“Point A reached. Drone signal status?”
“Analyzing drone signal status. From current position Point A toward the final destination, an additional 180 ters of flight is possible.”
“Knew it might be like this, but yeah... figures.”
Junho clicked his tongue.
This was exactly the signal limit of the relays installed on the rooftop of The First Apartnts and the safe house in the Edutown apartnt complex.
In a straight line, it was only about 1.6 kiloters away, but that mountain he had just crossed—and the clusters of high-rise apartnts that started multiplying the mont he entered Moku-ri—made all the difference.
“So I just install the portable relay at Point B, right?”
“If installed at Point B, stable drone flight control is confird within a 600-ter radius of that relay.”
“Good. The drone following heads back. Send a fresh one.”
“Carrying out instruction.”
The battery on the drone currently overhead was still about half full, but now that he was about to push into the city proper, he needed one that could stay up longer and handle more serious search and reconnaissance.
After confirming that the drone tailing him had turned back toward their shelter, Junho pulled a high-calorie combat ration from his backpack.
Inside were four combat rations, twenty energy bars worth six hundred calories each, and a portable water filter capable of handling up to a thousand liters.
They were there in case the plan went wrong and he ended up stuck in Moku-ri for three or four days.
Junho wolfed down the twelve-hundred-calorie combat ration in five minutes flat, folded the wrapper neatly, and stuffed it back into his pack.
Then he raised his digital monocular and checked Point B—a ten-story comrcial building about 240 ters away in a straight line—as well as Cheongsan Building, his final destination.
“No zombies in the streets...”
There were only two likely reasons.
Either it was too cold, or most of the zombies in Moku-ri were already under the control of Alphas.
“Probably both.”
Murmuring under his breath, Junho checked the route to Point B on the tablet one more ti.
“External work drone 06 will arrive in one minute.”
Then the ssage ca from AI Akina.
“I’m moving.”
“Confird. No threat targets within your direction of movent.”
With Akina continuing to feed him surveillance updates, Junho sprinted down the mountain.
***
A normal person would have taken thirty or forty minutes to cover the distance.
Junho did it in barely over ten.
He vaulted the wall of the high school at the foot of the mountain.
“Songhwa High School. No threat targets. Multiple survivors inside the building. Threat level D.”
A D ranking, when applied specifically to survivors, ant ordinary people.
Even if there were hundreds of them, they posed no real threat to Junho. It had to be at least C before he would even consider whether it was worth dealing with them on the way through.
“Sticking to the plan. Hoo...”
After tightening the straps on his weapons and backpack one more ti, Junho took a breath—
—and tore across the high school field at full speed.
Even wearing Gore-Tex work clothes, Junho could run one hundred ters in the eight-second range.
Now, with a bike suit, firearms and other weapons, plus a backpack full of gear and supplies adding nearly twenty kilograms, there was no way he wouldn’t be slower.
But—
“Current speed: 29.02 kiloters per hour. Arrival at target point in 14 seconds.”
Slower still ant he was moving at a pace equivalent to an eleven-second hundred ters.
And he crossed the slightly-over-140-ter diagonal stretch from one end of the field to the other in about fifteen seconds.
“Hoo... hoo... hoo...”
“No response from Songhwa High School survivors. No threat targets detected along the route from current position to Point B.”
Akina’s voice kept sounding in his ear as Junho steadied his breathing.
And with cardiopulmonary endurance and recovery that had already gone beyond normal human limits, he was back to normal breathing in barely thirty seconds before he vaulted the school wall again.
***
“Precision surveillance at altitude 120 ters. No threat targets on route. You may proceed.”
“Right. Moving now.”
The mont Akina’s report ca in, Junho took off along the route he had already morized, once again at full speed.
But this was no wide-open school field.
This was a residential district.
There were no imdiate threats in sight, but with houses and buildings lining both sides of the road, it would have been stranger if nothing burst out at him.
“Target B erging from house at your rear, forty ters, seven o’clock. Five units. Slow speed. Threat level D. Safe to ignore.”
“Target B erging from multifamily residence at your rear, twenty ters, four o’clock. Fourteen units. Threat level C. Slow speed.”
As if in answer to those thoughts, Akina’s reports kept coming through his earpiece while Junho cut through the wind.
But they were all late.
They either heard him running past or spotted him from indoors and only then ca out after him.
By that point, he was already gone.
Thirty seconds into the sprint—
Beep.
“Threat target erging, twenty-five ters ahead, one o’clock.”
Even before Akina finished, Junho had already reacted to the short warning tone.
He yanked a throwing knife and machete from his tactical belt.
“Grrraaaah!”
As zombies lunged out fast to block his path, Junho hurled the knife and swung the machete in one seamless motion.
Thud!
Smack!
They were only six or seven ters away, so even at a run, the knife hit one zombie cleanly in the head.
Then, with one wide swing of the machete, Junho took the heads off two more at once and angled his sprint slightly left, planted a foot on the wall, and ran along it.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
No matter how much body heat they had preserved by huddling together indoors, creatures stiffened by temperatures hovering around seven or eight below zero could never react fast.
By taking just three steps off the wall, Junho cleared a full five ters and avoided every zombie caught in that gap.
He landed as lightly as if he weren’t carrying nearly twenty kilograms of weapons and gear—
—and burst straight back into a full sprint.
The zombies gave chase only belatedly.
But their bodies were still sluggish from the cold, and all of them had been ordinary civilians before infection. There was no way they were catching a man running twenty-nine to thirty kiloters an hour.
