Chapter 63
"So, about that, could you help us out a bit?"
The Chairman brought up the main point to me in a very gentle voice.
"We found a group of survivors in a bad spot, and I was hoping you'd rescue them with the train."
"Rescue them?"
"Yes, of course. I've prepared a reward as well."
The Chairman's gaze shifted to Sua, who was hiding behind my leg and peeking out timidly.
"Do you like cute teddy bears, by any chance? Grandpa can get you a very big teddy bear."
"Um... a teddy bear?"
At that, Sua's eyes sparkled, and an innocent smile she couldn't hide bloomed across her face.
Then she quickly tried to read my expression so she wouldn't make things difficult for me, but the look she couldn't quite hide was already showing.
Could he be trying to use Sua—
I gave a wry smile, and the Chairman laughed heartily and waved his hand.
"I'm joking. The teddy bear is just a personal gift from me to this child. I'll offer two rewards."
The Chairman held up two fingers.
"The first reward is mana stones."
"Mana stones?"
"That's right. I've been keeping an eye on the Gallery, and you often accept requests that reward mana stones from the Exchange... I won't ask what you use them for. But from now on, we'll set aside the high-grade mana stones we get from hunting monsters and clearing dungeons, and sell them to you first at half the Exchange price. What do you think?"
Not bad.
I didn't know how many mana stones the Chairman had, but from the train's power source and Donggeul's nutritional supplements, mana stones were something I needed more than food.
If I could secure them steadily at half price, that was a huge perk.
'I was just starting to think about buying mana stones from the Exchange...'
"And the second is that I'll keep uploading educational videos to the Gallery board regularly."
"Educational videos?"
"Honestly, unlike the first reward, this one isn't just for you."
The Chairman continued while looking at Jiu and Sua.
"This time, the people we need to rescue are a very famous top instructor from before the apocalypse and his students. If you bring them back safely, I'll ask those instructors to prepare a bare-bones curriculum for the children and regularly upload educational videos to the Gallery showing how to survive in this changed world."
"That..."
"Children should at least know how to read and write, shouldn't they?"
I glanced at the siblings.
Education in the apocalypse, of all things.
It was something I hadn't even considered, but young children might need at least some basic education.
Especially reading and writing.
In the first place, I'd gone to rescue the siblings because I'd read Jiu's post.
Jiu could read and write fairly well, but Sua... well, she still had a long way to go.
"...All right."
"Ho-ho-ho! Thank you."
Watching the Chairman smile brightly and pat my shoulder, I clicked my tongue inwardly.
***
With a heavy rumble, the train left Singil Station and disappeared completely from sight, and a man who had been standing silently behind the Chairman carefully approached and asked,
"Chairman. Is it all right to sell the mana stones at half price...? That'll cut credit earnings a lot."
At the man's worried question, the Chairman smiled faintly and clasped his hands behind his back.
"What do a few dozen mana stones amount to?"
"Pardon?"
"What's important is the image of the most attention-grabbing Awakened right now working for us."
The Chairman smiled with satisfaction as he looked at the empty tracks where the train had departed.
Elections are all about attention.
The attention that monstrous train would bring simply by showing up would be anything but small.
But one thing bothered him, and the Chairman frowned before speaking.
"...At most, he'll only buy a few dozen, right?"
"...Probably not, right?"
The Chairman felt a strange sense of unease.
***
After leaving Singil Station, I sat in the cockpit and checked the destination I had been given.
Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu.
The mecca of cram schools, famous for having the fiercest education fever in Korea.
When they said the survivors we had to rescue this time were a famous top instructor and his students, I'd more or less expected as much.
But once I saw the name of the destination, it all made sense.
"Did the kids get trapped in a cram school when it happened...?"
This was my first time heading deep into the eastern side of Seoul.
Since I'd only ever been around Yeouido and the outskirts of the capital area, the scenery in the middle of Gangnam came as another shock.
"The buildings are tall, at least..."
The sight of the tall buildings collapsing was thoroughly apocalyptic.
Kagagak!
Debris from the buildings had spilled all the way onto the tracks, so the grinder on the front of the train worked furiously.
It ground through huge slabs of concrete and tangled rebar with brute force as it advanced toward Daechi Station.
After about forty minutes of driving like that,
the train finally came to a stop on the tracks near Daechi Station.
"They said they were hiding in one of the academies..."
I turned on the cockpit monitor and started moving the upgraded external camera around.
With the zoom function added, the letters on the building exteriors looked as clear as if they were right in front of me.
"Hmm, let's see... academy... academy...?"
As I zoomed in and inspected the surrounding buildings, I let go of the controls with a deep sigh less than a minute later.
"...This is insane, seriously."
