2―3. Weapon
Could he do it? Jeong Minha looked at the kitchen knife gripped in his right hand. If he had about a hundred knives, he could have thrown them to hit the targets, but unfortunately, the single knife he had was far too short. What’s more, it took quite a bit of time to kill just one, so there was a high possibility of being bitten by other zombies in the meantime.
As Jeong Minha dawdled like that, Seo Sihan lightly pushed Minha’s back.
“……?”
“Go ahead, Minha-ya. I’ve got the axe at least, so I’ll draw their attention with this… You can go in the meantime.”
“Huh, huh?! How can you handle all of them by yourself, hyung!”
Regardless of what was said, Seo Sihan pushed him, and Jeong Minha found himself thrust into the middle of the zombies. Swallowing his curses, he ran dodging left and right. At the same time, Seo Sihan knocked on the wall with the axe, drawing the zombies’ attention. The zombies with dangling necks rushed toward the source of the sound.
Jeong Minha was about to turn around reflexively when he looked down below the window and his eyes widened. It had been hidden by the horde of zombies until now, but looking at it now, there was a pistol glowing with blue light placed beneath the window.
“……!!”
As soon as he discovered the gun, he ran with all his might and slid, hastily grabbing it. Then he immediately turned around and shot the head of a zombie close to Seo Sihan among the horde. Fortunately, there were bullets loaded.
Trapped in the zombie horde, Seo Sihan was holding out by pushing them away with the axe, and was just about to be bitten by a protruding zombie. But at that moment, with a loud sound, the zombie whose head had been pierced fell over just like that.
Because of the sudden loud noise, the zombie horde twisted their bodies backward. Before they could grasp the situation, the successive gunshots pierced the heads of the zombie horde one by one. Accordingly, the zombies rushed toward the source of the sound again, competing with each other. Seo Sihan, who belatedly noticed, also struck off the head of a zombie running out from behind with his axe.
From far away, he could hear a cry: “Aack, I used up all the bullets!” Seo Sihan struck off a few more zombie heads that were nearby, then ran toward Jeong Minha.
“Hyung!”
He had followed wanting to see Jeong Minha shoot, but Seo Sihan actually couldn’t see well because he was blocked by the zombie horde. Setting aside his disappointment for now, he grabbed Jeong Minha’s hand to pull him up while avoiding the remaining zombies, then smashed the upper part of the window with the axe.
“Heok!”
In reality it was a brick toy, but the scene viewed through VR showed the glass window really shattering into pieces and flying. Jeong Minha, who unconsciously closed his eyes and covered his face with his arm, was embraced by Seo Sihan’s left arm.
“Jump!”
At Seo Sihan’s shout, Jeong Minha also opened his eyes wide again and jumped out the window together while clinging to Seo Sihan. However, since he jumped without being able to check the ground first, he thought he was really falling from the 4th floor to the 1st floor and screamed “Uwaaah!” while hugging him even tighter. Then, stepping on the floor that followed, he looked down in bewilderment. It was just a slightly high threshold with a veranda directly connected below.
While Jeong Minha was embarrassed, the zombies were still pushing their heads through the window, following them. The two hurriedly ran down the emergency stairs attached to the outside of the building.
“Hyung, you’re surprisingly good at action. You’re like a movie actor.”
“Thanks… Minha, did you shoot all the zombies with the gun earlier? I survived thanks to you.”
“It was only possible because you drew their attention, hyung! But don’t do that next time. If I hadn’t had the gun, you would’ve died.”
“This is a game though….”
“Ah, don’t say things that break immersion!”
“Mm.”
After that, when they were almost down to the 1st floor, they could see bullet sets scattered across a wide open area.
“Whoa! We need to pick those up!”
The zombies were rolling down the narrow stairs in a tangled mess. While Seo Sihan held them off by pushing them away with the axe, Jeong Minha ran to the open area. Then he picked up the blue bullets that had fallen on the ground and was disappointed.
“These aren’t for a pistol though?”
“What are they?”
“They look like shotgun shells… Wow, they even made details like this. They don’t even fit in the pistol for real.”
“Ah….”
“But I gathered them all up anyway. Let’s go!”
“Okay.”
Seo Sihan struck the zombies with the axe one last time and ran out toward Jeong Minha. When they were inside the building, he hadn’t noticed because there was at least flickering lighting, but now that they were outside, the moon was already hanging high in the sky.