“Distance to Point B: 70 ters. 65. 60...”
“In... out... in... out...”
Listening to Akina’s flat voice under the fading screams behind him, Junho kept his breathing steady and his pace relentless.
The farther he ran, the more zombies joined the pursuit, but he never once looked back.
Counting them was aningless. There were probably at least several hundred now, maybe over a thousand.
Before regression, fear would have narrowed his vision and sent him fleeing at random.
But the Junho of now knew they could not catch him.
So he simply followed Akina’s guidance and ran the route exactly as planned.
“25 ters. 20 ters. Turn right at the intersection ahead. Beyond this point, communication and reconnaissance unavailable...”
He darted around the three-way corner to the right just as Akina said, and the green tal rear door of the comrcial building ca into view.
But the area around that rear entrance was packed with obstacles installed by the survivors living inside.
Junho already knew that from reconnaissance.
“Hup!”
He took a deep breath, never slowing, hit the corner of the flower bed beside the rear door with one foot, and launched himself upward.
Whoosh—thud!
He nearly reached three ters in the air, stretched out a hand, and caught the second-floor tal railing.
Then, snapping his waist and using the rebound with the strength of his arms, he swung himself over it in a fluid, acrobatic motion that looked absurdly easy.
The instant he landed past the railing, Junho moved like lightning.
His left hand drew the commando dagger. His right pulled the Glock 17.
He settled into a modified cup-and-saucer firing grip, the back of his left hand braced beneath the pistol grip.
From here on, he was inside the dead zone.
No drone surveillance. No reliable radio contact with the shelter.
Which ant he had to make it all the way to the rooftop of this building completely alone.
“Hoo... hoo...”
Holding the firing stance, Junho slowly brought his breathing under control.
anwhile, countless zombies that had chased him this far thundered past below, shrieking.
But he knew they had not seen him jump to the second floor, so he never glanced toward them.
He kept his eyes fixed only on the silver tal door and the vent window beside it, just wide enough for a person to squeeze through.
Eventually, the zombies’ noise faded.
Once his breathing was back to normal, Junho finally began to inspect the building and its surroundings, slowly and very carefully.
Across from the rear entrance of the building he was on, the other side was lined with the sa kind of five- and six-story comrcial buildings you could find anywhere.
A PC café. A pool hall. A coffee shop. Karaoke. A massage parlor.
And, absurdly out of place among all of that, a church.
There was no sign of either people or zombies behind the normal glass windows.
But behind the darkly tinted ones, soone might have been watching him right then.
Junho, however, did not tense up at all.
There were clearly survivors living in this building.
Which ant other survivors nearby—or Alphas—also knew that fact.
And if the place had stayed safe anyway, that ant they either could not get in or had decided it was not ti yet.
Creak.
He carefully opened the vent window and pulled out a mini drone from a pouch, sending it inside.
Just as expected, the vent opened into a bathroom.
After confirming that no one was inside the three toilet stalls, Junho took off his backpack and guns, pushed them in first, then slipped through the window himself.
Click.
He cracked the bathroom door open, then sent the mini drone out again.
The businesses on the second floor—a Vietnase noodle place, a spicy-broth restaurant, a hair salon, and the like—were all the kind that would not have opened early on a holiday morning even before the apocalypse.
A dull layer of dust covered the floor, and not one of the shop windows was broken.
Which ant no one—human or zombie—had been through here.
Even so, Junho didn’t let his guard down for a second.
Keeping his firing stance, he stepped out of the bathroom and spent several minutes checking the entire second floor with his own eyes until he confird there really was no one there.
“Second floor’s clear...”
Muttering to himself, he finally headed for the ergency stairwell and sent the mini drone up along the stairs.
A short while later—
“They’ve been using it from the eighth floor up?”
The mini drone cara caught the stairwell between the seventh and eighth floors blocked off with furniture, computers, and all kinds of junk.
Which ant the building’s survivors were up there.
The eighth floor of this building was a PC café.
The ninth was a fitness center that also did Pilates.
And the tenth wasn’t a karaoke room, but a karaoke bar.
All businesses that would have had at least so food and drinks on hand.
On top of that, the rooftop of this comrcial building held around twenty solar panels, most likely installed by the owner to power a shop run personally.
So if the owner’s businesses occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, then those floors probably still had electricity.
And that also explained why survivors had chosen this building in the first place.
Junho moved quickly but soundlessly up to the seventh floor.
Then he opened the ergency stairwell door on seven and sent in the mini drone after swapping its battery.
The drone slipped into the floor with a low hum, flying close to the ceiling while filming every corner.
“...Bingo.”
Unlike the second floor, the seventh had far less dust on the ground.
And there were several footprints.
Oddly enough, certain parts were especially clean, with much less dust than the rest.
Junho, a man living through the apocalypse for the second ti, knew exactly why.
“Smart. Anyone but would’ve missed it.”
Leaving the mini drone hovering over that specific area, Junho moved toward it holding only the pistol.
Then, stopping a few ters short, he pulled a notebook from his tactical vest, wrote sothing on it in pen, and held it up toward the ceiling.
[Let use the roof for a minute. If there’s no answer in ten minutes, I’ll smash every barricade in the stairwell. And I’ll spread the word that there’s a secret route here going up to the eighth floor. Rejection rejected.]
In the upper corner of the ceiling where he held up that notebook, written in clean, blocky letters, there was a cara lens no bigger than a thumbnail—
and impossible to spot unless you were looking for it carefully.
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