The sides of the ten-plus-story buildings caught in the camera lens were plastered with signs for college-prep academies, English/math academies, essay academies, and more.
I'd heard enough about how intense Daechi-dong's education fever was, but I never imagined it would be this extreme.
Somehow, there were more academies than restaurants.
I had barely swept the camera around once, and the number of academies in view easily topped thirty.
The Chairman had only said he was hiding in one of Daechi-dong's academies; he hadn't told me the exact name.
Even if he had told me, I might not have been able to find it.
Unbelievably, there were even cases where more than ten academies had the exact same name.
"I'd spend all night just looking at signs."
In the end, I cleanly gave up on searching through the train's external camera.
Mobility was king in situations like this.
I asked the drones for help.
"Check the academies one by one and search for survivors."
Watching the drones scatter like a swarm of bees, I leaned back in my seat.
While the drones combed through the forest of buildings in Daechi-dong's cram-school district, I kept looking out at the road in case any monsters or survivors were passing by.
Ha-seon approached the cockpit from behind.
Ha-seon's expression as she looked at the dense signs displayed on the camera seemed oddly bitter.
As if she were recalling bad memories, I spoke to her.
"...Ha-seon, you didn't really like cram schools either...?"
"Ah, did it show...? Honestly, they made me feel a little stifled."
"I understand. Back when I was younger, I hated going to math academies too, so I used to sneak off and run away to PC bangs all the time."
I said, thinking back to old memories of my own.
At my sympathetic words, Ha-seon also smiled bashfully and nodded.
"That's right. I really, really hated going to academies too. But my parents said if I ranked in the top five in the whole school, it would be okay not to go."
That was a pretty harsh condition.
If you're top five in the whole school, why would you even need an academy?
Ha-seon's parents must have had that in mind when they set that condition.
"Oh, so?"
"I worked hard and made it into the top five!"
"..."
At a loss for words, I slowly turned my head and stared at the monitor.
Me, who used to ditch class and run off to PC bangs, and her, who had achieved a top-five ranking in the whole school.
I thought she was a dependable companion to go through hardships with, but this short conversation made the gap between us painfully clear.
"So-won?"
"Ah... uh, I don't see any survivors."
I decided to focus on the search, avoiding Ha-seon's gaze.
But there was a limit to searching through the several dozen academies with only three drones.
What's more, each academy was huge—
"This won't work. Let's search with our ears instead of our eyes."
There was actually one method I'd only vaguely thought about before and never actually tried.
I ordered the combat drones and sniper drones to gain altitude and wait while gliding silently.
Then I switched only the reconnaissance drone to silent flight mode and ordered it to weave between the buildings, detect the faint sounds around it, and fly toward the source.
I turned the cockpit panel volume all the way up.
A quiet city.
There were only two kinds of things that could make noise here.
Monsters, or survivors.
"Kak!"
The first thing that came through the speaker was the presence of monsters.
The ones shown by the reconnaissance drone were small demon- or imp-like creatures straight out of a fantasy game, with tiny bat-like wings and sharp horns.
They were roaming the alleys of the academy district, making unpleasant cries that sounded like scraping metal.
"Those sounds will drown out the survivors... clean them up."
As soon as my order was given, the combat drones waiting overhead dived down and spat fire.
Rat-a-tat—! Bang!
It was a swift and clean cleanup.
The heads of the ones hit by the flying bullets burst like watermelons.
The flock of little winged devils turned into chunks of meat in just a few seconds and scattered across the street.
It was just as the surroundings were about to fall silent again.
Whirr—
The reconnaissance drone, carefully skimming past the fourth-floor exterior wall of a building, picked up a very faint but unmistakably human voice on its microphone.
[...Teacher, didn't we just hear gunshots outside?]
[C-could it be that soldiers came to rescue us?]
Two youthful voices full of fear could be heard.
The voices were asking someone for their opinion.
[...It definitely sounded like gunfire, but just from that sound alone, there's no basis to be certain it was soldiers' gunfire—]
[Ah, forget it, teacher! I'll just secretly check through the window!]
The sounds of bickering while trying to figure out the situation.
"They just said 'teacher'..."
It was definitely a conversation between students and an instructor.
Feeling delighted, I ordered the reconnaissance drone to slowly move toward the academy window from which the sounds had come.
The moment the drone's camera was about to press right up against the tightly shut frosted window—
Creak—!
The academy window slid open, and the face of a girl who looked to be a high school student and had been trying to check outside suddenly popped out.
And the student who had been peeking outside and the lens of the pitch-black reconnaissance drone floating in midair came face-to-face at a distance of 30 centimeters.
"..."
A suffocating silence.
"Kyaaah!"
"Ugh!"
The girl screamed and rolled on the floor, and I too rolled on the floor clutching my ears, since I'd turned the volume up high.