Hiding a House in the Apocalypse - Chapter 22

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈

Chapter 22: Theme Park (2)

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Since I hadn't given my name, and the siblings hadn't given theirs either, I decided to call them Defender and Defender's sister for convenience.

“SKELTON.”

Defender's sister called to me in a tiny voice and beckoned.

When I looked over, she was on the community board.

She was writing a new post.

Defender: (Defender Breaking News) SKELTON came to our house!

- SKELTON's sooo sweet. I thought an actor had come over. He's practically a walking sculpture. He's two meters tall, wears a crisply pressed tuxedo, and even drives a Bentley! I'm a guy too, but he's so cool I fell for him at first sight.

The mouse cursor hovered over the <Post> button.

“No, no, no! Don't. Don't post it.”

“...Why?”

“What are you trying to accomplish by posting that nonsense?”

She pursed her lips, then suddenly opened Notepad and eagerly began typing.

-You have no popularity. That's why.

“So?”

-I want to hype you up.

“Your image isn't that great either.”

-I'm still a big-name user. You're a nobody, SKELTON.

“...”

-And everyone else is making online friends. Can't we do it too?

“Can't you just say it?”

-There are things words can't express.

“But typing can?”

I never thought I'd see someone communicate through Notepad while sitting right in front of another person.

“She's always like that. My sister.”

Defender spoke as he slipped a fully loaded magazine into his pocket.

I wondered if there was some dark story behind it and stared at her. He snorted and continued.

“No, nothing happened. She's just liked typing more than talking since she was little.”

Click.

As he smoothly locked back the bolt and checked the chamber, I asked him a question.

“There are a lot of them. Are you going to kill every last one?”

There were about twenty people in red pants.

They were far better armed than Lieutenant Colonel Choi's group that had come to my territory.

All of them had automatic rifles, and they even had an armored vehicle.

I would have to assess the individual soldiers' abilities, but their numbers alone made them a threatening force.

I was curious how he planned to handle such a difficult fight.

“We've got to kill those little shits first, right?”

Defender said it without batting an eye.

“If we kill the little shits, won't a couple of them come to investigate?”

He meant it.

He truly meant it.

“We kill them one by one and reduce their numbers. If it looks like they're all going to come running, we sneak around behind them and wipe out their camp.”

“What about the armored vehicle?”

“My sister's good with drones. She's especially a master at dropping things from them. She's even killed people by dropping bricks instead of bombs.”

His sister pointed both thumbs at herself.

“That's as far as I've planned. What do you think?”

“It's an impressive plan, but it has no fallback.”

“Isn't that what fighting is? Especially against rabble like them, plans don't mean much. You never know where they'll run, and if you set things up right at the start, they'll fall apart on their own.”

“Do we really have to kill the children?”

“Then should we save them?”

Defender snorted.

Defender's sister, who had been looking at the monitor, turned her chair and stared at me.

Feeling their silent pressure, I opened my mouth.

“Wouldn't it be better to save them?”

“Why should I? They're not my kids.”

Defender looked at his sister, and she nodded with a strange smile.

Defender looked back at me.

“Or are you going to take them in and raise them, SKELTON?”

“...That would be.”

“If you'll take them in and raise them, I'll reconsider.”

Defender grinned, while his sister calmly glared at me.

The siblings were both asking what I intended to do.

I suddenly thought about it.

How much did a child weigh?

I had almost no memories of childhood, and I had never raised one, so I did not know exactly how much a young child weighed.

But their weight could not possibly be light.

Otherwise, I would not have found it so difficult to answer a question that carried such weight.

“See? You can't answer either.”

Defender lined up the weapons he had maintained on the table and looked at his sister.

“What do you think, sis?”

As if she had been waiting, his sister spoke in her usual whispering tone.

“The moment they lost their parents at a time like this, they were already as good as dead. They're just unlucky. This era isn't on their side.”

In that instant, I understood.

Defender was not one person, but two.

This was not one person's solo act.

The two siblings together had created a horror movie called the human hunter.

After a brief silence, Defender suggested another option.

“We could also ignore them. This place is steep, and there isn't even a proper path up here, so they can't climb up. They move along the roads.”

“Then couldn't we just avoid fighting them?”

Avoiding unnecessary fights was my principle.

“Maybe. But we'll have to fight them someday, right? We can't hide forever. And before then.”

Defender stared at the monitor.

“Our friends will die.”

His sister pointed inside the monitor and added,

“Our board friends.”

“The community...”

It made sense.

Even if we posted a warning on the board, how many people would have a snake's heart like Defender?

