Taking on the role of representative for the Hanul High survivors didn’t hit me with great significance even after a day passed. There was a more important point for me. That Hanul High School would become my dwelling place going forward. So naturally, I couldn’t help but address the incident that had occurred on the field last time.
At that time, the possibility that they were a small-scale wandering group of only that number of people was slim. If that were the case, they wouldn’t have skillfully followed the sports club students as if waiting for suitable targets from the start, nor would they have attacked people without a moment’s hesitation as if it were natural.
Then it meant there was a separate group of survivors they belonged to, and in that case, from the perspective of that group’s people, it was obvious they would harbor suspicion before long about those sent outside not returning. I didn’t know whether those who had chased them to Hanul High had announced their destination to their group before following, but I couldn’t exclude the possibility.
Naturally, that survivor group would send people again for reconnaissance or revenge, and if they already knew about Hanul High, they would head straight here.
I didn’t think the twins would be defeated. However, if they reached Hanul High, the field here would again be littered with blood and corpses, and in severe cases, even the inside of the building might suffer damage. Since I had decided to remain here anyway, I wanted to prevent Hanul High from becoming a mayhem again.
So I planned to move first together with the twins. The large mart where the sports club students had gone out to collect goods was our target destination.
The ponytail girl expressed concern about the twins simultaneously leaving Hanul High empty.
However, thanks to Lee Gojun exerting his healing ability, there were no more injured people remaining within Hanul High. I heard that for some reason, the auditorium faction’s healing ability users also lent their strength to treating the injured. They had acquired minimum military strength in their own way.
Moreover, it wasn’t a schedule where we’d be gone long, and it was the twins moving directly, wasn’t it? Even anticipating a situation that would take too long from meeting enemies, it didn’t seem like it would exceed one night and two days.
Above all, I also needed an opportunity to examine the ability I had awakened in various ways, so this was exactly the optimal timing.
“Did you pack all the luggage?”
“…Is there luggage to pack?”
“Of course. It’s not just going out for a short walk but one night and two days.”
The words Cha Woodan and Cha Jeoh spoke in turn were only carefree without tension. If someone saw, it would look like the three of us were going on a trip holding hands. Moreover, seeing how they seemed to have already confirmed the schedule as one night and two days, their intention to sleep outside seemed excessively firm.
A small amount of drinking water, food, spare clothes, and even blankets. Cha Jeoh, who stuffed the abundantly wealthy items into a survival backpack, hoisted it on his back. I stared at him like that and opened my mouth.
“If sleeping outside with the three of us is good, we could just find a new dwelling without necessarily remaining at Hanul High.”
“Anyway, even that Lee Gojun bastard’s younger brother bastard will follow along, so what’s the point? And today we’ll be stuck together all day, but there will be many days when we can’t do that.”
Cha Jeoh, who had been grumbling, added quietly. I wondered why talk about ‘how much I can be stuck with the twins during the day’ suddenly came up when I brought up talk about dwellings, when Cha Woodan strode toward me.
“I’ll put on your blindfold. Close your eyes, Hayoung-ah.”
I quietly lowered my eyelids. Since the matter of controlling the entire Hanul High building that the ponytail girl had promised was still in progress, I still had to close my eyes and shut my mouth if I wanted to go outside the classroom. Though it was an essential procedure anyway since we were planning to go outside today.
The soft texture of the blindfold brushed over my skin. Cha Woodan, who tied the blindfold’s knot not too tightly but firmly enough not to come loose, stepped back from me. Then he announced as if whispering and lifted me up with a swoop.
We left the art room and moved without stopping until the first floor. Meanwhile, the corridor survivors passing by still obsessively avoided us. Then, around the time we reached near the building’s entrance, the ponytail girl and part of her faction who had come out there first greeted us warmly.
I listened absently to the final check conversation exchanged between Cha Woodan and the ponytail girl while wiggling my fingertips. Cha Woodan seemed to check on me briefly at my hand tapping his shoulder, then confirmed it was an action I was continuing meaninglessly and talked with the ponytail girl again.
In that boredom, Cha Jeoh, who had stealthily approached me, reached out his hand. I quietly received his touch unnecessarily adjusting the already perfectly positioned blindfold, when I suddenly turned my head.
