A-young's Ultimate Weapon! [Battle with the Outlaws] (2)
"Th-this fucking lunatics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
He had seen them coming with the accelerator floored, sure enough — but he had never truly believed they would do that. Ramming a barricade built with a durability no ordinary vehicle would even dare approach. The moment it actually happened, the Jjambba Tiger lookout on watch spat a raw scream of curses, reeling in pure panic.
"Wooooooooooooooo!!! Hell yeah!!!!"
Geum Tae-yang, on the other hand, erupted with pure, ecstatic delight.
"What the hell is this ride quality?! We just full-on smashed into that thing and my body barely even shook!!!!"
He had been braced for the worst on impact — yet when the Reinforced Custom Hummer slammed into that massive barricade, almost no shockwave reached the cabin at all. The protective barrier Park A-young had layered over the vehicle with her buffs did not merely absorb external force. It dampened the internal jolt as well.
"We're going to be carrying kids in this thing. Isn't that the bare minimum? In a crash, kids get hurt worse from the chaos inside the cabin than from the collision itself."
Park A-young answered with a cool, self-assured voice and expression, savoring Tae-yang's reaction.
In preparing for this expedition, Tae-yang had piled demand after demand on her. And every time, A-young had clicked her tongue and sniped back without fail. But of course she had — she was Park A-young, the tsundere queen herself. She bickered with him to his face, then quietly went and covered every detail he had overlooked, preparing it all with meticulous care behind the scenes.
"Augh, seriously!!! Why are you so damn cute, A-young!!!! Mwah!♥ Mwah!♥"
"Right? Our A-young is so pretty, isn't she, Tae-yang?"
"Hey!! I'm driving right now — what the hell are you doing!!"
That ridiculously addictive tsundere charm hit him so hard that Tae-yang momentarily forgot the situation and peppered kisses all over the cheek of A-young in the driver's seat. Kim Min-jung, ever the soft-hearted mom, beamed with pure delight and chimed right in — while A-young, thoroughly flustered, barked at them both. All of it was only possible because of the barrier she herself had created.
— CRAAAAASH!!!!!! THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!!!!
And the Reinforced Custom Hummer's incredible barrier was far from finished showing off. The Jjambba Tiger barricade — an obstacle so thoroughly packed with rebar that it would have taken something on the order of a five-ton truck ramming it head-on just to have a chance of breaking it — shattered completely under a single body-check from the Hummer.
"Kraaaaah!!! Insane!! It completely wrecked it!! This is the kind of combat power a Yuri supercar has???"
"This is the kind of power A-young's alchemy magic has!!!!!!"
The ride had been so absurdly stable that Tae-yang only registered the full scale of it after the fact. What filled his eyes now was the utterly demolished, pulverized wreck of the Jjambba Tiger barricade. The fact that he had fretted even for a second about whether his Reinforced Custom Hummer could take it suddenly felt embarrassing — so he blasted out a massive roar of admiration to shake the feeling off.
"What the fuck is that even supposed to be??? Did an Awakened just use some ability??? I've never seen or even heard of a power like that!!!!"
The sheer devastation of the shattered barricade hit even harder for the Jjambba Tiger member watching from the third-floor rooftop. He forgot entirely about radioing the main camp, pupils blown wide, frozen solid in place.
"That bastard's completely checked out. At this rate he might not even call it in."
Confirming the barricade was broken, Tae-yang looked up toward the rooftop lookout, ready for the next step. By his plan, the Jjambba Tiger member should already have been frantically radioing his allies. But because even Tae-yang himself had not fully anticipated how overwhelming the result would be, the effect had cascaded into a chain-reaction domino.
"Floor it, A-young. If he just sits there staring into space and lets us go, that's a win in its own way."
Click!
"Okay. Then I'll head straight for Yu-mi's camp."
He could not predict how things would unfold from here, but Tae-yang intended to cover every variable he could. He unbuckled his seatbelt and ordered A-young to drive hard.
— VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!
And just like that, Geum Tae-yang's Reinforced Custom Hummer coolly pulled away from the wreckage of the Jjambba Tiger barricade.
Ah! Fuck! Get your head together! If I just sit here I'm going to get my ass chewed out, damn it!
The moment the Reinforced Custom Hummer started leaving the scene, the Jjambba Tiger lookout on the roof — who had been practically blanking out — finally snapped back to reality.
"Hello??? Hello??? Chang-sik??? It's me, Kim Moon-chul!! Fuck, the trap barricade here is completely wrecked!!! Some weird-ass vehicle showed up, smashed it to pieces, and took off!!!!"
The lookout's name was Kim Moon-chul. He scrambled for the radio and, voice raw with agitation, reported the state of the barricade he had been tasked with guarding.
"Damn it. Back when we first set up shop, we should've grabbed a better location. Let's be real — what do we actually have less of than Nam Seong-chul's crew? Besides raw numbers, I mean."
In a commercial building on the outskirts of Hanseong Metropolitan City sat the office of the Jjambba Tiger survival camp. A big man sprawled on the office sofa, puffing cigarette smoke and venting his grievances. His name was Shin Dong-wook — second-in-command of Jjambba Tiger.
