Free Web Novel“Mmph! Mmph!”
Son Jeguk writhed on the floor, his arms and legs bound with cable ties, blue duct tape wrapped around his mouth.
“Ugh... hnngh!?”
Junho forced An Juntae—who still hadn’t fully come to—face-down onto the ground, twisted his arms behind his back, and cinched them tight with another cable tie.
“My arm, my arm—agh! Ugh... who the fuck are you, you son of a bitch? Do you even know who I—urk!?”
Still pinning An Juntae’s back down with one knee, Junho grabbed a fistful of hair at the back of his head.
“Of course I know who you are. You’re an executive in the Daeseong syndicate, right? The division chief at the headquarters in the New Town sent you here.”
“Ugh!?”
Even through the pain that felt like his hair was about to be ripped out, An Juntae’s eyes flew wide.
Because even through the ringing in his ears, he had heard the words Daeseong syndicate and division chief clearly enough.
“Anyway, I’m busy, so we’ll talk more later.”
Riiip. Press.
“Mmph! Nnngh!”
Without the slightest mercy, Junho wrapped blue duct tape around An Juntae’s face too.
Then he hoisted the fairly large man up like he weighed nothing, slung him over one shoulder, grabbed the ladder in the elevator shaft, braced both legs against the sides like supports, and slid straight down in one go.
Thud!
After dumping An Juntae in front of the elevator on Basement Level 2, Junho went back and brought Son Jeguk down the same way.
Then he dragged both men over to a corner of the parking garage, sat them against a pipe, and bound their arms to it one more time.
“Mmph! Mmph!”
“Nnngh!”
They both kept making muffled noises, lying on the floor like insects, clearly desperate to say something. Junho looked down at them with cold eyes and said loudly,
“There aren’t any zombies down here, right? So just sit tight a little while. I’ll clean things up and come back.”
“...!!!”
Leaving An Juntae and Son Jeguk there with their eyes bulging wide, Junho climbed the ladder back up.
***
Gwoooorgh! Kyaaaah!
“Fuck! Block it! Block it!”
Bang! Ratatat! Bang!
Apparently all the zombies that had been at Jaeseong Building had arrived by now. Outside the elevator doors on every floor, a chaotic mix of roaring, shouting, and gunfire was erupting.
“How long until zombies start getting into each floor?”
- Entry into Floors 1 and 2 is impossible. All entrances and windows have been blocked with obstacles. From Floor 3 upward, estimated entry time is one minute thirty seconds to two minutes per floor.
- Estimated time to reach Floor 6: six to eight minutes.
- Given the current number of B surrounding the building, reaching Floors 7 and 8 is unlikely.
“Got it. Then send one work drone into the seventh floor.”
- Confirmed.
Still talking to Akina over comms, Junho climbed the ladder fast and stepped back out into the eighth-floor elevator entrance, then glanced down below.
“They really did think this through.”
This shaft connected only the top floor—the eighth—and the parking garage on Basement Level 2, where there was presumably a secret passage leading outside.
The elevator doors on all the other floors had been completely blocked from the inside, so there was no opening them.
Which meant the ladder installed in what should have been a functioning elevator shaft had really been an access route and emergency escape path meant only for the top floor.
Junho had found it by sending a mini drone in through the large rooftop vent to scout the interior.
Clack.
He opened the steel door on the eighth floor that he had passed earlier before capturing An Juntae ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) and Son Jeguk.
A thick reek of gunpowder and blood hit him immediately, and Junho pulled his ballistic mask back up over his face.
Seven men lay sprawled in pools of blood down the hallway, guns and shell casings scattered around them.
They were the gangsters Junho had shot dead a few minutes earlier.
This was exactly why he had bothered suiting up in the Dragon Scale.
To break through armed enemies in a narrow corridor as quickly as possible, he had needed to accept taking a few rounds.
And although the armor had taken three or four hits, Junho had killed them with absurd ease.
Part of that was because his shooting skill wasn’t even in the same universe as a bunch of mobsters who looked like they’d barely fired live rounds a handful of times in their lives.