I was not especially confident myself.

“How much combat experience do you have?”

I asked Defender.

He caught my meaning, and his eyes gleamed.

“You want to fight with us?”

I nodded.

“We have to protect the community.”

That was the biggest reason, but not the only one.

The red pants' methods were especially cruel, and after seeing Defender's condition and equipment, I quickly calculated that this battle might be easier than expected. If we were going to fight anyway, more people were better than one.

Of course, I could not deny that I also wanted to satisfy my own shallow hypocrisy.

Yes, perhaps I had gotten older.

A drone rose into the dark night sky.

Defender's sister was controlling it.

“My sister's going to wreck the armored vehicle. Those guys always leave the hatch open.”

I had known since the Demian04 incident that Defender's combat ability was no joke.

He kept his mouth shut, but perhaps he had once been a Hunter.

The habits and actions that unconsciously showed through were not very different from what we had been taught at school.

He was probably from the seventeenth or eighteenth class.

If he belonged to one of those cursed classes whose futures vanished while they were still enrolled, it could explain his twisted personality, at least a little.

“That's where they keep the women. So that building has the weakest security. There are guards, but they're guarding the inside, not the outside.”

Defender was a meticulous killer.

He already knew the enemy's positions, weaknesses, and even their small habits.

Just before the fight, Defender lightly shook his body.

“Hey, feel that thrill running through me? This is when I feel the most alive.”

Through the earphone in my ear, I could hear his sister's uneven breathing.

She did not say anything, but she seemed to be feeling considerable tension and excitement too.

“Shall we begin?”

Defender gave a hand signal.

Seeing a combat signal I had not seen in a long time, I had the illusion that I had crossed time and sea and returned to the battlefield in China.

Thousands of bodies lay scattered around me. My expressionless comrades fired into the ruins. Chinese soldiers shouted in a language I could not understand and set corpses ablaze. Medium-sized monsters gradually took shape through the dimness above the ruins.

More than anything, I felt a slight headache and boredom.

“...”

Perhaps many comrades had fallen into eternal sleep for reasons beyond the dangers of the battlefield.

We had been in a loose hell.

One so slow and boring it made you want to yawn.

“SKELTON?”

Defender's voice pulled me back to reality.

“Let's go.”

The outline of the operation was simple.

Two trained killers with precise information and a plan would ambush disorganized rabble at night.

It was a fight whose result had been decided from the beginning.

As with everything, coincidence might change fate, but I would not let coincidence kill me.

The red-pants Pioneers' stronghold was an abandoned theme park.

The rides would never run again, but there were many empty buildings, roads, and resources to repurpose.

We approached the staff quarters where they kept the women they had captured.

Hearing women sobbing and men shouting, I watched the soldiers guarding the entrance along the outer wall.

Defender raised his gun.

I shook my head, drew my two axes, and headed for the sentries.

I did not crouch or make an excessive effort to muffle my footsteps.

Soon, one man noticed my presence and turned toward me.

Thunk!

An axe buried itself in his neck.

As the man staggered and began to fall, another sentry turned his head.

“What was that?”

Thunk!

Two corpses lay on the ground.

As I stepped on their temples, pulled out my axes, and wiped the blood on their clothes, Defender came over, raised a thumb, and whispered.

“SKELTON, double kill.”

Before he had even finished speaking, his sister's excited voice came through the earphone.

“SKELTON killed them? Huh? He killed two?”

Her voice was much louder and, somehow, more lively than when she spoke face-to-face.

“I'll clear out the inside.”

Defender drew a dagger.

“Can you handle it alone?”

“They'll be having their fun right now. I can handle it alone. Watch the outside and keep guard.”

I nodded and looked around.

Beneath a pale streetlight, I saw the armored vehicle.

Soon, a woman's scream rang out, followed by Defender's soft voice.

A moment later, Defender walked out.

“The children. They were in there. But there were five of them.”

“...”

“There are two ways to do this.”

“Two ways?”

“We can let the women run away and create confusion.”

“And the other?”

“We quietly kill them like this.”

“The latter.”

“Are you pretending to be too nice?”

Defender's expression turned slightly serious.

“Since I've decided to pretend to be nice, why only do it halfway?”

“Looks like you're only doing it halfway already.”

Judging by the result, my method was wiser.

Without proper guards or dispersal, they had gathered in a single dormitory, drinking or sleeping.

The old armored vehicle parked in front of the dormitory seemed to be the source of their confidence.

After taking down the sentries, we prepared to clear them out.

