The Tracker
The drifters who had left Claw Farm turned the opposite way from us.
We were bound for the ruins of Claw Farm. They put those ruins at their backs and went looking for a new settlement.
That was why they had emptied the armory of every weapon just before they left—to build one. A good site for a settlement was never going to be empty. And it wasn't only humans you had to worry about. Good land was often squatted on by a zombie horde. Zombies, after all, were humans who had been attacked by monsters and changed. A place with a horde was a place where many humans had once gathered. Most of the time, that meant good land.
Crunch, crunch. Gas masks on, we started walking toward the ruins.
"Postmen sure carry a lot of strange gear. What's that one?"
"A detector. It finds the Damage Measuring Device."
The measuring device constantly broadcast a signal into its surroundings. If it hadn't been destroyed, that is. The detector picked up that signal and led you to it.
"Find the measuring device, and there ought to be cores nearby."
"Because you lured the boss toward it?"
The space the raiders had come looking for, believing it was an armory. In truth, it had been a shelter.
"Strictly speaking, I lured them to the shelter. But yeah—it amounts to luring them to where the measuring device was."
A Damage Measuring Device had to be set down on the exact coordinates where a Giant Rod was expected to fall. That spot had happened to be the sturdiest shelter built anywhere in Claw Farm. While I was installing the device there, an idea had come to me.
Lure them here.
Finding cores in a ruin was hard work. Being buried under wreckage and difficult to spot was the baseline. The force of an air raid could knock them clean off where they had been, so you had to turn over every piece of debris by hand.
But if it was something stored in a space built to last, the job got a little easier.
Claw Farm's shelter had been reinforced with a special alloy. The steel roof took the first blow of the raid, and the shelter's own defenses held against a second. Of course, if the bombardment was large enough, a shelter did you no good at all. Even so, it was the place that caught a little less of the impact. So long as it wasn't smashed to pieces, whatever had been inside stayed inside. Well—stayed in the same place, at any rate. The people inside died, and most of the objects were pulverized. Cores were a different story. They didn't break easily.
Follow the measuring device and you'd reach the shelter. Find the shelter, and you could find the cores inside it.
"Hyung, what were you going to do if someone said they were staying in the shelter?"
That had definitely been the problem. If any of the settlers meant to remain, luring the boss that way would have gotten difficult. A shelter existed so people could take shelter. Not everyone left when an air-raid alarm sounded. It was there for the ones who intended to stay in the settlement until the very end.
"I was going to drive them out, one way or another."
To lure raiders into the shelter, it had to be empty. If anyone was left inside, the raiders couldn't come charging straight in.
"And how were you going to drive them out?"
I would have managed it somehow, even if it meant spouting nonsense about how precious it was to be alive. But not a single settler had wanted to stay. There had been no need to chase anyone off one by one.
"I'd have talked them into leaving."
"How? Some bullshit about the beauty of life?"
At times like this, it did seem like the kid knew me pretty well.
"Anyway, I didn't have to run my mouth, so it worked out."
"Isn't that a little strange too? If everybody was going to leave, why'd they bother building a shelter?"
"It means that when they built it, they still meant to stay."
The shelter was one of Claw Farm's earliest buildings. Back when they first settled here, there had been people who intended to lay their bones in this ground.
Those who chose to share a settlement's fate came in two broad types.
First, the ones who had lived there a long time. Either their affection for the place ran deep, or they had no confidence they could adapt and survive in the world outside. Or else they had been born and raised in the settlement, and treated the outside as a world where human beings simply could not live. To people like that, the settlement was the whole of the world. Even when an air raid came, flight never crossed their minds.
And second, the ones who had succeeded in building a settlement at the end of a life paved with hardship. Drifters and raiders whose actual goal in life was to found a settlement were common enough. Nine out of ten of them died before they ever turned the first shovelful of earth. But once that type had built the achievement of a lifetime, they never thought of leaving. They made up their minds to share the settlement's fate. The people who put up a shelter right after a settlement was founded were exactly these.
"So the people who built the shelter are all dead now?"
"The opposite. It didn't change because someone died. It changed because someone was born."
"Huh?"
"They had children."
Claw Farm had had an unusual number of them. The great work of those people's lives would no longer have been the settlement.
