as if they have frozen, hoarding what strength they have left. In that state they do not so much as twitch. Statues, more or less. Slack off on your watching and you might not even notice they are there.

"Just asking, on the off chance."

"It's fine, ask me gentle. Here!"

The Physiognomist rolled his sleeve and thrust out an arm. Hair grew thick across it.

"……Do you know a decent route from here to AAA?"

"Destination's hell. What road isn't the worst?"

No help at all.

At this rate he was no different from some stray dog or cat padding after me.

"You were just thinking I'm no help, weren't you?"

"Did my physiognomy tell you that?"

"This one's what we call mind reading!"

A man of many talents.

The mind reader, who until then had done nothing but trail at my back, suddenly strode out ahead.

"Watch close. I know how to pay a kindness back."

He dropped low and started in toward the place where the zombies stood clumped together, stiff as stone. On any other day I would have stopped him. This once, I decided to watch, because a thought had just occurred to me.

Physiognomist. Mind reader. What comes next.

Zombies hunt by sound. Those rotted-out eyes cannot see a thing, obviously, and they do not seem able to smell either. They gather in swarms and their numbers are no joke, but scramble the hearing and they are a fight you can actually take. Tell trainee hunters only that much, though, and they invariably started looking down on zombies. Trainees with no field experience grew more arrogant the longer they trained in safety, and that carelessness had taken the lives of plenty of green hunters. For the ones who had just gained an ability, become hunters, and gotten full of themselves, the most frightening thing of all was exactly that carelessness.

So the combat instructors piled on every gruesome story they had, trying to put the fear of zombies back into them—stories of hunters who died having the living flesh torn off them. It always ended the same way. Stay sharp, and fight like it.

My own method was a little different. The subject I taught was survival.

The mind reader, closing in on the zombies, stopped. One step nearer and they would hear his feet. The way he judged that distance was too clean for a man who had tried it once or twice. I could not picture that potbellied uncle winning a fight against zombies. He did look like a man who had met plenty of them.

Thwip.

Far off, the mind reader flung something. What landed in the middle of the pack was a crude, homemade noisemaker.

Hiss. Hiiisss. Tat-tat-tat.

"Kid! Hurry and get through! That battery won't hold!"

While the zombies were drawn off by the noise, we crossed the park as lightly as we could. Whenever we had slipped past one cluster only to meet another we truly could not avoid, the mind reader threw a fresh noisemaker. Each was a slightly different shape, and every one of them was junk.

Why is he carrying so many?

A noisemaker is the sort of consumable that earns you a name for thoroughness if you bother to carry even one for emergencies. Useful, yes, but the sensible purchase is food, and then you walk around the horde. Still, thanks to him we cut straight across the park in short order.

He had been a help. Fortunately.

"Well? I helped, didn't I?"

"You certainly did."

"Hah! This big brother's handsome, isn't he?"

"Must run in the blood."

The way across ran from high ground down to low, so reading the terrain was relatively easy. Use the same road on the return and it becomes a climb back into the heights. I memorized the lay of the land carefully on the way down, so that would not turn into a problem later.

"So. Are you a noisemaker wholesaler?"

"Ah, those. I make them whenever I've got a spare moment."

No wonder they looked crude. Still, the man had a knack.

"Where do you get the parts?"

"You know all that abandoned comms gear? Broken stuff. Pick it up, swap a few parts inside, and there you go!"

A tinkerer, then.

"You went to the trouble of making them. Seems a waste. Even if it took longer, we could have spared the consumables and looped around the outside of the park."

Not that they were my consumables. From where I stood, nothing but thanks.

"You asked for a decent route, kid! Cutting through the park was the best of them. Raiders playing guerrilla have the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠outskirts staked out."

News to me. If it was true, I had come out ahead.

"You earned your keep, old man."

"Thank Kim-ssi."

"Kim-ssi? That Kim-ssi?"

"I heard it from Kim-ssi myself. Said he got it off a postman heading back to headquarters after a delivery in Incheon."

"Hm."

"What are you doing?"

"A moment of grateful silence."

"Handsome."

If you cannot be grateful when gratitude is due, you do not get to call yourself human.

"Even with the information, burning through every consumable to punch through isn't an easy call."

"Save them for what? You've got to live through right now first."

Physiognomist, mind reader, tinkerer. And after that, a fairly decent survivalist.

Mr. Woo went back to trotting along at my heels. Not that he did nothing. From behind, he tossed me information and steered us onto safe routes, all of it things he had heard from Kim-ssi. Thanks to that, I had to observe a moment of silence every time a new piece came in.

