Sssizzle...!
Watching the marinated pork ribs crackle on the commercial grill, Park Deokcheol swallowed hard.
On the stainless-steel table set up in the yard of the container housing were fresh vegetables like lettuce, perilla leaves, carrots, soybean paste, red pepper paste, and instant rice bowls.
And below that, there was even an ice chest full of soda and a few cans of beer.
“Awesome. Unbelievable....”
Faced with a feast that truly deserved the name, Park Deokcheol kept marveling under his breath, chopsticks in hand, waiting for the pork ribs to finish cooking.
“Leave this part to me. Just wait a little longer.”
Jo Yuna, who had taken charge of grilling the meat, stared at the grill with even greater concentration than when she was sewing clothes with the sewing machine.
She was every bit as serious about eating as she was about her actual job as an idol.
“It’s almost done now. Sunny, can you hand me the scissors?”
Flipping the pork ribs at exactly the right moment, Jo Yuna held out a hand without taking her eyes off the grill.
But the scissors she expected did not arrive.
“Sunhee?”
“...Huh? Ah! Sc-scissors? Here.”
When Jo Yuna turned to look at Park Sunhee, Sunhee jolted like she had been caught daydreaming and hurriedly handed them over.
“What’s with you? You love pork ribs. Don’t tell me you’ve lost your appetite.”
“No, no. It looks good. How much longer till it’s done?”
“Not much. Still, where did he even get something like this? Plain meat would be one thing, but marinated meat like this can’t be easy to find.”
“Hard agree. Forget the pork ribs—I seriously never thought I’d get to drink beer this cold again. Want one? It’s ice-cold.”
Grinning from ear to ear, Park Deokcheol pulled a frigid can of beer out of the cooler.
But Jo Yuna, who did not handle alcohol well, picked up a cola instead.
“I’ll have cola. But really... where is this place, and what does that guy even do? Like you said, he doesn’t seem like just some professional killer or anything.”
“No clue. But he’s definitely intelligent and professional, sure. Just like you said, though, he doesn’t feel like some plain old killer. Look around here too.”
Park Deokcheol continued, glancing around the container housing.
“I’ve got a feeling the other container units are all set up just like the one we’re staying in. And there are twelve of them. That had to cost a fortune.”
“Yeah. The furniture and refrigerator in ours were all brand-new. It’s a little cramped, but honestly, it’s better than our first dorm. Right, Sunhee?”
“Huh? Ah, yeah.”
“Exactly. The bathroom ventilation and soundproofing are perfect too. Right, Sunny?”
“You wanna die?”
A terrible memory from a few mornings ago flashed back through Park Sunhee’s mind, and her face twisted instantly.
“No thanks, Sis.”
Park Deokcheol snickered, then cautiously looked up at the sky before speaking in relief.
“No drone now, at least. I was seriously shocked earlier today. Never in my life did I think a drone would be following us around.”
“He said that thing was really expensive, right?”
“Yeah. Drone stuff’s my hobby, so I know a little. The model that was following and watching us today? Just the body alone costs over ten thousand dollars. Add the payload camera and the accessories, and it goes over twenty grand easy. Crazy expensive.”
“Wow... so he really must be rich.”
“Right. But then this rich guy can shoot, work, and fight like crazy too. Uh...? Wait, this is basically...”
“A superhero?”
“Exactly. A superhero, and...”
Park Deokcheol looked from Jo Yuna, who was cutting the pork ribs with painstaking care, to Park Sunhee, who was fiddling with a can in her hands, then finished:
“Your die-hard fan.”
“......!”
Unlike Jo Yuna, who had been too focused on cutting the ribs to really hear him, Park Sunhee flinched hard. Park Deokcheol hurriedly waved both hands.
“No, no. Forget what I said before. I already sincerely apologized for that. By the way, if you ask me, he’s seriously a Psyche Flare fan.”
“Like seriously?”
“Sure. Just think about our working conditions. At this level, this is a top-tier company. Forty-five minutes of labor, fifteen minutes of break. And on top of that, a nine-to-five schedule in Korea? Goddess, even before the world went to hell, this would’ve been top class in Korea. An angel company.”
“Is it really that good...?”
“Sis, you came to Korea later than I did, so you don’t really know, but I do, right? Even employees at our company were stuck doing overtime all the time. And extra pay? Nothing. But look at this place.”
Like he was giving a presentation, Park Deokcheol swept a hand across the food spread out on the table.
“This is what he gave us just because we worked hard a little late today. Food like this in the world now? You couldn’t get it even with money. But he gave it to us. And we’re just workers. Why? There’s only one reason. He’s your fan.”
There was something about Park Deokcheol’s analysis that made no sense and yet somehow strangely did make sense, carrying a bizarre kind of persuasion.
Without realizing it, Park Sunhee found herself nodding.
