Free Web Novel“Aaargh! Gwoooooh!”
With the roar of zombies erupting behind him in his ears, Junho kept running at full speed, hurling drawing knives into big plate-glass windows again and again.
Crash! Baaang!
The thunderous noise of glass shattering—sometimes practically exploding—rang out nonstop.
And the more windows the drawing knives smashed, the more zombies burst out of buildings to chase after him.
But Junho never looked back. He focused solely on tearing through the route he had already burned into his head at top speed.
- Left turn. Entering Route 2. Route 2 again 1...
Akina, too, spoke the way she always did during operations—no polite phrasing, just strictly formatted reports.
- B in pursuit. More than 2,000.
Rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble!!!
Gooooooaaah...!!!
Amid an overwhelming roar that felt like it was shaking the earth itself, the howls of thousands of zombies rang out.
- ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) Left turn. Entering Route 3. B in pursuit. More than 3,000.
- Route 3 again 1, 2, 3...
Craaash! Rumblerrr...!!!
A deafening crash burst from an alley Junho had passed just moments earlier, and hundreds of zombies came pouring out.
Whether their own kind tripped and fell, whether bodies got crushed and burst beneath the stampede, the creatures didn’t care. All they saw was one thing: prey.
- Left turn imminent. Entering Route 5.
The moment Akina’s voice ended, several abandoned vehicles came into view at the corner.
Smack! Crash!
He was moving so fast, and inertia was hitting so hard, that Junho had no choice but to come barreling in as if he were about to slam straight into them.
At that instant, he launched himself sideways like he was throwing a side kick.
Smack! Craaash!
Using the side of the biggest vehicle left on the roadside—a delivery truck—as a foothold, he changed direction mid-run.
Rumble, rumble, rumble! Kraaah!
But the zombies had no technique like that. Every time they rounded a corner, a fair number of them got thrown off by inertia and went tumbling across the ground.
Junho, of course, kept sprinting.
- Reentering Route 4.
A little over ten seconds later, Akina reported that he had completed a full lap around the entertainment district centered on Jaeseong Building.
- Warning. Two entities presumed to be Alpha detected. Some B units in Route 3 are detouring through the back alley.
So the Alpha bastards had finally started using real tricks.
They were probably planning to loop around through the rear alleys behind the tightly packed commercial buildings and cut him off from the front.
But that only worked if Junho was merely fast for an ordinary person—someone who ran a hundred meters in thirteen or fourteen seconds.
- Estimated encounter with detoured entities in seven seconds.
Papapapapapapak!
He still had energy to spare, so Junho ran like a madman.
- 44 kilometers per hour. Probability of contact with detoured entities: zero percent.
In the end, after hitting top speed, Junho passed the predicted interception point several seconds before the zombies looping behind the buildings could get there.
Gooooaaah...!!!
Rumble, rumble, rumble!
Hundreds of zombies arrived too late and tried to turn sharply after him, only to lose to inertia and go spilling across the road.
Crash! Boom!
Dozens of them slammed into buildings and were crushed apart.
- Reentering Route 3. No B observed within the route.
- Recommendation: reduce speed slightly.
At Akina’s words, Junho eased his pace a little. If he ran too fast, the zombies would give up.
- Reentering Route 1.
That was how Junho made one full lap around the entertainment and commercial district centered on Jaeseong Building, a rectangular loop more than six hundred meters long.
And in doing so, he succeeded in drawing every last one of the thousands of zombies in the area onto himself.
- Approaching point.
Just as he had when he first entered Jaeseong Building, Junho stepped on the planter, sprang upward, grabbed the second-floor railing, and bolted into the restroom.
Rumble, rumble, rumble...!
Kraaah! Kaah! Gwoooorgh!
The zombies that arrived moments later slammed into the building wall and went berserk trying to climb up it.
At first there had only been dozens.
Very quickly, that number multiplied several times over.
In less than a minute, the six-lane road in front of the building—from the point where Junho had climbed up the rope onward—was packed with an uncountable number of zombies.
By zombie nature, most of them—except the ones under Alpha control—would have dispersed back to where they came from after a few minutes.
But that didn’t happen.
Bang bang bang! Thud! Bam bam!
“Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaaah!”
“Over here! Over here, you monster bastards!”
The third floor of Jaeseong Building contained only a beauty salon, a hold’em lounge, and a singing-practice room. The rest was vacant.
Meaning there had been no people on the third floor the morning the apocalypse began.
And now two of the hostesses had opened the back restroom door connected to the third-floor exterior balcony and were screaming their lungs out.
Gwoooooorgh!!!
Junho, the original target, had already vanished from sight.
But now there were two fresh, vivid prey voices to hear, and the rest of the zombies surged toward the back entrance of the building like a pack of wild dogs.
And then some of the ones that reached it late began acting strangely.
They started climbing onto the backs of the zombies ahead of them, trampling them down, trying to grab the balcony railing.
Kraaah! Krrk! Kyaaaah!
