Kwaang!

Getting hit by a shotgun slug did not send someone flying backward several meters like in a movie.

Gu Junseok merely staggered violently as if someone had shoved him hard, then flailed both arms before collapsing to the ground on the spot.

The slug round tore through the Kevlar and aramid fibers of the Level 3A ballistic vest and buried itself in his chest.

“Hrrrk... hrrrk....”

Gu Junseok gasped in shock as he fumbled at the impact point rapidly turning red with blood.

“Sssseuuu....”

Then, around ten seconds later, he let out one long, strange wheezing breath like air leaking from a punctured tube before his head dropped limply.

“......!!!”

A man had just been shot dead right in front of them.

And not just anyone—their superior officer.

Faced with this absurd, unreal situation, the soldiers could only stare wide-eyed.

Cheolkak!

But the horrifying sound of the shotgun being reloaded dragged them back to reality.

And just before they could collectively raise their rifles and aim at Junho—

“Move and you all die!”

Immediately after Junho shot Gu Junseok, Kim Jimin—who had already been aiming his weapon at the soldiers alongside Baek Suho and the squad members—shouted the warning.

“Ah....”

The soldiers’ faces instantly turned pale as they awkwardly stepped backward.

At that, Junho looked around at his companions and lowered a hand.

“Lower your guns. These guys are probably different from that dead lunatic.”

“What? But....”

“I’ll take responsibility. Lower them for now.”

“...Understood.”

His companions lowered their muzzles toward the ground.

But their fingers still rested near the triggers, and their fire selectors remained on automatic rather than semiautomatic.

If the soldiers did anything stupid, they would be turned into swiss cheese.

***

Junho looked over the dozen or so soldiers who could not hide their tense, frightened expressions.

Spotting several older-looking men among the still youthful troops, Junho gestured toward them.

“Come over here for a moment.”

Two of them were officers—a first lieutenant and a second lieutenant—and one was a man in his forties.

And Junho could more or less tell what kind of person the man in his forties was.

The two officers and the middle-aged man hesitantly approached, and Junho glanced at Gu Junseok’s corpse before speaking.

“You people didn’t originally know that bastard, did you?”

“What? Ah, yes.”

He had been able to tell from their insignia.

The division patches on their uniforms were the same, but their ribbons were different.

From what Junho could see, the two officers belonged to this reserve-force battalion, while the man in his forties appeared to be either a civilian military employee or a senior NCO experienced enough to stand duty in civilian clothes during holidays.

“You were stationed at this unit? Then that bastard came here and you followed his orders?”

The three of them were once again flustered by Junho’s unexpectedly rational attitude, which was difficult to reconcile with a dangerous and brutal man who had thrown grenades without hesitation and then shot someone dead.

“Yes, yes. It was a holiday, so the battalion commander wasn’t here, and there weren’t many officers present. As you probably know, reserve-force battalions are already short on personnel, and after the military restructuring a few years ago, our numbers dropped even more....”

Instead of the still extremely tense second lieutenant, the first lieutenant—who had at least spent a few years in military service—answered.

“Still, shouldn’t there have been around thirty people? Why are there only this many left? And some of those soldiers look like drivers.”

“Th-that’s....”

The lieutenant bit his lip and hesitated, and the man in his forties let out a deep sigh before stepping forward.

“More than half the boys died or turned into zombies after Captain Gu ordered them to recover transport vehicles. That was months ago already.”

“.......”

Junho had suspected as much.

The lieutenant probably could not answer properly because he considered it partly his responsibility.

Even if Gu Junseok outranked him, allowing an officer from another unit to freely pull soldiers under his command and shove them into dangerous missions was not much different from standing by and doing nothing.

“Excuse me.”

At that moment, the man in his forties spoke again.

“Ah, right. I’m Park Yonggi. I’m a civilian military employee assigned to this unit. I managed the warehouse.”

Just as Junho had expected, Park Yonggi introduced himself as a civilian employee at the reserve-force unit before continuing with a bitter expression.

