I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 206: Is Jinx real? or FAAAKE?

"Pull me up RIGHT NOW—"

I pulled Jisoo up, and... it went easier this time— either because she weighed nothing or because my Strength stat is actually too much... (⌐■-■) Either way, fast forward through the part where she sat on the grass with both hands over her face.

"Forget that happened," she said into her palms. "I just slipped. That’s it."

"I guess?"

"Huh? ಠ⁠,⁠_⁠｣⁠ಠ"

"I mean, I slipped too," I said, looking at her. "(ಠ_ಠ)>⌐■-■ Reaction was a little different though."

She glared at me through her fingers. I looked away immediately, which felt like the smartest move. I walked back to the edge, looked down at the tilted continuation of the road below, and sighed harder than the situation probably warranted.

"Okay. Let me try again. For real this time."

"Do whatever you want," Jisoo said, still not moving from the grass.

I stepped back, found my footing, ran, and jumped.

This time I made it clean— feet hitting the tilted road on the far side, momentum carrying me forward into a stumble I caught by grabbing a thick vine hanging off the building beside me. I held onto it, breathing once, steady, and looked back across the gap.

"Jisoo!" I called down. "Come on, jump— I’ll catch you!"

Her head popped up over the edge on the other side, hair messy, expression unimpressed. "I’m not jumping into your arms like some kind of—"

"Jisoo."

"No." She stood up fully, backed up several steps with clear annoyance radiating off her, and ran at the edge with the kind of stubborn commitment that came from refusing to be caught on principle.

She cleared the gap— actually cleared it, height and everything, reaching for the higher section of tilted road above where I was standing.

Her foot landed on a vine.

The vine had other plans.

She slipped sideways, the surprise hitting her face for exactly half a second before her whole body followed the momentum down past the edge, and I lunged without thinking, catching her wrist on the way past, my grip closing hard around it just as her weight pulled taut against my arm.

I held.

"Got you," I said, smirking slightly despite the strain in my shoulder.

She looked up at me, dangling, unimpressed in a way that suggested she would have words for me later.

I didn’t wait— I shifted my grip, wrapped my other arm around her waist, and pulled, hauling her up and in against me in one motion until both of us stumbled backward onto the solid section of road, her weight collapsing into my chest before I set her down properly.

We made it.

Jisoo sat down hard in the grass at the road’s edge, breathing fast, and leaned back against the side of an abandoned car parked half overgrown with vines.

Her arms hung loose.

Her head tipped back against the door panel. Completely out of stamina, in the very specific way of someone who had just put in a maximum effort sprint and a near death cliff incident back to back.

I looked down at her.

"Resting again?" I said.

She didn’t even open her eyes. "Shut up."

Figure... I’ll just sit.

We sat there for a few minutes, just resting, my back against the same car door panel Jisoo was leaning on.

Neither of us said much.

The grass swayed a little. Somewhere far off something howled and neither of us reacted to it anymore, which probably said something about how the day had gone.

Then Jisoo stood up, walked behind me, and slapped the back of my head for no absolute reason.

"Ow— what?"

"Let’s go. Enough resting." She was already brushing grass off her knees. "Let’s go check what’s behind that hole in the building."

I looked at her. She looked back, completely unbothered by the slap she’d just delivered for NO REASON.

I nodded and got up.

We walked toward it together, snd the whole way there I kept catching myself scanning the rooftops, the windows, the tall grass at the edges of the street— still weirded out by how quiet everything had been since we crossed the gap.

No screeching. No howling close enough to worry about.

Jisoo did her own scanning beside me, quieter about it, eyes moving in that methodical sweep she always did without seeming to think about it.

We talked about nothing in particular on the way— whether the chips back at the store had an expiration date that still meant anything, whether the rain from the start of all this counted as one continuous storm or several separate ones, whatever came up.

It passed the distance.

Then we reached the building.

The hole was bigger up close than it had looked from across the gap— several floors of wall simply gone, concrete chunks scattered across the ground below in a wide debris field, rebar bent outward, I leaned in and poked my head through the gap to get a look at the inside.

Broken everywhere.

Concrete dust still settling in places. And pressed into a thick layer of rubble on the floor, a single footprint— massive, human in shape but wrong in proportion, deep enough that it had to weigh as much as it looked like it weighed.

"That’s the monster’s footprint," I said, pulling back slightly. "Wait. Jisoo. What if that’s not the only thing here. What if everything in this trial got the same treatment? What if it’s not just one weird triceratops humanoid something... what if it’s everything—"

"Stop talking," Jisoo said immediately. "You’re jinxing it. Again."

"I don’t believe in jinxes."

"I do."

I didn’t say anything else after that, mostly because there wasn’t a great comeback and partially because some small voice in the back of my head agreed with her more than I wanted to admit.

We stepped through the gap together, picking our way over the rubble, and walked toward the next opening further into the building where light was coming through.

Then we saw it.

Between the buildings, in a wide courtyard space that had probably been a parking lot once, sat a camp. Tents, half collapsed. Barricades made of scrap metal and overturned vehicles.

Then filling almost the entire space between the structures— dozens of them. Zombies with those same pale orange fungal growths sprouting from their skulls, some upright, some down on all fours moving with a wrong loping gait that looked more animal than human.

I looked at Jisoo.

"See?" I said. "Jinx isn’t real. No mutated other version. Just more of the regular—"

"Shut up. Look at the camp. That’s not natural terrain, someone built that. Which means there were people here." Her eyes were already moving across it, cataloguing. "Or are."

"Ah. Yeah, not surprised, honestly." I crossed my arms. "I’m someone who got pulled from one world, dropped into another world, then to your world and then dropped again into this trial specifically. At this point nothing about extra survivors shocks me."

Jisoo turned and looked at me with an expression that had fully run out of patience about thirty seconds ago. "ಠ_ಠ. What the hell. Are you a bug."

Then the explosion hit.

It came from somewhere deep in the camp, a flash and a concussive boom that rattled dust loose from the ceiling above us, and we both ducked behind the crack in the wall on instinct, watching through the gap as smoke rolled outward across the courtyard.

Through the haze, something massive shoved its way into view— a swollen, bloated zombie, skin stretched tight and grey, its head replaced entirely by a wide pale growth that pulsed faintly even from this distance.

"(⌐■-■)" I said, watching it lumber forward. "Okay. Still not a mutated animal though. Just a bigger gross guy which we have seen already."

Then, behind the smoke, two more shapes emerged.

A bear— or what had been a bear, the silhouette mostly right except for the ribs that had grown outward through the hide and curved forward, exposed rib cage wrapping around its front legs.

And beside it, a wolf, except wrong in a way that took a second to fully process— too many legs, six or seven of them moving in a rhythm that didn’t quite sync, blood running steadily from its open mouth like it never stopped.

I stared at all of it.

Jisoo turned her head slowly and looked at me.

"Fuck you, Si Hon."

I stared at the bone-bear. Then at the seven-legged wolf. Then back at her.

"(ಠ_ಠ)>⌐■-■," I said. "Okay. I believe in jinx now."