Free Web NovelIn Korea, hunting season ran from November through the end of February.
Anyone with a Class 1 hunting license and a firearm possession permit could enjoy hunting with shotguns or air rifles during that period.
Junho had originally intended to take out the air rifles as soon as November began.
But there had been so many other things that needed handling first, and from November to December—when the weather was relatively milder and better—there were a lot more hunters active, so he had delayed the timing of the firearm release.
So in mid-January 2023, when the bitter cold was at its peak, Junho went to the police station as soon as the sun came up and finally officially retrieved the air rifles that had been kept in storage.
Dressed in cold-weather hunting gear like real hunters to show they were serious about hunting, Junho and Junhyeok passed through the station’s public service office and headed down to the underground firearms storage room.
Lucky.
The moment Junho saw the officer in charge of the weapons, he cheered inwardly.
It was the same bored-looking officer he had seen the previous spring when he bought the air rifles and turned them in for storage.
“Your permits?”
“Here they are.”
Junho handed over both his and Junhyeok’s hunting licenses, firearm possession permits, and authorization papers for firearm use during the hunting period.
“Please wait a moment.”
Just like the first time they had turned in the air rifles, the officer gave them a perfunctory glance, opened the door, and went into the storage room. A moment later, he came back carrying three hard cases.
“Here they are. Check that everything’s correct, and...”
Setting the hard cases down one by one, the officer went on in the same sullen, bored tone.
“Once you’ve finished checking, sign the withdrawal log. For the reason for removal, write down hunting activity. After hunting is over, you’ll need to return them.”
His words followed procedure, but his attitude radiated total annoyance at having to deal with any of this, and Junho found himself oddly reassured.
“Understood.”
“As you already know, ammunition must be stored separately while transporting them, and don’t forget to keep the firearms disassembled while carrying them. Before you arrive in the licensed hunting zone, you are absolutely not to take them out or load them.”
“Of course. Then have a good day.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Leaving the officer behind as he nodded halfheartedly, Junho picked up the hard cases and left the station with Junhyeok, who had been standing there stiffly in tension.
“Hoo... damn, I was ridiculously nervous over this.”
“Everybody is the first time. Anyway, let’s move.”
“Yeah.”
With the air rifles loaded into the back seat, the brothers drove to a wooded hill in Namyangju, carefully avoiding areas they had already checked that were designated no-hunting zones.
There were no houses or buildings there, and on a day as cold as this, there was not a single person around.
***
“Oh, there it is.”
When Junhyeok pointed from the passenger seat, Junho immediately steered the car that way.
A plain van was already there waiting.
Screeech.
As the Bionic5 carrying the brothers came to a stop at the entrance to the wooded slope, someone got out from the van’s driver’s seat.
It was Baek Hail.
“You made it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hello, sir!”
When Junhyeok greeted him cheerfully, Baek Hail walked over with a bright expression.
“Been a while, Junhyeok. You doing well?”
“Yes! Have you been doing well too, sir?”
“I’m always doing well. I told you, just call me mister. What’s with the ‘sir’ stuff?” freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
“Oh, come on, no way. You’re doing something incredibly important for our shelter. I can’t be rude like that.”
“Really? Fine, call me whatever’s comfortable, then. Come on, let’s move this stuff. Cold as all hell out here.”
Shivering at the knife-like wind blowing across the mountain in the dead of January, Baek Hail opened the rear doors of the van.
The brothers grabbed the hard cases holding the air rifles and climbed into the van.
“Whoaa...!”
Unlike Junho, who had already checked the van a few days earlier, Junhyeok was seeing it for the first time, and his mouth fell open.
The inside of the van was packed with tools and equipment of every kind.
“Crazy, right? Cost me over eighty million won, not even counting the van itself. This here’s a high-speed 3D scanner—this thing alone was twenty million. And this is an XRF spectrometer. Even used, one worth a damn costs over ten million.”
Besides that, digital measuring tools and precision tool sets—vernier calipers, micrometers, three-axis gauges, and more—were attached to magnetic trays on both sides of the van around a fixed workbench.
There were also two 5-kilowatt power tanks to run the electronics, along with cooling fans and climate-control equipment for the devices.
It had been built with serious care, for use not just today but later on after the apocalypse began as well.
“All right, let’s start with the domestic one.”
“Yep. Here it is, sir.”
When Junhyeok carefully took out the air rifle from the hard case, Baek Hail turned up the brightness on the LED lighting and inspected it.
Then Junhyeok, watching him, asked cautiously,
“But, sir... do you know your way around guns too?”
“Of course.”
With a smirk, Baek Hail removed the trigger guard in practiced motions and continued,
“Owner of the factory I used to work at used to go pheasant hunting all the damn time every winter. So I tagged along a lot and handled plenty of shotguns and air rifles. But that bastard was so cheap he even made me do the gun maintenance and modifications for him too. Factory already had all the basic tools, after all.”
That was exactly why Baek Hail had been treated with a certain amount of respect as a technician in the pseudo-religious cult.
On top of being able to fix just about anything from cars to electronics, he also had deep knowledge and understanding of air rifles.
So he had even built modified air rifles with simple structures, but since materials had been limited and the environment restrictive, their performance had not been all that impressive.
They could only fire around ten shots before running dry, too.
Even so, they had been more than enough to kill zombies or people at around fifty meters, so the modified air rifles Baek Hail made had been used by the guard unit closest to the cult leader.
“Ah...”
As Baek Hail loosened the frame bolts with a torque wrench, the metal parts came free with sharp little ticking sounds.
