Free Web NovelMarch 16, 2025, 5:30 a.m., wooded hills near Kangho Resort, Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province.
“......”
Yoon Seolhee waited on the ridgeline beneath a mottled camouflage tarp.
Keeping her body low, she watched the area ahead with sharp eyes.
Beside her lay a modified bolt-action air rifle, and a military dagger hung at her side.
“Hoo... hoo...”
Yoon Seolhee slowly steadied her breathing.
The wind blowing in from the northwest brushed the hair beside her face.
Her scent wouldn’t carry back to them, so there was no risk of being detected.
Then she heard heavy footsteps from below the ridge.
The spacing was erratic, the shifts in weight uneven. On top of that, they were making far too much noise crashing through brush, with metal clanking and their own chatter mixed in.
'Amateur gangster pieces of shit...'
Yoon Seolhee’s gaze turned even colder.
But the gangsters were carrying Chinese-made suppressed submachine guns, pistols, and even air rifles.
And whatever else was true, they had still managed to survive for over half a year in a world like this.
She could not afford to underestimate them.
'Seven.'
They were only about fifty meters away, but Yoon Seolhee, wrapped in the camouflage tarp, did not move a muscle as she watched them.
Human eyes were easier to fool than people thought, so there was almost no chance those amateur thugs would spot her at this hour from this distance.
Their dark silhouettes drew closer and closer.
And then, at one point,
she saw one of them put a cigarette in his mouth and light it.
Even that alone proved how amateur they were—and how easily they must have spent all this time killing other people and staying alive.
The yellow flame created a brief target in the predawn dark.
'Distance thirty. No wind effect. First target is the one in front.'
A principle hammered into her head during nighttime ambush marksmanship training in the special forces rose to mind.
Break their momentum with the first shot. Take away their vision. Delay their judgment of the situation.
A memory flashed by—lying belly-down in the snow for thirty hours during winter training in the mountains of Gangwon, waiting for a target.
There was only one difference between then and now.
Now the rounds weren’t rubber. At this range, these were red clay pellets that could kill a person.
“Hoo...”
After one last breath, Yoon Seolhee let it out, held it, and gently squeezed the trigger.
Pak!
The short burst of compressed air hissed past the leaves.
The neck of the pot-bellied gangster at the front caved in.
“Ghk!?”
He pitched forward on the spot.
“Huh? What the hell?”
The second man reflexively grabbed the falling body, and Yoon Seolhee did not miss the opening.
Pak!
The second report sounded.
This time the red clay pellet flew cleanly beneath the second target’s jaw, tearing through his carotid artery.
The instant blood sprayed out in warm steam—
“Fuck! It’s a gun!”
“S-so somebody got shot!”
The remaining five instinctively dropped low, whipping their heads around as they tried to locate the direction of the shots.
At only thirty-some meters away, she could clearly see their panicked faces and movements. frёeωebɳovel.com
The moment they spotted her, bullets would come pouring in at this distance like rain.
But Yoon Seolhee did not panic in the slightest.
She twisted her left wrist just a little, pulled back the bolt lever, and shoved it forward again.
It was the same motion her body had repeated over a thousand times in marksmanship training during her special-forces days.
“Where is it!? Fuck!”
“I-I can’t see!”
Third shot.
Pak!
“Aagh!”
The gangster carrying the most dangerous weapon—a QBZ-97 rifle—went down as his cheek burst open red.
The rifle he dropped rolled over the dead leaves.
“B-Beomhui hyung!”
The moment one of the others screamed it like a shriek, the fourth shot followed.
Pak!
“Gahh!”
Another one dropped with a scream.
Even so, as if proving they had survived more than half a year in the apocalypse by crawling through hell—
the remaining three figured out her firing position and reacted.
“T-there!”
“Shoot, fuck!”
Tututung! Tung-tung!
Muzzle flashes burst rapidly in the dark, and the dull sound unique to Chinese-made suppressed machine pistols spread through the trees.