“I don’t know what you think, but Lieutenant Ahn and Second Lieutenant Park aren’t really at fault here.”

“.......”

Junho silently listened to him, finding the man rather fittingly courageous for someone named Yonggi.

“The battalion commander couldn’t be contacted, most of the officers were on leave or out because of the holiday, and then the world turned into this. If not for Lieutenant Ahn and Second Lieutenant Park, we wouldn’t even have been able to contact the logistics support unit, let alone receive supplies. And if you’re former reserve forces too, then you roughly know how this works, don’t you?”

“Know what?”

Park Yonggi looked at the two officers, who had lowered their heads gloomily, with sympathetic eyes.

“In a crazy disaster nobody could’ve imagined, junior officers—especially officers at some reserve-force unit like this—can’t actually do much.”

“.......”

“But these two did everything they could. Then Gu Junseok showed up. On top of that, that bastard was up for promotion to major. Did you think a lieutenant and a second lieutenant could really say anything against him?”

Now that he heard it explained, Junho could understand to a certain extent.

Among enlisted soldiers, even within the same division or brigade, men from different companies simply called each other mister.

Officers were different.

“Explain in detail.”

“Ah, yes. So at first....”

Once Junho slightly eased the atmosphere, Park Yonggi began calmly explaining.

Unlike officers who rotated frequently, he had served at this unit long enough to practically be called part of its history.

He neither added unnecessary details nor omitted anything important, relaying only what Junho needed to hear.

“...And that’s how this whole mess happened. It didn’t matter how much I opposed it. In the end, Captain Gu really was the highest-ranking officer present. And Captain Gu... he wasn’t like that from the beginning.”

Looking down at Gu Junseok’s miserable corpse, Park Yonggi spoke heavily.

“I think the world itself... everything that happened just drove him insane. Like he had to be the one to do everything right, that only he could overcome this situation. Something like that.”

A classic case of apocalypse protagonist syndrome.

But from everything Junho had seen and experienced, people with protagonist syndrome almost never personally took the lead and did the dangerous work themselves.

The ‘protagonist who must not die’ always stayed somewhere safe while ordering others around and forcing sacrifices onto them.

And the biggest problem was—

“I see. Then I’m even more glad I killed him.”

“...What?”

“You said he forced untrained reserve-force soldiers and logistics support troops into missions to recover transport vehicles, didn’t he? And then he lured those civilians with promises of guns and supplies, only to steal the vehicles and abandon them? No. He basically threw them out as sacrifices, didn’t he?”

“......!”

People with protagonist syndrome almost never did that sort of thing only once or twice.

Even after getting countless people around them killed, they still never came to their senses.

“So those people ran all the way here just trying to survive, which turned the entire surrounding area into a disaster. This whole thing happened because of that bastard, didn’t it? And the biggest problem is that once supplies ran low, he probably would’ve done the exact same thing again. Well? Am I wrong?”

Although today was his first time meeting them, Junho had seen and experienced several similar cases before regression.

And judging by the reactions of Park Yonggi and the two officers, who fell silent, they had clearly been thinking the same thing.

A brief silence followed.

Clap!

Then Junho suddenly clapped once, startling everyone into focusing on him.

“Anyway, let’s clean this place up quickly and move on. You two there—Mr. Kim Sangmin and Mr. Ha Younghyeon, come over here.”

The two looked confused before quickly walking over.

Then Junho turned toward the soldiers, who were still glancing nervously at him and the squad members.

“And you lot will work together with the civilian gentlemen here. Clean up this entire base first, then sweep through the lower village area too.”

“What? Together with these bastards?”

Kim Sangmin was horrified at the idea of working with the same soldiers who had been shooting at them moments ago.

Ha Younghyeon, whose cousin had nearly been killed by a bullet, also stiffened visibly.

But Junho merely gave them an indifferent look.

“You don’t want to? Then we’ll leave, and you can go back to fighting each other.”

“......!”

The two flinched and unconsciously looked toward the soldiers.

Soon, the gazes of both groups met.

But neither side said anything.