"That's life for you. You take on high risk if you want the big score. Isn't that just how it works?"
The man leaning back in a leather chair by the window, boots propped on a modern desk, answered Shin Dong-wook with easy composure. His name was Jo Pan-ho — the number one of Jjambba Tiger.
The Nam Seong-chul crew they were discussing was currently one of the hottest outlaw factions in all of Hanseong Metropolitan City. As Jo Yu-mi had already told Geum Tae-yang, the outlaw gangs of Hanseong were being reshuffled. And right at the center of that shift, holding considerable weight, stood Nam Seong-chul.
In the early days of the apocalypse, Nam Seong-chul had taken shelter in a major downtown evacuation center. Over time he had built a power base right on top of it. Unlike the outskirts, the city center had been a blood-soaked free-for-all of backstabbing and political warfare — and by surviving that meat grinder, Nam Seong-chul had secured a large number of men and a prime survival-camp location in a remarkably short time.
"Which is exactly why it's time for us to make our move too. You and I both just hit D-rank with our Awakened abilities. Time to bare our teeth."
"So just trust me and wait. The traps we've laid are going to catch every last group around here. Once the rainy season hits and the flooding starts, people will be desperate to move to higher ground. And when they do, they'll have no choice but to pass through the barricades we built."
"Any other route means cutting through streets crawling with zombies. The pressure will be enormous."
Unlike Nam Seong-chul's side, Jo Pan-ho's faction had chosen total isolation. That had let them build a stable camp — but it had also made the kind of growth they wanted nearly impossible. So after long deliberation, they had decided to gamble on exactly what Geum Tae-yang and Park A-young had predicted: the coming rainy season, and the fact that zombies became far more unpredictable in the rain. Jo Pan-ho was burning with ambition — to stage a massive battle on ground he had prepared himself, and to subjugate every ordinary survival camp in the area.
"Boss Pan-ho!!!!! Boss Pan-ho!!!!"
Then a call came that might prove to be opportunity — or disaster. It was Go Chang-sik, who had just taken Kim Moon-chul's radio report.
"We've got a situation!!! There's been an incident at the intersection barricade!!!! Looks like an attack from outside!!!"
And Go Chang-sik, voice thick with panic and excitement, reported to Jo Pan-ho exactly what Geum Tae-yang had done — that their ultimate barricade had been smashed to pieces.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhh...! Shhhhhhhhhhhhh...!
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
At a rain-soaked intersection, two men walked under umbrellas.
"What the hell? This is real? Just like Chang-seok reported — some random bastards who aren't even from any of the local camps smashed the barricade and ran?"
Jo Pan-ho and Shin Dong-wook. Shin Dong-wook, serving as both enforcer and second-in-command, held the umbrella and spoke in a low voice to Jo Pan-ho walking ahead of him. The two of them had arrived at the scene of the incident.
"....."
Even after hearing Shin Dong-wook's near-report, Jo Pan-ho said nothing. His expression was deadly serious — the look of a man staring at the wreckage and realizing something.
I can feel mana... and a hell of a lot of it...
Because mana was lingering at the scene. Jo Pan-ho was a psychokinesis-type Awakened. His primary ability let him manipulate metal and stone to a certain degree — which was exactly how he had been able to raise a massive barricade along the main road of the intersection in such a short time. And as a kind of mental-ability Awakened, just as Enhanced Humans excelled in durability and Supporters in stamina, Jo Pan-ho possessed an exceptional talent for sensing mana. That was how he had picked up the substantial mana residue left behind when Geum Tae-yang's Reinforced Custom Hummer had formed its protective barrier.
As far as I know, nobody around here can put out this much mana. And nothing about powerful outsiders being brought in ever hit my radar either.
Working from the intelligence he had gathered, Jo Pan-ho's mind raced.
Don't tell me... are these the people Do Min-chul warned me about??
His deduction was, in its own way, uncomfortably close to the truth. Jo Pan-ho was cautious enough that in the early apocalypse he had chosen the safe play — and so he had quietly traded information with survival camps that shared a similar code. One of those camps had been Do Min-chul's. With a large organization that needed room to expand, Do Min-chul had found Jo Pan-ho's abilities quite useful, and in exchange for borrowing that power he had provided certain pieces of information.
Fuck. We're screwed!!!!
Even having correctly read the situation, Jo Pan-ho's face twisted.
"KRAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Found them!!! It's obvious — the bastards in that vehicle did this!!!"
VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!
Because his subordinates had already deployed to chase Geum Tae-yang's group. A swarm of men on motorcycles tore down the road, and a man with an armband on his shoulder spotted the Reinforced Custom Hummer almost dead center in the street and bellowed.
"Oh~ worth the wait! You finally came after us, you bastards!"
Ssssssssssssss...!
Geum Tae-yang welcomed them gladly. He had been sitting on the hood in the rain, and now he rose slowly to his feet.
"Yeah. Best to prune off every useless branch before we get there."
Griiiip...!
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Clenching a tempered steel pipe in his fist, he walked out to meet the motorcycle pack head-on.