A Hobby
Towers erupted in the hearts of the world's major cities. Seoul was one of them.
At first, everyone took them for the omen of a calamity. But they say a crisis is just another kind of opportunity—and the opportunity arrived right alongside the disaster. Curiosity was what seized it. No one knows who went in first. People began to enter, though, one and then another, and they came back out carrying goods. New energy resources. Strange items. Even jewels. Whatever they hauled into the real world was valuable enough to shake the balance of global power. It was, quite literally, a chance to turn a life around.
That chance was offered to anyone.
Not everyone could make it back alive. That was all.
Whoa. This video is insane.
After the Towers rose, he picked up a new hobby: picking apart the footage Hunters brought back. If he ever went in, how would he move? Could he do it better than the Hunter on the screen? The fantasy alone sent dopamine ripping through him.
A hobby. That was all it was. He didn't have the faintest intention of actually entering a Tower. Still, imagination was free.
Which was how the second hobby started. Walking his own neighborhood on Street View.
A Tower's first floor took the Hunter's own neighborhood as its backdrop. Not a perfect copy. Roads sealed off. Barbed wire strung up here and there. Restaurant doors smashed in, entryways boarded over with planks. The traces of an apocalypse were sitting right there on top of the streets he knew.
Three floors had opened so far. No Hunter had come back alive from the third. It was open, though, wasn't it?
What a Hunter did inside was simple. Farm an apocalyptic city, then get out through an extraction point.
And what was in it for them? Most of what you farmed became yours. Clean out a jewelry shop that was still intact and you'd make more money than winning the lottery. Cash, you couldn't bring out—the Tower reclaimed it automatically. In exchange, your ranking climbed by however much had been recovered. What a high ranking was actually good for, he had no idea.
Getting in was simple, too. You just had to think that you wanted to enter. No other condition required.
So why not step in once, if it could flip your life? If the goods were just sitting there to be picked up, sure. The problem was the setting the Tower had chosen. An apocalypse. A zombie apocalypse, at that.
A bite, fortunately, didn't turn you. The difficulty was anything but low.
The zombie types known so far split into two stages. Stage One came as runners and walkers. At a glance you could mistake them for different species, but they were the same kind. A zombie was asleep by default—standing, head drooped, dozing where it stood. Sound woke it. So did a person drawing close, exposure to light, or someone breaking into a run nearby. Freshly woken, the body was stiff, and all it could manage was a shuffle. That stiffness held for three minutes. After that, it was a runner.
Lose aggro by any means and it went back to where it had been, then fell asleep again three minutes later. Stiffness right after waking wasn't the only weakness. Their vision was blurred. The farther off you were, the less accurately they could make you out.
Stage Two had monstrous strength. That was as much as anyone had figured out.
And the video he'd just been watching had one in it.
"Holy shit."
A hulking mass of muscle, as if the tissue had swollen at random—and the face had gone the same way, features so bloated they were hard to tell apart.
"How are you even supposed to kill that?"
The Hunter in the video still got away clean. The moment he cleared a set radius around the fire station, the Stage Two turned around and went back.
So they balanced it. Barely.
If things like that had been free to wander, no Hunter would have survived. As it was, the survival rate wasn't terrible anymore. In the early days it had been pure despair.
Then a warning tone screamed, long and shrill.
He picked up his phone.
"This is—?!"
The Tower of Calamity. The app that installed itself on a Hunter's phone. A push notification was sitting on the screen.
The problem was that the app was only supposed to install for people who had entered a Tower.
Why is this on my phone?
He read the push first.
Time remaining until calamity strikes Korea: 10 months, 29 days
To prevent the calamity, a sum equal to the nation's annual tax revenue must be recovered from within the Tower.
"No way!"
Ten months and twenty-nine days until a calamity hit Korea? And to stop it, someone had to pull—out of the Tower—a sum equal to the country's entire annual tax revenue?
Please tell me this is some new phishing app.
Maybe it wasn't the real Tower of Calamity app at all. A hack thrown together by Chinese hackers felt a lot more likely. And why wouldn't it? Did anyone even grasp how big the country's annual tax take was? How were you supposed to recover that?
He opened the app info, ready to delete it.
There's nothing here? Yeah. Figures, if it's a hack.
He'd take the phone to a service center tomorrow.
Then he searched the internet.
This is real?!
Articles were pouring out. The communities were already plastered over with posts, as if the calamity had already landed.
We're fucked?
No. Too early to despair. First, the total recovered so far.
A chime, as if the app had been waiting on him. He opened the Tower of Calamity, and the target amount came up.
