Chapter 27
#027
1.
Today's lesson.
The zombie apocalypse is dangerous, so don't try this at home—watch it only in theaters.
“Haa, haa… fuck… I’m done for….”
I’d already ditched the coat and jacket, soaked through with blood.
What had once been a white shirt was now a deep reddish brown, as if it had been dipped in an inkwell.
My left ring and pinky fingers were bent at odd angles, grotesquely swollen.
My stamina was drained, as if I’d sprinted full-out for 40 kilometers.
My throat feels like it’s burning up.
I’d tangled with zombies so much, punched them, kicked them, thrown them….
At this point I’d done everything but kiss them, so I had no idea whether I’d been bitten or not.
“I don’t know, fuck it. If I got bitten, I’m dead anyway.”
I spat out saliva tinged with blood.
How many had I killed? How many rounds had I fired?
Dozens—maybe even into the triple digits?
I killed the ones swarming me, and killed them, and killed them again.
Still, to cut to the conclusion….
======
:::Challenge (New!):::
- Survive the infected citizen swarm. +5pt
======
There was only one person standing on two feet around my apartment—me, Cedric.
I had survived successfully.
“I lived!!!!!”
Even if I copied those extras who die because they let their guard down, I’d still be alive.
All thanks to Laplace’s Eye and the superhuman power of Augmentation.
But now I understood why Isis warned me that ‘Augmentation gnaws away at lifespan and life itself.’
I really do feel like I’m about to die.
Still, a booster that gnaws away at your lifespan and life as you use it….
Maybe this is kind of cool?
“Oof, my aching joints….”
After barely making it back to the limousine and collapsing inside.
I started the engine and put a cigarette in my mouth.
“Phew….”
As I drew the smoke deep into my lungs, I could taste burning corpses.
“Ha, that’s the taste….”
After a short rest, I started the car again.
-Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle
“What the hell, why is it doing this?”
The limousine had been through such a brutal journey with me that, like its owner, it was in awful shape.
It barely got moving, but the ride quality was like a farm tractor.
“Ugh, I’m gonna hurl….”
Would Ceres blow her top if she saw what the car had turned into?
Or would she be amazed that I’d made it back at all?
Either way, it didn’t matter much.
The last mission given to me this run was to meet the mastermind Ceres, whatever it took.
Ask her what the hell this Project Z is.
Ask her why she fed me the noxious poison.
Ask her why, on top of that, she tried to stop me from getting anywhere.
Even if she lies, it doesn’t matter.
I have a joker card.
One use of the ‘Monocle of Exhumation,’ which digs up the past someone wants hidden.
Two uses of the ‘Coin Toss of Truth.’
I’m going to use them well to expose Ceres’s contradictions.
I don’t have much time.
And then there’s my condition, where even a brief lapse makes my focus blur….
But the biggest risk is that at the moment Arvel died, a ‘choice’ appears and the save point changes.
I have to avoid that at all costs.
“But… can I even get out of here?”
Right after the fight, I’d managed somehow on adrenaline alone.
But three minutes after grabbing the wheel, I realized it.
That I didn’t even have the strength to lift a spoon, let alone film another car action scene like before.
Thankfully, my fear that zombies might swarm me in this state turned out to be nothing more than paranoia.
“Oh, so that’s it?”
I really had unleashed a zombie slaughterfest that would make even John Wick tremble, but for all that, there was no follow-up wave.
“If you get bitten, you’re infected. Keep the formation!”
“Kill them!”
“Kyaaaah! Kyaaaah!”
“Minimize damage! We still need to sell the corpses!”
The troubleshooters were on the scene, carving the zombies apart.
“……!”
Among them, I could see the gallant figure of Sunming, wearing a blue changpao and swinging a hammer.
“Truly splendid.”
I headed for the barricade, memorizing the image of the man I’d one day bring down.
“Halt! Halt! Unauthorized personnel are not allowed through!”
Unlike when I came in, the area in front of the barrier was littered with zombie corpses—and human ones too.
Both sides had probably tried to leave E-Sector and were taken down by the troubleshooters.