“Yeah, being domestic, it’s almost the same structure as the one the factory owner used. See? Receiver and cylinder are integrated. Efficiency’s a little worse, but maintenance is easy and convenient.”
After that, Baek Hail busied himself measuring the cylinder bore with calipers, pressing some of the metal parts against the XRF analyzer, and [N O V E L I G H T] doing various other checks.
The brothers, with nothing in particular to do, could only stand there and watch.
After about ten minutes of working alone like that, Baek Hail finally said to them,
“This much we can absolutely copy with the CNC in our workshop. Gas route’s simple, too, and the output stabilization’s solid. With a few adjustments, we should be able to pull a stable hundred joules out of it.”
“A hundred joules? What’s that?”
When Junhyeok tilted his head, Junho answered instead.
“It’s a unit of energy. You know the handguns you see in movies and dramas? A 9mm pistol is usually around five hundred joules. Go ahead and keep working, sir.”
“Got it.”
Baek Hail took out the rest of the domestic air rifles and the top-end British air rifle from the hard cases and started disassembling them.
“Really? Then isn’t a hundred joules weak?”
“It’s different if it’s an air rifle. These things are around fifty joules right now. Because of Korea’s gun laws, anything over sixty joules isn’t allowed. Caliber and pellet weight are restricted too. But even in this state, inside fifty meters, birds or squirrels or anything like that go down in one shot. Hit a person and it’s dangerous too.”
“Oh...”
“But we’re going to copy the air rifles and modify them to raise the power to a hundred joules. And instead of using lead pellets like these, we’ll use special tungsten rounds. At that point, at around a hundred meters, whether it’s a zombie or a person, one shot to the head and they’re done.”
“...!”
Junhyeok’s eyes went wide.
It was the first time he had heard the word kill come out of his brother Junho’s mouth.
At the same time, it hit him all over again what exactly they were preparing for.
“You’ve seen zombie movies and TV shows, right? They use ordinary rifles and shotguns all the time.”
For some reason, Junho’s voice sounded a little colder as he went on.
“In a real apocalypse, if you fire something like that carelessly, you’ll be surrounded by a horde in less than three minutes. In urban areas or neighborhoods, gunshots carry for hundreds of meters. If I fired a gun at our place in Bucheon, zombies from the apartment complex across the road would come too.”
“Seriously? Jesus...”
The apartment complex separated from the neighborhood where their Bucheon house was by an eight-lane road was roughly three to four hundred meters away.
Hearing that even the things that far away would hear the gunshot and come swarming left Junhyeok no choice but to be shocked.
“That’s why using ordinary firearms is dangerous. Why do you think later on people stopped firing guns recklessly even in America, where pistols and rifles are everywhere? Bullets were limited, and the instant you fired one round, hundreds or thousands of them came running.”
“Ah...”
“And monsters that aren’t afraid of getting shot, and don’t die or even fall over just because they take a few rounds to the body. So what do you think it’d be like in a country as densely populated as ours?”
“......”
Looking at his brother, whose face had gone pale, Junho stated flatly,
“That’s why for now, it’s air rifles no matter what. Even after we get real guns later, suppressors and subsonic ammunition are mandatory by default. And when we do use guns, we first thoroughly confirm positions and numbers with drones, then shave them down from the outside and work our way in.”
At first glance it sounded very efficient, and very simple.
But because no one understood even this simple point, the police and the military alike had all been wiped out.
And in the early stage, when the situation exploded simultaneously across city centers and residential areas, there was not even room to use that kind of method.
That was why, for at least the first month after the apocalypse broke out, Junho intended to remain at the shelter and only move discreetly through the nearby mountains on reconnaissance. He had absolutely no plan to go into nearby villages, including Gahyeon-ri.
For the first couple of months after the outbreak, the military would still be operating fairly actively, and there was a real chance they could run into them.
“All right, I’m about done.”
At the sound of Baek Hail’s voice, the brothers turned their heads.
“The British one’s definitely more complicated, since it’s high-end, but I can still make something similar. Chrome-moly steel and stainless steel are easy enough to get in Korea too...”
He said the same went for aluminum alloys, tool steel, and the materials that went into the polymer parts—all of them could be obtained legally.
And even the compressed-air tanks needed to operate the air rifles could be made well enough by getting industrial or paintball tanks and modifying the valves.
“If we’re talking drafting the design, doing the CAD modeling, and building one as a test, it’ll take about a week. I can source the metals and other materials myself. So what do you want to do? Want me to start work tomorrow? To be safe, in fifteen days I can turn out one gun.”
Junho shook his head.
“No. First we finish the soundproofing work on the range.”
“Right. Heh-heh. Starting tomorrow, you two are in for some suffering.”
“Still gotta do it.”
When Junho shrugged, Junhyeok asked carefully,
“If we really have to do it, then fine. But how long do you think it’ll take, sir?”
“If we work five or six hours a day, about two months.”
“Ahh...”
“We’ve gotta do the soundproofing, the sound-absorption installation, and the ventilation system ourselves, just the three of us. Junhyeok, you ever done any construction labor?”
“No...”
“I’ll teach you proper. Both you and Junho—built like that—you’ll do the work of two or three laborers easy.”
“Understood... I’ll work hard...”
“What’s with you drooping already? A real man oughta know how to do hard labor too.”
Watching Baek Hail laugh and smack Junhyeok on the back as his brother sagged lifelessly, Junho organized his thoughts.
The next two months, huh...
If that wrapped up sometime in March, then it would line up perfectly with the overseas schedule he had already reserved.
In early April, Junho and Junhyeok were finally scheduled to head to a private military academy in the United States for a short intensive training program using actual firearms.
And the time of heavy manual labor passed quickly.
