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Paang!

About a second after the suppressed gunshot cracked out, the gangster in the scope collapsed, spraying blood around his head like red paint.

The other bastards immediately dropped flat right where they were in alarm.

It seemed the gangsters thought their comrade had been hit by a shot fired from the people up on the mountain.

'That works even better for me.'

Since the gangsters had stopped in place on their own, Junho was able to fire at the men in his scope with a much easier mind.

Paang! Paang! Paang!

One gangster’s head dropped.

But the other two rounds missed.

No matter how good Junho was, once the distance passed a certain point, it was impossible to hit every target nearly three hundred meters away with subsonic rounds, whose velocity dropped off sharply and whose trajectory fell hard.

What was more, only the first shot had succeeded as a head shot. After that, the rounds were only hitting shoulders or bodies.

And if the bastards were wearing body armor, the ones who got hit would only be in pain, not dead.

Even so, since two or three rounds out of every five were landing, the gangsters were panicking and had no idea what to do.

But, proving Junho’s prediction that they were not ordinary punks just from the look of how they were armed, the gangsters quickly realized that the shots killing their comrades were coming not from the mountain above them, but from another direction.

Chk!

“Hey, Lee Ujung, you motherfucker! Where the hell did you send the drones!?”

“We’re under attack right now! Fuck, send the drones over here, now!”

At that moment, the urgent voice of someone who sounded like the leader of the gangster group on that side blared out from the walkie-talkie of the bandit-looking gangster Junho had subdued earlier.

The moment he heard it, Junho fired rapidly and emptied the entire magazine.

Because it was rapid fire, only a few rounds hit, but the gangsters gave up on climbing higher up the mountain and started fleeing downhill in a hurry.

The moment he saw that, Junho stopped firing at once.

If no one kept answering over the radio, they would realize the men here had been taken out.

And then his position would be narrowed down.

Junho slung the bandit-looking gangster he had knocked unconscious with a kick over his shoulder and quickly left the spot.

He was already loaded down with all kinds of gear and weapons, and on top of that he was carrying a man who had to weigh over seventy kilograms.

Even so, Junho crossed the slope and ridgeline like a wild beast, and in less than ten minutes he reached the middle of the valley.

After tossing the still-unconscious gangster aside wherever, Junho immediately launched the drone.

Veeeeeng!

The drone shot upward and flew fast along the valley, transmitting information from the surrounding area to the controller screen.

“Found you.”

After spotting the gangster group that had swung around by climbing up this valley, Junho fixed the drone camera on them and sprinted up the valley himself.

The narrow valley the gangsters had needed more than thirty minutes of hard climbing to get through—

Junho covered it in barely five minutes.

After that, he was able to spot footprints still marked with damp soil, along with signs of brush that had been roughly trampled down.

Checking the gangsters’ location on the controller screen mounted at the center of his tactical vest whenever he needed to, Junho ran up the mountainside following their trail.

Then, at one moment, both he and the gangsters came into view on the controller screen at the same time.

And right then, the gangsters started firing in a certain direction.

“......!”

There was only one thing that could mean.

Junho clicked off the AR-15’s safety and, keeping his body low, burst into a terrifying sprint.

***

Clack. Clack.

When the QCW-05 suppressed submachine gun taken from the gangsters started acting up again, Yoon Seolhee yanked out the magazine and threw the whole thing aside.

It was such a piece-of-shit gun that even Chinese soldiers cursed it, and on top of that it was a bullpup design she was not used to. The gangsters had also taken terrible care of their weapons, so it had been obvious from the start that it would not last long.

Since she was a former Special Forces NCO, she could still fire and hit with a gun like this, but for the other staff members it would have been impossible.

That was why Yoon Seolhee had given the proper rifles to the other employees and kept this gun for herself.

In any case, the only firearm she had left now was the suppressed pistol.

Even including the 9mm subsonic rounds she had stripped from the submachine gun magazines, she only had around forty rounds left, but she had just one pistol magazine, which meant she had to fight with fifteen rounds.

