Everyone sensed it.
This winter,
among the survivors here,
more than half would not make it.
‘And most of those will be the survivors who haven’t awakened.’
No one voiced that fact,
but even without saying it, the instant everyone thought the same thing,
a heavy air settled over the mart.
“S-Still!”
As if trying somehow to improve the grim mood,
one woman mustered her courage and spoke.
“If we can just increase the number of Awakened, things might change.”
“What?”
“You know, right? Awakened are relatively resistant to the cold, and they don’t get minor illnesses as often. Even in winter they can get around somehow, so we could secure extra firewood.”
“...As if increasing Awakened is easy.”
“Now that we’ve got a decent number of Awakened too, if we accept the risk and go out hunting a bit more aggressively—”
It was a plea to hold onto some hope,
but words like that only have effect when they have some degree of realism.
“Ji-yeon.”
“Yes?”
“I get how you feel. But stop.”
“...Ah. Okay.”
No matter that they’re Awakened,
facing monsters isn’t easy.
How strong a given monster is,
what weaknesses it has—
they didn’t know anything.
Even if it’s just a lone monster roaming around, you can’t let your guard down.
Stories of groups being wiped out by that one monster have become commonplace.
And it’s not as if you can eat what you hunt.
Monster hunting is something you do only when you feel that specific monster must be taken out,
and even then it has to be done with extreme caution.
“Take risks and hunt actively? That’s ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) nonsense.”
If they tried that,
the number of Awakened would drop faster than they could increase it.
As no one could bring themselves to speak easily,
step...
someone
walked, step by step, toward a shelf standing in the corner.
And then—
bzzzt...
from there,
she switched on a small radio.
“...Hey, you!”
Seeing that, one of the survivors
jabbed a finger in irritation.
“Sorry?”
“That damn radio. How long are you planning to keep that thing on!?”
“‘Damn’... Why are you talking like that.”
“What else should I call it but damn? It just crackles annoyingly all day!”
At that,
the woman who was about to turn on the radio argued back with her own logic.
“Our situation isn’t good. That’s exactly why we should turn the radio on.”
“Turn it on and all you get is that damn crackle, so what—!”
“That’s now. But you never know. Maybe some kind of message of salvation will come through.”
“Salvation... salvation? Sounds nice. But!”
At those words,
the irritated survivor couldn’t hold back his indignation and shouted.
“That kind of salvation isn’t coming!”
“...”
The man who suddenly yelled—
the group’s gazes fixed on him.
“Damn it... it’s time we admitted it.”
At the corners of the shouting man’s eyes,
small tears had gathered.
“There is no force coming to save us.”
“...”
“The soldiers have all been wiped out. And you know the government’s the same. We can’t trust other groups either. You know it too, right? That big group recruiting people—when we got there, some lunatic monster was using humans as slaves.”
“P-Please calm down.”
“How am I supposed to calm down.”
The mood began to turn more and more heated.
“The kid’s sick...! I’m on edge, with bad thing after bad thing piling up.”
“S-Sorry.”
“Why do you keep clinging to false hope!”
The woman who had turned on the radio hurried her hands.
“O-Okay. I’ll turn it off. I’ll turn it off, so please—!”
“Yeah. Before someone really gets hurt, shut off that damn, annoying crackle—”
Her finger was moving toward the radio’s power button—
—bzzzt...
right then.
—Hello.
From the radio,
a human voice flowed out.
“Hello my ass...!”
Not grasping the situation, the man snapped at the sudden sound,
but those watching had no attention to spare for him.
“W-Wait a second!”
“T-The voice just now. Didn’t it come from the radio?”
“...What?”
While people were flustered or not,
the voice coming from the radio
—We are... the Legion.
calmly moved on to the next words.
“Legion...?”
“He means soldiers?”
But
even more shocking than the voice from the radio
—We intend to share information on monsters that our Legion has secured.
were the details that voice began to recite in an even tone.
Maybe ten seconds in,
the group’s leader shouted urgently:
“...Everyone, get notebooks and pens!”
