The Art of Getting Your Ass Kicked
I ended up inside a zombie apocalypse novel. To be fair, it wasn’t an unwinnable fight. If Kang Siwoo had the technique, I had the stamina and raw power. My plan was simple: tank everything with my insane regeneration and strike the moment he left an opening.
But no matter how many times I swung, my fists never connected. Every punch I threw was met with a light, effortless counter that sent me rolling across the mat. After getting pummeled like that for a solid hour, I honestly didn’t feel like continuing.
Come on, there has to be some give and take for it to be fun, right? If I hit him, he should at least get hit back. But I was the only one eating punches. That wasn’t entertaining at all, and the places I’d been struck hurt like hell. Moving was already a struggle.
He was hitting me with real force too, knowing my regeneration could take it.
Either way, it meant slamming your fist into someone’s gut as hard as humanly possible. Until they were puking stomach acid and groaning on the floor. I didn’t see how there was any real difference.
So I told him to hit me lightly. I was used to getting hit, and since I asked him to use less power than before, I figured I could handle it.
…!
Kang Siwoo’s fist buried itself in my right side. Normally I could’ve gritted my teeth and endured pain like this. But the impact felt like I’d been smashed with a steel hammer. It hurt so much that my legs gave out and I collapsed on the spot.
Wait, I’m not someone who can’t handle pain. What the hell?
I couldn’t understand. Normal zombies still knew when their bodies were being damaged. The Monster from before had been like that. It understood that when my fist met its own, something bad would happen. That’s why it had roared and charged at me so aggressively.
That thing had already been different from regular zombies the moment it started needing nutrients. So even if a zombie could feel pain, it shouldn’t be that strange. I was pretty sure about one in ten zombies I’d punched had looked like they were suffering.
Ah…
In the original novel, zombies had been portrayed as feeling pain and having emotions, probably to help readers stay immersed. Of course, since it was written in first person, it might have just felt that way. But learning this new information felt strangely fascinating.
After that, Kang Siwoo started teaching me all sorts of things. How a strong strike to the lower back could kill most people. How throwing a body blow with the left hand was more effective than with the right. How the liver was more important than the stomach, so I should protect my right side. All kinds of knowledge that sounded completely alien to someone like me, who could get up just fine even with broken ribs stabbing into my organs.
Up to this point, everything was great. There was surprisingly a lot to learn, and after a few more hours I was even starting to step properly and dodge a little.
The problem was that Kang Siwoo had been teaching me exclusively how to beat humans with your fists this entire time. As if he expected me to be fighting people instead of zombies from now on.
Honestly, I would’ve preferred to just keep pretending I didn’t know anything and keep listening to the lecture… but I had already lied to Kang Siwoo and told him I was a regressor. I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.
The corners of my mouth rose on their own. After all, the protagonist of the novel was Kang Siwoo. Even with ten years of experience and a body in its physical prime, he was saying I was on his level. Of course I was happy.
Of course, if we actually fought I’d get absolutely destroyed. Kang Siwoo would find the weaknesses in my abilities in no time.
If I compared it to a game, Kang Siwoo was a close-range assassin built around basic attacks. I was a bruiser whose damage scaled with how much health I lost thanks to my sustain. Normally, if an assassin could burst a bruiser down in one combo, the assassin wins. But if the assassin’s burst can’t kill the bruiser and their sustained damage is only slightly better than the bruiser’s healing, then the assassin loses every time.
I know this because I played games at home every day. Even if games and reality are different, this was obvious. Unless I did something about weapons, there was no way I could beat Kang Siwoo even if I died and came back to life. Without weapons, I win, obviously. If he had been a boxer, I would’ve been the boss of this place ages ago. One-two jab jab jab.
If it weren’t for that damn sword, I would’ve completely turned the tables on him back at Guduk Campus, you know?
Kang Siwoo teased me with a smirk. If this had been the old me, I would’ve been embarrassed. But not anymore. The current me was ultimate. I was confident I could take Noh Changhun’s punches and keep standing.
So I smiled confidently and changed the subject, moving on to the main topic. Basically, I was warning him that if he kept acting cheeky, he was going to get punched.
There weren’t that many places to investigate anyway. I could just go with Lee Ayoung and check the church near where she used to live. Since Lee Ayoung had gone to a church in Nam-gu, Busan, gotten brainwashed, and ended up as their so-called Saintess… asking her would solve everything.
The zombies we’d meet on the way weren’t much of a threat to me anymore. So this mission seemed easier than I thought. Running my mouth was my specialty too.
I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Because there was no need for reconnaissance. The zombies here weren’t the kind we usually thought of. They moved according to orders, hid and ambushed. They didn’t just stupidly wander around the same area in circles.
And even if we needed detailed maps, we could just raid the district office and be done with it. If not, there were still a few people living here. Just asking them would quickly tell us where zombies tended to gather.
So this definitely had some other motive behind it. He was hiding that motive by saying we needed to make maps.
Kang Siwoo smiled kindly. He said that I was someone he could trust with this kind of work because we shared so much information. And it was true—we had shared a lot. We had confessed things to each other that we couldn’t tell anyone else.
When he added that I would definitely understand the importance of this task, I couldn’t refuse. So I slowly nodded and listened to the rest of the explanation.
No, he wasn’t exactly wrong. Still, would it kill him to phrase it a little more nicely? In the apocalypse, appearance and figure were assets too. Objectively speaking, I was quite beautiful right now, so he probably wanted me to use that to gather information.
Part of me wanted to ask why he wasn’t going himself. But since I knew how much he was running around this campus, I reluctantly agreed to go.
Kang Siwoo gave me a dependable smile. Dependable smile or not, I still needed concrete orders to carry out the mission properly, didn’t I? So I asked again, and he really just told me to go wherever I thought survivor groups might be.
In that case, there was definitely one place I had to go.
It’s been a while. Time to enjoy a nice vacation at Haeundae.