Raid
Preparations are finished.
The road was carpeted with zombie corpses—the handiwork of Puppet 1 and the rest of the mannequins.
Clearing zombies along a roadside is never easy. Not unless you have something like Sia's Adrenaline.
But a spawn-kill is different.
Right after entry, there are hardly any zombies at all. They come crawling out at a crawl from dark alleys and the guts of sealed buildings. That window was what I had been aiming for. I cut them down one by one before they could settle into place, which was why I had sprinted here without stopping to farm.
Doing it alone would have been a serious risk. My kill speed couldn't keep up with the spawn rate.
But I have Puppetry.
Run it as a four-on-one rotation, and I could clear them faster than they appeared.
"Everyone, get over here and take your gear."
Puppet 1 got the iron shovel. The other three got ordinary shovels and hammers. I also buckled a leather belt around Puppet 1's torso, so the iron shovel could be hung and fixed in place whenever it wasn't in use.
This loadout ought to be enough.
But before that, I still had one test to run.
Puppet 2. Go stand behind that zombie over there.
The area around us had already been cleared, so it had to travel a fair distance. A nod. I waited until the mannequin reached the zombie.
Wake it.
As if to say it understood, it swung an arm in a wide arc and gave the zombie a light tap. The zombie reacted, turned, and started toward the mannequin.
Get on the ground. Don't move a muscle.
The mannequin dropped flat at once.
Hm.
The zombie lunged and climbed on top of it. But then—
Just as I thought!
It shoved its head in as if to bite the neck, and a moment later simply stood back up. After that it glanced around, searching for something.
As expected.
A zombie's vision is blurred. That was why it could mistake a mannequin for a person—but I had figured that the moment it actually bit down, it would realize this wasn't human. No movement. No noise. And if the texture of the skin and the body temperature were different on top of that? To a zombie, that would be nothing but a lump of plastic.
You all saw that, right?
A nod. A nod. A nod.
From now on, lying on the ground to drop a zombie's aggro will be called Playing Dead.
I settled the term in advance so there would be no confusion later. Of course, it was a trick that would only work on a handful of zombies. Once they were swept up in a frenzy, they smashed whatever was in front of them without bothering to check.
I called Puppet 2 back in.
Now we rob the bank.
I laid out the operation.
Puppet 1, you handle luring the Stage 2 zombie.
A nod. I handed the clothes over to the one on lure duty.
Puppet 2, infiltrate the bank and bring me the key. It's in the key box in the inner office.
A nod.
Puppet 3 and Puppet 4 will clear the Stage 1 zombies with me.
A nod. A nod.
I took out my tumbler and drank a mouthful of coffee.
If you're ready, lights on.
Pop. Pop-pop. Pop. Pop-pop-pop. A wave of light raced across the road. Its source was the rope I had handed to the mannequins. Look down at your feet and you could see it strung at ankle height, wound with bulbs meant for a Christmas tree.
Zombies are sensitive to light. Zombies do not avoid obstacles. And there was rope at ankle height. With that, the kill zone was complete.
Throw.
Whoooosh—thud. Whooosh—thud. Thud. Thud. Beer bottles sailed into the bank's floor-to-ceiling glass wall. At the same time a dull, heavy vibration began to roll out from inside.
Then the glass blew apart.
"Kwaaaaaagh!!"
"Kweeeeeeek!!"
"Krurrrrrrrk!"
"Krrrk!!"
The bank's glass wall burst outward, and zombies came pouring through.
Puppet 3, Puppet 4—draw them in.
I gave the order calmly. The two waiting in front of the bank swept their flashlights and pulled the zombies into the kill zone.
"Kwuuurgh!"
"Keeeeek!"
The herd's course changed at once.
A roar shook the air right after.
Puppet 1, lure the Stage 2.
Click. Flash, flash, flash, flash, flash. Puppet 1 flicked the flashlight on and off, drawing the Stage 2 zombie in.
The provocation landed. The thing came after it in a headlong charge. But Puppet 1's taunt didn't end there.
Turn on the cassette player.
Click. A tinny little melody spilled out of the portable player—so rustic it tipped straight over into shamelessly catchy. Huuu—hyaa! Assa! Ssa, ssa, ssa, ssa, ssa!
With that, there was no way the Stage 2 zombie's aggro was slipping free. And the instant the thing lunged, Puppet 1 caught the rope hung from the traffic light and went up.
Good thing we drilled rope movement.
I had gotten good at climbing rope, and Puppet 1 had gotten just as quick.
