Free Web Novel- They’re all men in their forties or fifties. Only one of them has a gun. Air rifle? Hunting gun? Something like that. The rest are all carrying weapons too.
- Doesn’t look like their route will bring them up toward your side, boss. Still, they might reach the spot where our turret dropped that water deer carcass within twenty or thirty minutes.
- The old guy in front climbs mountains pretty well... Huh? They’ve got a dog too. About Kkamsoonie’s size? Anyway, looks like a hunting dog.
Listening to Yoon Youngsu over the radio, Junho pulled the modified air rifle and spare air tank off the carrying frame.
Then he spoke to the idol siblings, who had flattened themselves against the ground the moment they heard his warning.
“They’re still pretty far below us, so they won’t be able to see this spot. For now, you two head back the way we came. You remember those two big boulders stacked together we passed about five minutes ago? Hide there. And take this.”
Junho handed Park Deokcheol a portable walkie-talkie with an earpiece attached.
“It’s set to channel one. You can only communicate with me on this. Do you know how to use it?”
“Yes, sir. I know it well.”
“Good. Every now and then, somebody other than me might speak to you. If that happens, don’t ask questions. Just do exactly what you’re told. It’ll be the person watching from over there.”
Junho raised his index finger and pointed upward.
“......?”
The idol siblings followed his finger and looked up at the sky at the same time. Their eyes instantly went wide.
There was a tiny dot hanging high, high overhead.
A d-drone?
He really is a professional killer!
Realizing it was a high-performance drone, the siblings swallowed nervously and looked back at Junho.
“You can run off somewhere else if you want. That is, if you think the two of you can survive in a world like this after leaving your friend behind.”
“N-no. We’d never run.”
“We weren’t planning to go anywhere else anyway. And we’d never leave Yuna behind.”
The idol siblings really did stay calm even in a situation like this, true descendants of rooftop Koreans.
Giving them a few more points in his head, Junho said,
“Good. I trust you’ll do fine. Now go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes.”
The siblings nodded and quickly headed back the way they had come.
Then Park Sunhee suddenly stopped and turned around.
“Um...”
“......?”
Junho, who had been listening to Yoon Youngsu and planning his route, glanced back at her.
“B-be careful. Don’t get hurt.”
“...Okay. You two be careful too.”
Maybe because the situation was tense, and maybe because it was still warm out, Park Sunhee’s face and neck were flushed red. Then she hurried after her brother.
“......”
Junho checked the condition of the modified air rifle in his hands—something he had not held in quite a while—and of the Glock 17 he carried at all times, then took off running down the mountainside.
***
- Akina thinks they probably came from the Yeongho 2-ri side.
Yeongho 2-ri was a small village northeast of their shelter and safe zone.
Of course, “small” still meant nearly two hundred households and a population of over four hundred.
- Not from the center of Yeongho 2-ri. Peach Valley, maybe? Anyway, Akina thinks there’s a high chance they came from the old native-resident section where the longtime Yeongho 2-ri locals live. It’s the most remote part, and it’s also close to the shelter’s back mountain.
Looking at the map on his tablet, where Akina had drawn a dotted line showing the estimated direction, Junho nodded. frёewebnoѵēl.com
“Probably.”
Even Gahyeon-ri was only about ten minutes by car from Moku-ri, where there was a train station, so it was still a fairly dense population area, with apartment complexes and lots of villa clusters.
But beyond the back mountain behind their shelter and outside the safe zone—especially to the north and east—things got pretty inconvenient if you did not have your own car. Miss one bus and you were stuck waiting thirty minutes, no way around it.
Other than the little center around the village hall, with a supermarket and a few small shops, the houses were all scattered far apart.
And villagers in places like that, whether near the capital or out in the provinces, had better survival odds than city people.
If it’s Peach Valley, the original population was maybe fifty or sixty?
That meant there were probably at least twenty survivors, maybe over thirty.
And probably two-thirds of them were over sixty.
So they must’ve come out leaving only the bare minimum of guards behind. Which means...
There was no way the men from Peach Valley had discovered their shelter.
There was not even a proper path through there, and the mountains were rough enough that even somebody used to hiking, fully equipped, would need a whole day to get through.
Besides, before the regression, there had never been any sign that anybody had come to the pension.
But judging by the direction they were headed, there was a pretty high chance they would end up entering the safe zone.
And once they came in once, they would definitely come again, and sooner or later they might spot one of the outposts.
I need to make sure they never get a foothold here in the first place.
Thinking through a few of the plans he had already prepared for a situation like this, Junho asked,
“Are we sure they’re people from Peach Valley? Not gangsters or anything like that?”
- Zooming in now.
The drone camera’s magnified feed immediately popped up on Junho’s tablet.
But the mountains were steep and the trees were dense, so the image quality was not great.
- The guy with the gun is wearing one of those green work caps country guys always wear. The others just look like plain old rural middle-aged men. Their weapons are brush knives and sickles, stuff like that.
Then there was a ninety-nine percent chance they really were residents of Peach Valley in Yeongho 2-ri.
In that case—
“Check the Cheonmok Tunnel side. See if there are any threats near the entrance or on the mountain.”
- Yes, sir.
A few minutes later, as Junho pushed through the trees and headed down in the direction of Cheonmok Tunnel—
- Nothing. I think there are a few zombies near the tunnel entrance and inside it, but I don’t see anything on top of the tunnel or nearby.
“Good. Keep watching those people, and let me know if anything unusual happens.”
- Yes, sir!
The ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) route Junho had chosen was the one leading toward Cheonmok Tunnel, which connected to Namyangju’s so-called Yangjin New Town.
In other words, he was planning to run into the five men while pretending he had come from the northwest, from beyond the shelter’s back mountain and the safe zone.
