“Kugh, cough cough!”
The ponytail girl, who had been listening quietly, coughed dryly. As if she’d swallowed wrong and choked, she bent halfway at the waist and coughed while covering her mouth. Small tears formed in her reddened, swollen eyes and soon rolled down her cheeks.
Lee Gojun was looking straight at only me as if the ponytail girl’s life-or-death struggle didn’t matter at all.
If the reunion embrace and tears were over, he should at least stand up, but he remained kneeling and facing me, making me feel even more like I’d become that “Messiah.” What’s more, if it were just Lee Gojun doing that, it’d be one thing, but his younger brother, who had inadvertently become a believer kneeling alongside him, joined in to stimulate my complicated, subtle emotions.
When I rolled my eyes slightly, Cha Jeoh opened his mouth as if he’d been waiting. Should I kill him after all? At that question full of sincerity, I was once again—very intensely—tempted.
“…What even is the Church of Hayoung?”
The one who broke the awkward silence first was his younger brother. At the sight of his younger brother showing interest, Lee Gojun wore a beaming smile, clasped his hands together, and started chattering.
“The benefactor standing over there is Kim Hayoung, you see. So I took it from that name and called it the Church of Hayoung, and since the name is pretty, doesn’t it seem like our religious order will be totally successful too?”
“……”
“Geonwoo-ya, Grandmother always used to say. Noble actions are fundamentally……”
Lee Gojun didn’t seem to notice his younger brother’s expression slowly distorting. Otherwise, there was no way he could so shamelessly and proudly list out praises for the “Church of Hayoung” like that.
It seemed like only about ten minutes had passed since Lee Gojun said he’d create a new religious order, but I had no idea when exactly the founding of this “Church of Hayoung” was decided. What’s more, there was still only one believer and no proper doctrine or rules yet. No, even if there were plausible doctrines or rules, the Church of Hayoung was undeniably a cult.
So wasn’t that why Lee Gojun’s younger brother had that look in his eyes? He kept endlessly repeating the cycle of pitifully watching his zealously evangelizing older brother as if looking at a family member who’d gone crazy after being deceived by a cult, then glaring at me as if looking at the enemy of the century.
“…This won’t do, Kim Hayoung.”
The ponytail girl, who had cautiously approached me, let out a small sigh.
“Geonwoo is still only 16 years old. He’s in the middle of his growth spurt, but for the past few days he’s been trapped inside the studio, voluntarily confining himself, so he probably hasn’t eaten or drunk properly. So you need to step up and take care of those two.”
“…Why me?”
“Well, because you’re the Messiah of the Church of Hayoung.”
Looking at the ponytail girl who had an expression like “Is this right?” even as she said it with her own mouth, I gently narrowed my brow. And I was just about to open my mouth to refute it in some way.
Vice President! Are you in the broadcasting room?
Just before the shout blocked by the door spread all the way inside the studio, Cha Jeoh raised his hand and covered my eyes. No sooner had he done so than the sound of one person’s footsteps entering through the opened broadcasting room door quietly continued.
“What, why is the studio door……”
The person who had been muttering in puzzlement crossed the broadcasting room with suddenly urgent steps, then stopped in front of the wide-open studio door.
“…Gasp!”
Soon that person, whoever they were, swallowed their breath in shock.
“Th-the twins are here……”
“Jeong Seyoung?”
“Yes… Vice President!”
Her presence turned toward the ponytail girl.
“How is the studio door open? The tw-, um, why are those people here? That middle schooler who was inside……”
“Fortunately he’s still alive. Right now he’s having a touching reunion with the older brother he was so desperately searching for.”
The two brothers the ponytail girl pointed at had already finished their touching reunion and were in the middle of a struggle between the spear and shield of cult evangelism, but the female student didn’t pay much attention. Instead, she showed an impatient attitude, saying she needed to handle urgent matters first.
“Let’s go to the student council room and talk. Hurry and bring the Vice President.”
“They told you to bring me? Who did?”
“You know. Those bastards acting like they’re kings.”
“Why, what for? Don’t tell me the club kids caused trouble?”
“That’s not it, the upper floor……”
The female student trailed off for a moment, pausing. She glanced at Cha Jeoh before carefully continuing.
“The survivors who came down from the upper floor, we need to have a meeting about what to do with them… and make them take responsibility.”
