Entangled in a Rape-Murder Case... [Mart Raid][2]
Ahem. Still missing the point. The second growth engine isn't called "Kim Min-jung's Savior" in the first place. It's just "Savior."
Which means I could fulfill the growth conditions through bonds with people other than Min-jung, too. So there's no reason to assume I'll definitely end up using the Mana Condom special skill with her.
That was how Geum Tae-yang chose to think about it.
Honestly, he was already getting more than enough sexual satisfaction from Kim Min-jung's handjobs alone. And while he was prepared to do anything for her, that resolve did not necessarily include actual sex.
Quasi-sexual acts and real intercourse were entirely different dimensions. To him, she was still the tender, motherly auntie figure — Kim Min-jung. So Tae-yang rough-drafted a rather convenient interpretation of the Savior growth engine's mechanics, half in denial of reality.
"Hmm? What's with that look on our pretty Tae-yang's face all of a sudden?"
Kim Min-jung caught the shift in his eyes with uncanny precision the moment his thoughts grew heavy. She took his earlier banter as a front and figured he was actually quite tense — so she immediately softened her tone and expression, trying to ease whatever was weighing on him.
Goddamn… this is exactly it. How am I supposed to not overthink things when she's like this?
Watching her, Tae-yang felt a quiet shiver run through him. She reacted instantly even to the subtlest change in him. When she was giving him a handjob, her allure as a sultry MILF poured out without limit — but in every other situation, she became this affectionate Auntie Min-jung again. In that light, he simply could not picture any buildup that would lead to sex.
And just barging in with a raw demand for it didn't look like the right answer either, not when measured against a Status Window mechanism that put so much weight on sincerity.
"Hahaha! It's just a little surreal, getting seen off by both you and A-young like this."
Tae-yang snapped his expression back into place and offered a half-decent cover.
"And you saw me the day before yesterday, Auntie. Squatting three hundred forty kilos. I've gotten ridiculously strong, hahaha!"
Before heading out on external work, he had already laid the groundwork thoroughly — just in case Kim Min-jung fretted herself sick. A state-of-the-art training room had been set up in a corner of the bunker's first floor, and there he had demonstrated exactly how much stronger his body had become.
Before awakening, Tae-yang had squatted two hundred kilos. After awakening and gaining E-level physical stats, that number had jumped by a full hundred forty kilos. A man who had already possessed top-tier athletic ability among ordinary people now ranked among the absolute elite even of the elite.
"Well, Auntie's gotten crazy strong too. I wanted to help out, but…"
Kim Min-jung, now at G-level, had physical capabilities on par with an intermediate male athlete. At a hundred seventy-nine centimeters and sixty-three kilos, she had squatted a full hundred kilos. She had begged so earnestly to help with the mart raid — and Tae-yang had refused her at every turn.
"This is a problem. I don't think I can even talk back to Mom anymore. We used to be about even in strength, but now she's crushing me."
Park A-young, who had been watching their back-and-forth from a step behind, reached out and kneaded Kim Min-jung's shoulders as she spoke.
"Oh, you little— when have I ever shown you that kind of side?"
Her daughter's sudden jab caught Min-jung off guard, and she protested at once.
"Haha! Alright then — I'm heading out, Auntie~~~!"
Seeing the genuine mother-daughter bond between the two women warmed Tae-yang's heart. He stepped out through the bunker gate with a full, blooming smile on his face.
"Ready yet, dickhead Tae-yang?"
"Shut up, Park A-young. I'm ready."
Tae-yang stood in front of the main entrance and growled at the voice crackling through the speaker.
"Tae-yang, you really have to be careful. Got it?"
"Haha! Of course, Auntie."
"Opening the gate."
"Okay, hurry it up, A-young."
Kim Min-jung's final caution and Park A-young's announcement came through the speakerphone. A-young had used bunker materials to install an additional gate at the main entrance — meaning once the gate opened, you still had to open the front door beyond it to get outside.
Tae-yang looked down at his right hand, having received the last send-off from the people he held dear.
Give me strength, Dad. Strength to protect these people no matter what happens.
Clutched in that hand was the steel pipe his father, Geum Il-bong, had left behind like a final keepsake.
The gate rumbled open.
Awakened Geum Tae-yang — mart raid, deploying…
With a resolute glint in his eyes, Tae-yang walked out between the opened double doors.
"Wow… was this system always set up like this, sweetie?"
Watching Tae-yang's retreating back on the front-gate CCTV, Kim Min-jung spoke with open wonder to her daughter, who sat at the main computer. The second-floor computer room had, at some point, become a full central control tower. From there they could open the front gate and the bunker gate, and the auxiliary monitors to the side displayed real-time graphical maps of the bunker interior, the landlord's house, and everywhere else besides.
Kim Min-jung could not hide her amazement as she took in that magnificent control hub.
"Some of the functions were already there~ and some I just cobbled together and added myself~"
A-young answered in a cool, casual voice, eyes on the central monitor.
"You're really incredible. I know you're my daughter, but I'm so proud of you."
A full mother's smile blooming on her face, Kim Min-jung stroked her daughter's hair.
"Hmm. Hey, Mom."
The praise made A-young itch, so she immediately tried to change the subject.
"Are you okay with that?"
And she lobbed a question so vague it barely meant anything.
"With what? What am I supposed to be okay with, sweetie?"
Kim Min-jung's eyes went round as she tilted her head.