Pupupuck!
Tree bark exploded. Dirt kicked off moss-covered rocks.
But Yoon Seolhee had already crouched low, rolled backward, and dropped beneath the slope into cover.
In an instant she shifted several meters to the left, slipped behind a small rock, went prone again, worked the bolt, and chambered another round.
Then she heard the gangsters spreading out and moving in.
“I-I saw it! She was definitely over there.”
“Then go check, you bastard!”
She heard them rushing up toward the spot where she had been hiding just moments ago.
Near that position, she had left a small bait in advance.
The bait was nothing more than several empty cans half-buried under the fallen leaves.
Beside them she had hooked a thin branch.
If anyone brushed it even with the tip of a foot, the cans would roll and clatter together.
Seolhee waited, pressed low to the ground.
“Slowly. Be ready to fire.”
The gangster’s voice had just become clearer when the lead man touched the buried bait.
Clang.
The clear metallic sound of metal striking stone rang out.
“Huh!?”
All three of them reflexively turned their heads and gun barrels toward it.
And at that instant, from a side angle five or six meters away, came the distinctive compressed-air crack of the rifle.
Pak!
The pellet punched through the throat of the gangster trailing in the rear, and he collapsed, dropping his machine pistol.
“Behind us! Behind!”
The last two whipped around in a hurry, but it was already too late.
Yoon Seolhee had already drawn her dagger and closed to point-blank range.
Before the first man could bring his barrel up, she stepped inside fast, seized the gun barrel with her left hand and twisted it aside, then drove the blade in her right deep into his flank.
“Gaaaah!”
He staggered back, screaming, trying to retreat—
but Yoon Seolhee instantly wrapped around his neck from behind, took his back, and stabbed him in the chest over and over with ruthless force.
Thud! Thud-thud!
“Agh! Ugh! Kkh...!”
“Fuck!”
The last gangster yanked the trigger on his pistol blindly.
Tak-tak! Tak! Tak!
Thud! Thud!
The shots tore through the darkness, and several rounds slammed into the body of the gangster Yoon Seolhee was still holding.
“Ihk! Ihk! Huh?”
Click.
The gangster froze for a split second as his pistol jammed—a malfunction that happened now and then.
And he had to pay the price for not taking proper care of his weapon.
Papak!
Yoon Seolhee shoved aside the gangster who was going limp after being stabbed again and again with the dagger, lowered her body, and lunged.
“You fucking bitch!”
He didn’t know the woman in the cap and mask was actually a woman, but the gangster spat out the curse by habit as he swung the pistol down at her like a club.
Yoon Seolhee did not take it head-on.
She twisted her upper body left and slipped the blow, the pistol grip slicing past the side of her head and smacking empty air.
Whoosh!
Holding her dagger in a reverse grip, she drove it deep up beneath his armpit, into the side opened by the recoil of his own movement, burying it all the way into his lung.
“Hup...”
Before the last gangster could even draw another breath, she twisted her wrist and ripped the blade free.
“F-fuck...”
But he still did not go down. Shoving at her shoulder with his left hand, he raised the pistol again.
Yoon Seolhee slashed the dagger in a straight vertical line, and in an instant the tip passed through his groin and reached all the way to the spine.
“Ghk.”
The gangster’s body locked up for a moment, then his knees gave out and he collapsed.
Thunk.
Yoon Seolhee quickly picked up the pistol he had dropped.
The slide was stuck halfway back, with a spent casing half-extracted and caught in place.
A classic jam. Stovepipe.
Yoon Seolhee quickly racked the slide with her right hand, flicked out the stuck casing, pressed and checked the magazine with her left, then sent the slide forward and checked the chamber.
In less than a second, the pistol was functioning normally again.
She trained it on the gangsters lying on the ground and began walking forward slowly.
Two of them were already completely motionless.
“Huh... hhh... ngh...”
The last gangster’s body hitched a few times as he gasped, then went limp.