In hard mode, zombies were active whether it was night or day. However, it was inconvenient for players to move through the ruined city at night without the sun. It was scarier not knowing where zombies might appear from.
Still, fortunately, they could see a shelter with a flickering green light nearby. The only place zombies couldn’t enter—a shelter exclusively for players, literally. Jeong Minha quickly ran over, opened the door, pulled Seo Sihan in, then locked the door just in case.
“Phew….”
After catching their breath for a moment, they looked around the interior of the shelter. It was equipped with a cot, table, chair, bottled water, energy bars, and even simple healing potions. They could manage for about Day 1 with what was here. Since neither of them was injured yet, they only ate food. While Seo Sihan drank water, Jeong Minha ate tons of energy bars.
“Hyung, you eat too.”
“We just had lunch though….”
In the game, they had been running around all day, but in reality, only about 2 hours had passed since they ate lunch. Seo Sihan, who wasn’t particularly hungry, gave it all to Jeong Minha.
“Are you sure you don’t need to eat?”
“Yeah. You can eat it all, Minha.”
“‘Kay.”
Thanks to that, only Jeong Minha swept it all up and ate everything. The development department team had prepared food that two people could eat over the course of about 3 days, but Jeong Minha ate it all by himself on Day 1 alone.
Having eaten his fill, Jeong Minha recalled the situation from just moments ago. ‘He said he’s bad at games, but he’s way better than I thought? Is it because it’s done with your actual body? Now that I think about it, the way he used the axe was quite……’
“……”
Thinking about it again, the stance was a bit unusual. Isn’t an axe normally supposed to be struck from top to bottom? But until just now, Seo Sihan had mainly fought by swinging upward from bottom to top. This gave him a strange sense of déjà vu. ‘It resembles something? Golf? No, rather something done while running….’
At that moment, something Seo Sihan had said before came to mind.
—The longer one… ice hockey.
“……!”
Feeling refreshed as if all the puzzle pieces had fit together, he suddenly broke out in cold sweat and asked Seo Sihan.
“…Hyung.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever… fought with a hockey stick…?”
When Jeong Minha asked seriously, Seo Sihan made a bewildered expression. However, seeing Jeong Minha glancing at the axe, he immediately understood what misunderstanding had occurred.
‘No, I never have…. It’s just a familiar form so unconsciously….’ At Seo Sihan’s answer, Jeong Minha felt relieved. Then Seo Sihan added an additional explanation.
“There… if you’re going to fight, you can’t do it with a stick, you have to do it with bare hands.”
“Huh…?”
After that, Jeong Minha couldn’t close his mouth again with a surprised face. Since it seemed like he was misunderstanding again, Seo Sihan hurriedly continued. ‘Of course I didn’t, really. I’m bad at fighting….’
‘After fighting so well just now?’ Jeong Minha still wore a dubious expression, then soon accepted it. ‘Well, you need to be angry to fight, and I’ve never really seen hyung get angry until now….’
‘…Right? We’ve been living together this whole time, so why has he never gotten angry even once? Even when he said he’d leave the house before, honestly he wasn’t even that angry then… Huh? I think I’ve been really irritable with hyung this whole time though…?’
“…I’m sorry.”
“Huh?”
Jeong Minha suddenly had a moment of reflection.
As they were resting on the bed for a while, a rest recommendation alert rang saying that play time had exceeded 1 hour. It seemed a day had already passed in the game. The sun was rising outside the window.
“Isn’t this resting right now? It’s not particularly tiring though. Taking off the equipment and putting it back on would be more annoying.”
“Mm…. Then shall we do a little more and then rest?”
“Yes.”
As Jeong Minha said, Seo Sihan, who found re-equipping bothersome, agreed to continue, but soon regretted it.
Befitting hard mode, the survival difficulty increased from Day 2 onward. It was a format that got harder as days went by. The zombies scattered across the streets seemed about 3 times more numerous than on Day 1. There would be many zombies hiding in buildings too.
It seemed to be a story saying to escape quickly since more and more people were getting infected. And to get to the safe zone, they absolutely had to defeat all those zombies along the way.
Before they knew it, it was their hour and a half of play time.
They had planned to rest when it reached two hours, but that was only a possible pause when there were no zombies nearby.
“……”
“……”
“Are we screwed?”
“Mm….”
Currently, the two were trapped on the 3rd floor of a hospital.