I had wondered why he was carrying so much information about Incheon. There was a reason. His own delivery address was in Incheon too, a settlement a little way off from AAA. He had not been lying when he said Incheon was his destination.

We had nearly arrived, but the sun was already down. Night is better when you want to move unseen. When you need to visit a settlement, day is better. Approach in the dark for no good reason, and a startled sentry has been known to pull the trigger before anyone gets around to checking who you are.

We found the most wretched-looking abandoned building we could and hid ourselves in it. The walls had all but fallen in, and still the inside was pitch-black. Tonight the moon was hiding behind the clouds. I leaned against a wall and shut my eyes, and the old man asked if I was holding another moment of silence. I did not answer.

Time passed that way.

"About Kim-ssi."

And why was the old man pitching his voice low and making a production of it again.

"He carried that core around as insurance, didn't he? The one with a ninety-eight percent failure rate."

"……If you can't sleep, stay up on your own. I was just about to drop off."

"I wondered if he never got an opening to use the core once those raiders showed what they were. But no. Kim-ssi chose not to use it."

"So."

"So, what so. You know what I mean."

"I wouldn't know."

"Kim-ssi was scared."

I knew. Of course he had been.

Kim-ssi feared death. The moment he realized he had walked into the raiders' trap, he would have known, in his head, that he was not going to survive. That was why the core would have come to mind. And in that same instant, fear ate into him. People turn irrational in a heartbeat.

Maybe I shouldn't use the core, just in case. What if these bastards don't kill me after all?

It happens all the time. Survival instinct misfiring. You turn your face from a death that is already set and take the path that stretches your life by even a little, right this second. Dither like that, and you miss the moment to use the core. Kim-ssi's thread of hope did not end there.

In the end, Kim-ssi's survival failed. Given a second life, he would never make the same mistake again. But whether he knew it or not, he had only one.

Nobody living an ordinary life uses an Ability Core. Use one, and most of the time you die. Which means every hunter is someone who has already gone to the edge of death—punched through the floor of despair and had a look at the basement underneath. Only at the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠last ditch, about to starve or about to be hunted down by something, do they spend a core as a final resort.

Most of them land on the failure rate. Even the ones lucky enough to succeed often find it was not an Ability Core at all. And even if the use succeeds and it really was an Ability Core, survival still is not guaranteed, because you do not know what ability you will get. Get exactly the ability the moment calls for, and that is a problem of its own. If the conditions or the method are finicky, you cannot use it the moment you receive it. Then you go to your grave holding a brand-new power. That is why hunters are rare.

Kim-ssi had been a long way from a hunter. What if he had squeezed his eyes shut and used the core? I could only imagine. Would it even have been an Ability Core? Unless that core could be found again, there was no knowing now.

"If you've got nothing more to say, sleep."

"You don't seem like an ordinary postman, kid."

"What about it."

"You've got a fine pistol, haven't you? I hear the kick on it is something else."

My Backscratcher. I had been wondering when he would bring it up.

"Watch your mouth."

"A postman with a hunter-grade pistol. Who'd even believe me if I talked? How'd you get it?"

"What's there to it. I picked it up."

"You picked that up? Whoever dropped it must've been properly wrecked."

He did not believe a word ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of it.

"I imagine so."

The owner of this gun did get properly wrecked, for a different reason. Then he was demoted to a rank-and-file soldier. I am talking about myself.

Being a hunter had not suited me. On the way out, after I turned the hunter gear back in, I quietly kept just the pistol. That was the start of my second life, as a soldier. I had quit being a hunter because teaching did not suit me, and then the army showed me the simpler truth: I do not suit living in a group at all. And so the third life began. A postman who works alone fits me exactly. This delivery, granted, was unfolding a little differently.

"So what you're saying is, you're just an ordinary postman?"

"Ordinary me will move the moment it's light. Ten minutes from here to AAA."

Mr. Woo smacked his lips. He scratched at his head a moment, then went on.

"My road overlaps yours anyway. We're sticking together, yeah? No dumping me to go off alone just because we're almost there!"

"I heard you, so shut your eyes, your nose, and your mouth, and sleep."

"That's our family, all right! Handso—"

"Handsome. Yes, yes. Let's sleep."

Humoring Mr. Woo had cost me sleep. A man who wore you out from the first word to the last. The fortunate part was that, for reasons I could not name, I slept more deeply than usual. Probably the thick dark, the moon never showing itself.

And so the date turned. When dawn broke and I opened my eyes, I was alone in the abandoned building.