Because even to her, Lee Junho did not look like the kind of man who would ever show this kind of kindness for no reason at all.
“And the clincher...”
Her brother’s voice, like a devil whispering in her ear, kept drilling deeper.
“There could’ve been pork or beef. Actually, Korean barbecue is even more famous and common with that stuff. So why marinated pork ribs, specifically? That’s your favorite.”
“......!!!”
“Sunny, if you ask me, this is fan tribute. So forget what I said before. You need to approach this as someone dealing with a genuine Psyche Flare fan—a personal fan whose favorite is you. That’s only right, isn’t it?”
“Fan... tribute....”
“Yeah. So remember Grandpa’s last words, Sunny.”
“If you forget kindness... you’re not a human being.”
“Yes. A person must never forget kindness received. And I swear he’s a real Flare stan.”
Remembering her grandfather’s last words, and hearing that “fact” from her brother one more time, Park Sunhee made up her mind.
She would absolutely repay Junho—the benefactor who had saved them, and a fan of her group, Psyche Flare.
“It’s done! Let’s eat now!”
At Jo Yuna’s proud announcement—she, too, being utterly serious about food—
the siblings picked up their chopsticks, placed the beautifully grilled pork ribs on top of lettuce leaves, added vegetables and soybean paste, wrapped them up neatly, and stuffed the whole thing into their mouths in one bite.
“God... this is so good....”
“It really is. It’s so, so good.”
While Park Deokcheol and Jo Yuna, nearly in tears with emotion, chewed through the meat and hurriedly built another huge wrap,
Park Sunhee savored the pork ribs, whose seasoning was somehow exactly to her taste, and her eyes sharpened with resolve.
And...
having watched and listened to everything the three idols did and said again today, Yoon Youngsu was rolling around the control room clutching at their stomach and laughing helplessly.
***
“Before winter comes, we need to finish organizing the shelter and really shore up the inside.”
As fitting for a place prepared over the course of two full years, their shelter was nearly perfect in every respect, but now that it was actually being used, a few shortcomings had come to light.
Of course, Junho had expected that.
Now that the overwhelming blight and threat called EoktenZ had been removed, he intended to reinforce and tune up the shelter properly.
With that menace gone, there was no force left in Gahyeon-ri capable of threatening the shelter.
Of course, those EoktenZ delinquent punks had never directly affected the shelter itself.
But for Junho, who planned to one day bring Gahyeon-ri under his own influence, they had been vermin that needed to disappear as soon as possible.
So they had to be exterminated.
And on top of that, Junho’s extermination of EoktenZ had produced an unexpected effect.
“The survivors who’d been hiding around the mansion, and the people in the Sangdong apartment complex, know we exist now?”
“Ah, not exactly know exactly. The day after you set the third floor on fire, boss, a few residents started poking around. Turned out they were people who’d been hiding really well in the basements of nearby villas and mansions.”
Around a dozen of those residents had taken food and other usable things from the mansion the EoktenZ punks had been living in.
And from what Yoon Youngsu had seen through the drone feed, a few of them had also apparently witnessed Junho fighting that day and then taking the kids he rescued toward the ridge road by the reservoir.
“So they normally didn’t go that way much, but they actually blocked off the entrance to the ridge road with cars and furniture and stuff. Well, makes sense. You were probably pretty terrifying that day, boss.”
Junho nodded.
That was actually for the best.
There were only three routes leading from Gahyeon-ri into the safe zone where the shelter sat.
The tunnel had already been closed for ages, so nobody even thought of trying to use it.
And the secret route along the industrial road was known only to Junho and a few shelter members.
That meant the ridge road by the reservoir had previously been the only route the people of Gahyeon-ri knew about.
If they had blocked it from their side first, then the shelter had become even safer than it had been before regression.
We can go into Gahyeon-ri whenever we want.
They could go out through the secret industrial-road route and use the nursing-home route by the communications relay station side road.
Or they could even arrange it so only their side could make use of the sealed tunnel.
And as for the ridge road by the reservoir, even if vehicles could not pass, Junho alone could still use it whenever he wanted.
“Good. Then we take the reservoir too.”
“Oh! You said there were a lot of fish there, right? Then can we finally start eating freshwater stuff?”
“Yeah.”
That was one of the reasons Junho had gotten rid of the artificial wetland that had been doing the final purification of the shelter’s wastewater.
The reservoir, only five minutes away by vehicle, was full of freshwater life of all kinds.
There was no reason to keep an artificial wetland right beside the shelter, drawing mosquitoes and wild animals in.
Even if the shelter did the first round of wastewater treatment without the wetland and discharged it into the valley stream, natural purification took care of the rest over the more than two kilometers it flowed before reaching Gahyeon-ri.
“Find a point near the reservoir where we can build a guard post. No, forget that. Let’s go out and start the work today. If we install a relay unit and a PTZ camera over there too, we’ll get a much better view than we do from the Sangdong apartments.”
