“What, why so quiet?”
“Heh heh. Did you get scared? We aren’t that bad. First, why don’t you show us where you’ve been staying.”
...How should I put it.
It was a line that overlapped with what I went through in middle school, getting worked over by high school guys.
“If you’re thinking about resisting, I hope you wake up from that dream.”
Saying that,
the man pulled a weapon out from inside his coat.
That weapon—
surprisingly—
“A gun?”
He didn’t look like a former soldier or anything,
but it was a real gun.
“You see this?”
“......”
“My job is [Shooter]. Hm? I don’t want to make a scene here either. Let’s keep this quiet and smooth.”
A picture-perfect page from a robber’s handbook.
Raiders around our unit had all been swept clean by Ariella,
so it had been a while since I’d dealt with something like this; honestly, it threw me a little.
When they first tried to rob me,
I probably failed to realize it was a robbery attempt for that same reason.
“Sigh.”
But now,
with the situation properly assessed, things were a little different.
The first humans I’ve met here.
I wanted to treat them well if possible, but—
—Master of our Master!
From the shadows,
the voices of two kids came.
—We’ll—
—Take them out?
Voices chattering, unable to hide their excitement.
“Pipe down, you little punks.”
I guess I should call it a relief.
[Ingredient Identification (Enhanced)]
[Shooter Lv.12]
[Pickpocket Lv.11]
[Shieldbearer Lv.9]
Their levels didn’t look very high.
I scratched my head and answered.
“Can’t see it too well.”
“What?”
“You asked if I could see. You flashed it too quick, so I couldn’t get a good look. So—”
I might not be a combat class,
but still.
“Levels are busted.”
Pak!
“Let me take a closer look.”
I threw my body forward,
slipping into the guy’s guard in an instant.
“W-what!?”
The flustered man hurried into a guard,
but it didn’t mean much.
—Clack.
The cold, familiar feel of a firearm
was in my hand.
“M16, huh. What’d you do, knock over a reserve unit armory?”
“......!”
I stripped the gun away in a blink,
looked it over, and said,
“S—son of a...”
Only then
did they seem to catch on that something had happened.
“S-sir.”
Then,
one of the guys in back spoke up carefully.
He was the one with the [Thief] job.
“Back there... look at those tracks in the snow.”
“What...?”
Did [Thief] have a skill to read nearby traces,
track things like the enemy’s path?
At his words,
I turned as well and looked back the way I’d come.
“...What about the tracks?”
With snow piled deep,
even if you weren’t a thief, you could observe the path I took.
Didn’t look like any issue to me.
“The direction he came from... it’s toward the [Demon Realm].”
“...Don’t talk nonsense...!”
Maybe I was the only one who thought it wasn’t a problem.
As soon as they realized which way I’d come, their faces went pale.
“?”
Why they were reacting like that,
I had no idea.
But as soon as they realized the direction I’d come from, their whole bodies began to shake.
“W-we’re sorry!”
“We—we committed a grave discourtesy to you, sir!”
They bent 90 degrees at the waist.
“What?”
If they’d just sensed the skill gap from what I’d shown them, I could understand,
but how should I say it—
“It looks like the direction I came from matters more than what they just saw me do...”
I really had no idea
what the hell this was.
“For now...”
I scratched my head,
then opened my mouth.
“Why don’t we start with you emptying your pockets.”
Because me, too—
right now I’ve got nothing.
****
“T-this way.”
The moment they realized the direction I’d come from,
they started bowing and scraping at high speed.
Back in the Legion, I was a rich man who could crank out “Combat Rations” as currency,
but here I was flat broke, literally.
So for starters, I asked them to guide me to the base they were staying in.
—Boss, are you really going to guide him?
—F-for now we have to, what else can we do, man.
—Still...
—Better than dying, so stop being stingy. We ditch him at a good moment with a trick and run.
—Haah. Even after coming all the way here, we’re still the ones being chased.
Of course,
they weren’t exactly thrilled to be guiding me either.