Naturally.

The root cause of this entire situation had already been removed, and once a fight stopped long enough for both sides to regain their senses, it was difficult for it to flare up again.

More importantly, these people had simply wanted to survive.

And now they were supposed to start killing each other again?

Especially in front of a terrifying existence who had just slaughtered zombies, thrown grenades around, and casually shot a man to death with a shotgun without even bothering with discussion?

They neither could nor wanted to do that.

“.......”

“.......”

Watching the awkward silence between the two sides, Junho added,

“Ah, right. You people still don’t know yet. The zombies that gathered around this base? Almost all of them are dead.”

“Wh-what!?”

“Seriously? Really!?”

Both soldiers and civilians widened their eyes in shock, and Junho turned toward Baek Suho.

“Suho, show them the footage.”

“Yes, boss!”

Baek Suho immediately brought over a tablet.

Everyone’s eyes widened as they watched the live drone feed scouting the area where Junhyeok and Song Gijun’s group were waiting with the armored vehicles.

The fields and roads were littered with zombie corpses.

“You’ve seen it now, right? Me and my people took care of them. So all you need to do is clean up this base. Anyway, putting that aside....”

Junho looked between Park Yonggi, who would become this base’s new ‘person in charge,’ and Kim Sangmin and Ha Younghyeon, the leaders of the pension-village survivor group.

“Exactly where are the abandoned deuce-and-a-halfs that are still sitting untouched?”

***

Junhyeok and Song Gijun’s group arrived at the reserve-force base with the vehicles.

After leaving Junhyeok and Kim Jimin in charge of managing both the survivors and the soldiers, Junho headed toward the location of the military transport vehicles that had been abandoned after an accident occurred on the way here.

Kim Sangmin, who knew the location, accompanied him.

“Hoo... It’s strange seeing how short this distance really was. Then again, even before all this, it was basically close enough to trip and fall into.”

The distance between the pension village where Kim Sangmin and the survivors had stayed and the reserve-force base was only around four or five kilometers.

But in the apocalypse, that was a distance people had to risk their lives to travel.

Even in the countryside, there were still several villages nearby, and because so many people had come for summer vacation, the zombie population had swelled to nearly a thousand.

But most of those zombies had chased the pension-village survivors toward the military base, only to be shot dead by Junho and his group.

As a result, Kim Sangmin found himself strangely reminded of peaceful rural areas around the Seoul metropolitan region from before the apocalypse, and he looked out at the scenery with emotional eyes.

“Once we go around that corner, there’s a bridge crossing the stream. One of the trucks overturned right in the middle of the bridge, so all the vehicles behind it ended up abandoned.”

At first, neither local residents nor outside survivors had even dared approach the area.

But eventually, someone driven by hunger went to loot the site during the dead of night, when zombies became sluggish, and succeeded through sheer luck.

After that, the pension-village survivors had gradually worked together to haul supplies away little by little—especially combat rations.

“The weapons and ammunition were loaded in heavy crates, and trying to pry them open on-site would’ve made too much noise. Combat rations were the easiest thing to take. And food was what we needed most anyway.”

“So there’s still a lot left?”

“Yes. We only managed to loot one deuce-and-a-half loaded with combat rations. Gu Junseok failed too, so the other vehicles were never touched. Ah, you can see them now.”

Kim Sangmin pointed from the passenger seat of the electric truck.

And the moment Junho looked in that direction, his eyes widened unconsciously.

The vehicles looked half-scrapped after being exposed to the elements for eight months.

But despite that, more than ten military trucks stood lined up untouched.

“Still a lot left, huh?”

“Yes. A lot....”

Personal firearms and equipment intended for reserve-force troops.

Ammunition.

Since it was battalion-level, there were even light machine guns, heavy machine guns, mortars, portable anti-tank guided weapons, Claymores—

along with enough combat rations to feed an entire battalion for a week.

Those K-511A1 2.5-ton trucks—commonly called deuce-and-a-halfs—

were now going to become theirs.

It truly was the apocalypse lottery.