“Yes. We could see Gahyeon Hanbit Riverview Edutown decently enough, but Gahyeon The First—”
“Just call them Edutown and The First apartments.”
Why the hell had they slapped those ridiculous English names all over some apartment complex out in the sticks?
At Junho’s words, Yoon Youngsu snickered and went on.
“Yes, sir. If we build a guard post on the mountain by the reservoir and install a PTZ camera and relay unit, we’ll get a clear view of The First apartments and Jung-dong too. We can launch the drones depending on the situation from there. Oh, right—and from now on, I think it’d be better to mainly use the modular drones.”
“Because they wear out?”
“Yeah. Drones have a lifespan too, and honestly, we’ve been running ours pretty hard.”
Of course, the shelter had twenty units of each of its two main drone models, including reserves.
Right now they were using only five or six of each, and the rest were still brand-new, properly packed away.
But at the rate they had been operating them, it felt like within a few years, about half of them would be unusable.
“The modular ones are good too. They’re louder, since they’re made for agricultural spraying, but once you remove the altitude limit and get them up over about two hundred meters, people still can’t really hear them.”
They had around fifty modular assembly-type drones for pesticide spraying.
To begin with, each one only cost about a million won thanks to bulk-purchase discounts, making them far cheaper than the finished-model drones the shelter mainly used.
“They’re built to carry up to twenty liters of pesticide in the first place, you know? So they’re great for transporting supplies too. Or if you fit them with camera payloads, they work well for reconnaissance. The only downside is the flight time’s just fifteen minutes.”
“Then let’s do that. We’ll use those inside the safe zone, and keep the existing drones for whenever we go outside.”
“Got it.”
“Lord, if we gotta modify all those too, that’s gonna be a damn backbreak—”
Baek Hail clicked his tongue, then immediately took it back himself. Yoon Youngsu grinned.
“Nope. Akina will help with the modification work too. Master, the workshop helped a lot, right?”
“Man, that AI really is a freak of nature. If Jeongwoo and I had done it by ourselves, it would’ve taken about an hour. With that thing helping, it didn’t even take twenty minutes.”
At Baek Hail’s words, the others started speaking up too.
“Me too. When I made the anti-inflammatory painkillers and the sulfa drugs this time, it helped a lot. I was originally just going to follow publicly available formulas, but it compared reaction temperatures and crystallization times from a paper published by the Japanese Chemical Society last year and suggested the optimal values. When I tested it myself, the yield really was clearly higher.”
“Same here. It’s been so long since we left the hospital, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but that AI is definitely incredible. Good grief...”
“It marked suspicious lesion areas in the endoscopy footage frame by frame. When I zoomed in and checked those areas, there really were tissue changes. Later, when we ran the biopsy, the accuracy came out to ninety-seven percent.”
Starting with Baek Sua, who was in charge of the dispensary, even Choi Uisu and Kim Heeyoung in the medical room shook their heads in amazement at the capabilities of Akina, the shelter’s AI computing system.
“Good. Anyway, let’s all finish perfectly setting up our assigned parts before November. I’ll take the kids staying in the container housing and finish the outside work.”
“Oh, right. Are those kids good workers? How’re the clothes for the little ones coming along?”
At Baek Hail’s question, Choi Haneul answered with a bright smile.
“They brought two sets of fall clothes each for Jiwoo and Junseo today, along with some underwear, and good lord, how is a girl only twenty years old that good with her hands? I was honestly shocked.”
“That good?”
“I thought they were store-bought, seriously. Jiwoo and Junseo loved them too.”
“That’s a relief. She’ll probably finish the rest of the clothes within this week.”
Jo Yuna passed.
On sewing skill alone, she was useful manpower for their shelter, whatever the case might be for other survivor groups.
And since she had grown plants and vegetables from childhood in the greenhouse at her family’s home in Japan, she would probably do well managing the shelter greenhouse too.
“What about the Dallas Park siblings, hyung?”
“They’re fine.”
At Junhyeok’s question, Junho slowly nodded.
They had a hard time climbing the mountain, but maybe because they really were “farm idols,” their labor power was the real # Nоvеlight # thing.
Thanks to that, in just the past two days, they had installed over two hundred meters of concertina wire meant to keep out harmful wild animals.
Park Deokcheol had worked hard too, but Park Sunhee in particular had shown incredible enthusiasm.
And on top of that—
“The younger one knows mushrooms and wild greens too. She’s good at gathering them.”
Apparently Park Sunhee had followed around her grandmother, Lee Sunrye, who had been born in Korea in 1953, and had picked mushrooms and edible greens a lot even while living in the United States.
She was even good at gathering chestnuts, and while they were working on the wire fencing, she had gone and found wild pear trees, wild grape vines, and clusters of silver vine.
In other words, those two idol siblings really were farm idols and survival idols.