“Idiots...”
They hadn’t known a thing about what happened when you started blasting live ammunition indoors—especially in a cramped hallway like this—without ear protection.
That was why three of them had either panicked at their own deafening gunfire or their partner’s, suffered severe hearing damage on the spot, dropped their weapons, and collapsed where they stood.
Quietly giving thanks, in a way, to all the movies and TV dramas where people fired like maniacs indoors with no ear protection and came out just fine, Junho muttered,
“Might as well take what’s worth taking.” ƒгeewёbnovel.com
He quickly stuffed their guns into his backpack, frisked their bodies, and collected every spare magazine he could find.
After lengthening the shoulder straps as far as they would go and slinging on the noticeably heavier pack, Junho opened the emergency stairwell door at the end of the corridor.
Creeeak.
Gwoooooooorgh...!
The roar of zombies floated up from far below in the stairwell.
- Large numbers of B have entered Floor 4. Entry into Floor 5 is expected in approximately one minute.
As Akina’s voice reported, Junho headed down the stairs while glancing at the tablet.
One of the drones had already entered the seventh floor and was now stationed beneath the water dispenser at the end of the hallway, giving him a detailed view of everything there.
But with thousands of zombies surrounding the building and trying to climb it, nobody had the attention to spare for a water dispenser.
Then he saw them—four men armed with things like steel pipes wrapped with blades, and two more carrying firearms—running in a pack toward the stairwell.
“Those are...”
Junho narrowed his eyes the moment he saw the two with guns.
One had a Chinese-made pistol.
The other was carrying a heavy matte-finished shotgun.
“Benelli M4...”
A masterpiece with superb reliability and outstanding performance, something you could almost call the shotgun itself.
But like any other gun, in the apocalypse—and especially indoors like this—it was not something you ever wanted to fire casually without hearing protection.
No joke, your eardrums might actually rupture.
The bastard with the Benelli M4 hurriedly punched at the keypad on the emergency-exit door.
Installing a keypad on a stairwell door, no matter how important security was—these lunatics were unbelievable.
And a “premium shotgun” like that was way above what thugs like these should have been able to get their hands on.
'I wonder if it’s possible to make a suppressor specifically for shotguns.'
Then again, for someone like me, maybe.
***
Bang.
The seventh-floor emergency door burst open, and the gangsters came charging up the stairs.
“B-boss, there were gunshots on the eighth floor, and Director An is up there—”
“Jesus fuck, you moron. Is that the problem right now? If those zombie bastards get up here, we’re all finished. You wanna fight one or two assholes with guns, or the zombie bastards outside? Fucking use your brain for once—huh?”
Something like a soda can suddenly whipped past right in front of him, and the gangster cursing his head off while climbing the stairs stared wide-eyed.
Taaang! Baaaang!!!
The flashbang landed right in the middle of the stairwell where they were charging up, and the blast and light exploded at the same instant.
“Kraah!”
“Agh! M-my eyes!”
As the gangsters on the stairs all simultaneously covered their eyes, staggering and collapsing on the spot, Junho calmly put them down one by one with the suppressed AR-15.
Then, as always, he gathered up every gun and round of ammunition, went down to the seventh floor, opened the emergency-exit door, and entered.
The seventh floor was a complete mess.
Screams and shouting were flying everywhere, with gunfire mixed in on top of it.
Apparently they were shooting at the zombies clinging to the outside walls and trying to climb up.
- A large number of entities within a 500-meter radius of this building are now approaching.
Terrified and firing wildly out the windows, they had probably drawn out far more zombies with the gunshots than the number Junho had lured in himself.
- Error values are being added to the operation simulation.
- Immediate revision of the plan is required.
- Immediate withdrawal is recommended.
“Tch.”
Without even having time to marvel at Akina’s absurd calculation speed and inference ability, Junho kicked open the door right in front of him.
Bang!
“Kyaaaah!”
“Aah! Aaaah!”
A cluster of young women, in underwear or completely naked, screamed in terror.
One look was enough.