Making the survivors who returned alive from the isolated upper floor take responsibility—
I had to chew over those words several times, wondering if I’d understood their meaning correctly.
***
Monsters were like cockroaches. Just because you killed all the ones visible right now didn’t mean you could completely exterminate the monsters within that space.
Though there would be some differences depending on the type of beast-form monster, most monsters didn’t require a long preparation process for mating, giving birth, or laying eggs. Moreover, the “offspring” or “eggs” born that way were rarely discovered for some reason, so it was nearly impossible for people to prevent the monsters’ reproduction.
Because of this, the Hanul High survivors regularly selected people and formed teams to exterminate monsters. They killed those monsters relatively easily before the barely mature monsters could become even stronger, and preserved the peace—or non-peace—within the building.
Since the monsters’ growth rate was also tremendous, no less than their reproductive capacity, survivors had to take up weapons for extermination once every three or four days. Since this place was clearly a hundred times better than other environments, those who had awakened their respective abilities joined forces to face the monsters.
Thanks to this, those belonging to the “combat division” within Hanul High had become quite skilled at fighting monsters. However, as mentioned earlier, newly mature monsters were relatively easy to deal with, and since they repeatedly conducted exterminations, the number reaching maturity each day wasn’t very large either. In other words, except for the early days when the apocalypse era had just arrived, they had no experience fighting multiple monsters at once.
So they had no choice but to be thrown into utter panic when monsters poured down from the third floor. Even knowing they shouldn’t raise their voices, they screamed, and even knowing they should spread the news and prepare for battle, they froze in place unable to move. It stemmed from the natural and instinctive fear they felt upon facing a scene different from the battles they’d experienced until now.
Really, this time they might actually die.
When they were thinking that, what appeared like salvation was the figure of one of the twin brothers they knew well, holding a pitch-black sword.
Cha Woodan lightly swung his sword and thrust it into the monster’s neck as it staggered, bleeding dark red blood. The monster, already dying and unable to even resist properly, had its vital point pierced defenseless and collapsed forward.
Cha Woodan pulled out the sword he’d driven into the monster’s flesh. He lightly dodged so the blood droplets scattering in all directions wouldn’t splash on him, then turned his head.
The scene of the second floor filled with monster corpses, the bodies of survivors who died in battle, and the fishy smell of blood entered his view. Among the classrooms on both sides of the corridor that had been used for various purposes, there were quite a few where doors were twisted or glass was broken. Right now, the second-floor corridor’s condition was more serious than even the situation on the third-floor corridor when monsters had been densely packed there.
Cha Woodan let out an irritated sigh, leaned the tip of his sword against the floor, and swept up the strands of hair that had gotten stuck together with blood because he couldn’t avoid it in time. In his view, he could see the survivors dealing with the last remaining monster on the opposite end of the corridor.
‘…Crazy bastards.’
Cha Woodan inwardly chewed and swallowed a curse that Cha Jeoh was fond of using.
In Cha Woodan’s view, the monster invasion of the lower floor just now wasn’t a battle where this much damage and sacrifice was inevitable. Both the corrosion of the second-floor space and the deaths and injuries of survivors could have been sufficiently lowered and reduced.
But the lower-floor survivors couldn’t do that. Among the major reasons were fear and dread, but that wasn’t all of it.
Unlike the upper floor where a small number of survivors had been busy hiding while cut off, the lower-floor survivors numbered as many as a hundred or so. Of course, compared to the number of students and teachers before the world became like this, it was woefully insufficient, but it was a size that had no difficulty producing its own order, rules, and leaders. Even a single class with a capacity of 20 to 30 people would elect and follow a class president and vice president, so a hundred people was an overflowing number.
Therefore, the lower-floor survivors distinguished the abilities they had awakened and divided them into fields so those abilities could be used efficiently. Those with abilities related to combat and defense became the combat division, and those with abilities related to observing and researching monsters became the organization and research division. Some cooked with monster meat, others patrolled around the school and kept watch, and they positioned them in their respective optimal places to form a community.
There were exceptions too. A representative case was the healing ability holders who gathered in the auditorium demanding their rights be guaranteed.
But regardless of a few counterexamples, a new “society” befitting the apocalypse era was created within Hanul High’s main building. High school students whose heads had grown thick but who hadn’t yet experienced adult society created a system based on their narrow knowledge, established a framework, and gathered around those with strong leadership to form factions.
‘The problem is that the power struggles between factions are endless.’
