I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 216: This world is MASSIVE

We kept the same rhythm after that— me carrying her, jumping rooftop to rooftop in a straight line north, the city sliding by underneath in broken pieces.

Atone point I caught sight of something on the ground between buildings, faint but consistent, a streak of red painted across cracked pavement every so often, spaced out like breadcrumbs.

"Hey," I said, adjusting my grip on her as I landed. "Should we check the camp if we pass it? Look— there’s marking on the ground pointing the same direction we’re already going."

"If it doesn’t delay us," Jisoo said, glancing down at the marks herself.

"Okay, okay."

We kept jumping. Hours passed and it actually felt weird— slow and fast at once, the kind of stretch where you stop counting buildings and just trust your legs to keep doing the work.

Eventually I landed on a wider rooftop and set her down, BOTH of US catching a breather... even though I’m the one doing all the work, and I pointed toward the next building over.

"There’s a zombie over there."

"So? What do you want me to do about it."

"...I’m the one going, obviously. You don’t need to do anything." I pinched the bridge of my nose.

"Right, dumbass, I literally can’t make that jump on my own." A pause. "Oh, yea! Want me to go over there and kill them myself?"

"Is that sarcasm?"

"I don’t know."

I let it go, mostly because I already knew I wasn’t winning anyway. I climbed up onto the concrete barrier and looked across at the next rooftop, counting— 5 of them shuffling near the edge, oblivious for now.

Wait. Can I even use skills in this world? The penalty said something about focus thing.

I let the thought trail off, looked down at the street far below instead, and decided that line of thinking could wait. "I’d probably die if I fell down there. So that option’s crossed off the list."

Then I jumped.

And, for no absolute fucking reason whatsoever, I slipped on the exact same kind of nothing that had gotten both of us before.

I felt the drop start, the wind picking up around me, and caught one last glimpse of Jisoo’s head snapping over the barrier, her face already locked into pure panic.

I then immediately closed my eyes.

..

Thup...

..

I opened them after, standing on the concrete barrier of the other rooftop, perfectly upright, like I’d just stepped there instead of nearly becoming a smear of blood on the pavement below.

The five zombies all turned toward me at once and lunged.

"Shit— I can use skills!!" I shouted, mostly to myself, and dropped down into them before they could fully close the distance, a kick to the first one’s skull, my heel driving down on its head until something cracked beneath my shoe, then straight into the next one without slowing down.

One by one I worked through them, throwing the bodies clear off the edge of the building when I was done, until the rooftop was quiet again.

I looked across the gap at Jisoo.

She was glaring. Full GLARE.

(Yep. I’m dead.) I climbed back up onto the barrier, already preparing several apologies in my head.

Then the sound hit— guttural, layered, rising up from the streets below all at once.

I looked down. So did Jisoo.

The zombies on the ground weren’t shuffling toward anything anymore. They were running, fast and chaotic, bumping into each other, tripping, scrambling over wreckage in a way that looked less like hunting and more like fleeing.

Then glass shattered somewhere below— one storefront, then another, then a third in quick succession, and something came out through the broken windows that made my stomach drop in a completely different way than the fall had.

Bald. White. Hairless in a way that made the skin look stretched too thin over whatever was underneath, no visible eyes, moving in fast jerky bursts that didn’t look like running so much as the ground simply refusing to hold it in one place for long.

It hit one of the fleeing zombies mid stride and tore through it like a wet paper, parts scattering, and then it was eating, fast and agressive, while more zombies kept scrambling past it in every direction trying not to be next.

I didn’t wait to see more.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was crouched directly behind Jisoo, low, both hands already braced against the rooftop.

"I can use skills," I said, quiet and fast, "as long as nobody’s touching me or right next to me."

She spun back around the second I said it, her face cycling through about three stages of done with this trial in under a second. "Shit— the fuck even are those?!"

Both hands then immediately grabbed the front of my shirt without hesitation. "Si Hon. Carry me. Right now. Let’s go before they notice us."

"Right, but the skill thing— if you’re touching me I can’t use—"

"I don’t give a FUCK!, I can use skills too, now. Carry me. Now!"

I didn’t argue past that. Scooped her up properly, full princess carry, and pushed off the edge of the roof before either of us had time to think too hard about the thing still tearing through zombies somewhere below.

We kept the same rhythm after that— building to building, straight north, the wind picking up the higher we climbed and the faster I moved.

Jisoo stayed quiet against my chest for a while, eyes fixed somewhere behind us, watching for any sign that the bald thing had noticed the commotion on the rooftops. It didn’t seem to. Whatever it was, it had its hands full down there, and for once that worked in our favor.

A few jumps later I spotted something off to the side— a construction crane, rusted but still standing, its arm extending out over the street at a height that put it well above everything around it.

I slowed down, eyeing the distance, and set Jisoo down carefully on the rooftop we’d just landed on.

"Stay here a second," I said. "I want to check something."

She didn’t argue, just settled against a vent housing, and suspiciously took a... my mattress? How did it compressed in her bag?

Tsk... And watched me go.

Still pissed off, I crossed the gap to the crane’s base in one jump, found the ladder welded up the side of the support column, and climbed— fast, hand over hand, until I cleared the top of the cab and pulled myself up onto the arm itself, balancing on the narrow beam with the whole city spread out beneath me in every direction.

I focused my eyes, the way I’d started doing on instinct over the last day or so, and the world sharpened.

Far to the west, past the broken bridge and the monkey-watched basin, the ground dropped low and went dark with standing water— a swamp, wide and flat, dead trees rising out of it in twisted clusters, the surface of the water catching what little moonlight made it through the haze.

East of that, the terrain shifted hard, the green overgrowth thinning out into something cracked and pale, a stretch of the city gone completely dry, buildings bleached and sand-colored, the streets between them choked with dust instead of grass like the water itself had simply given up on that part of town... it was dry, so DRY.

North, further than I expected to actually be able to see, the buildings gave way to something denser— trees packed so tightly together that the rooftops underneath them had mostly vanished, swallowed by a canopy thick enough to qualify as an honest-to-god jungle, vines 3x thicccker than my torso looping between structures that weren’t visible anymore at all.