And the effective range of the pistol was fifty meters, while to get reliably lethal effect, she would have to fire from within thirty.

In other words, from here on out she was in a situation where she had to fight close-range against enemies armed with rifles and submachine guns.

Tatatak...!

Avoiding the booby traps she had laid herself, Yoon Seolhee climbed higher toward the summit.

The terrain was rough and steep enough to make it difficult for people to go up and down, but that was not a big problem for her.

Of course, there was a mountain path the villagers usually used, but KW Cops was already holding that route and engaged in a fierce firefight there, so the only route the enemy could use to come up was this one.

That was why Yoon Seolhee had set traps all along this route to confuse or injure anyone tracking her.

'Those bastards have definitely had training.'

Unlike the gangsters she had first run into, this group had at least some military training.

And not the level of ordinary reservists, either. They looked like men who had served in reconnaissance or special-assault units and were used to mountain warfare, and they had even deployed drones.

'But where did the drones go?'

Small drones flying quickly outside effective range were hard to hit with a gun.

Anyone who could shoot them down would have to be called a god of marksmanship.

And because she was in the middle of a fight right now, even though Yoon Seolhee knew the two drones were alternately showing up and checking her position, there was nothing she could do about it.

'What the hell are these guys, really? Are they even gangsters?'

It was absurd, but stray thoughts only got in the way in combat.

She immediately pulled her focus back together and headed toward the second battlefield she had chosen in advance.

That was when it happened.

Piiing!

In the midst of the nonstop gunfire, a completely foreign sound bored into her ears.

“......!”

In that instant Yoon Seolhee felt the hair all over her body stand on end, and she threw herself straight into the brush where spring flowers were growing thick.

Pak! Papak! Tiing!

Bullets slammed into the spot where she had been standing just a moment ago.

And the last round struck a rock, ricocheted, and buried itself in her shoulder.

“......!”

A burning pain tore through her, but Yoon Seolhee clenched her teeth hard and stopped the groan rising in her throat.

'Did I hit her...?'

'I think I got her...! She dropped!'

Voices chattering came from the summit side rather than from below the mountain, and Yoon Seolhee quickly rolled through the brush.

It would leave traces, but this was no time to worry about that.

Judging from the loudness of the voices, the bastards seemed to be only a few dozen meters away. She had to get out of here somehow, and fast.

After rolling several more times, Yoon Seolhee crawled sideways down the slope.

“That bitch. We were supposed to keep her alive and bring her to Brother Ujung.”

“Fuck that. Did you forget what that bitch did to Seokho? Even if she’s dead, we oughta chop off all four limbs and throw them to the zombies.”

As the pain in her shoulder kept growing worse, the voices of the bastards descending the slope while talking drew closer and closer.

They would discover her trail soon, so Yoon Seolhee crawled behind a tree trunk, hid herself, and aimed her pistol toward the direction the voices were coming from.

The distance was roughly forty meters.

Since the pistol had a suppressor, they would not identify her position immediately.

“She’s around here somewhere... where the hell’d that bitch go?”

“You sure she got hit? Wouldn’t it be better to call in a drone and sweep the area once?”

“I’m telling you, I definitely hit—”

The moment one of them came into view through the thick branches, Yoon Seolhee pulled the trigger.

Tatak!

“Agh!”

She did not know whether both rounds hit, but the bastard dropped.

“Fuck!”

With that short curse, the other bastards instantly hid themselves beneath the brush.

Tak! Tatak! Tak!

After firing a few more rounds toward where the gangsters were likely to be, Yoon Seolhee immediately moved again.

The left shoulder hit by the ricocheted bullet sent even sharper pain through her, but she gritted her teeth and endured it with superhuman patience as she moved low.

“There!”

Tatang! Tang! Tatatang!

Tutututu! Tutung!

The cracks of 5.56 standard rounds and the muffled shots of suppressed weapons rang out in a chaotic mix.

Papak! Papapak!

But because Yoon Seolhee had deliberately moved into a more heavily wooded area, every bullet either buried itself in the trees or sliced past through the brush.