Of course, I’m not part of that.
-Rattle-rattle-rattle
As the wreck of a limousine crawled past at about 20 km/h,
“The Royal Inspector has arrived!!!”
the troubleshooters, flustered but obliging, cleared the barricade for me.
2.
I held on by biting my tongue every time I nearly lost consciousness.
I even nodded off in spots and plowed into a few people, but that’s fine.
This is Necropolis.
Just kidding.
I was about to collapse and die like this, so I tried to liven the mood a little.
At last, Ceres’s townhouse.
I barely managed to park in the garage and boarded the private elevator that looked ten times nicer than my apartment.
“Ugh….”
As soon as I leaned against the wall, a sigh escaped me.
If I’m going to regress anyway, maybe I should at least take a shower first?
I hadn’t realized how gross dried blood could feel.
“No time for thoughts like that.”
What should I ask her?
Why did you try to save me?
Why did you feed me the poison?
Should I try playing the sympathy card first?
Living with her for a while, she didn’t seem quite so heartless after all.
-ding!
The elevator doors opened onto the entryway.
“……?”
My eyebrow twitched.
Something felt off.
The entrance hall visible as soon as I stepped out of the elevator was just as it always was.
It was neatly arranged, like a long gallery filled with works of art.
But beyond the gallery, the living room looked as though it had been caught in a typhoon.
“…….”
That wasn’t all.
I could hear shouting from inside.
“What the hell is this supposed to mean?! This is nothing like what we agreed on!”
One man.
“Shut your filthy mouth. I had no intention of indulging your disgusting tastes.”
One woman.
The woman’s voice wasn’t Ceres’s.
Fortunately, they were too busy raising their voices to hear the elevator arrive.
And since they were fighting around the corner in the living room, they hadn’t even noticed my presence.
This feels bad.
The ruined interior.
A man and a woman shouting at each other in someone else’s living room.
There’s no way Ceres would tolerate that sort of outrage.
There are two possibilities.
Either Ceres had suddenly left the house at 5 a.m., deep in the pre-dawn dark, or….
“I kept my promise. I did kill Ceres, didn’t I?”
What?
I thought I’d misheard.
And understandably so—there’s no way that could happen, right?
This is Ceres, the eight-foot-tall widow.
The Ceres whose ferocious charisma supposedly put her on par with a mage of at least fourth tier or above?
The scene was as unimaginable as Jensen Huang, Lee Jae-yong, and Chung Eui-sun downing chimaek together at Kkanbu Chicken.
Get a grip.
Information. Gather information.
I crept forward, holding even my breath in check.
‘Lucky!’
As luck would have it, there was a plaque-like trophy at one end of the display stand.
Like a sniper using a mirror to secure a line of sight, I used the plaque to look across to the other side.
“You damn bitch. That was only half the deal. You were supposed to hand over the body intact, and instead you tore it to shreds just to screw me over! Now I can’t even use it as a toy!”
The man shrieking just now was a stranger.
But embroidered over his luxurious black changpao was a turtle-shell pattern.
He was from the Hyeon-gwi family, one of the three great houses of Overnus Pharmaceuticals.
“And what if that causes trouble? I-ming, are you going to take responsibility? If you half-ass things because of your filthy fetish and screw this up, then what?”
On the other hand, the woman’s voice felt familiar from the start, and sure enough, she was an acquaintance.
Gisella Rosenbach, one of the eleven directors of Twilight Resource Development.
I remembered seeing her coming and going from headquarters while I worked as a driver.
“What do you mean, what’s going to go wrong?!”
“She’s a dangerous woman. We don’t know what she’ll do even at the very end, do we?”
At Gisella’s retort, the man, I-ming, barked back.
“Fuck! Of course I know that—that’s why I helped you, isn’t it?! I was the one who tipped your side off that Ceres was trying to interfere with the project! I’m also the one who fed that woman poison so it’d be easier to deal with her! I’m just asking why you had to butcher her when cutting off her head would have been enough! You bitch, when you came back from the bathroom your story changed, didn’t it?”
