Junhyeok had no choice but to believe his brother, Junho.
No matter how much you loved soccer and knew it inside out, this was not just guessing a score. Predicting the minute details of a match in real time and nailing them was something even an expert could not do. But Junho had done it. Just like he said, Fenerbahce s Korean defender, Kim Injae, stopped two sure-fire goal situations by himself.
And it was not even the big stuff. Kim actually won the ball outside the penalty box, carried it all the way up to the halfway line, and threaded a ridiculous pass. The instant that pass left his foot, Junho said, "The keeper s going to come out first and clear it," and right then, a goalkeeper who had not even been on the broadcast frame burst out and booted the ball away.
Junhyeok got chills. And when a ten-man Fenerbahce scored the comeback winner in stoppage time exactly like Junho said, Junhyeok decided to try believing him. It felt like Junho had a prophetic dream.
The word regression was just too insane to swallow.
"So... the world really ends? A zombie apocalypse?"
"Yeah. Some genetic thing. A virus that only infects humans and primates. Other animals are fine."
"No, but what s the military doing? What about the U.S.? Their tech is insane. A country like the U.S. collapses too?"
"Hoo. I thought the same thing when it first hit. Like, how the hell does the world end when modern science is this advanced? But it ends. Looking back, there was no way around it."
"...?"
"It blows up everywhere at once in, what, two days, three days? That little window. The U.S. even breaks into a civil war."
Junho spoke calmly, laying out what he had seen and lived through. The past, no, the future.
"And the military moves on the assumption there s an enemy, right? War, terrorism, whatever. There s a chain of command, orders, operational goals."
"Right."
"But this is completely different. It s not a specific enemy. It happens in cities and towns... basically everywhere there are people. Your own citizens turn into monsters. You think tactics and strategy mean shit in that kind of situation?"
"Ah..."
"And listen. The military can t avoid infection either. If anything, they were more vulnerable because they live in groups."
"..."
Junhyeok was a reservist too, so it clicked immediately.
"Still, it wasn t total extinction. If it was, do you think I would ve survived over two years?"
"Huh?"
"The power, the internet, it all got cut within a month, so I can t be sure. But Korea was, what, twenty percent? If you re generous, maybe thirty percent survived. Other developed countries with strong militaries or solid infrastructure probably ended up similar."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. It s because of how zombies work... but I ll explain that later when we have time. That s not the urgent part. Anyway, the reason I m telling you all this is..."
Junho s expression changed.
"We need to prepare. While we still have time... thoroughly."
"Prepare... yeah, sure, we should prepare. Like, stock up on food in bulk? Tell people online, tell the government too?"
"Haah, are you stupid? You think people would believe you? You, my own brother, didn t believe me until a minute ago."
"Ah... yeah, but still..."
Junho frowned. His brother was not stupid. If he was saying this, it was because he was still confused. Hell, if your older brother woke you up in the middle of the night and started talking about a zombie apocalypse out of nowhere, being able to think cold and logical right away would be the weirder thing.
"Still, if you do that prediction thing like the soccer match..."
"No. Don t even think about telling anyone. Especially do not even bring up the government."
"Why?"
Junho let out a long sigh.
"The presidential election is in a few months, right?"
"Oh, right. Who wins?"
"Yang Jincheol."
"For real? Yang Jincheol becomes president?"
"Yeah. He barely squeaks in. And the problem is..."
"The problem is...?"
Junhyeok had zero interest in politics. He just looked genuinely curious.
"That the Yang Jincheol administration is the biggest fucking clownshow of all time."
"What?"
"I don t even want to talk about it. Just assume it s worse than the dumbest shit you can imagine, and they do it every single day. They spent the whole term doing pointless crap, and when the disaster hit, it got even more disgusting."
After the apocalypse started, almost all the top officials, the president, the ministers, the high-ranking bureaucrats, all of them pulled insane stunts just to save themselves. From the initial response onward, every order was not about saving the country or the people. It was about preserving their own lives.
"Even after Yang Jincheol got infected and died, the prime minister and those minister bastards kept doing the same fucked-up idiot shit. You think telling those people, hey, the world ends in a few years, here s what happens before that, would help? I guarantee they won t prepare. They ll fill their pockets and focus on saving their own asses. And me? I get tossed aside, one hundred percent."
"..."
Seeing Junho more heated and disgusted than when he talked about the apocalypse itself, Junhyeok shut his mouth.
The Junho he knew was usually calm, the kind of guy who read people well. If he was reacting like this, the reality was probably even worse.
"Just getting ready to survive from now on won t be easy."
"Yeah. So what do we do? Oh, should I not go back to school?"
"Obviously not. First, we sell the house."
"The house? Ah, so we go somewhere rural, somewhere with no people, stockpile water and food, right? If we sell the house and pool all our money, could we last ten years?"
Junho shook his head, face set hard.
"We sell the house, pull in Dad s insurance payout and settlement, every won I ve saved up too. Then we max out loans. And we go all-in on a coin."
"A c-coin?"
"Yeah. Selene coin."
Junho had fought through that hellish apocalypse for [N O V E L I G H T] over two years. And he had not been alone the entire time.
From government shelters to survivor groups big and small, he had brushed past countless people, sometimes clashing, sometimes getting by together.
And among them were people you did not forget. Distinct, special types.
Han Youngjung. People called him Han Pro. He introduced himself as a full-time pro investor, and even after the world ended, he wore a gold Rolex on his wrist.
