“Huup... ha. Huup... ha.”
Inhaling short and fast, exhaling long, Junho moved his arms and legs in rhythm.
About fifty percent of a full sprint. His speed was probably around twenty-five kilometers per hour.
Gwoooooo...!
He could hear the zombies roaring as they chased him from roughly a hundred meters behind. They were the ones that had come from near the reserve-force unit.
He could run faster, but if he wanted to keep luring them, this speed was just right.
There were not many entities capable of covering a hundred meters in under thirteen or fourteen seconds.
— Objective point approximately 520 meters. Group Two and Group Three, reserve group combat ongoing. Alpha and remaining entities approximately 270.
Tuhak...! Tutututu...!
Listening to the repeated K2C1 gunfire beneath Akina’s report, Junho reached a conclusion about the Alpha that had gone that way.
'Among every Alpha I’ve dealt with so far, this one is the most cunning and dangerous.'
To begin with, an Alpha in an area like this—low population, no particularly threatening survivor level—was usually overconfident and careless nine times out of ten.
The number of slaves it controlled usually did not exceed two or three hundred, either.
Even when they controlled more than three hundred, most had only eaten weak, powerless old locals in places like this to grow their strength and territory, rather than struggling against their own kind. How should he put it? They were a little naive.
But the Alpha here in Sang-myeon was different.
'I can’t believe it had that many slaves waiting inside the factories and warehouses....'
The roadside buildings and houses had windows, or their windows had been broken and left open, so drone reconnaissance was not difficult.
With wide-angle and thermal cameras, it was possible to roughly estimate how many zombies were inside.
But factories—especially warehouses—usually had no windows, making it impossible to confirm the interior situation from high altitude.
Unless one entered directly, there was no way to know even while passing right in front of them.
Zombies under an Alpha’s control stayed completely motionless while waiting, like actual corpses.
The Sang-myeon Alpha had used exactly that point.
It had even stationed a little over 150 slaves in ordinary buildings where some outside observation was possible, hiding its true strength with meticulous care.
It made the slaves inside the buildings near him attack Junho, while it took its real forces and went to assault the squad members.
On top of that, judging from how the situation had played out—
'It deliberately induced me to use heavy weapons that make a lot of noise.'
That way, even the ordinary zombies near the reserve-force unit would swarm over and join in.
It really was chillingly thorough and cunning. One wrong move and they could have been wiped out.
Of course, that would have been before the regression.
'Today’s the end for you too.'
Junho was a regressor who had already experienced the apocalypse once, and a tenacious survivor who had lasted more than two years among urban Alphas far more devious than this thing.
On top of that, the creature had no idea that Junho was completely different from the countless humans it had encountered and devoured before—a superhuman, and the natural enemy of its own kind.
It could never have guessed that he would not only slaughter every slave it had left behind in less than three minutes, but also run nearly a full kilometer in two minutes.
Which was why—
'It’s only protecting the front and both flanks while attacking like that.'
— Alpha confirmed. Please equip thermal imaging gear.
“No need.”
Seeing the one entity surrounded protectively by ten or so zombies, and the only one whose appearance was relatively neat, Junho stopped in place and aimed his AR-15 at it.
“Hoo... hoo....”
His breathing had not fully settled, and his shoulders still rose and fell slightly.
But Junho, now capable of controlling even the movement that came from that, aimed at the especially conspicuous bald head and pulled the trigger.
Paang!
The moment he confirmed the shiny back of its head burst like a watermelon, he turned around.
Kwoooo...! Kyaaaat...! Kyaak...!
Now it was time to clean up the ones that had kept chasing him from about a hundred meters behind.
***
“Whoa!? J-Junhyeok!?”
“I see it too!”
Holding back the urge to cheer like Baek Suho, Junhyeok calmly stared through his scope.
The zombies, which had been divided into several groups of dozens and advancing while using their fallen kin like shields, suddenly dropped the corpses all at once and began twisting their bodies grotesquely.
Their master, the Alpha, had to be dead.
“It was my brother. He did it. Suho, keep firing.”
“Y-yes!”
As Junhyeok and Baek Suho resumed firing, Song Gijun, who had joined this operation as well, kept shooting without pause using the modified air rifle he had brought as a backup.
There were still many zombies.
But once the Alpha’s control disappeared, they could no longer use their own dead as shields like before, nor could they split into several groups and move with some measure of tactics.
They simply charged like a pack of dogs toward the sound of gunfire, like moths chasing light, and that meant firepower could be concentrated.
Tatatang...! Tatang...! Tangtang...!
Papang! Pang! Papapang!
Once the squad members’ gunfire and the attack drones’ shooting joined together, the zombies running chaotically in one direction began to be suppressed at a rapid pace.
Entering zombie territory to eliminate them was extremely difficult, but wiping out enemies that came charging in once a firm position or defensive strongpoint had been established was relatively manageable.
Of course, if it were a large group containing multiple Alphas, that too would become a brutal battle with life and death on the line.
But if they were only ordinary zombies, wiping out several hundred with a single platoon was not difficult.
Taang! Tang! Tatang!
“Cease fire! Group Two, cease fire!”
Staff Sergeant Park Jiyong shouted after they succeeded in killing the remaining zombies in less than three minutes.
Soon, the K2C1 gunfire fell completely silent.
