Sting...

The moment I stepped outside, my skin started to sting.

It had been like that the first time I faced that sun too.

But now, the pain was even worse.

Which made sense.

‘It got stronger.’

The sun floating in the sky.

Its radiance was far stronger than before.

“As the Chairman said, let me say it once again myself.”

The enormous sun that had been blocking the vampires.

I had wondered how something like that could even be hanging there in the first place, but—

‘There’s no such thing as that much power without a price.’

That sun—

was being created through those nobles.

“Thank you.”

“This should let us hold out for another month.”

And then.

When I turned around,

“Now that the urgent matter has been taken care of.”

“We’ll tell you about ourselves in detail.”

the two old men who had been gazing up at the sun said that to me.

***

“My name is Yun.”

“Hmph. I’m Yang.”

After confirming the condition of the sun, we returned to that circular room.

Everyone else had left, and only the two old men remained to speak to me.

The old man who had used magic was Yun.

The bald old man was Yang.

“At present, together with that bald old man over there... I serve here, in this place, as one of the Vice Chairmen of the Military Commission.”

And.

It seemed the official name of their guild was the Military Commission.

Though.

Vice Chairman, huh.

“So the Chairman is, as I thought...”

“Mm. The one whose voice you heard is the one currently serving as Chairman.”

I spoke, a little puzzled.

“From what I heard then... that person, no, the Chairman, seemed to speak rather rarely.”

The moment the Chairman spoke,

I had seen people react with shock from that fact alone.

If it were someone who spoke often, they wouldn’t have reacted like that.

“Mm. Unfortunately, the Chairman’s... health is not very good. That is why the Chairman tends not to be very active.”

“But in that case, wouldn’t it make more sense for one of you two to take the Chairman’s role instead? Someone who’s in poor health and can’t properly stay active is sitting in the top seat... from my point of view, that feels a little strange.”

“To explain that, I think we’ll need to tell you what happened in this land, and about our guild.”

At that,

Old Man Yang grinned and said,

“You bastard, what did you think when you heard our guild’s name?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, didn’t it feel too stiff to you?”

Stiff, huh.

Well, it did sound overly official.

A lot of the other guilds I’d met up to now had cases like that too.

After all, just because the world had fallen didn’t mean people could immediately forget the systems of the world before it.

Names like self-governing committee or provisional government weren’t exactly rare either.

But.

Among minor guilds, more ordinary names were still more common.

And.

“Well, that’s only natural.”

It seemed there was a reason they had a name like that.

“Because this guild originally began as a government institution.”

***

According to their explanation, this land had also been struck by an apocalypse similar to ours.

People had struggled desperately to survive, but in the early days of the fall, an enormous number of them died.

“It was an age when not only monsters, but dwindling food... and even other humans couldn’t be trusted.”

“Mm. If that situation had gone on just a little longer, I might not have survived. Whatever anyone else might have done.”

If there was one thing different from us, it was that not long after that—

“the government began gathering people together.”

“What?”

“Judging from your reaction, I suppose that would count as surprising even from another country’s point of view?”

Even as I reacted in confusion, they kept talking.

“It was hard for us to believe too. But right there in the middle of Beijing, major government officials managed to survive this apocalypse.”

“Were they really government officials? Wasn’t there a possibility they were impostors hiding their identities?”

“There were many faces we had often seen on the news. Among them was... even a major figure who served as Vice Chairman of the [Central Military Commission].”

When I looked at him like I had no idea what that meant,

Yang frowned and said,

“...Is it normal for foreigners not to know? The Central Military Commission is the official name of one of China’s government bodies.”

“Ah.”

“It’s an institution with tremendous power, one that manages all of our military forces. They’d lost control over military facilities, of course... but in any case, the Party had survived.”

At those words, I remembered something I had heard in Seoul not long ago.

The apocalypse Jang Youngwoong had gone through.

He had said that even in the original apocalypse, before his revisions, there had been government officials who survived at first.

“After that, the people in Beijing began rallying around the Party. Before then, we had each been leading our own small survivor groups, but it wasn’t long before we joined up with them too.”

At that, I tilted my head slightly and asked.

Because—

“Even if the government had survived... it couldn’t have been easy.”

Jang Youngwoong’s case had proved it.

And just looking at the meeting I had witnessed in Seoul, the same was true.

Back then, even though everyone gathered had believed the government had survived,

half the assembled factions had refused to cooperate with it and walked away.

The apocalypse paralyzes the government’s administrative power.

No matter how much of its form remains, that’s all it is—a form.

The coercive force it once had as a state is bound to disappear.

Awakened individuals who had gained enough power to overwhelm many people on their own.

It wouldn’t have been easy to bind people like that together under the name of government alone.

“This old man’s trying to say it gently, so I think it’s coming across wrong.”

And.

It seemed they hadn’t been an exception either.

Old Man Yang clicked his tongue and said,

“Rather than saying people started rallying together, it would be more accurate to say they were forcibly absorbed.”

