Chapter 233: How About It?
Before the regression, Junho had heard several times about survivors who practiced cannibalism.
But he had only actually witnessed it once.
Even Junho, who had survived for a long time in the apocalypse and seen every kind of horror imaginable, could not help vomiting at an act of cannibalism that could only be called something beyond a scene from hell.
But after regressing and thinking about it carefully, he realized cannibalism had probably been more common than he had imagined.
Especially in urban areas, where finding food was extremely difficult. Starting roughly half a year to a year after the infection outbreak, cannibalism had probably become widespread in ways people did and did not know about.
But that was something that mainly happened in cities, where food was hard to obtain and the number of zombies was overwhelmingly high.
By contrast, Cheondo Reservoir here might technically be in the capital region, but it was countryside.
There were several farming villages nearby, large and small.
With even a little effort, a person could obtain long-term preserved food or old rice from the cold-storage rooms found in most rural houses.
On top of that, crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes were not difficult to grow.
At the very least, if they caught fish from the reservoir right beside them and foraged through the mountains, it was possible to scrape together enough to keep themselves alive.
In other words, the men Junho had executed today had chosen cannibalism because even that much was too unpleasant and troublesome for them.
They were monsters who had given up being human.
***
“Urp...!”
The sharp-looking girl named Kim Heejin covered her mouth and hurried outside.
Bleeergh...! Uweegh....
As the sound of vomiting came from outside, the remaining brats also turned deathly pale and shuddered.
“Y-you’re lying... You’re lying, right? That doesn’t make any sense....”
“It does. I can show you directly.”
“......!”
At Junho’s flat assertion, Oh Seunga, who had been denying it as if she could not possibly believe him, widened her eyes.
Junho looked around at the other kids.
“Do you want to see for yourselves?”
“A-at this hour? It’s pitch-black, so we won’t be able to see anything....”
At Oh Seungmin’s words, Junho turned on the tactical flashlight he always carried and aimed it at the ceiling.
“This will be enough.”
“......!”
At the tremendous brightness, something that could not even be compared to the so-called security-guard flashlight they had or the light from a smartphone, the kids’ eyes went wide.
“But wouldn’t it be dangerous? Those people might have more companions. Maybe zombies too....”
“There are no zombies.”
“...Excuse me?”
Without a word, Junho showed the kids the tablet.
Their mouths fell open at the drone footage filming the entire reservoir from above in black-and-white night-vision mode.
Especially Jang Taehyun, who was in charge of operating the drone among them, spoke urgently with a shocked expression.
“Is, is someone other than you controlling this right now? Is it linked wirelessly? How did you even do that?”
“We have a communication server, wireless relays, and amplifiers.”
“Whoa... That makes no sense....”
Junho turned his gaze away from Jang Taehyun, who could not hide his astonishment, and looked around at the rest of them.
“Anyway, before coming here, we thoroughly reconnoitered the area around the reservoir with drones. We’re still doing it now. So there’s no danger. And even if there is....”
Tap, tap.
Junho touched his gun and machete, then continued.
“I’ll handle it.”
***
Junho and Purdy used the underwater scooter, while the Yeondeok High School students crossed the dark reservoir in the boat tied to the floating platform.
“That’s seriously insane....”
The Yeondeok High School students stared in fascination at Junho as he moved over the water’s surface with the underwater scooter, like some kind of shark.
“Why? Is that really so amazing?”
When Kim [N O V E L I G H T] Heejin asked, Jang Taehyun, whose hobby was drones and who was interested in machines in general, pushed up his glasses with one cracked lens and nodded.
“That’s professional equipment divers use, so it’s crazy expensive. Probably close to ten million won.”
“Wow....”
“And that drone too. It’s modular, and seeing how they’re flying it in weather like this, there’s no way they only have one or two. That guy was probably loaded before all this.”
“Loaded or whatever. Is that really a real gun?”
At Oh Seunga’s words, Lee Minjae, who was in the same class as her older brother Oh Seungmin and had an interest in the military, spoke quietly.
“It’s probably real. The air gun definitely is, and the pistol is a Glock. Seeing how it even has a suppressor attached, I think he was rich and came from somewhere like special forces.”
“Really? Then why didn’t he use the gun?”
Lee Minjae sighed at Oh Seunga, who still sounded suspicious.
“Whew, listen carefully. Suppressed guns use different ammunition. And in Korea, that kind of ammo is hard to get and expensive. And besides.”
Lee Minjae rowed hard while following the IFF strobe glittering on Junho’s helmet seven or eight meters ahead of the boat, then whispered even lower.
“You saw it earlier, didn’t you? What that man did with just one blade....”
“......!”
At those words, not only Oh Seunga but the other kids had no choice but to flinch.
The image of Junho hacking, slicing, and slaughtering people with one large, dark blade surfaced in their minds all over again.
And he had done it on a small boat rocking on the water, without losing his balance even once, as if he were dancing with the blade.
“A knife alone was enough for him....”
“.......”
Oh Seunga, who had slightly talked back to such an absurdly brutal being, eventually swallowed dryly without realizing it.
Only then did she seem to understand just how much that huge man named Lee Junho had gone easy on them, and that he was absolutely not a bad person.
If someone who had a gun and a blade—and even barehanded, looked capable of eating brats like them for breakfast—had harbored bad intentions, there would have been no reason for him to go through such a troublesome process.
***
The rain that had fallen heavily all evening had turned into a drizzle, and the wind had calmed down a great deal as well.
So Yoon Youngsu sent the shelter’s main industrial medium-sized drone to Cheondo Reservoir instead of a modular drone.
“Now, you see? There’s no one around here.”