“P-Pens!?”
“Anything you can write with! Hurry!”
No wonder.
The content spilling out of the radio was just too shocking.
‘Monster traits and weak points?’
In times like these, that’s information you’d be hard-pressed to get even for a king’s ransom.
And those monsters the voice described—
some were monsters he himself had encountered.
“W-Wasn’t all transmission broken?”
“No. More than that...”
“They’re just giving this kind of info away...!?”
Shock spread.
Even as they scribbled in a rush, people muttered as if they couldn’t believe it.
They weren’t even sure if it was information they should trust in the first place,
but there was no harm in writing it down.
—Do whatever it takes to survive. And if you do, someday—
And then,
the voice from the radio signaled the end of the broadcast.
—our Legion will come find you.
Silence fell over the mart.
A moment later,
someone murmured in a small voice:
“A-A force that would come save us...”
“Existed...?”
But—
“I-I can’t believe it!”
someone stepped up to deny it.
The very man who’d just barked to turn off the radio.
“If there was a unit like that, they should’ve come long ago!”
“...”
“And now they say they’ll come find us? That we should hold out until then? How are we supposed to believe that!”
The man shouted in agitation.
He wasn’t entirely wrong.
“W-Well.”
“From the start... even these notes we just took.”
“Whether they’re real or not... we can’t know, right...?”
However,
their leader,
Hyunsu, spoke calmly.
“The way to check... that’s simple, isn’t it?”
His gaze turned toward the outside of the mart.
Out there—
Grrr...
the dead wandered the ground,
zombies everywhere.
“We try to trigger an Awakening.”
Even ordinary Awakened
could easily subdue zombies.
“First we find that worm. If, as the broadcast said, there’s a worm inside the zombie’s body—”
His gaze
moved toward the coughing child.
“we start by awakening Jinhyuk, who’s caught a cold.”
****
[Guild - Iron Legion has contributed to combat.]
[You gain experience points equal to your contribution.]
“W-What is this again.”
“I’m not the only one seeing this, right?”
A notice of experience gain popped up out of nowhere before my eyes.
The problem was,
it wasn’t just me—it had appeared before every member of the unit.
And—
“Why are we getting experience all of a sudden...?”
We hadn’t hunted a thing.
We’d finished the radio broadcast, and were just sitting around chatting leisurely.
Yet to us,
experience had suddenly been granted—that, in itself.
“...Don’t tell me.”
Unlike the puzzled soldiers,
it wasn’t hard to figure out what phenomenon this was.
“A contribution system?”
“Sir?”
“You know how it goes, right? When a bunch of us hunt a single monster together.”
Experience you get from hunting monsters—
how that’s calculated differs by game.
It gets especially complicated if multiple people take down one monster.
‘Some games dump all the experience to the one who gets the last hit. Some give the same amount to all participants.’
And some others—
“distribute experience differentially according to how much you contributed to the fight.”
“You’re saying this is experience we received in return for our contribution to combat?”
“Yeah.”
The reason I caught on faster than the other soldiers
was simple.
“This system itself—I’m kind of used to it.”
My class is [Chef].
I don’t usually take part directly in combat.
Even so, my experience has steadily risen.
[Someone who was served your meal performed well in battle—]
When someone who ate my food won a battle,
I received experience in proportion to the impact my food had.
Same thing now.
“We’re gaining experience in proportion to how much we contributed to the fight.”
“‘Contribution’?”
“...When did we contribute? We...”
The soldiers looked even more lost.
Then—
“The information...!”
The one who answered their question
was not me, but Sergeant Lee Minjae.
Second only to me as the unit’s senior,
and the very person who drove the decision to send the radio broadcast.
“The information we leaked!”
Always rational, he
shouted, face flushed with excitement:
“There are people who succeeded in hunting thanks to that information!”
Those data—
their source was all my skill, [Chef’s Eyes].
Back when I used to brief the soldiers myself,
I’d never gained experience because of it.
Probably because, by itself, that was contribution too ambiguous to award experience for.