"Looks like Tae-yang's already started jacking off. I figured it out living with him, but I thought it might be a shock for you. You go into his room a lot, after all."
It was a topic she could only broach so carefully. A-young had known about Tae-yang's masturbation habits since day three.
"J-jacking off…? You mean… Tae-yang masturbating…?"
Kim Min-jung, whose eyes had just been round, answered with a look of mild brain-freeze.
"Yeah. When he jacks off, he locks the door. Then three nights ago, he suddenly locked his room in the evening. Unlocked it an hour later."
A-young pointed at the auxiliary monitors scanning every corner of the bunker. Surveillance cameras covered the storage areas and major equipment zones. Bathrooms and living quarters had none — but any security action like locking a door still registered on the scan system.
"I… I already knew, sort of… Sometimes when I went into Tae-yang's room, there was a smell…"
Faced with ironclad evidence, Kim Min-jung nodded slowly. The reason she had been flustered was not simply that Tae-yang had started masturbating. It was that A-young had noticed — and that her daughter had used a word as crude as "jacking off."
"Wow. Mom, you really are different. The first time I ran into that, I was seriously traumatized. For a solid two weeks I couldn't even look at Geum Tae-yang like a human being. Living together for about six months got me used to it, though."
A-young marveled at the fact that Kim Min-jung had known about Tae-yang's habits — had even smelled it — and never let it show. She herself had suffered genuine post-traumatic stress the first time she realized what he was doing.
"Oh, sweetheart. You're a twenty-one-year-old young woman now. Mom's just an old auntie, that's all. And you've always had such a big heart. The fact that you're even talking about this means you've come to understand Tae-yang's masturbation, right? You've accepted that side of him."
A-young sometimes tore into her own rotten personality. It pained Kim Min-jung, so she rushed to take her daughter's side.
"But Mom — do you masturbate too?"
The follow-up question that landed in that moment was, if anything, even more outrageous and shocking than the last one.
"W-what??? W-why would you suddenly ask that????"
Kim Min-jung's eyes, which had been soothing her daughter, went dramatically wide.
"No, it's just — when Geum Tae-yang jacks off, the temperature in his room goes up by a meaningful amount. And sometimes the same thing happens in your room."
There were no cameras installed, but the central control tower still pulled in a remarkable range of data. Every time Kim Min-jung gave Tae-yang a handjob, the temperature in her room rose — in A-young's words — by a meaningful amount. That data was the basis for the question she had just asked.
"Well, this is… awkward for Mom… But there's no helping it. I should just say it."
"This is just between us, A-young, but the truth is… you and Tae-yang have both been away from home since the start of the year, and Mom's been really lonely. So I think I just… developed a habit of masturbating. Aigoo… even saying this to my own daughter is so embarrassing…"
Kim Min-jung knew perfectly well what was actually causing those temperature spikes. So she confessed to a masturbation habit she did not have — and in doing so, successfully hid her secret acts with Tae-yang from her daughter.
Ugh… the stench of rotting zombie corpses is really starting to hit hard.
After patrolling the zombies around the house, Geum Tae-yang headed toward Ondol Mart. Corpses piled up in the streets with every passing day, and the reek they produced made him wrinkle his nose. In the first day or two, before the flesh began to rot, the dominant smell had been blood. But by day six, decay had started setting in among some of the street zombies.
That one — I took him down on the first day on my way back. Didn't notice at the time, but he was a big bastard.
The rotting corpses all belonged to people who had turned in the earliest days.
I figured once this place became a closed zone, people wouldn't be wandering around much. Looks like I was wrong.
Thanks to the district reorganization project, sealing off zones in South Korea had become easier than before — and closed zones were multiplying fast. On day three, Pyeonghwa-dong, where Tae-yang was based, had been declared one as well. Once the apocalypse truly settled in, closed zones would mean almost nothing. But in this transitional period, Tae-yang figured they would still have a major impact in several ways. A zone recognized as that heavily infested would see its influx of people drop sharply — which was another reason Ondol Mart might still be unlooted.
And yet more people seemed to be moving through Pyeonghwa-dong than he had expected. The evidence was right there: far more zombie corpses than on day three. The people who had produced those corpses were almost certainly newcomers.
And those kinds of people are exactly the ones thinking the same things I am. The type you really have to watch out for.
In the current situation, Tae-yang was starting to think that running into a survivor might be more dangerous than dealing with the zombies themselves. Anyone roaming a closed zone was either passing through temporarily while fleeing — or deliberately exploiting the zone's characteristics to move freely. The latter type could be written off as genuine lunatics who had come out with a real purpose. He thought so because he himself was out here with exactly that kind of lunatic objective.
Not just paranoia after all. Looks like a real psycho already came through here.
A little farther on, Tae-yang ran into precisely the situation he had feared. He found a scene that looked like a lunatic had paid a visit.
I can roughly piece this together. That body — they killed the person while they were still human, then smashed the head after death to stop them from turning.
What he had found was a corpse slumped against the wall at the corner of a mid-sized alley. It did not look like a normal death. There was no trace of zombification at all, and every sign of a desperate attempt to flee remained. In other words — a murder victim.
Gruesome as hell.
Tae-yang approached slowly to examine the body.
Looks like she was raped.
Up close, the murder scene was even more horrific. It was a woman's body. She was wearing a one-piece dress, and near the hem of the skirt her underwear was visible. From the look of it, the killer had pulled her panties down to about mid-thigh, flipped the skirt up, raped her, and then murdered her.