Free Web Novel“......”
On a clear early September morning, dry enough to feel it in the air, Park Deokcheol, Park Sunhee, and Jo Yuna stood there awkwardly, trading embarrassed looks.
In khaki long-sleeved shirts, dark-brown work clothes, and rubber boots that came up to their calves, the three of them looked, at a glance, like ordinary construction laborers.
No—these days not even construction laborers really dressed like this anymore, so they looked more like Generic Worker A, B, and C.
On top of that, they were wearing visors the kind middle-aged women often used, with hand towels wrapped around their necks, and though none of them said it out loud, all three were thinking roughly the same thing.
This feels like we’re on one of those “Back to My Hometown at Six” shows.
The senior idols dressed like this when they did mudflat experience segments with their managers...
Of course, even those had been dream programs they would have killed to appear on.
Unfortunately, the three of them were not heading to a TV variety show or a famous NewTube channel.
They were following a killing specialist to go do some kind of labor they still did not fully understand.
And not just him. The somewhat younger guy they had seen yesterday was there too, watching them with interested eyes while carrying not one but two guns.
“Follow me.”
“Ah, yes.”
The three hurried after the killing specialist.
As they did, they took a careful look around this place, which they had not ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ been in any state to properly examine yesterday.
More than ten container housing units had been arranged in a rectangular layout.
And off in one corner of the wide yard stood another structure that looked like a storage building.
Before long, the killing specialist stopped in front of one of the containers.
Clank! Giiiing...
“......!!!”
As the container split open in half with a heavy mechanical sound, all three stared with their eyes wide— freewebnσvel.cøm
and understood at the same time.
This place was completely cut off from the outside world.
And they were trapped in it.
But that also meant this was a safe zone that nobody could easily get into.
With a complicated mix of maybe thirty percent worry over being confined and seventy percent relief at finally being safe,
the three followed a roughly four-meter-wide road that was unpaved but solidly packed down and well maintained.
Both sides of the road were thick with trees big and small, making it impossible to see much beyond them.
And from outside, it seemed just as likely no one would be able to see the container housing area they had just left or this road either.
After about five minutes of walking down the quiet forest path, with nothing but birdsong around them, the three finally arrived at a fairly wide clearing where the ground had been packed down to some degree.
***
The three blinked in confusion, clearly not having expected to find a clearing like this in the middle of the mountain.
Junho pointed to one side and said,
“Park Sunhee and Jo Yuna, grab shovels. Park Deokcheol, pick up a mattock and come with me.”
The multipurpose electric cart they had been hauled in like baggage yesterday was already waiting there.
The three hurried over and picked up the tools they had been told to take.
“From here to there, we’re leveling the ground. Park Deokcheol, you break up the raised parts. You two pack it down with the shovels and fill in with dirt. How’s that sound? Easy enough, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, yes.”
Junho had expected them to panic, so he was slightly surprised to see the three answer obediently, even if they looked a bit tense.
But he showed none of it and kept talking.
“We’re putting up a greenhouse here. That means the foundation has to be level down to the inch. If water pools inside or runs off to one side, the crops die.”
“Ah, I know. I’ve done similar work a few times.”
“Me too.”
“I have too, back in Japan...”
This time, Junho was the one caught off guard.
These were not even Korean-born kids. They were idols raised in the U.S. and Japan, and they had done this kind of work before?
Well, he would see soon enough from how they worked.
“Good. Then get started. The other tools and the basic plans are in the cargo bed if you need them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Park Deokcheol immediately found a section of ground that bulged upward and went at it with the mattock.
Feet shoulder-width apart, left hand gripping the end of the handle, right hand set about two-thirds of the way down.
Driving it down with the weight of his body using the spring of his waist and lower body, then naturally sliding the right hand that had been gripping the middle of the handle—
it was skillful enough to be called textbook mattock work.
“What the hell is with this kid...?”
Junho only gave a calm nod, but Junhyeok, standing beside the electric cart watching the scene, was beyond surprised.
A twenty-one-year-old idol born and raised in America, with a polished pretty-boy face, was that good with a mattock?