A new goal. That was what extended their lives.
Either way, right now I had a mountain of work.
"Let's see if the cores are here."
I switched the detector on.
"Hyung, save the battery."
Clock-out Man grinned. Something about it was deeply annoying.
Mother always kept the worst case in mind.
"Strange, isn't it? How on earth did this happen?"
"Sir?"
But reality had outrun his expectations. Even if they had walked into a trap, he had never truly believed the strike team could be wiped out.
"The raid schedule was changed, and an air raid struck at precisely that moment. There is no other explanation. Someone knew the air-raid information in advance."
"That isn't what matters right now! They're annihilated! The entire combat force...!"
"In that case, the postman is the likely one."
"Mother...?"
Rubbing his chin, Mother headed off somewhere.
"Mother! What are we supposed to do now? Mother!"
A bad feeling had kept him from leaving the hideout, and that was why he was still alive. He was not, however, the sort of man who would use the word fortunate for a thing as small as this. To Mother, survival was a matter of course. The green days of scrambling and fretting just to stay alive were long behind him.
The part that was actually fortunate lay elsewhere. The strike team had taken nothing of any value with them. Every bit of wealth remained in the hideout.
Mother's destination was the vault room. The vault keeper's face was dark as well.
"Mother, what are we supposed to do now..."
"Open the door, if you would."
The keeper opened it without strength.
"By the way, Mother, don't you smell something strange? Not strange, exactly. Fragrant, I suppose."
"Perfume. It masks one's scent."
"Masks one's scent...?"
"Nothing you need to concern yourself with."
Click, click. Mother went straight to the dial on the vault and entered the combination.
The vault was a relic of the old era, used jointly by Mother and Father. They both knew the combination, but only for the sake of that joint pretense. Inside, it was filled with nothing but Mother's valuables. Once the loot from a raid was divided up, the precious things somehow always ended as Mother's share.
The Ability Core taken from a dead postman had been no exception.
Ordinarily, an Ability Core was something you carried as a last resort. Mother's thinking was different. Was survival not a matter of course? He could not gamble, not even at the last of the last. Trusting his own cold head—that was Mother's secret to staying alive. So the core had been kept in the vault.
"Mother! I want to know the plan from here!"
A subordinate who had followed him all the way to the vault room.
"Hmm. Well."
Aside from the vault keeper, subordinates were forbidden to enter. Right now, though, the man had nothing in his eyes at all. Broad-minded as he was, Mother decided to overlook the rudeness, given the special nature of the situation.
"Please take only what is worth the most for its weight. We must leave."
"Sir?"
"There is no time."
A mercenary had tracked a hideout whose location he had never been given, and found it. Then they had changed their plans on that mercenary's word and walked straight into an air raid. Remaining here was dangerous.
"Ah—understood!"
Creak. The vault door opened.
Mother reached at once for the familiar spot, meaning to secure the most precious thing first.
And then—
"...What is this."
He turned an uneasy look on the vault keeper.
"What happened?"
The hand he had reached out lost its way. The core that should have been there was gone.
"What do you mean?"
"Who came in here? Did you see?"
"Sir?"
"Quickly!"
"Ah, well—who else would there be but Father?"
"Why would that man?"
"That's..."
"Quickly!"
Mother barked it in a harsh tone he had never used before. The handful of subordinates still left in the hideout, wondering what was wrong, crowded in front of the vault room.
"He took the core out..."
"Why did that man... take it?"
"You said you were staying at the hideout, so he said he ought to take it, to prepare for 'whatever might happen'..."
Bang. Mother slammed the vault door shut.
"Damn it."
He had lost the Ability Core.
In the next instant, another thought occurred to him. That handsome postman might know the core existed. Hadn't those been the ones at Kim-ssi's side when they abducted the postman? If they knew one another, they might well have spoken of the core.
"Don't tell me..."
He wanted to deny it, but the bad feeling crept up all the same. In Mother's mind rose the handsome face of that accursed postman, who might already have recovered the Ability Core.
"..."
By his own plan, even if he lost every combat soldier, he was not supposed to lose the Ability Core. Father's sudden move had wrecked it.
He could not keep from remembering what the mercenary had said.
The postman's true ability, as the mercenary had put it.
A man born under strong luck...