These were women the gangsters had kept around to vent their sex drives on.
Junho strode right over to the women, who were trembling violently at the sight of him.
“Please save us, p-please save us!”
“Please. We’ll do whatever you say. Please just save us.”
To the naked woman on her knees, rubbing her palms together in supplication, Junho said,
“Does anybody know where the gangsters are keeping the zombies they captured?”
“S-save... what?”
“Somewhere in this building, they caught a few zombies and locked them up. I’m asking if anyone knows where.”
“...!?”
Still out of their minds with shock and fear, the women just trembled and couldn’t answer.
Then one woman—the only one who at least still had underwear on—raised her hand.
“I-I know! I heard they locked a few zombies in the karaoke place on Basement Level 2.”
“The karaoke bar on Basement Level 2. Got it.”
Junho turned and went straight back outside.
Then he returned with clothes stripped off the dead gangsters and tossed them to the women.
“Put something on and come with me. If you go out like that, you’ll freeze to death. You’ve got thirty seconds.”
“Oh! O-okay!”
“Uhhk... uhhhk...!”
All four women broke into sobs, but they hurried into the clothes anyway, glancing at Junho nervously the whole time like they were afraid he might change his mind.
Junho led them back to the emergency stairwell and went up to the eighth floor with them.
The women recoiled in horror when they saw the gangsters’ bodies sprawled across the stairs, but like survivors who had managed to stay alive this long, they didn’t completely lose it.
“I’ll go down first. After that, come down one at a time.”
“D-down there?”
The women looked down into the elevator shaft, its bottom lost in darkness, and started trembling again.
“If you don’t want to, you can stay here. Suit yourselves.”
Without waiting for an answer, Junho grabbed the ladder and slid all the way down in one go.
“Huh?”
The women’s eyes flew wide as Junho vanished into the darkness almost instantly.
But a moment later—
“Ah!?”
A tactical flashlight flared brightly from below, illuminating the shaft.
Only then, with some of their fear eased, did the women begin climbing down one by one.
***
“Mmph...”
Bound to a pipe in the parking garage with Son Jeguk, An Juntae felt like he was going insane.
'What kind of bastard is he? Ah, fuck...'
Several minutes had already passed, but his stomach was still churning and his head still hurt.
His hearing had mostly come back, but the ringing in his ears hadn’t gone away yet.
'A flashbang? Military? Did the government send him?'
But when he pictured that unidentified man—no, that monster—An Juntae shook his head inwardly.
Even as a former Marine and ex-cop, he had never seen or heard of a special unit equipped like that.
'He knew about our organization. Knew about the division chief too. Fuck, how?'
It was enough to make a ghost scream.
It would have been shocking even before the world ended.
Now? With man-eating zombies crawling all over the ruins of civilization?
No matter how he turned it over in his head, it made no sense.
Thud!
That was when he heard a louder sound from the direction of the elevator door, and the monster who had done this to them came walking back.
“Mmph!”
Unlike An Juntae, who merely flinched, Son Jeguk bucked violently and tried desperately to say something.
Junho ripped the blue tape off Son Jeguk’s jaw.
Riiip! Peel!
“Ugh! Agh.”
“Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want to die.”
The flat, emotionless look in Junho’s eyes and voice made Son Jeguk clamp his mouth shut instantly.
“I know you’ve got a special zombie locked up in the basement karaoke room. Take me to it.”
The term Alpha still hadn’t spread to all survivors yet, so Junho phrased it that way.
“Hhk...!”
“...!!!”
The moment Junho casually mentioned something the two of them had believed only they knew about, Son Jeguk and An Juntae both stared at him with their eyes blown wide open.
But they couldn’t possibly imagine that Junho intended to personally kill the Alpha that had grown powerful by feeding on lots of people in a relatively busy area like Moku-ri—
and use it to upgrade his physical abilities even further.
In other words, Junho had pulled off three things at once:
he had already taken care of the most dangerous enemy threatening both his shelter and Gahyeon-ri in advance,
he had secured more guns and ammunition,
and on top of that, he was about to make himself even stronger.