When the hum of the drone drifted faintly through the night sky, we began the operation.

Defender tossed in a grenade. At the same time, we broke the windows and opened crossfire from both sides.

Rat-tat-tat-tat!

At the sound of gunfire, the drone approached the armored vehicle and dropped a grenade precisely through its wide-open hatch.

With an explosion, the armored vehicle began to speed away.

The driver had probably died with his foot on the accelerator.

Bang!

A few red pants inside tried to return fire from behind tables, but the building was already on fire, and smoke rapidly filled it.

Every variable had been eliminated.

All that remained was a boring slaughter that made me want to yawn.

“Hey! SKELTON!”

Defender laughed loudly as he watched a red-pants man run out with his body on fire.

“Not bad?”

Still grinning, he took aim and fired. The burning man, screaming in agony, dropped face-first and never rose again.

“SKELTON. You thought I was a joke earlier, didn't you? Yeah, I know everything. This big sister sees it all.”

Defender's sister was just as excited.

Using her Chinese-made drone as if she were playing a game, she shot fleeing red-pants men dead.

“Surrender! We surrender!”

Several red-pants men came out of the smoking building with both hands raised.

Defender shot them with a smile, and his sister's laughter grew ragged.

Boom!

An explosion went off in the distance.

The speeding armored vehicle must have crashed into one of the theme park's facilities.

Just as I was about to dismiss it as an insignificant coincidence, I heard another sound.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

With the explosions, brilliantly colored lights soared into the sky and burst, painting the night with beautiful radial patterns.

Fireworks.

A large number of fireworks that had been loaded into launch tubes before the war had been jolted out of their long silence, shooting multicolored flames into the sky.

“Wow! Look at that! Hey!”

“Aahhhhh!”

Watching the siblings delight like children, I suddenly wondered if the red pants' evil deeds had never mattered much to them.

Perhaps they had merely wanted to kill the red pants, and they had thrillingly achieved that goal.

In that sense, it might not be an exaggeration to say the theme park had fulfilled its duty.

Why? People had come to have fun, and they had certainly enjoyed themselves.

Thinking that, I silently watched the miracle brought by the coincidence that had not struck me.

The game was over, and it was time to settle up.

“What are you going to do with these people?”

The women and children left behind.

The price of shallow hypocrisy.

“Like I said earlier, I won't take them in. No, I can't.”

Defender stared at me.

“...I.”

Many thoughts raised their heads in my mind, but I knew the truth.

My gaze had been fixed on only one outcome from the beginning.

I silently watched the people, awkwardly holding guns and looking around as they walked into the darkness.

One child turned back and stared at me.

I decided not to think about their fate.

Click. Click.

Behind me, Defender was taking proof photos.

“SKELTON.”

He approached and held something out to me.

“What is this?”

When I took it, I saw it was a drawing.

An absurdly idealized handsome man, like one from a romance comic for women, filled the page.

“My sister drew it.”

Sure enough, pretty handwriting at the bottom read, “For SKELTON.”

Come to think of it, he did look a little like me...?

“My sister asked me to tell you, ‘You weren't going to stop by our house anyway, right?’”

Defender really did have a way of seeing through people's hearts.

His sister was the same as her brother in that respect.

“Don't you wonder why I do this?”

“What's with the sudden self-reflection?”

“I know you think I'm a psychopath.”

Defender put a cigarette between his lips and smiled strangely.

His eyes followed the last scattered sparks.

“This park. I came here with my sister when we were children. Holding our father and mother's hands.”

He sent white smoke into the night sky.

“He was a truly pathetic father.”

“...Yeah.”

His sister's voice came through the earphone.

“Let's save the next story for when we're closer.”

This time, Defender handed me a sheet of paper.

Unlike his sister's careful drawing, Defender had prepared a crude ticket.

“What is this?”

“If you need help, send me a DM.”

Defender waved and walked toward the darkness with heavy steps.

“I'll go anywhere.”

Then his sister's voice followed.

“SKELTON. Let's be online friends from now on?”

Holding the drawing and ticket they had left behind, I stood there blankly for a while, looking at the mountain, the park, and the sky sunk in silence.

A lot had happened, but in the end, all I felt was tired.

The kind of tiredness you felt when you had played all day at an amusement park and were heading home.

That night, Defender spammed the board.

Defender: (Defender Confession) I like SKELTON so much!

Defender: (Defender Confession) I like SKELTON so much!......

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I did not witness that horrible atrocity in real time.

“Damn it...!!”

Because I was being chased by goddamn zombies!

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