Only the occasional sound of air rifles fired by the attack drones as they finished off the ones crawling on the ground could be heard, and even that stopped entirely.
— Combat ended. There may still be surviving entities. Please confirm with caution.
Even after accomplishing the remarkable feat of killing hundreds of zombies without a single person dying or being wounded, the cold voice of the operator lady made it sound as if it were nothing special. Feeling even more favorable toward her, Staff Sergeant Park Jiyong gave the order.
“Everyone, fix bayonets! Confirm the kills!”
“Yes, understood!”
Although the squad members were badly exhausted from the intense cycle of running and firing, they answered with force.
Soon, the squad members who had been taking cover behind abandoned vehicles came out one after another and began clearing the battlefield.
“Huh...?”
Then they saw Junho, who had finished cleaning up the other zombies with his machete, walking toward them from far away.
He looked exactly the same as when he had left separately, walking with the same steady gait as always—neither slow nor fast.
Only then did they truly feel it.
The battle was completely over.
They had won an overwhelming victory under a flawless operation.
***
“...I see. No wonder it felt strange.”
After hearing Junho’s explanation during their break, not only Junhyeok but everyone else looked surprised.
“Yeah. The Alpha we killed today was definitely an outsider. If it had been a resident of this neighborhood, it couldn’t have had that many slaves, and it couldn’t have been that smart.”
“So it came here from somewhere else, and on the way, it probably beat other Alphas?”
“Right. It must have taken down at least one or two. The Alpha earlier had nearly five hundred slaves under it, but the population around here doesn’t even reach a thousand. And judging by how many of the entities were relatively young, it probably came from a tourist area.”
This region had clean streams and valleys, and if one went a few kilometers farther, the Bukhan River appeared. There were quite a few pensions, motels, training centers, and similar facilities.
On top of that, most of them were clustered together rather than spaced far apart. A large portion of the thousands of vacationers who had come for the end of the holiday period must have turned into zombies early in the apocalypse.
It seemed clear that an outsider Alpha, with a temperament relatively freer than a local resident, had led its slaves here.
“But the problem is... even an outsider Alpha needs some kind of trigger before it moves or tries to expand its territory.”
“A trigger?”
“Yeah. My guess is...”
Junho’s gaze dropped to the tablet, and the group looked toward the laptop screen linked to the tablet as if they had arranged it beforehand.
“The people over there. They’re probably the cause.”
“......!”
On the laptop screen, live footage from the drone hovering above the reserve-force unit was being transmitted.
A scene of utter chaos, people hitting, beating, and stabbing one another.
Strangely, however, even though there seemed to be many soldiers serving at the reserve-force unit, they were not using firearms.
“Why aren’t they shooting?”
Junho answered Kim Jimin’s question.
“Because they know zombies will swarm in if they fire. But they probably don’t know yet that we drew aggro from the ones near the unit and killed them. If they knew, they would’ve started shooting immediately.”
“Ah... that makes sense.”
That was when it happened.
“Huh? They’re getting pushed back! The soldiers are getting pushed back!”
Several soldiers standing on top of the barricade were stabbed by spears and blades and collapsed. Civilians climbed over it and quickly began attacking the rest.
In the end, after several more were taken down, the soldiers abandoned the barricade and attempted to flee toward the barracks.
The group’s expressions hardened rapidly at the sight, as if proving that numbers were impossible to overcome—especially the squad members, who were soldiers of the same army.
“For now, we just watch, right, hyung?”
Everyone was exhausted from the fierce battle, so Junhyeok said that.
But—
“No. We go in immediately.”
“Seriously? Right now?”
Starting with Junhyeok, whose eyes widened, Junho looked across the others and said,
“Yeah. Junhyeok, you stay here. Three or four squad members who still have stamina can follow me. The rest wait here with the ballistic vehicle.”
“You sure that’s okay? Wouldn’t it be better to go after the situation over there settles down a bit?”
Whether the military unit won or the civilian group won, from the shelter’s position, it honestly did not matter.
They could simply propose a trade to the victor and exchange what that side needed for ammunition and supplies.
But Junho thought a little differently.
“If we’re going to do it anyway, helping the disadvantaged side gives us the better position in negotiations. Of course, helping the good side would be ideal, but in a world like this, it’s hard to tell which bastards are good or bad.”
That convinced everyone at once.
Junho loaded three squad members who still had relatively good stamina, Baek Suho, Kim Jimin, and two G1 attack drones onto the electric truck, then headed toward the reserve-force unit.
***
The Sang-myeon reserve-force unit had a fairly long distance between the access road and the main gate.
Also, the surrounding area had been densely planted with trees so that the parade ground and other unit buildings could not be seen from outside.
Perhaps because there had been no maintenance at all after the apocalypse broke out, from the outside, it looked like a huge forest.
In a place like this, neither zombies nor survivors would ever know it was a military unit unless they were local residents.
But—
Taang...! Tatang...!
“......!?”
As Junho quietly drove the electric truck up the narrow road toward the reserve-force unit’s main gate while receiving drone footage and AI Akina’s guidance, his eyes widened.
As if to show that no matter how lax a reserve-force unit might be, it was still fundamentally the military, the soldiers had finally fired their K2 rifles.
And that meant this might become his first battle after regression against the military, rather than mere gangsters.