But Park Deokcheol was not the only one.
His younger sister, Park Sunhee, was pretty good with a shovel too—no, considering she was a woman, it was honestly hard to believe how good she was.
To be blunt, she looked better at it than most guys her age.
The way she lightly set her foot on the shovel blade to scoop dirt, the way she kept her speed by taking manageable amounts instead of overloading each scoop.
Even the way she pushed, scraped, and packed dirt with the shovel blade was not beginner stuff at all.
Jo Yuna was weaker and slower than Park Sunhee, but she too clearly looked like someone who had spent a lot of time using a shovel somewhere.
“This is insane. If they’d gone into construction or farming instead of becoming idols, they would’ve been aces. Hyung, where did the Park siblings say they were from again?”
“Dallas, Texas.”
“Dallas, Texas... what kind of place even is that?”
Not quite as shocked as Junhyeok, but Junho was plenty surprised too.
Dallas, as far as he knew, was one of the three biggest cities in Texas. So why would kids born and raised there be like this?
Still, for what he had not expected much from—manual labor—the three were showing far more ability than he had anticipated, and Junho assigned them scores by his own cold standards.
“The drone’s up, but you keep an eye on them too. Make sure they stick to forty-five minutes of work and fifteen minutes of rest. Keep them fed and watered. After lunch, make them rest for an hour, whether that means a nap or whatever.”
“Roger that. I’ll supervise properly. You go handle your stuff.”
“Good.”
Leaving supervision of the three idol laborers to Junhyeok, Junho cast one more glance at them, absorbed in their work, and left the clearing.
He had expected it to take two or three days.
At this rate, though, it looked like they might finish one greenhouse today.
***
“Wild, right? I thought it was wild too, but once I dug into our hired hand and the Missy Sisters, it started to make sense.”
“Really?”
Yoon Youngsu had been watching the three work through the drone camera, and he continued,
“Yeah. First off, it’s true that Park Deokcheol and Park Sunhee were born and raised in Dallas. But their grandfather was first-generation immigrant stock who moved over in the sixties, and their dad was born and raised in L.A. But then—”
Rapidly working the computer, Yoon Youngsu pulled up an old-looking photograph and went on.
“In 1992, something happened. Yep, the L.A. riots. And their grandfather and father were right there—those famous rooftop Koreans. The Korean self-defense groups in L.A.”
Back then, the Park family had run a restaurant and a beauty salon in Los Angeles.
Fortunately, nobody died because they fought back with their lives on the line, but their businesses were wrecked and looted, and they took heavy losses.
Sure, they got compensation later, but it was not about the money.
Their grandfather had been so deeply shaken by what happened that he decided to leave L.A. and move elsewhere.
So the whole family relocated to the outskirts of Dallas and built a new life there.
Later, the Park siblings’ father met and married a Korean-Irish woman there, and the two siblings were born.
Of course, none of that by itself explained why they were so good at hard labor.
But—
“The grandfather got trauma from fighting in the middle of the L.A. riots. So from when the grandkids were little, he obsessively taught them everything from firearms to self-defense. Took them hunting all the time too. Sounds like he raised them with something beyond just outdoor recreation—more like survival training.”
“And the family ran a small farm growing side-dish ingredients, plus a restaurant. They had a salon too, so the kids helped with family work all the time? And they were familiar with tools because their father worked in construction?”
“Yep. Sounds like if they didn’t help with the family businesses, they didn’t get allowance. Anyway, their upbringing was unusual, so it was briefly a talking point in idol fandom circles too. Stuff like wild idols, survival idols... heh.”
“I see. Well...”
Junho felt like he now understood a little better how Park Deokcheol, Park Sunhee, and Jo Yuna had managed to survive for almost two weeks after infrastructure like electricity and running water had completely gone down.
If the siblings had been raised with that kind of training from childhood through their grandfather and father, their survival odds would obviously have been a lot higher than normal people’s.
“Then what about Jo Yuna?”
“Ah, she’s the exact opposite case from the Park siblings.”