Puppet 2, find the key. And clean out the ATMs.
Puppet 2, hidden in the shop beside the bank, melted into the dark and slipped inside.
"Kweeeeeet!"
"Kwuuurgh!"
"Keeeeek!"
I was still snapping out orders when three zombies closed to arm's reach and grabbed for me. There was no need to dodge. They snagged their ankles on the rope and went down in a tangle—crash, clatter, a flat sprawl—and I brought the hand axe down on their heads. Crack. Crunch. Split.
I looked up. Puppet 3 and Puppet 4 were luring zombies in with their flashlights. The dead came on like moths to a flame, caught their ankles on the rope, and went down, and shovel and hammer stamped their skulls. Bare black asphalt, without a scrap of cover, had turned into a perfect kill zone.
Numbers really do make this easy.
More than a hundred zombies were cleared in a flash. I waited a moment, and Puppet 2, the one that had gone into the bank, waved. It had slipped past the security zombie's eyes, gotten inside, and swept up the cash.
Hm? There's more?
Nod, nod. The mannequin had found something. I went deeper into the bank and stopped.
Huh?
Bank passbooks lay scattered around a chair. A quick look showed a balance of roughly fifty million won.
Would something like this even count as cash?
I pocketed them for now and got back outside. The security zombie, furious, let out a roar.
And what exactly can you do about it?
Of course, there was nothing I could do either. Not until I awakened Puppetry.
Time to start.
A nod. A nod. A nod. Puppet 1, up on the traffic light, waved as well.
The Stage 2 zombie raid had begun.
Puppet 1 goes first.
It drew the iron shovel fixed to the leather belt, wound the rope around its left arm, and leapt off toward the side opposite the security zombie. Using the swing of that drop, it skimmed past the thing like someone on a swing, and the keen edge of the iron shovel opened a wound across that huge body.
The answer came at once. A punch loaded with overwhelming brute force—but Puppet 1 had already skimmed past. As if to soothe that frustration, the other mannequins struck at its ankles while it locked up, then fled.
Before the thing's aggro could jump, Puppet 1 was already back up the rope, shining the flashlight. Click, flash, flash, flash, flash. The cassette player came on again. The moment its focus snapped back to Puppet 1, Puppet 2 sprinted in, lashed the ankle, and ran. Puppet 1 dropped in the same flowing motion, cut as it passed, and was gone. Puppet 3 stamped down with a shovel. Puppet 4 swept the flashlight across it.
The mannequins drove it in a perfect chain. Even so, the thing showed no sign of going down.
Not easy. As expected.
Even back when I had only ever seen them on video, I used to simulate raids against Stage 2 zombies. No matter what approach I came up with, taking one down was impossible. Its monstrous toughness was a problem, but the greater problem was destructive power enough to burst a person like a watermelon. That kind of force plants fear in a human being. Fear makes you shrink. The raid drags on because of it, the danger climbs, and the whole thing turns into a vicious cycle. My simulations had always been doomed to fail.
But mannequins are different.
A mannequin has no fear of death and no hesitation. That was why it could aim for an opening more boldly, more nimbly. Even if one broke, I could restore it or simply grant it a new will. That was all.
Puppet 2 lashed the ankle, and at last the security zombie went down on the road. The mannequins piled onto it, quick as a pack of jackals. It swung an arm and they shot clear; it tried to rise and the relentless attacks started again. At this point I almost felt sorry for the security zombie.
As if it had given up on standing, it flailed its arms at random. Puppet 3, which had been attacking that arm without letup, caught the end of the swing. A hollow crack, then the clatter of pieces. It had only been a graze, and yet the puppet came apart with a pathetic, almost laughable ease.
But.
"Restore."
Restore
The fragments of Puppet 3, shattered past mere breakage and scattered in pieces, drew together into a single point.
"Attack again."
A nod. Whole once more, it charged the security zombie.
A person would have lost their nerve. The thing's instinct to attack did not fade.
But how long can it hold out?
If we had been human, that stubborn life force would have dropped us first. Mannequins, though, don't get tired.
Both legs were crushed first—crack, wet snap, crunch—and everything after that was nothing but one-sided torture. Puppet 4 held its attention while the other three reduced its lower body to pulp. The moment they reached the spine, its attacks stopped. All it could do now was twitch.
"Well done."
Its skull was far too hard for them, so the finish had to be mine. The instant the hand axe came down—
Puppetry's level rose. And then—
Executioner
"Ooh!"
Right on the heels of the new skill—
"An item?!"
Light was leaking from around the thing's pocket.