“Do they think I can’t hear them?”
Some abilities had been curtailed,
but my level and stats hadn’t gone anywhere.
Especially since my stats were high for my ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) level to begin with,
I could easily pick up on most quiet whispers with my physical senses.
Well.
Whatever they were plotting didn’t matter.
“Doesn’t look great.”
“S-sorry!”
“We’ll at least get a fire going!”
These guys weren’t doing great.
Their “base” was just: go into one floor of a building that seemed to be free of monsters,
and there were a few sticks of firewood there.
“It’s been a good long while since the world went to hell, and this is all they have.”
If you banded together properly over that time and built a power,
no matter what, your base should be better than this.
The fact it looked like this meant either
they’d only arrived here recently and didn’t have a proper base,
or else—
“People in this region failed to band together.”
Thinking that, I sat in a corner,
and the very first thing I did
was question the guy who’d pulled a gun on me.
“You.”
“Y-yes! Sir.”
“Start with your name.”
“...Sorry?”
“Your name.”
“Ah, yes! I’ll answer!”
It would be nice if I could feed them a dish using the [Special Sauce],
but I didn’t have the ingredients right now.
“I can only use [Elemental Cuisine] freely during combat.”
Besides,
[Special Sauce] is a power that leaves traces if misused,
and if it gets exposed, it can become dangerous.
No helping it.
I’d have to take the more complicated route.
“You?”
“M—my name is...”
“Next. You.”
And like that,
after I took everyone’s names—
“Next, your jobs.”
“Our... jobs? Why the jobs.”
“Are you supposed to answer a question with a question?”
Clink...
I picked up the gun lying beside me,
and they flinched and spat it out.
“S-Shooter!”
“I—I’m a Shieldbearer!”
The first two blurted theirs in a panic,
but the last one hesitated a bit.
“I, I’m... a Scout.”
And then—
“You.”
“Y-yes?”
Last,
I called the one who’d said he was a scout.
“Let’s have you take a few hits.”
“W-what does that—!”
I don’t have any real combat skills,
but the level gap was just too big.
“I—I’m sorry!”
One way or another,
I could still dish out some pain.
“As expected, this method isn’t my style.”
I was only doing this because I had no choice right now.
Honestly,
it didn’t suit me at all.
“And I can’t just take a raider’s word at face value either.”
Right now I had zero information about Gyeonggi Province,
and I had to get it from a pack of untrustworthy raiders.
“Urrrk...”
“Again. Job.”
“P—Pickpocket!”
“Good. Isn’t it nicer if you tell the truth from the start?”
Like this,
I had to pound it into their heads that lying was not an option.
“You all saw it—try to trick me and this is what happens.”
“I—I’m sorry... I thought I might be punished if I said what my job was.”
Pickpocket is, in the end, a criminal-type job.
He must have wanted to hide it if at all possible.
Even—
“Weren’t you a scout?”
“A pickpocket, really.”
Even his buddies
didn’t know his actual job.
“M—my comrades didn’t even know what my job was, so how did you—”
“...Just know that there’s a way to know.”
It was the power of Ingredient Identification,
but there was no need to spell that out.
I sat back down
and kept mixing in questions.
“You. Over here.”
“I—I’m telling the truth!”
“Right. You truly lied.”
After repeating that a few times,
they finally stopped lying to me.
Only then did I say,
“Give me a brief rundown of what’s happened here in Gyeonggi Province.”
“Yes! But why ask something you’d obviously know anyway...?”
...Chnk.
“I—I’ll talk!”
I finally got to
ask what I wanted to know.
“They won’t think I came from another region.”
Questions about status screens would be easier to catch as lies, in their minds.
Now, at last, I could safely hear the real story.
“At first... communications suddenly cut off, and monsters showed up...”
“The flunky I was dragging around turned into a zombie...”
The content was surprisingly ordinary.
“So zombies didn’t only appear in Gangwon Province.”