‘…A monster?’
No, it is a monster, but. This is somehow….
‘First of all, there’s no way a monster would remain in the main building, right? They set regular periods to periodically subdue them, and there’s no way other survivors wouldn’t have seen a monster running toward here, yet it’s this quiet….’
It was strange.
Just in case, I raised my hand to feel around the blindfold. But the blindfold blocking my vision was still there without dishevelment, and I still hadn’t made a sound even by mistake.
‘But it’s running here, toward me?’
This time I tapped Cha Woodan’s shoulder with a bit more force. When I pointed to the floor with a gesture, Cha Woodan, while expressing doubt, obediently put me down.
Leaving Cha Woodan, I even passed by Cha Jeoh and stood blankly in the middle of the corridor. I stared piercingly at the other side of the corridor beyond my vision covered by the blindfold, then suddenly bent my knees and awkwardly reached out my hand.
I felt the thing that had been struggling to rush toward this place pause for a moment. Then before long, having recharged its courage, it kicked off the ground again.
The thing that lightly avoided my clumsy gesture trying to catch it jumped up with a spring. I received it with displeasure as it clung into my arms just like that.
I heard the surrounding survivors, who had each been looking at me questioningly, take small breaths. It seemed this small existence was now visible to their eyes.
‘…A monster juvenile.’
What had rushed into and clung to my arms right now was a monster juvenile.
For some reason, monster eggs and babies are not discovered by people. So until now, survivors had never seen monsters in a juvenile state that hadn’t fully grown yet, though they might have seen relatively weak monsters that had just become adults.
I hesitated, then slowly moved my hand. I felt around the small monster with fluffy fur, then fiddled with the area around its head. It seemed to be a quadrupedal beast-type monster, but relying on sensation alone, I couldn’t tell what type of beast it corresponded to.
As the time I spent handling the monster this way and that grew longer, the number of times people took breaths here and there and stumbled in surprise seemed to increase. Cha Jeoh also seemed to have tried to draw his sword for a moment, as the flow of such an ability was felt behind my back, but he was soon quietly waiting for me instead of rashly stepping forward.
‘Now what… should I do?’
I had thoughtlessly picked it up because it seemed to be running toward me. However, since I had impulsively committed this act without thinking about what came after, an appropriate solution didn’t come to mind.
I staggeringly stood up while holding the small monster in my arms. Then, after pondering for a moment, I found a fairly suitable solution and asked.
“…Should we leave it in our art room for now?”
***
The beauty called handsome and pretty didn’t only apply to people, and my subjective standard-filled “beauty” also included the field of cuteness. And the small monster I briefly faced after entering the art room was a monster juvenile in the form of a puppy with yellow fur, cute and pretty.
“Are you going to raise it?”
A question readily flew from Cha Jeoh, who was walking ahead on the road. When I moved my lips as if pondering, Cha Woodan presented the concerning part instead.
“Even if it doesn’t show any particular aggression now, a monster is a monster, so when it becomes an adult it will try to eat the people around it.”
“Couldn’t we train it?”
As I mulled over Cha Jeoh’s additional words, I made a very small sound briefly to reconfirm one fact.
“You said your mental-type ability doesn’t work on monsters.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I kept trying even after the first failure, but it didn’t work at all.”
Then we couldn’t receive help from mental-type abilities like brainwashing. Without such mystical power, would it be possible to breed a monster that was instinctively born to fill its belly by eating people?
If I hadn’t seen that small monster with my own two eyes, I could have said to dispose of it cleanly. But having already faced its small form, it wasn’t easy to shake it from my mind. Moreover, most monsters only borrowed the rough appearance of this world’s beasts and didn’t show much similarity, but the small monster looked exactly like an ordinary puppy, perhaps because it was still an undergrown juvenile, so it bothered me particularly.
As I swallowed a sigh, I sharply turned the direction of my head. One of the monsters wandering nearby was reacting to my voice that had briefly responded and was stealthily approaching here.
I tapped Cha Woodan’s shoulder to signal.
“One monster is coming.”
Cha Jeoh, who heard those words, reached out his hand into the air and created a sword of pitch-black light. He adjusted his grip on the sword handle and belatedly noticed the presence of the gradually approaching monster and watched that spot.