What I had thought would be difficult was the case where the government survived in form alone and lost its coercive power.

In that case, the government would only have an impressive name. It would be nothing more than just another survivor group.

But naturally, there was one exception to that assumption.

“They went around beating down any awakened who refused to merge.”

A government that should have been no more than one awakened faction among many—

had succeeded in securing military force as an awakened faction as well.

“So there must have been a lot of powerful awakened among the government side.”

“A lot, you say... Well, you should know this part too.”

“Huh?”

“You said you already met him, didn’t you?”

Old Man Yang frowned and clicked his tongue.

“General Jinlei.”

“...Ah.”

“That bastard belonged to the government from the start. They never told us his exact position, but he seemed to be some kind of secret agent or something. He led the charge, going around smashing the heads of anyone who refused integration.”

The very bastard who had been rolling on the floor under Ariella’s orders.

“There must have been a lot of resistance.”

The integration had been forced.

Naturally, I thought that had to have caused massive backlash, but—

“Mm? No?”

Old Man Yun shook his head and said,

“The only ones who resisted were those who wanted to build power of their own. The ones who simply wanted to survive in this world... back then, they welcomed General Jinlei very much.”

“Why?”

“Because... he was strong.”

As if recalling the past,

Old Man Yun closed his eyes and spoke.

“Monsters were appearing everywhere. And among them were countless enemies that ordinary awakened clearly had no hope of defeating. But... once rumors spread that General Jinlei was going out on extermination missions, those powerful monsters would be found neatly wiped out.”

“...”

“No one ever actually saw him hunting the monsters. But even that was enough. He was conquering the city’s monsters at a truly unbelievable speed... calling him a hero wouldn’t even be enough.”

At those words,

I thought to myself,

‘...Was he really that incredible?’

I had felt he was impressive, sure...

but I thought back to the apocalypse in Seoul that Jang Youngwoong had experienced.

Beijing was the capital of this land too.

A place packed with an enormous population for its size, which also meant an enormous number of monsters running wild.

By those conditions, it ought to have been similar to Seoul.

‘And he... conquered a city like that in a relentless sweep?’

Jang Youngwoong himself had reached the mid-30s by the end—a hero in his own right—

and yet he still hadn’t been able to overcome that apocalypse.

But this man had not only endured it, he had performed to that extent?

Honestly, it was hard to believe.

“Thanks to ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) those achievements, the humans in the capital were unified into a single guild. That was the beginning of the Military Commission as it exists now. The guild leader... the Chairman’s post was originally taken by the Vice Chairman. Other key government officials also became executives.”

“You said major officials became executives... then what about General Jinlei?”

What was even harder to believe was—

“He was a general. Which means he was in a position where he followed the government’s orders. The executive posts went to other government figures.”

A man of that caliber.

Obediently following the orders of those so-called government officials.

‘Was he some kind of absurd patriot...?’

Even so.

It still wasn’t easy to swallow.

“Anyway, thanks to those accomplishments, the survivors in Beijing grew stronger very quickly. Around the ten-month mark, they finished conquering Beijing and even succeeded in opening that wall.”

Ten months.

That meant they had done it faster than we had, and we conquered Gangwon Province in a year.

‘...I thought we were already insanely fast.’

The more I heard, the harder it was to believe.

“Once the wall opened, we were able to rapidly gather survivors from nearby cities too. Our forces swelled in an instant.”

“At the height of our prime, there were as many as twelve who had gained especially powerful strength and had their status recognized by the Chairman... twelve who had surpassed level 30 and received the rank of general.”

That was enough to leave me stunned.

‘More than thirteen awakened above level 30?’

It sounded absurd.

But China had always had a massive population to begin with.

If the capital of a country like that managed to survive the apocalypse relatively intact,

then quickly opened that wall and used that momentum to gather survivors from the surrounding areas too—

maybe that number really was barely possible.

“It was an overwhelming force. Awakened only grow stronger the more of them there are together.”

The more different kinds of awakened gather, the more synergy they create.

If that many people had managed to survive and unite, then they would have grown even faster, and more of them would have crossed the wall of level 30.

“We thought if we kept growing like this, there would be no enemy left to fear.”

“There were many who boasted that we had overcome the apocalypse.”

But.

Everything they said was in the past tense.

“Around two months ago.”

Two months ago.

That was more recent than I had expected.

“By order of the Party leadership, all the generals were summoned to Beijing. The generals who had been spread out in every direction, gathering survivors from all over, were all called back to the capital.”

“We don’t know why they were called in, or what happened during that summons. All we know is...”

His face reddening,

Yang ground his teeth.

“That on that very day! Those vampire bastards started pouring out from our capital.”

One year after the apocalypse.

Right around the same time we had succeeded in conquering Gangwon Province.

“And among the ones leading those vampires and invading humanity... was Jinlei, that bastard.”

The people who had thought they had succeeded in overcoming the apocalypse were forced to face a different kind of apocalypse.