Free Web Novel“Here. Eat up.”
Woong.
At Junhyeok’s words, Purdy gave a low bark and started eating the canned dog food.
Good thing they had the cargo drones. Otherwise, he might not have been able to get the dog fed at all.
After patting Purdy on the head while he ate dinner, Junhyeok went to the master-bedroom window and pulled the curtain aside just a little. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
Like the First Apartments—another upscale complex with larger buildings and more large-unit residences—Edutown Apartments had its own solar-power system, so some of the streetlights inside the complex still turned on at set times.
Inside the complex, it looked like hell itself.
Trash and debris were strewn across the snow, which had piled up without fully melting because no one was around to clear it, and dozens of bodies had been left lying there.
They were all zombie corpses.
There were no human bodies.
Because every uninfected human corpse had been dragged away by the zombies.
“Fuck...”
Junhyeok cursed under his breath without meaning to.
Junho had already told him about it, but the sight of zombies under an Alpha’s control dragging bodies around like slabs of meat was still shocking.
According to Junho, an Alpha viewed humans as boxed lunches.
And Alphas that had survived a long time, eaten a lot of people, and grown stronger in their control had a habit of trying to claim the most densely populated areas possible as their territory.
To them, territory was something like a vault—or a farm—to a human.
And just as ordinary people did not spend every last bit of money or valuables in a vault at once, and a farmer did not butcher all his livestock in one go, an Alpha would keep taking people inside its territory little by little whenever it had the chance.
But nothing in the world lasted forever, and eventually every human inside an Alpha’s territory either died or got eaten and disappeared.
On top of that, when a zombie bit a person, there was roughly a seventy percent chance the victim would turn into one of them, which meant only one out of every three or four humans was actually edible.
That was why an Alpha not only made the zombies under its control haul food in and stockpile it, but also kept trying to expand its territory wherever it could, toward places with more prey.
That was exactly what had happened today.
The ones who had suddenly appeared and killed the people fleeing after being beaten by the First Apartments search-and-kill team were that Alpha and the zombies under its command.
“More than five hundred. And on top of that, all the zombies from Buildings 8 and 9 got pulled in too...”
The zombies from the other buildings had gone back to where they originally belonged after the hunt ended.
But the Alpha and its own subordinates had not.
It was obvious the thing intended to claim Buildings 1 and 2 of Edutown Apartments as its territory.
The proof was that all of them were now inside the underground parking garage.
“Hoo... If it were up to me, I’d wipe them all out myself, but...”
Remembering Junho’s repeated warning—If you see a zombie you think is an Alpha, hide or avoid it no matter what—Junhyeok let out a sigh.
Then again, just hearing about the Alpha that had attacked his brother earlier, during the battle at Gahyeon Elementary School, was enough to make his skin crawl.
In the middle of that chaos, the Alpha had heard the distinctive suppressed report of the AR-15, realized that the prey was preoccupied with attacking other zombies, and most of all that it was alone, then led its group up to the rooftop and launched an ambush.
And the moment it realized the opponent was not prey but a natural enemy, it had fled—while still using other zombies to surround it and protect it as it escaped.
According to Junho, that had only been a low-grade Alpha, one that controlled maybe three hundred zombies, not even enough to matter in a city.
But the Alpha camped here now controlled five hundred by default, and after today’s successful hunt, it was commanding nearly seven to eight hundred zombies.
Rather than attack first, expose his position, and get himself killed, the right call was to wait for Junho.
So Junhyeok had called off the operation and hidden in the safe house.
“Yeah?”
That was when Junho’s voice came over comms, and Junhyeok brightened instantly.
- I just got here. We’re starting in ten minutes, so get ready.
“Okay. No zombies there, right?”
- None. Anyway, get up to the rooftop right now. The second I give the signal, start immediately.
“Yeah. But what about the A1 drone? Doesn’t seem like it’ll do much against zombies.”
Unlike the G1, the A1 had been designed as an attack drone with human enemies in mind.
Its accuracy was terrible, but if it kept firing from the air while using trees or high-rise buildings as cover and concealment, people had no choice but to fall into fear and confusion.
But zombies felt no fear.
And since they did not die unless you destroyed the head, Junhyeok figured the low-accuracy A1 was basically useless here.
- No. Bring it.