At Junho’s words, the Yeondeok High School students nodded while staring in fascination at their own heat signatures displayed on the tablet.
“Zombies have lower body temperatures than humans, so their color is different, but they still show up.”
After saying that, Junho gave instructions to Yoon Youngsu and had one drone enter the building where the “cannibal raiders” had been living.
Inside the building, there were no heat signatures from any living things except small animals like rats or bats.
“There really isn’t anyone....”
“Right. But what the hell? Then did all of them come rushing out at once just to catch us?”
As the kids returned the tablet, their gazes naturally gathered on Junho, as if asking him for an answer.
“.......”
But Junho did not bother answering.
Of course, he had a guess as to why the “cannibal raiders” had done that.
'They couldn’t trust one another.'
The fact that they practiced cannibalism meant they could eat even those who had once been their companions at any time.
In other words, when someone went out on a “human hunt,” the others left at the residence could set up a trap and wait to attack him.
And they would greedily devour the meat of the companion with whom they had been eating human flesh until just yesterday.
—Uh, boss....
“Why?”
At Yoon Youngsu’s subdued voice, Junho asked.
—I found something on the third floor. I don’t think it’s something the kids should see....
Junho looked down at the tablet screen.
“......!”
Inside the third-floor guest room visible through the window, something was piled in layers.
And that thing, which looked like one enormous “mass,” was an uncountable number of corpses.
—Looks like those crazy bastards gathered human corpses and stored them there. Fuck, why the hell would they keep something so rotten they couldn’t even eat it....
Yoon Youngsu almost never cursed, but even he had let profanity slip at the sight.
Junho calmly examined the scene, which was horrendous and grotesque beyond description, then turned his body toward the kids.
“Which one of you has the strongest stomach?”
“...Excuse me?”
“Only one representative comes with me. Someone with a strong stomach and good nerve. One of you step forward.”
“.......”
The Yeondeok High School students were not foolish enough to miss what that meant, and their faces instantly drained of color.
***
“Uweegh! Ugh...!”
“Seungmin, are you okay? Good grief....”
After returning from the third floor of the pension with Junho, Oh Seungmin retched again from a stomach that had nothing left to throw up, and Kim Heejin patted his back.
After watching that sight, Junho spoke to the kids, whose expressions had darkened even further.
“There was meat in the kitchen refrigerator at the pension. But the solar power system broke, so it’s half-rotten. Probably because none of those bastards knew how to fix it.”
“.......”
“You can check it yourselves if you want. Do you want to see?”
Oh Seunga, who received Junho’s gaze, shook her head with a deathly pale face.
“N-no.”
“Good.”
No matter how much these children had survived all kinds of things at a young age in a world like this, there were still things a person could endure and things a person could not.
It was much better not to see the traces of cannibalism, which clearly belonged to the latter category.
“The corpses on the third floor were tourists in this area.”
And after the infection outbreak began, some of them had probably left for home at first, while others continued staying where they were, before eventually all gathering at that pension.
It seemed that had been possible because, by extraordinary luck, no Alpha had appeared around Cheondo Reservoir.
But even if it was a tourist area with many restaurants and cafés, there was not enough food for several hundred people to live on for months, not just a day or two.
So because of the food shortage, some of them must have left to search nearby villages or mountains for something to eat, and in all likelihood, they had never come back.
People who had merely hidden here for quite a long time while consuming food had no chance of dealing with Alphas that had spent that same period constantly hunting humans, evolving into beings more cunning and more accustomed to hunting.
As winter came, the food situation must have worsened even more, and eventually internal conflict must have broken out.
The cannibal raiders Junho had executed were probably the final winners of that fight.
“And while they were living like that, you came this way.”
“Ah....”
When the Yeondeok High School students imagined how the dead men must have thought they had found an unexpected windfall, their hearts began pounding violently all over again.
Because that was not just a figure of speech.
They really would have been eaten like food.
“...Thank you.”
At that moment, Oh Seungmin, who had emptied out everything in his stomach, bowed his head to Junho.
“We survived because of you. Thank you. Truly.”
“Th-thank you, sir.”
“Thank you so much for saving us, Mister Junho.”
At Oh Seungmin’s polite thanks, the other kids also hurriedly bowed their heads to Junho again and again.
And then.
“Thank you, mister. And I’m really sorry about earlier. I didn’t know anything... I’m really, really sorry!”
Oh Seunga, the youngest, lowered her head with a face that looked like she was about to cry.
Junho silently looked at the five kids.
Every one of them was scrawny. Their faces were dirty, and their greasy hair, which they had clearly been unable to wash properly, had been roughly cut and tied back, sticking out in uneven tufts.
As armor, if it could even be called that, they had reinforced their stomachs and limbs with books or magazines and wrapped them in duct tape, but it would be hard for that to stop a raider’s spear or blade. If even three or four zombies latched onto them, they would become helpless.
But these kids had survived for more than ten months on their own strength.
And according to Oh Seungmin, although they had killed quite a number of zombies, they had never killed a person even once.
That was why.
“You’re right to be grateful, but you don’t need to be sorry to me.”
“......!?”
“Because if I were you, I would have suspected and refused to trust someone I’d never seen before in my life too. Especially someone like me.”
“Ah....”
Junho was able to give a faint smile to the five brats—no, the five genuine survivors—who looked awkward at those words.
“Anyway... how about it? Do you want to come with me to the place where your school friends are?”
They were not only sources of information who could tell him about the situation in the Yeondeok district and the Alpha there.
They were excellent talents of the apocalypse who would, in one way or another, be useful to his shelter and to Gahyeon-ri.