“......”
After killing all seven gangsters, Yoon Seolhee carefully checked even the ones lying farther down the slope, making sure they were dead. Then she stripped them of every gun they had and frisked their bodies for magazines as well.
Only then did she switch her radio back on and transmit.
“I’ve taken out everyone who came down Route 1 through the valley. Collected all the guns too.”
“G-good work, Manager. The other routes are engaged right now. If possible, can you support them? It’s getting dangerous.”
“I can. Route 3 is closest, so I’ll head there now.”
“Yes! Thank you for your hard work, Manager.”
The former KW Cops employee’s voice, thick with respect and amazement, faded from the radio.
Yoon Seolhee grabbed only the captured guns she could make use of herself, shoved the rest into her backpack, and ran hard through the wooded hills.
As she ran, she thought,
'There are too few people who can fight enemies carrying real guns.'
The resort’s combat personnel were highly capable. Skilled, too. And gutsy.
But—
it was one thing to fight with air rifles firing red clay pellets, where you could survive a hit or two as long as vital spots were protected.
It was something else entirely to fight enemies armed with real firearms in a world like this, where even one bullet hit could mean life or death.
And once that became the reality, the combat teams centered around the KW Cops staff could no longer perform to their full potential.
Still, unless someone had received special training like she had, that was only natural. It couldn’t be helped.
'But still...'
Even so, Yoon Seolhee could not help feeling bitterly frustrated.
Because the enemy—an organized-crime group presumed to be the Daeseong syndicate—had too many men, and too many guns.
And already, six of their employees had either died from gunshots or been so badly wounded that their survival was uncertain.
One of them was Assistant Manager Kim, her junior.
“......”
As she ran in silence, filled with anger and frustration, one face naturally rose in her mind.
Lee Junho.
Despite his utterly ordinary name and plain face,
he had given off an unmistakably uncommon air from the moment she first met him. And he was the man their age who had done an enormous amount to help Kang Baekho and the people of Kangho Resort survive this far.
What if he had been here at the resort with them?
'Three men... no, more than five.'
Yoon Seolhee was certain he would have been worth at least five of their staff by himself—maybe even as valuable a fighting asset as she was in a situation like this.
Before she realized it, she found herself thinking that she missed him.
***
Pow...! Pow...!
Tungsten rounds fired from a modified air rifle punched through the heads of zombies a little over a hundred meters away.
“That does it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dressed in camouflage fatigues and a tactical vest suited to the approach of spring, Park Deokcheol lowered the air rifle. A backpack was slung over his shoulders.
“But didn’t those soldiers finish them all off? None of them headed this way?”
“There were a lot of them, and they had trucks too, so they probably didn’t come down this road. All right, let’s move. Get on.”
“Yes, sir.”
The utility electric cart started rolling down the mountain path again, a trail less than two meters wide.
Right now Junho was moving along a narrow path on a mountainside overlooking the Bukhan River, with Park Deokcheol beside him.
Their destination was the water-sports dock where the gangsters had vanished by motorboat not long ago.
“You don’t have to stare that hard. The wireless relay reaches this far, so if it spots a zombie or a person, the AI will let us know.”
“Ah... Yes, sir.”
Park Deokcheol, who had been checking the tablet continuously as drone footage streamed across it, smiled awkwardly.
Junho had brought Park Deokcheol along on this expedition.
The reason was simple: if Junho was going to be gone for an extended period, then Junhyeok absolutely had to remain at the shelter.
And after Junhyeok, the person whose skills he could trust most was Park Deokcheol.
More than anything, Park Deokcheol himself had strongly insisted on coming with Junho.
And the reason was—
“K-Kangho Resort? Cherry might be there! What? You ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) don’t know Blossom Cherry? Blossom’s way more famous than our group...”
The girl-group member he had been secretly having a thing with had performed at Kangho Resort the day before the apocalypse, and then stayed there with the rest of her members as part vacation, part work trip.