The zombies’ faces, black teeth bared and saliva streaming, were now only four or five meters below.
“U-unnie!”
“Run!”
The two hostesses, already warned in advance by Junho, instantly yanked open the restroom back door and darted inside.
They locked it from within, then grunting with effort, shoved a beauty-salon refrigerator placed in the hallway over to block it.
Gwoooorgh...!
The two women had disappeared from the balcony, but the zombies still kept trying to climb up over one another.
That too, however, would normally be abandoned within a minute or two by the great majority of them, apart from some of the Alpha-driven ones.
But after about a minute had passed, this time another hostess and one of the male employees on the fifth-floor balcony did exactly what the first two women had just done on the third.
“Aaaaaah! Come on up, you bastards!”
“Kyaaaah! Eek! Eek!”
The ones that had already climbed higher than the second floor and were nearing the third-floor railing only grew more frenzied in their efforts.
Like a gigantic grave mound, or worker ants carrying food, the creatures clung tightly to the outer wall and kept crawling upward. And every gap created by the ones scaling the wall was naturally filled by the others still crowding the road in front of the building.
In the end, while the karaoke-bar employees and hostesses repeated the same performance from the third floor up through the fifth and seventh at two-minute intervals, all the way to the main base on the ninth floor—
the thousands of zombies that had completely filled the road in front of Jaeseong Building were all funneled around to the building’s side and rear entrance.
Which meant that Junho, who had entered the fifth floor by rope, had just been granted about eight minutes.
***
- Distance to target: 224 meters. Wind from west-northwest. 3.8 meters per second.
- Adjust 1.2 dots left. Estimated point of impact: 4 centimeters low.
Steadying his breathing as he listened to Akina’s firing-assist voice, Junho pulled the trigger at the target in his scope.
Pahng...!
A suppressed gunshot rang out, and 0.7 seconds later the target—who had been leaning halfway out past the rooftop edge, watching this way—snapped his head backward and dropped.
Another target right beside him flinched in shock.
Pahng...!
With the next shot, that one too went down with a hole punched through his head.
- All rooftop sentries at the final destination eliminated. Work drone commencing action.
One of the two drones hovering over Cheongsan Building quickly descended onto the rooftop and set a rope in place.
Seeing that, Junho grabbed the rifle and sprinted for the rooftop stairs.
He looked different now from when he had just lured all the zombies in the area over here.
The ballistic armor wrapping his body was as heavy and imposing as medieval plate.
The overlapping black Dragon Scale plates, laid in irregular patterns, caught and cast the light in different directions, making him look even sharper, more dangerous.
At a glance it looked like he was wearing thick black armor, but the ballistic plates running over his shoulders, chest, abdomen, and thighs were interlocked layer by layer with mechanical precision.
Instead of restricting his movement, it somehow made him look even more solid.
“Hoo... hoo... hoo...”
Armed with the Level 4 Dragon Scale ballistic suit, the AR-15, and a whole array of weapons and gear, Junho hurried down the stairs.
The additional weight on his body came to nearly forty kilograms.
For an ordinary person, just walking down the stairs would have been impossible. Even an athlete would have taken forever.
But to Junho, it felt about the same as the standard assault loadout special operations troops moved in.
- No threat targets on the road in front of point.
Tap, tap, tap tap! ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
Racing down the stairs, Junho grabbed hold of the emergency descent rope the male karaoke-bar employee had installed in advance on the third floor and lowered himself down.
And the exact moment Junho’s feet touched the ground was when, up on the fifth-floor balcony at the back of the building, the male employee and one of the hostesses were in the middle of screaming themselves hoarse.
- Time remaining: approximately four minutes.
Listening to Akina’s cold, precise voice, Junho ran once more across the broad six-lane road in Moku-ri’s entertainment district, now entirely stripped of zombies.
Because thousands of zombies were all swarming a single building and trying to climb it in an unprecedented frenzy, the surviving people in the area were all on edge, terrified, watching Jaeseong Building.
And a few of them even caught sight of Junho in the Dragon Scale ballistic suit sprinting down the six-lane road.
Junho didn’t care in the slightest.
No one mattered except the gangsters in Cheongsan Building, his final destination.
And now that the two bastards standing watch on the roof had been shot dead, there was no gangster left who could see him heading for the building’s back entrance.
***
“What the hell? What’s going on?”
An Juntae, head of intelligence for the nationwide crime syndicate the Daeseong syndicate, walked over to the window and asked the question.
Then Son Jeguk, boss of the Namyangju Kookje faction, which had fallen under the Daeseong syndicate’s umbrella two years earlier, pointed outside.
“There. Over there. That biggest commercial building in this area’s called Jaeseong Building, right? Every zombie in the entertainment district just went charging over there. Holy fuck, this is insane. Scary as hell. Jesus...”
The distance was a little too far to see clearly up close, but that actually made it easier to take in the full, overwhelming sight of thousands of zombies cutting across the roads in a single rushing mass.
“The zombies? All of a sudden? Didn’t something happen?”