- The Peach Valley guys are heading up over the tunnel too. The dog and its owner, plus the guy with the air rifle, are in front. The dog’s about ten meters ahead.
- They’re about to come within a hundred fifty meters of your position. You should be able to see them soon.
“...I see them now.”
Using the digital monocular he always carried whenever he went outside, Junho observed the five men.
Only one of them looked to be in his mid-forties. The other four all looked over fifty.
But as country people, they were all darkened by the sun and looked pretty sturdy.
And that meant—
Their food situation must be decent.
Then again, even in the greater Seoul area, in a place this rural—especially one called Peach Valley—pretty much every household would have a small cold-storage unit.
And nearly half the food filling those country cold-storage units would be grains like rice, barley, and flour.
The rest would be seasonings and staples like sugar, salt, and soy sauce, along with fruit, vegetables, and alcohol.
Which meant that if the Peach Valley survivors had wiped out all the zombies in their village, they naturally would have cleaned out all those cold-storage units too.
So they probably were not hurting for food.
And if they still came all the way up here carrying an air rifle...
Putting together the fact that there were five of them and that they had a hunting dog, Junho could draw a conclusion.
And the moment they entered perfect effective range, he moved.
Thup...! Thup...!
Two tungsten rounds punched through the trees and struck the ground one meter in front of the yellow dog and directly in front of the man leading the group with the air rifle.
“......!?”
The dog stopped. The man in the green cap holding the air rifle nearly jumped out of his skin and staggered back.
He swung the air rifle on his shoulder into a ready position and whipped his head around, about to say something to the others when—
“Don’t move! If you do, I’ll blow your fucking head off!”
Even though he was still pretty far away, Junho deliberately thickened his voice and shouted the warning.
But the man in the green cap instinctively turned both his body and the muzzle toward the direction the voice had come from.
At that instant—
Thup...!
Junho aimed through the scope at the bright green cap, which stood out especially well, and fired a tungsten round.
Pak!
A hole punched through the brim, and the cap flew backward.
The man who would have had a hole in his head if the shot had been off by just a few centimeters— freewebnoveℓ.com
or rather, the balding man in his fifties whose wide bare forehead was now exposed with the cap gone—
dropped flat onto the spot.
“Next one goes through your actual skull! Drop the gun and the weapons! All of you, back up ten steps!”
The balding man immediately hurled away the air rifle he had been holding.
The other men, flustered and scrambling, hurriedly set down the sickles and knives in their hands and carefully backed up seven or eight meters.
But—
Woof! Woof-woof!
The dog did not.
“Ddol...! No...!”
Ignoring its owner’s desperate shout, the yellow hunting dog came racing toward Junho’s position like an arrow.
Junho rose at once, drawing the machete from the sheath strapped to his thigh.
Then he raised the blade toward the hunting dog charging uphill at him, fully intent on splitting its skull in half.
And the instant his eyes met the dog’s—
Flinch.
The hunting dog stopped dead in its tracks.
Then—
Whine... whine, whiiine.
Its tail tucked between its legs, and it trembled, not knowing what to do.
And when Junho started walking slowly toward it, the thing dropped flat on the spot and started pissing itself.
- Wow... boss, your intimidation game is insane. Feels like I’m watching one of those old dog butcher videos.
Junho had seen that video before.
And the hunting dog lying flat in front of him now, constantly watching him for any sign of danger,
looked exactly like those dogs people always called the meanest in the neighborhood—the ones that barked like crazy at the dog butcher from a distance, then tucked their tails and crawled back into the doghouse the second he got close.
***
“Peach Valley? You mean the one in Yeongho 2-ri?”
“Y-yeah. That’s right. We all live there. The Peach Valley Youth Association.”
In rural villages, most people were over sixty, so of course people in their forties and fifties counted as “youth.”
“What brought you all the way here? Judging by how you look, it’s not like you’ve been starving.”
Seen up close, the men from the Peach Valley Youth Association looked a little worn down, but none of them looked physically unwell.
Just as Junho had guessed, it was proof that their food situation was decent.
Their gun and weapons had all been confiscated, but the Peach Valley men were at least sitting in reasonably comfortable positions as they answered, watching Junho carefully.
“Well... we’re short on meat.”
“We killed and ate the rooster a long time ago because it wouldn’t stop crowing. And it looked like the meat in the refrigerators would run out soon, so... so we came to catch a water deer or something...”
“Then why didn’t you go to the mountains near your own village? Why come all the way into our area?”
“Well, it’s not like Cheonmok Tunnel suddenly became somebody’s terri— s-sorry.”
The man who had been muttering under his breath immediately shut up and lowered his head under Junho’s cold stare.
They all had eyes, and they had all served in the military.
That unusual-looking air rifle. The handgun at his side. And even that black blade, clearly different from the brush knives they used.
Anyone could tell that Junho was no ordinary man, armed like some kind of special operations soldier.
More than that, the way he had subdued Ddol—a dog so vicious that nobody but its owner could handle it—through sheer force of presence and atmosphere alone...
The men of the Peach Valley Youth Association were frightened, but fascinated too.
“Anyway, this side has already been under our control for several days.”
“.......”
At Junho’s firm words, their expressions stiffened.
But with all their guns and weapons already taken away, and even their hunting dog cowed, there was nothing they could do.
In a world like this, they should be grateful just to be left alive.
“But.”
And looking at those Peach Valley men, Junho decided to make them a proposition.
“Judging by the look of things, it seems like your side has its own problems too, so let me say this.”
“......?”
It would sound like a scam, but it was not a scam, and it would not be bad for them either.
Looked at objectively, it was a win-win deal.
Though really, their shelter stood to benefit a little more.