He turned a coin USB into a necklace and wore it around his neck, cackling that one day, when the world recovered, he would use it to build a building-style shelter. He was a goofball, but in an apocalypse, it was rare to meet someone who did not lose all his humor. Junho did not exactly hate him.
He looked endlessly light and careless on the outside, but Junho knew. Han Youngjung s silliness was him thrashing around, refusing to break.
Han Pro had a story he told all the time. At first it sounded stupid. Later it got a little annoying. But after the day he died trying to save a kid, those foolish, empty words would not leave Junho s head.
"If I d known the world was going to end up like this, I would ve liquidated everything and built some ultra-top-tier shelter. Damn, what a waste."
"Huh? What kind of ultra-top-tier shelter? Basic stuff like washing, eating, sleeping, obviously. But also like before, watching movies, playing games, working out. And heh heh, dating too. A shelter where you can do everything we used to enjoy before we got ruined."
"Though thinking about it, even with all my money, that might be hard. You d need tens of billions. I never made that much."
"And man, Selene coin... what a fucking waste. I bought in when my average was 3,000 won, dumped it the moment it passed 10,000. The ride felt kinda shitty. But fuck... who knew drivers would pile in like crazy and it would hit over 100,000 won just a few months after I sold?"
"Anyway, if I d just held Selene, I could ve cleared like 20 billion. It pisses me off so bad."
Han Youngjung rambled about shelter designs under the premise that he had held Selene, made hundreds of billions, and also somehow known the world would end in advance.
At first, Junho listened with real interest. But after hearing it over and over, he got sick of it. It sounded like the delusion of a loser who wanted to look away from hell and escape reality.
"Huh? Why imagine something that stupid and pointless? Hey, does it make sense that a virus spreads across the entire world in three or four days and turns perfectly fine people into zombies? Does it make sense that half-dead things walk around eating people?"
That impossible fantasy that could never happen might have been what kept Han Youngjung alive in a dead world. And after he died, that fantasy jumped to Junho.
Before falling asleep, Junho would catch himself imagining it. Like the little match girl in a fairy tale, at the very end, drawing happiness that would never come in the tiny, fading flame of a match. Junho, a survivor living through the apocalypse, endured each day through the fantasy he had caught from Han Youngjung.
But now... he could make that fantasy real.
Junho s body trembled, just slightly.
"Selene coin?"
"Yeah. So here s the thing..."
Junho gave a brief explanation about Han Youngjung, then searched Selene coin on his phone and held it out.
"Look."
"Holy shit, it s not even 7,000 won right now. This goes over 100,000 by spring?"
"Yeah. He said something about stable this, pegging that. I don t do coins, so I don t know the complicated parts. All I know is it went over 100,000, then it fucking crashed. Tens of trillions evaporated worldwide."
"So you re saying you re buying this now and selling when it hits 100,000?"
"Yeah. If I want to build the shelter I m thinking of, this is the only way."
"Uh... okay. I get the rough idea of what you re saying, but what kind of shelter are you even thinking about that you have to do all this?"
Junhyeok swallowed hard. He could not run the numbers cleanly yet because his head was still a mess, but if things went the way Junho said, they could really make hundreds of billions. And he was going to pour all of that into a shelter?
"Just... a place where you can do everything."
"A place where you can do everything...?"
Junhyeok tilted his head, and Junho slowly looked around the house. The things in this home they had always taken for granted. Things that, in truth, contained the essence of modern civilization.
"Yeah. Like our house right now. A place where, if you and I want to, we can do anything. We need to build that kind of shelter."
Junho s low voice was firmer and harder than ever.
***
After talking a little more, the brothers went back to their own rooms for the moment. Without hesitating, Junho signed up for a crypto exchange and opened an account. Then he scraped together every bit of money he could put his hands on and bought Selene coin.
Last year, their father had died suddenly in a traffic accident. The insurance payout and death settlement from that accident totaled 800 million won. The money, their father s life price, had been left untouched. After a year, the interest brought it to just under 820 million.
He took all of that, plus the money he had saved working, plus every scattered bit of cash he could gather, and poured roughly 850 million won into the coin.
Still not enough.
"We have to sell the house fast, too."
Junho immediately opened a real estate app and checked prices. A listing for the same size unit in their twenty-year-old old-build apartment was up for 380 million won. Since they had done a full renovation three years ago, if they listed it as a quick sale and knocked 20 or 30 million off, it would probably move fast.
"Hoo..."
Only after finishing the buy did he finally feel like he could breathe a little.
But Junho could not sleep. In the end, he stared at the ceiling until morning.
During the apocalypse, he had only ever imagined it vaguely, the fantasy he clung to at night just to forget, even for a moment, the miserable ruined era where dangers lurked everywhere. Now he had to make that fantasy real.
But right now, the world was still functioning normally. Laws and systems existed. Permits and regulations existed. Buying land, building something, bringing in electricity, getting approvals... all of it would be insanely complicated and painful. There was no way his head would not be a mess.
When it was finally time to get ready for work, Junho shook his head hard.
"The shelter problem... first we secure funds, then solve it one step at a time. The land is already there."
So until the money was in place, the right move was to make plans and keep refining them.
And while he did that...
"First, I build my body."
If you wanted to survive an apocalypse, stamina was the base. If you wanted to learn combat skills and handle different weapons, you needed a strong body first. And it cost almost nothing. He could start today.
Junho opened the window. The dark sky was slowly beginning to brighten.
"Next, overseas news. NASA, the U.S. space agency, has observed a new asteroid. This asteroid is AX07, called Esik..."
Listening to the voice coming from the upstairs neighbor s TV, someone who had woken up early, Junho set his resolve.
