I brought Ethan into my room and rummaged through the desk drawer. Inside, I found a map of the village of Brunel that I had prepared in advance.
Spreading the map out on the carpet, I sat down carelessly and made Ethan sit beside me.
“Do you think Ludfisher is safe?”
At my question, Ethan simply glared at the map in silence for a long time before finally responding.
“If he was lucky, he survived. And that guy has always been lucky.”
But unlike Ethan’s confidence, Nox wasn’t the physical type—he relied on his brains. Surviving alone among the monsters would be far more difficult for someone like him.
It was too irresponsible to assume he’d be fine just because he was one of the most prominent supporting male leads in the original novel.
I needed to accept the reality. This wasn’t a novel anymore—this was real life.
I stole a quick glance at Ethan.
No matter how hard I struggled to survive on my own, it wouldn’t mean anything in a world without a cure. The number of monsters would only keep growing, and unless someone developed a cure, they’d devour humanity down to the last person.
And as I kept reminding myself, just because Ethan had antibodies against the virus didn’t mean he was immune to death. A vaccine didn’t make anyone immortal.
With that in mind, I decided to treat Ethan’s life as equal to my own from now on—whether he liked it or not.
“There’s a way to divert the monsters outside,” I said.
Ethan, who had been staring intently at the map, turned to look at me. I pointed at the hill behind Happy House, which was marked on the map.
“I’ve set up bells on the hill behind Happy House.”
This time, I gestured toward the mountain drawn behind the mansion.
“They seem sensitive to sound. If we pull this line, it’ll ring the connected bells and make noise. When the noise comes from the forest, their attention will shift in that direction, and that’s when we can go out.”
Ethan looked at me with an expression that said he had a lot to say about the bells. Of course, he’d be curious why I’d set up something like that. But in the end, he swallowed his questions and said nothing.
Good decision. Now that things had come this far, there was no need to pester me with unnecessary questions. I silently thanked him for his restraint and let the matter slide.
The only problem was that the bells could only momentarily distract the monsters—they couldn’t drive them away completely.
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“For now, we should keep an eye on them from the watchtower and make our move once their numbers drop, even slightly.”
“I think the same. With more of them still gathering, it could backfire if we act too soon.”
In the end, Ethan and I had no choice but to keep monitoring the monsters from the watchtower, waiting for them to tire out or for their numbers to dwindle.
But the monsters’ numbers didn’t decrease as quickly as we had hoped.