The Toad and the Cultist
I woke up feeling a bit queasy, but I forced myself to eat breakfast with the food we'd brought. The frozen stuff went into the microwave to heat up, and I cracked open a can of tuna, eating it straight with chopsticks. It was pretty pathetic and sloppy for a proper breakfast, but there wasn't much choice. Right now, this counted as a feast.
More than that, though, that bastard Changhun was eating way too much. Every time he took a bite, the tuna-topped biscuit chunks vanished in a rush. At that pace, he'd finish an entire pack in five bites. I shot him a look to slow down, and Noh Changhun just answered bluntly.
"Eat a little slower."
"Ugh, and I'm the one who took down all the zombies around here, remember?"
"Go ahead."
After cleaning up, I unhooked the generator from the microwave and loaded both the generator and the battery onto the handcart. Noh Changhun must have finished stretching because he grabbed the cart and hauled it up the stairs. While he did that, I packed up anything we might need in case of an emergency and followed him out.
But then my stomach gave a strange, tingling squeeze. A familiar zombie came into view. I had no idea how it had gotten all the way here, but a single Boxer was doing its little footwork dance.
"I've taken close to three hundred gut punches from those bastards. That's why."
Noh Changhun stepped forward lightly. In an instant, his hand punched straight through the Boxer's stomach and out the other side. I knew he was strong, but I didn't realize it was this strong. The Boxer couldn't even put up a proper fight. Because its spine had been snapped. While feeding it a gut punch, he'd apparently grabbed its spine and broken it clean in half.
Noh Changhun dropped the vertebra from his hand and swung his arm, hurling the Boxer into the wall. Its head burst on impact, and the body slid limply to the ground. Then this idiot had the nerve to say:
"What are you, some blond vampire? Or an Italian mafia boss?"
"Yeah, I'll give you that one."
I kicked the corpse aside so it wouldn't get in the way, then finished getting ready to move. The handcart rolled pretty well as long as we stayed on asphalt. It shook like crazy, of course, but since we weren't riding it, that didn't matter. Still, I worried it might fall apart if we loaded anything too heavy. That's why we were planning to swap out the wheels for bigger ones.
"If you're so picky, you do it! I was just going to tie it with a cute ribbon."
"Ugh, you son of a—"
Thinking I'd hide behind him if any zombies showed up so he could suffer instead, I used the rope to tie the generator and battery down tightly. After testing it with a few laps around the room, it seemed stable enough to move without falling apart. Noh Changhun started rambling about how he was going to modify the handcart. First, he'd replace the bottom frame. Since the side panels were useless anyway, we'd repurpose them to create spots for the new wheels. Typical engineering student—explaining his plans with way too much enthusiasm.
Then he suddenly stopped in his tracks.
"What is it?"
"A what?"
Something whistled through the air. I quickly raised Beopbong to block, but I didn't feel any impact. When I looked closer, Noh Changhun had flicked the arrow away with his brass knuckles. Wait, what the hell? He knocked the arrow down with his knuckles, caught it mid-air, and threw it like a dart. The Poisoner dropped dead on the spot.
Noh Changhun just shrugged like it was nothing, but that was definitely something.
"Whoa, shit. I want some adrenaline too."
"Like getting all hot and bothered whenever a dangerous variant shows up, like a bitch in heat?"
"Isn't it basically the same thing?"
"Duck!"
A zombie burst out of the bushes. Unfortunately, Noh Changhun was pushing the cart, so it looked like he wouldn't be able to react in time. Killing the zombie wasn't hard. All I had to do was swing Beopbong while he ducked his head. The problem was that the zombie's corpse looked familiar.
"What variant was this again?"
It looked like a person imitating a frog. There were small holes all over its back—big enough to fit a fist through. Okay, maybe they weren't that small. Anyway, it had those holes and webbed hands and feet that looked perfect for swimming. That bastard Noh Changhun, who had created this setting himself, turned his head away in disgust.
"Toad? Like a toad?"
"Then what are those holes on its back for? I'm seriously about to throw up."
"...Not for spitting out babies?"
My mind was reeling. Okay, sure. I vaguely knew about certain frogs that hatched eggs on their backs. But those were still frogs. This thing was a human. A human pretending to be a frog, hopping around, bursting poison sacs from its back and giving birth to babies? This was... really fucking gross.
"No, you idiot! You come up with shit like this while thinking about physics? Wait—drawing?"
"I knew it."
We were about to keep moving when I suddenly remembered a sign we'd passed earlier. There was a valley and a waterfall nearby. Just twenty minutes on foot and we'd reach water. But there was no water here yet. That meant the conditions for Toads to appear shouldn't be met.
Then it hit me.
"Hey, Changhun. You know about the Hunters, right?"
"Those bastards tried to kidnap me instead of killing me."
"There's something out there strong enough to order Hunters to kidnap me."
"And something that can move Toads all the way here from a body of water twenty minutes away."
The pieces clicked together perfectly. Something had clearly gone wrong in this area. Otherwise, a water-dwelling variant wouldn't have come this far. There had to be some variant that had taken Generals as subordinates and was starting to devour the region.
"You know, the Worm types. The really big ones. The ones that dig tunnels and transport zombies through them."
"Yes! It's been almost a month. It wouldn't be weird for one to show up now, right?"
"Yeah?"
"................................."
"..........................."
As a reader. And as the author. In this damn zombie apocalypse novel, the phrase "No way that would ever happen" fit perfectly. "No way a General would show up already," and then I got my guts punched in. "No way I'd get sucked into the novel," and yet here I was.
Noh Changhun, who had quickly realized the gravity of the situation, spoke carefully.
"Why?"
"I'm not an idiot. Anyway, he was gathering people and telling them to head to Busan later when they had the strength, right?"
"Because there aren't enough survivors?"
That part was definitely strange. In this region—not Busan—there weren't any particularly large survivor groups. At best, there was the university where the protagonist was, on the outskirts of Busan. But the protagonist couldn't be dead yet. He was a regressor, after all. The protagonist of this novel had gone back ten years in time. I remembered him as someone who said he'd live for me but was actually a soft-hearted guy who took care of everyone around him. That's why survivor communities only started forming in Gyeongsang Province after several years.
Then one thought occurred to me.
"Hey, Changhun."
"There was this one crazy obsessed reader on the illegal novel reading site, remember?"
"The one who left reviews on every single chapter of your novel."
"That guy wrote a few chapters as a parody of your novel. The plot was something like this..."
What if. That guy. Had been transported here after fulfilling the chamdokchung condition.
"Using future knowledge to enter a cult in Busan—you know the one, right?"
"He said he'd join that cult and pretend to be the Prophet."
"What if that guy actually got transported here and joined the cult just like in the novel?"
"So what if Busan never became a clean zone, and except for a few areas, it's still being overrun by zombies?"
Noh Changhun muttered the English titles for the Noble ranks. Then he muttered again that intelligent zombies would obviously form a hierarchical society in a situation like this. He kept muttering to himself the whole way until he finally spoke with determination.
"What?"
"Are you out of your mind?"
For a second I seriously considered smacking him in the head. We weren't even ready to leave this area yet. Instead of running away as fast as possible, he wanted to go hunting variants and zombies? Logically, it made no sense. But for some reason, my heart was pounding. Maybe my body still remembered the thrill of taking down powerful variants.
In the end, I nodded.