In terms of organizational rank, An Juntae technically held the higher position, but Son Jeguk was seven years older, so he spoke respectfully to him.
“No clue. It got loud as hell all of a sudden, so I looked, and there they were—thousands of them running like maniacs. Christ! L-look at that! Even the ones from the apartment complex are pouring out after hearing it!”
“...!”
An Juntae’s eyes flew wide open.
It was a genuinely horrifying sight.
Countless zombies were plastered to the side of the building like giant cicadas, trampling their own kind underneath as they tried to climb up.
Below them, nearly as many others as the ones on the wall were all reaching upward with gaping jaws.
And now even some of the zombies from the huge apartment complex across the road had come spilling out through the main gate and were running that way.
“It’s like a movie. Jesus fuck, how many is that? Three thousand? Five thousand? That is a fuckload. Christ.”
An Juntae turned to look at Son Jeguk, who muttered low under his breath, shivering.
“Tell the guys to stay at their posts, just in case.”
“Yeah.”
While Son Jeguk barked orders to his men over the radio, An Juntae kept watching the scene outside with a darkening expression.
“Fuck. Nothing can go wrong with what’s in the basement before the boys get here from Deokso tomorrow...”
“That’ll be fine. We blocked every door there is. Whether you’re going in or coming out, the only way to use the basement parking garage is through the elevator shaft.”
And in the basement parking garage of Cheongsan Building, there was a secret passage the owner of the building—Park Ilho, who also ran an illegal business on the top floor—had created to prepare for police crackdowns.
The Kookje faction gangsters had been using that very passage to move in and out from outside.
“But... are the things in the basement really that useful to the chairman?”
“They are. So you should—”
Booom!
A violent blast suddenly erupted from somewhere.
“Jesus!”
“W-what was that!?”
The sound was like a giant firecracker going off right beside the building, and both Son Jeguk and An Juntae jolted in shock.
But then An Juntae’s face twisted hard.
As an executive in the Daeseong syndicate, he had heard a bang very much like that one before.
“A gunshot?”
“A g-gun? Somebody fired a gun?”
“Yes. That was definitely a gunshot. Fucking hell, what kind of lunatic—ah!”
“D-do you think maybe...?” freёwebnoѵel.com
The same thought hit both An Juntae and Son Jeguk at once, and their eyes widened.
Even they, inside the building, had felt their guts drop from how monstrously loud the shot had been.
Which meant it could very well be heard from two hundred meters away.
For example, from there—
where thousands of zombies were currently massed all at once.
“S-still, it was only one shot, so maybe—”
The moment Son Jeguk muttered that tiny scrap of hope to himself—
Boom! Boom! Boom! BOOM! BOOM!
As if crushing it underfoot, the unsuppressed AR-15 started firing subsonic rounds, one after another, each blast exploding out at roughly 150 decibels.
And then, among the zombies swarming Jaeseong Building, the ordinary ones not under Alpha control—the ones that had gone several minutes without seeing any human figure and had started drifting back toward where they came from—along with the ones that had just come running out of the apartment complex—
a horde of fully five thousand zombies began surging toward Cheongsan Building like a massive wave.
“H-holy shit!”
The two men staggered back from the window without thinking, looked at each other, and then bolted for the door as though they had rehearsed it.
Boom! Boom! Bang! Ratatat! Bang!
Even as they ran, the gunfire kept erupting, mixed now with other sounds.
And from the way it was getting even louder, it sounded like somebody had actually entered this building and started a firefight.
“The elevator! Let’s go through the elevator shaft!”
“Fuck! Fuuuck!”
Even if that many monsters came crashing in at once, the building itself wouldn’t collapse. And since the entrances had been thoroughly sealed, breaking through them wouldn’t be easy.
But what if several thousand of them started climbing the walls like they had just seen?
What if the huge solid-pane windows starting from the third floor shattered and even some of them got inside?
“Some,” sure—but that would still mean hundreds pouring in.
And if that happened, then no matter how heavily armed they were, they had no chance of winning.
It would be total annihilation.
Boom! Boom! Ratatat! Bang!
“Aaaugh!”
Already half-crazed with fear at the thought of being torn apart alive by thousands of zombies, the two men lost all reason when those crushing blasts kept exploding one after another, making it feel like their hearts were shriveling up.
“Move, goddammit!”
“Ugh!?”
In the end, An Juntae shoved the somewhat overweight Son Jeguk aside and went sprinting like mad toward the elevator area.
Tap tap tap!
Inside the elevator opening, already standing wide open, was a sturdy steel ladder.
All he had to do now was climb down it straight into the basement.
Baaaang!!!
In that instant, a blast and a flash detonated at the same time.
“Aagh!”
A flashbang turned everything white before his eyes and rang through his skull like it had torn his eardrums open. An Juntae let out a scream and collapsed onto the floor.
Clank, clank.
“Got you, you gangster bastards.”
Then Junho appeared, opening the steel door near the elevator, the Dragon Scale ballistic suit pocked all over with bullet marks.