Well,
not that zombies and monsters showing up is “ordinary,” but—
Ordinary meaning:
“It’s similar to us.”
Monsters appeared.
The dead turned into zombies.
Especially around army bases, stronger monsters appeared...
In response, some Awakened emerged... they gathered into groups...
Most of it
matched what I’d experienced in Gangwon Province.
If there was a difference—
“This cold, you mean?”
“As you’d know, the weather did turn oddly chilly starting on the first day of Doomsday.”
Starting on the first day of Doomsday,
oddly,
the temperature across Gyeonggi Province dropped sharply.
“S—still, that wasn’t a big problem.”
“It was actually nice in the summer—cooler.”
So it hadn’t been a huge issue.
“...Then when did it become like this?”
“Well...”
“After winter came.”
Their eyes
shifted toward the outside of the shabby building.
“Up until then, the monsters were scary, but the weather was ordinary enough. People looked for ways to get through the winter somehow... We actually made some progress, and it seemed like we could scrape through a normal winter... but the problem was—”
“This winter’s weather was anything but normal.”
...Hmm.
“It wasn’t that ‘once-in-a-century cold wave’ the forecasts used to talk about. No matter how you looked at it, it was something strange...”
It wasn’t just a little colder.
This place turned into something that makes the Arctic look mild,
and that happened
after that winter arrived.
“If not for the radio, about 50% of the humans would already have frozen to death.”
“...Huh?”
Then,
at the casual words that followed,
I couldn’t help but open my eyes wide.
“I—is something wrong?”
At my reaction,
the guys who’d been talking meekly shrank back, more startled than me.
“Radio—don’t tell me.”
No.
This was definitely—
“You all—tell me more about that—”
“Sorry? It’s just that...”
At last,
just as the information I wanted was about to come out of his mouth—
“Hold it.”
“Sorry?”
I hated to cut them off when they were finally getting to the interesting part,
but too bad:
I had no choice.
And—
“W-what’s the—guh!”
Bang!
The guy watching my face as he spoke—
I sprang to my feet,
and drove a rough kick into his body.
“Kh—khuu...”
“I—it wasn’t a lie! I was telling the whole truth, so why—”
“I know.”
And in that very instant when the raiders looked at me in confusion—
—KA-BOOM!
“!?”
With an immense crash,
the wall of the crumbling building blew inward,
and right where the guy who’d been answering me a moment ago had been kneeling,
jagged chunks of shattered wall hurled through.
“H-hiiik...?”
He seemed to realize he’d just nearly died,
and the raider froze in terror.
And then,
to that man—
“Finally found you.”
“Committing crimes like that, then running to some hole like this?”
The people who smashed through the wall
were growling with hostility.
****
When I felt a group charging this way all of a sudden,
since I still had things to hear from these guys,
I had to save the man’s life in a hurry with a kick.
But anyway—
“Who the hell are those?”
A squad of humans who’d suddenly smashed into the building.
It had been a short look,
but unlike the raiders who’d tried to rob me—
“They’re real Awakened.”
The aura their bodies gave off,
the faint tingle of mana,
and gear that was made properly, not store-bought junk.
They looked like proper combat classes.
I was wondering who they were when—
“First, subdue them at once!”
“!?”
They didn’t seem inclined to chat.
Without a word, they swung weapons.
“Gah...!”
“D—damn it!”
The three raiders were instantly overrun by the assailants’ assault.
A group of humans who’d stormed the building out of nowhere.
From the look of things,
their target was clearly those three who’d tried to rob me—
“This one’s the last!”
A burly man in armor,
the huge axe he swung came hurtling at me.
“Why me!?”
Was it guilt by association for standing with them?
Blows poured down toward me.
The burly middle-aged man who seemed to be their leader—
the huge axe he swung
was about to split my head in two—
Kang!
I caught the blow on a slant,
gripping the [Kitchen Chef’s Knife] in reverse.
Then—
“...What the—?”
Shock
spread over the assailants’ faces.