Mother turned those words over and over in his mind.
Beep...
The deflated tone the detector gave off when it failed to receive the Damage Measuring Device's signal. That alone was too early to conclude the device was broken. A ruin was full of things that interfered with reception. The toxic gas that followed an air raid was one of them—and one of the reasons a gas mask was unavoidable.
"So the detector can't find it?"
"Yeah."
"Lousy piece of gear."
"Tell me about it. Nobody's on my side."
"?"
"What, punk."
I switched the detector off. I wasn't giving up, of course. It was Clock-out Man's turn.
"Right. Hyung, you just save the battery."
"Let's see you show off."
Searching for cores was Min Yeo-jin's specialty. She had an ability that let her see core energy. Get close enough, and she could find a core under any conditions, however foul.
Clock-out Man's specialty was finding monsters and zombies. Cores were none of his business. They gave off no smell. On top of that, toxic gas lay over everything now, so his tracking wouldn't work properly anyway. Between the stink of the gas and the gas mask on his face, that nose of his ought to be useless.
My prediction missed, and missed cleanly.
"Think it might be over that way."
Clock-out Man strode out ahead. He had grown during his time in the outside world. He had been raising his sensitivity to one particular smell—something like the way I had trained my probability. He said he had stuck something rank onto the Damage Measuring Device. When I set the device in the shelter and mentioned that it was something we'd have to recover later, it seemed to have tripped his tracking instinct. He must have stuck it on in the moment I looked away. The fact that he had aimed for that gap already put him well past ordinary.
"I've been training for years. That smell—let off even a little of it, and I can find it right away."
"Even so. We're neck-deep in toxic gas, and you're wearing a gas mask. You really think you can?"
"Worst conditions I've had, sure. Normally I should've found it already. It's definitely finicky. Not gonna be easy."
Beep...
"Why are you turning the detector back on?"
Clock-out Man's fruitless tracking went on for a while. In the meantime, we found fragments that had probably, at one point, made up a raider's body.
They would have charged in meaning to strip the place clean. They would have thought they were only dropping by, and that they'd be gone again soon. Until the sun was up, plenty of people had still been living ordinary lives at Claw Farm. The raiders might never have set foot here before the raid. A few hours later, the settlement was a ruin, and the raiders would be staying here for the rest of their lives. A world where you truly couldn't see an inch ahead.
"Here. I'm sure."
Clock-out Man pointed at a spot. When we cleared away the wreckage of the steel roof strewn across the ground, the shelter showed itself. Badly crumpled, half-buried in the earth. The crumpling had split it open in places, leaving gaps. Shine a flashlight in, and it looked like we'd be able to see inside.
We approached one of those gaps.
Beep-beep!
The detector answered. The Damage Measuring Device was still alive inside the shelter.
So there was a reason the detector couldn't do its job.
The special alloy used to build the shelter must have been blocking the signal. A faint trace that had barely leaked out through the split had only now reached the detector.
Clock-out Man and I put our strength together and forced the gap wider.
Creak. Screech. It opened just far enough for one person to squeeze through.
"I'm going in. Hold position."
"Talk like that and you sound exactly like your active-duty days."
"Hold your current position."
"Yes, sir!"
The moment I was inside, I switched on the flashlight. The interior was so badly crumpled that neither the measuring device nor a core was immediately visible. What stood out most was the blood spattered in every direction. No body parts in plain sight, so it probably hadn't been a large number of people who came in. If the pressure of the air raid had burst the bodies, even a few of them could have left a trace like this.
I jabbed the flashlight this way and that, checking every corner, more than once.
"Hyung, can't find it? Want to change shifts?"
That confidence—that if he did it, he'd find the thing in no time. He wasn't wrong. Follow the smell, and he'd have it at once. Which only made it more infuriating. I was absolutely not changing shifts.
"No. Found it."
"Oh, for real? There's a core?"
I had not found it.
"I'll bring it out in a second."
But before an indomitable will, the impossible did not exist. I swept the flashlight through the interior one more time.
"Found it for real."
Something caught my eye.
"Huh? Then what was that about finding it a second ago?"
"I'll bring it out in a second."
"Hello?"
Wedged into a crumpled gap in a corner of the shelter, a core caught the flashlight and shone.