“Look at you, a grown man whining and sniveling. And what are you going to do about it now?”
“What?”
“I dealt with the traitor, didn’t I? But you? Didn’t you fail to report this properly to headquarters because of that filthy hobby of yours?”
“You bastard…! So you’re just going to enjoy the fun and then slip away? You think I came here without any backup plan?”
Though my reunion with Mama Ceres had been pushed to the next life….
I had gained a great deal of information from their conversation.
It felt as if Nietzsche himself had descended into my head.
I had understood the flow of everything.
Now, let’s go through it step by step.
First, as the monocle showed, Ceres had acted as an internal whistleblower.
She leaked ‘Project Z,’ a plan for dispersing biological weapons and carrying out mass slaughter, to the rival company, Overnus Pharmaceuticals.
Why? I don’t know the details.
She probably didn’t want Project Z to go ahead.
Even so, the project moved forward.
Why?
Because I-ming of the Hyeon-gwi family, who received the information, betrayed her.
That bastard took the information from Ceres and didn’t pass it on to Overnus.
Instead, he tipped off the Twilight Resource Development board about Ceres’s betrayal.
Why?
And judging from the way he’d been whining over the corpse from the start….
He probably just wanted to toy with Ceres’s corpse.
The civic sense in this city is fucking awful.
And so I-ming, in collusion with Gisella, drugged Ceres.
The ‘traitor’ Ceres was then purged by Gisella, a director of Twilight Resource Development.
If that’s the case, everything fits perfectly.
Even the incomprehensible ‘noxious poison’ makes sense now.
Ceres didn’t drug me.
Ceres and I were drugged ‘together.’
I was the one who held out thanks to my iron stomach.
Then her stopping me from going outside, and lending me the car when I said my family was at home….
That meant it was at least a minimal act of kindness.
As expected of the late Mama Ceres.
Sure, she was an iron-fisted director who’d gouge your eyes out during the interview, but there was no way such a busty beauty could be a bad person, right?
Her mercy stats are on a whole different level from Gisella’s miserly asphalt tits.
…And, by the way.
Fuck, my head’s spinning.
What a truly fucked-up city.
Even a mage like Ceres gets taken out by office politics?
At any rate, I’d gotten all the information I needed from the conversation.
That made the guidelines for the next run clear as day.
‘Good.’
I’ll abandon Ceres’s route from the next run on.
Project Z went from Season 1 to Season 2 to Season 3, then kept piling on more and more nonsense until it reached Season 8.
Even if audiences and critics curse it to hell and only zombies are left in Necropolis’s slums, it’s none of my business.
How is a commoner like me supposed to stop something like that?
And by now, the fact that Ceres was the snitch had already been exposed.
With my flimsy sense of justice, what—‘Let’s change the world together’?
We’d just be crossing the rainbow bridge together.
Since I’d already gotten all the info I could, there was no point in getting found out and wrung out for nothing.
It was lucky I hadn’t been caught yet.
-click
It was just then, as I was starting to shove the gun barrel into my mouth.
The moment the bitter taste of thick gunpowder spread through my mouth.
I saw something strange.
Blink, blink.
The crimson lights illuminating the gallery blink slowly.
Before long, the townhouse lights quietly died out, like candles that had burned themselves out.
In the wake of the darkness that arrived in an instant.
-tap
Footsteps could be heard.
-tap
The sound of wooden clogs was enough to chill my spine.
-tap
The intruder’s footsteps came from the far end of the hallway.
The footsteps came to a stop in the living room where Gisella and I-ming were standing.
Still, just from the peculiar phenomenon of the ‘light’ disappearing.
And the distinctive sound of those footsteps alone, I could tell who had entered this space.
“Hello. Looks like the two of you are having a fun little private chat.”
My enemy, the one who had cut my throat twice and, on top of that, delisted all those all-purpose charms.
The enemy who had butchered defenseless Arvel.
Necropolis, day 16, 5:00 a.m.
“Can I join in too?”
The Samurai Bitch had descended upon Necropolis.