“Huh? Seriously?”
- Yeah. This time, the A1 might end up doing more work than the G1.
“Damn... okay, got it.”
He didn’t really get it, but nothing Junho had said so far had turned out wrong, so Junhyeok obeyed without protest.
***
After ending the call with Junhyeok, Junho surveyed Edutown Apartments through a digital telescope equipped with thermal imaging.
He had already sent the Dragon Scale back to the shelter by cargo drone, so now he was dressed in the same black motorcycle suit as always, plus a tactical vest loaded with Level 3 ballistic plates.
He had also broken down the AR-15 and sent it back to the shelter along with the gangsters’ guns and ammo recovered from Cheongsan Building. For now, he was armed with the KP9 and the Glock 17.
There had been a decent amount of 9mm ammo too, which would help arm Park Deokcheol and Baek Suho.
And as for An Juntae, the Daeseong syndicate’s intelligence chief, Junho had left him right where he was in the junkyard.
It was an isolated place, and he had been bound thoroughly and gagged, so there was little chance anyone would find him.
As an act of humanitarianism, supposedly, Junho had even covered him up properly with clothes and stuffed multiple hot packs inside, so he would not freeze to death either.
Beep.
Opening Channel 0, Junho spoke in a low voice.
“You still can’t pin down the Alpha’s exact position?”
- No, boss. Normally we could, but like you know, both Akina and I have been absolutely swamped today. Akina especially had to stay focused on supporting you.
- No, seriously, even after I put the workshop, medicine lab, and medical room systems into idle mode, it was still barely holding together. There really wasn’t anything else I could do.
At Yoon Youngsu’s aggrieved, frustrated protest, Junho nodded.
As he said, the shelter AI Akina had been forced to handle more simultaneous tasks today than at any point since it was created.
While Junho had been sprinting through the downtown entertainment district near Jaeseong Building, gathering zombies behind him, Song Gijun and the search-and-kill team had been fighting the Edutown survivors who had joined forces with the gangsters dispatched by the Kookje faction.
At the same time, Park Deokcheol and another search-and-kill team had been moving through the remaining houses in the Jung-dong and Hadong areas of Gahyeon-ri, clearing zombies.
Baek Suho had been patrolling the outpost line along the mountain behind the shelter, checking the barbed wire they had installed in the fall and keeping an eye on conditions beyond the safe zone.
And the total number of drones committed to all those operations—recon, attack, transport, all of it—had easily gone past twenty.
This was not some synchronized drone show either.
Every drone had been carrying out its own independent mission.
So no matter how many billions had been poured into it, and no matter that Yoon Youngsu, a genuine computing expert, had spent nearly half a year building the AI system, it still could not transcend the limits of electrical power and hardware performance.
Which meant that lower-priority tasks were inevitably going to develop blind spots.
- Boss, I’m not kidding. We really need to upgrade the shelter’s computing system and servers.
- Honestly, in the edge computing environment, with deep-learning inference piled on top of everything else, memory bandwidth’s saturated, GPU resources are already locked above ninety percent, and even if we leave only the minimum required systems running, we still need tensor operation accelerators—
“Got it. We’ll do it after this is completely wrapped up. For now, stay focused on Edutown.”
The second Junho sensed that Youngsu—who had been relatively quiet lately—was about to relapse into one of his tirades about liberal-arts majors, he cut him off fast.
- Okaaay. But are you really going to use the A1? Its accuracy sucks, so it’s pretty useless against zombies.
Junho answered the same reaction he had gotten from Junhyeok.
“That accuracy issue only happens because it shoots while hovering over a hundred meters up, right?”
- Right?
“If the target’s zombies, do we need it flying that high?”
- ..Ohhh!?
Exactly.
The A1’s poor accuracy came partly from its light airframe, which made recoil control harder.
But the decisive factor was that it had been designed on the assumption that it would fight armed humans from high altitude.
Which meant that if it fired from just twenty or thirty meters up instead, its accuracy could improve dramatically.
“If we put everything except the shelter’s essential systems into idle mode, how many A1s and G1s can Akina control at once? Not counting recon drones.”
- Seven—no, maybe eight! Not counting the recon drones.
“Good. Junhyeok already has two A1s with him, and there’s a G1 waiting near the armored vehicle. Send four more A1s. If they rotate in groups of three, that should do it.”