Target Recovery Amount
≈ 494 trillion won
Amount Recovered
≈ 1.482 trillion won
Even that was money banked in the early days. Once word spread that cash didn't turn into anything, nobody bothered bringing it out.
Now. One month later.
Completion rate: 0.3 percent.
"We are so completely fucked."
He hunted for information until the night was gone, and only when he was on the verge of passing out did he finally drop onto the bed. It would be fine. The government would announce something tomorrow. Mm. Not that he trusted them. Sleep, for now.
Consciousness sank into the dark the way the dying light of his phone did.
The dream was a familiar one. He slipped between the zombies without a sound, gathered what he needed, and reached the extraction point untouched. He got out perfectly, exactly as he'd calculated—movement cleaner than the clumsy Hunters in the videos, judgment colder. In the dream, he was a veteran Hunter.
Veteran, my ass! What the fuck?!
He barely choked down the nausea surging up his throat.
Are you kidding me. Is there actually a dumbass like this?!
Dreaming it had been fine. So why, inside the dream, had he gone and thought he wanted to enter the Tower?! And why had the Tower taken sleep-mumbling for an actual decision!!
He drew a long breath and clawed his composure back. Situation first.
Starting point: his studio. Time of day: night. No different from any other Hunter. A phone in his hand. The only things you could bring in were thin clothes and a phone. Everything else had to be scavenged inside, which was why the first run was the hardest. You started with basically nothing on you.
Get out once, and it got easier. Anything obtained in the Tower could be brought back in on the next entry. On top of that, a first successful extraction awakened a unique skill.
If he'd known it would go like this, he would have walked in on purpose, braced for it. Instead he'd been dragged through with no mental preparation at all.
Weapon first.
He looked around the room he knew by heart. Nothing that would serve. Not even a frying pan. The map itself matched reality almost exactly, but the objects placed in it were sparse.
At least the sneakers and the bag are here.
Lucky. A starting point was usually empty, and yet there was a bag. He opened a drawer and found a few T-shirts, too.
This might actually be the best start you can get.
Sneakers on, he wound the shirts tight around his feet. The noise of his steps ought to drop, at least a little. He'd never seen a Hunter do it, so he wasn't sure.
Move.
Nothing good came of lingering in the starting zone. Better to cover ground while he still had the strength.
The front door's the problem.
Opening a door was the most dangerous moment there was. A zombie on the other side had a good chance of waking. He popped the batteries out of the digital lock first, then eased the bolt back, slow.
Please. Just don't be close.
The door creaked. He'd tried to kill the sound, but the rusted hinges gave him away anyway. He froze and counted off ten seconds.
Nothing nearby. Lucky.
A flash.
What the fuck?!
The phone had turned itself on.
What?! I didn't touch anything!
He scrambled back inside and checked.
Right. I never looked at the map.
The app had one up. He didn't strictly need it. This was his neighborhood, and on top of living here he'd been walking the Street View of it every single day. That was also why checking had slipped his mind.
Still. Confirm the extraction point. Mark the important spots while I'm at it.
There were two kinds: a public extraction point and a personal one. The public point was where he'd expected—the turnstiles at Hongje Station. The personal one lay toward the Yuil Arcade. It had a time limit, though, so he set it aside for now.
Centered on Hongje Station, the map's farthest reach was Hongje Elementary School. The opposite edge sat at roughly the same distance.
Check finished, he stepped back outside. His place was a first floor that might as well have been a semi-basement, and the shared entrance leading out was clear. Outside, just as he'd feared, zombies stood asleep on their feet.
He would have loved to loot his own building. Every door in the starting zone was sealed.
Slow. Go slow and it'll be fine.
He set a foot down, careful. Under the thin wash of a streetlight, they took shape—skin stained ash-gray and creased, clothes like rags stitched back into the shape of a person, bodies giving off the smell of rot. He circled wide, the way you'd walk around something you refused to touch.
"Grrrk."
A low moan rose behind him, and his skin crawled.
Oh, come on. Zombies snore now?
Walking slowly wasn't enough. He dropped his posture and crept, almost on all fours.
A weapon. I need a weapon first.
Fighting a zombie was the last resort. Unless there was truly no other choice, you avoided it. Start a fight and the noise woke everything nearby; backpedal to dodge one attack and you woke another pack. There was no telling how far a single fight would pull aggro.
I still need a weapon.
Having a way to answer them and having nothing were worlds apart. The building next door, then—maybe he could loot that.
He was shifting his weight forward, one careful step at a time, when he saw it.
Huh?!
A person, lying on the ground.
Not a zombie. A corpse.