Unlike Park Deokcheol and Park Sunhee, who had gotten early survival education from an older family member from childhood, ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
Jo Yuna’s mother’s side came from a wealthy Japanese family that still retained the habits and traditions of the old aristocracy.
But—
“She grew up getting trained in calligraphy, piano, flower arrangement, tea ceremony, embroidery, sewing, bonsai, and growing plants and fruit trees. You know, rich-young-lady education. Ojou-sama training, Japanese-style.”
“That’s why she knows at least some shovel work?”
“Yep. They had a greenhouse at home too. She took care of it every day with her mother. She also did one year of high school in Japan, and her club activity there was tending the school garden and raising rabbits.”
That explained a little why the two girls—whose nationalities and upbringings were so radically different—were such close friends.
In a strange way, they had grown up learning and experiencing similar things.
Things most ordinary Korean teenagers and young adults had never really experienced.
“Not bad.”
Junho gave a small nod and looked at the monitor.
The three were now hard at work assembling the greenhouse frame, putting together the aluminum-alloy pipe structure after just finishing the anchor installation with Junhyeok.
Since the kids were doing such a good job, Junhyeok seemed fired up too and kept helping out here and there. It looked certain one greenhouse would be finished within another two or three hours.
Of course, Junho would still test them and keep watching them for the full four weeks.
“They’re fine for now. What about Hanchang and EoktenZ?”
Yoon Youngsu quickly brought up the feeds from the high-rise apartment CCTV, the PTZ camera at Hanaareum Nursing Home, and the two drones currently out over Gahyeon-ri onto the main monitor.
“The Hanchang Development gangster old-timers have swallowed up over half the townhouse complex. There are almost fifty households there, and unlike the country houses, they’re packed tightly together with no yards between them, so they got discovered a little while back. There are more zombies there than in the country-house neighborhood too.”
So, apparently, some of the surviving townhouse households had banded together.
There were only around twenty people total from five or six households, but at least seven or eight of them were men high-school age or older who could handle physical labor and had organized for defense.
That had made the Hanchang Development goons and gangsters pause their expansion for the moment.
“And the EoktenZ bastards?”
The ones he had killed had all been brain-dead punks, so there was no chance they would have known the address of a short-term rental, and he had never even considered asking.
There was no way guys who had come there for the first time in their lives could have accurately explained the location anyway.
“Ah, those assholes are the real problem. You know the ones you killed when you saved the Park siblings and Jo Yuna? You’d think they’d at least come investigate what happened to them, but after that they still haven’t moved at all—”
Beep... beep...
Right then, a warning tone sounded, followed by the brisk voice of the AI Akina.
—Scooters, motorcycles, and a vehicle have been detected in the designated surveillance zone.
“...! Switch screens.”
—Drone Number 02 is moving to the designated surveillance zone.
The drone, which had been cruising at an altitude of three hundred meters, accelerated fast.
Soon, electric scooters, bikes, and a famous domestic electric car appeared in the area between the two apartment complexes of so-called Sangdong and the longtime residents’ neighborhood of Middle Village—
a zone packed with small factories and dozens of old mansions and villas.
Since about half the buildings were vacant and some had been abandoned outright, there were not that many zombies there.
But the moment more than ten scooters and bikes, plus a car, showed up all at once, around fifty zombies came charging in like maniacs.
“Damn. Those punks can drive.”
“That’s not the important part. Put the drone on follow. And can you identify where those bastards just came out from?”
“Probably?”
At Junho’s words, Yoon Youngsu worked the keyboard and mouse at high speed.
Then Akina’s voice sounded again.
—Gyeonggi-do, Namyangju-si, Gado-eup, Gahyeon-ri, 143beon-gil. Estimated location: 45-12. Margin of error: 8 meters. Estimated error probability: 2 percent.
Using VPR—Visual Place Recognition—technology that Yoon Youngsu had personally modified and improved on top of what had already been there—
“Found them. These bastards...”
Having finally identified the EoktenZ headquarters, the highest-priority extermination target, murderous intent flickered in Junho’s eyes.