- Roger that!
Hearing the oddly excited response from Youngsu, Junho once again carefully examined the underground parking entrance—where the zombies had reportedly poured in—and the lower-floor apartments in each building through the digital telescope.
Through the windows of apartments where the curtains had not been drawn, he could see groups of heat signatures clustered together, clearly a different temperature from humans.
“We’ll leave those alone for now...”
Keeping low, Junho ran toward the parking-garage entrance.
But even hunched over, he was moving as fast as a normal grown man sprinting flat out.
Staying strictly in the dark and avoiding the patches touched by the light of the few remaining streetlamps, Junho reached the entrance in no time.
Then he launched a fully recharged mini drone into the underground parking garage.
Its noise was tiny to begin with, and because it stayed tight against the black ceiling as it moved, neither zombies nor humans would be likely to notice it.
The mini drone eventually made it deep into the underground garage.
The moment Junho saw the feed coming back from it, his mouth fell open.
“...Ha. This is insane.”
The sight of hundreds—possibly over a thousand—zombies packed together in tight masses of dozens at a time was /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ grotesque beyond words.
Most were sitting still.
Some were standing, slowly circling the edges. Those had to be sentries posted by the Alpha.
And some were lying on the floor tearing apart human corpses.
Those ones were gathered inside the apartment coin laundry connected to the parking garage.
“That bastard can’t be...”
As a regressor who knew Alpha and zombie behavior inside and out, Junho narrowed his eyes and sent the mini drone into the laundry room.
“...Fuck.”
Without realizing it, Junho ground his teeth.
Just as he had expected, dozens of corpses were stacked inside the laundry room.
That was enough food for the zombies in the underground parking garage to last at least a month.
But Junho knew the laundry room was not being used just as a food storage area.
Because in one corner of the room, a male specimen of ordinary build was greedily tearing into what looked like a woman’s breast.
And the area around it was littered with human bones and blood.
“Two. No—three with the one it’s eating now... huh?”
His eyes sharpened as he watched the gluttonous Alpha through the tablet screen—the thing had already eaten three people just tonight.
Then, apparently full at last, the gluttonous Alpha rose to its feet.
“That asshole... the convenience store?”
Like something with at least a little intelligence, it had thrown on some dead person’s clothes to help preserve body heat.
But underneath, it was wearing a blue convenience-store uniform.
And that uniform was the same brand as the one worn by the convenience-store employee Junho had seen through the safe-house CCTV in one of the high floors of this apartment complex on the very first day the apocalypse broke out.
Which meant that, for the first time since his regression, Junho was seeing again the very first Alpha he had ever witnessed in person—
now, right before Gahyeon-ri was about to be completely pacified, and right before the final battle.
“...”
At that absurd coincidence, two sayings naturally floated through Junho’s mind: all meetings end in parting, and what leaves must return.
And at the same time, he could not help feeling that maybe this was fate.
The first Alpha he had seen in Gahyeon-ri had become the strongest Alpha in Gahyeon-ri—and had appeared again as the last one.
“Yeah. Perfect.”
Watching it stand there looking satisfied, Junho’s eyes cooled.
He had killed three Alphas today.
If that one was added to the count, then beyond the shelter’s conquest of Gahyeon-ri, Junho himself would step fully into the realm of the superhuman.
The perfect finale.
- Boss, the A1s are almost there!
At Yoon Youngsu’s transmission, Junho replied quietly.
“Send them to the underground parking garage where I am. Send the G1 waiting near the armored vehicle too, and hide it somewhere suitable in the apartment complex. I want it killing everything that comes out of the garage.”
- Yes, sir!
“Junhyeok. You ready?”
- Yeah.
After Junhyeok answered, Junho recalled the mini drone and moved to the best firing position he had picked out on the way here.
A moment later—
The G1 drone came drifting in from the distance and settled beneath the slide in the apartment playground a little ways from where Junho was concealed, then turned its barrel toward the rear exit of the underground garage.
And right after that—
Bzzzzzz...!
Three A1 drones dove fast from the sky and streaked toward the underground parking garage.
- Operation commencing.
With Akina’s dry announcement,
Junho, Junhyeok, and the full force of the shelter’s ground and aerial drones launched at once into a large-scale battle against the zombie swarm.