“Flank her! Go around and—”

Paang!

The instant a sound clearly different from the gunfire she had been hearing rang out, the bastard giving orders was cut off mid-shout.

And unlike the gangsters, Yoon Seolhee had actually fired many kinds of weapons back in her active-duty Special Forces days, so she recognized that alien sound immediately.

'AR-15, subsonic rounds!?'

Paang! Papang!

“Wh-what the hell!? Where—”

“There’s somebody else—”

The two bastards who raised their voices never got to finish.

Tatang! Tututung! Tangtang!

Thrown past mere confusion into full panic by the fact that three of their comrades had been killed in an instant, the bastards started spraying bullets in every direction.

And that meant, in turn, that the fire aimed at Yoon Seolhee had stopped.

She stopped retreating, quickly tucked herself behind a tree, and cautiously leaned her head out toward the direction the gangsters’ voices were coming from.

Papang!

“Khhk!”

At the crack of the suppressed AR-15, a gangster hit by the round collapsed and rolled down the slope.

“Aaah! Aaaah!”

Tatang! Tatang! Tang!

Then the gangster hiding behind a big tree started sticking only his gun out from the side and firing like mad without even aiming properly.

A reaction often seen in people consumed by fear during a firefight.

Yoon Seolhee immediately aimed her pistol at him and pulled the trigger.

Tatak!

It was a pretty long distance, but one of the two rounds luckily hit him in the face.

The bastard could not even scream; he just lowered his head and sank down where he was.

'I fired eight rounds, so that leaves seven.'

And the gangsters who had ambushed her were probably down to only two or three now.

Feeling grateful to the unidentified ally(?) who ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) had not only saved her from danger but had even handed her a chance to counterattack, Yoon Seolhee leaned out from behind the tree trunk again to look for the remaining gangsters. freewēbnoveℓ.com

And at that moment—

“......!?”

A man in a multicam-pattern combat uniform mixed with light green and yellowish brown, wearing a ballistic helmet in the same colors and a black mask—

holding an AR-15 in a C-clamp grip that maximized recoil control—

was moving fast while firing at gangsters hiding in the brush or behind trees.

Paang! Papang!

With just three shots, another bastard toppled over on the spot.

'Jesus Christ....'

His movements were bold, but the shooting was so precise it was chilling, and what Yoon Seolhee felt watching him went beyond admiration into something close to fear.

And if even Yoon Seolhee watching him felt that way, then naturally the gangsters facing him directly were far more terrified than she was, and could do nothing but fire blindly in every direction.

“Aaah! Aagh!”

Tang! Tatang! Tang! Tang! Tatang!

It was exactly the kind of behavior that produced the worst results in a firefight, but the bastard, swallowed by fear and plunged into panic, could not realize that.

Taang!

“Ah...!?”

When no round came out even though he pulled the trigger, the gangster finally realized he had emptied an entire magazine and hurriedly tried to pull a fresh one from his mag pouch.

But in a firefight where life and death were on the line—especially after all his comrades had been wiped out almost instantly—it was not easy to calmly reload.

Paang!

Before he could manage it, the other man had closed the distance like a ghost, and the bullet he fired punched a hole through the gangster’s temple. The bastard dropped in a heap.

Not even a minute had passed since he began firing, and the man had already taken care of every gangster.

Still maintaining his firing stance, he examined the fallen gangsters.

Then, after confirming that every one of them was either already dead or in a state where they would die within minutes—

he finally lowered his mask and raised his voice toward one direction.

“Assistant Manager Yoon Seolhee, come out. It’s me, Lee Junho.”

“......!!!”

Yoon Seolhee, who had still kept herself hidden because she had not been certain the unidentified ally was truly an ally, stared with her eyes wide open.

Then, her shoulders trembling before she even realized it, she slowly stepped out from behind the tree.

“It’s been a long time, Assistant Manager.”

“Lee... Junho?”

The moment she saw Junho’s calm face, Yoon Seolhee felt the strength leave her body all at once.

A reunion after nearly a year.

In the apocalypse, that was no different from a miracle.