But—
‘we just scattered a huge volume of information, far and wide.’
Even small contributions, when piled high enough,
can be more than enough to manifest as experience.
Finishing his explanation, Sergeant Lee Minjae closed his eyes a moment.
“H-Haha.”
“Minjae?”
“Do you feel it, Youngjun?”
As if tallying the experience that had entered his body,
he contemplated his inner self for a moment, then smiled with his eyes still closed.
“The experience coming in at once isn’t a lot.”
True.
Even killing the weakest monster gave you hundreds of times more than this, as I recall.
There are several reasons.
First, the base amount of experience for providing information isn’t high to begin with.
Second...
it’s probably the fact it was published under the guild’s name.
The message still up in the status window:
[Guild - Iron Legion has contributed to combat.]
That information—
its source was me, but its announcement was carried out under the guild’s name.
So the experience would be split among all unit members.
“The amount is extremely small. But!”
The amount that came in at once was by no means large.
However—
[You gain experience points equal to your contribution.]
[You gain experience points equal to your contribution.]
[You gain experience points equal to your—]
[Equal to your—]
“...This frequency, what is it?”
The number of times it hit
was oddly high.
“You get it too, Youngjun?”
“Hm?”
“Even if every survivor in all of Gangwon had turned on their radios and waited, experience couldn’t be coming in this often!”
Which means, in other words—
“...Ah.”
Grasping it even before I did,
Sergeant Lee Minjae clenched his fist and said:
“It reached.”
A frequency unbelievable even if it had reached all of Gangwon.
So, the source of the rest of the experience was obviously—
‘it must have spread not just in Gangwon, but across the entire peninsula.’
If that broadcast just now spread across the Korean Peninsula,
and those who heard it started hunting to verify it,
then this frequency made sense.
“There were survivors outside Gangwon...!”
“R-Right.”
“Our message reached them, Youngjun!”
Lately,
Sergeant Lee Minjae had looked dejected, wondering how humanity elsewhere was faring,
and whether maybe everyone had died.
“H-Haha!”
Now,
he burst into laughter so joyous it brought tears to his eyes.
‘Our help reached others.’
No—
to be precise,
‘Minjae’s goodwill reached them.’
All I did
was tack on the “zombie disposal” spoon to the thing Sergeant Lee Minjae wanted to do.
Originally, I’d never even had a thought like
sending a radio broadcast to help others.
From here on, if there are people who survive because of the information we spread,
the biggest reason they lived
is not that I gathered the information.
“Haha... With that message just now, at least a few more people can survive...”
As if greatly relieved,
that man there, wiping his face—
that would be Minjae.
Smirk.
“Feeling that good?”
“...Ah.”
Maybe he’d had a lot on his mind all this time—
Sergeant Lee Minjae, laughing through tears.
“Ahem. Ahem. Hem.”
When I chuckled and called him on it,
he hurried to get his expression under control, embarrassed.
“A-Anyway. Our operation worked out, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Good.”
“Yeah... it really, really is.”
And not just ‘worked out.’
Our goal—his and mine—had simply been to succeed in spreading the information,
to make it easier for people to hunt zombies and monsters.
But now—
“S-So, every time people hunt using that information...”
“Everyone shares in the experience, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s it.”
Experience generated while they hunt—
we’ve ended up able to share in that.
In that case—
“Minjae.”
“Hm?”
“You’re going to be working pretty busy from now on.”
“...Where’s that coming from?”
Right—and there’s a term for this in games.
“As information stacks up, we’ll have to do broadcasts like this over and over.”
“What does that even—”
“Experience comes in for free, Minjae—even when we’re not the ones hunting.”
Experience comes to me without me hunting, with others doing the hunting for me.
In other words—
“auto-hunting.”
I couldn’t help muttering with a grin:
“We’re going to spread as much information as possible, save as many humans as possible, and make as many humans as possible level up.”
“...!”
“Because that’s how—”
the free experience from auto-hunting
gets even a little more efficient.
