episode_0081

“Let’s have a toast after a long time! To our comrade Sergeant Kwon!”

“I’m discharged. Just take my name, my military career is over now.”

“Ah~ That’s what it was? Then, for the sake of my eternal comrade Kwon Do-hoon~!”

“““For!!!”””

The old man’s colleagues were crowded around a makeshift table, holding their beer glasses high. There weren’t that many of them. There were eleven of them in total.

Considering what the old man said, that there would be about 30 people, it was a rather shabby number. What happened to the rest? Did they die? Are they missing? Or did they get discharged like the old man?

“Kuhaha! Pour more quickly!!! I’ll run until I die today!”

The man who was called the lieutenant chugged down his beer in one gulp and shouted as if he was cursing. The rest of the people seemed to agree with him, some of them even pouring whole bottles of alcohol.

Muscles filled my eyes. The sight of them twitching was both uncomfortable and disgusting. It also smelled like sweat.

By the way, this lieutenant’s real name is Lee Si-hyeon. As soon as I heard the introduction, I frowned because I knew it was rude, but the name and the person didn’t match.

The lieutenant also saw my strange expression and laughed, saying that he knew how I felt and moved on.

Just hearing the name, it seems like it would have a neutral charm, but the result is a muscle mass like that. Well, a name is just a wishful thinking.

There was a man sitting to the left of the old man, pouring a glass. He was relatively small compared to the others, but he was still a healthy man, easily over 180 cm tall.

“Kyungjin, you little punk. I took care of you so much.”

The man poured beer from a huge container into the man’s glass.

The old man kept expressing his feelings of betrayal and regret towards the man named Jeong Gyeong-jin, but his eyes and actions were dripping with honey.

Perhaps, it must have been because he felt good seeing the person he had taken good care of doing well. The man named Jeong Gyeong-jin was also smiling the whole time he was looking at the old man.

Another round of drinks was had. The muscles writhed once more, pouring the golden beer into their bellies.

It was a shabby scale considering the number of people, 30, but the atmosphere was enough to fill more than a dozen empty seats, so I decided not to worry about it, thinking that a good thing is a good thing.

Because the parties involved said it was okay, it wasn’t something for an outsider to tackle.

I also had a beer. The alcohol content of the liquor in the shelter was high, so it was difficult to drink, but the beer had a low alcohol content, so I was able to enjoy it without any burden.

“But where did you get the beer? We’re completely wiped out. All we have is the ones that are all dried up and rested.”

The old man, who was busy drinking beer, suddenly asked a question. Oh my, I even pestered him to get some information, so why are you asking such useless questions?

Of course, beer was a precious commodity. In the case of alcohol with high alcohol content, it was easy to store and had a long shelf life, but alcohol with low alcohol content like beer did not have a long shelf life by nature.

Therefore, it was almost impossible to obtain and was a luxury item that could only be consumed by manufacturing it directly. Compared to similar fruits, it was clearly considered to be of a higher grade.

In short, in the case of fruits, even though they are expensive, if you are the type to diligently attend the trading table, this is almost a complete failure.

What a world where beer, the drink of the common people, is more expensive than whiskey. If I hadn’t become like this, I might have cried and screamed.

“You were lucky. When the situation broke out shortly after you left, Kyungjin saved a person during the operation…”

After listening to the long-winded story, the old man nodded and patted the man named Jeong Gyeong-jin on the back.

“Well done. If you help others, things will go well for you.”

“Yes.”

“But why did that guy make a bet with me?”

“Haha, that’s…”

I thought the old man was praising me, but he was drifting and giving me a hard time. That’s what an old man does.

As the place got warmer, the people who usually drank together began to split up into groups. Lieutenant Lee and Jeong Gyeong-jin, or Sergeant Jeong, joined me and the group of old men.

The snacks on our table were nuts and fruits. I picked up a peanut and an almond and ate them, and they had a salty, stale flavor.

Ugh. Don’t give me something like this…

The three of them ate the side dish diligently as if it were a delicacy.

“The number of people has decreased significantly.”

“Well, the world is like this. There were people who died during the operation…”

A glance exchanged between the old man and the lieutenant. I didn’t know what had happened, so I couldn’t tell, but it seemed to be enough for the old man, who nodded and poured himself a drink.

“Are you having a hard time these days?”

“Should I say it’s hard, or should I just say it’s too much? Did you see the chicks on your way here? If you really look at them, they’re far from chicks… Well, they look like chicks anyway.”

“Well, I’ve seen those girls a lot.”

This time it wasn’t hard to understand what he was talking about. He was definitely talking about the group of superhumans that Hayura was leading.

“There’s a reason they call you godmother, godmother, right?”

My uncle and I listened attentively because it was the first time we had heard of it. It wasn’t just something like, boss or captain, right?

“They’re not people. To be exact, they’re people, but not like us… No, not like Mr. Danhwa.”

“I got a shot of the medicine, so I guess so.”

“I’m not just talking about drugs. They’re born different from us. They were created through artificial insemination. I bet your genes are mixed in there too, right?”

My expression and that of the old man instantly hardened. I doubted my ears for a moment, wondering if that made sense, but that didn’t change the words that came out of the lieutenant’s mouth.

“No, how is that…?”

“We don’t know, we’re just soldiers. By the way, the oldest among them is 5 years old.”

“…”

The old man and I were both speechless in shock. We felt that there was something different about his way of thinking, but we didn’t feel like he was childish at all, which made it even more so.

Is mental age something that matures so quickly? If that’s the case, then why do we have puberty?

“Ah, don’t bring this up in front of them. It won’t look good. They all think that Hayura saved them. They say she created the memories by randomly generating numbers or something and implanted them in their heads.”

The lieutenant added, pretending to tap his head.

“Why, if I tell you that you’re not a human but an android, will you rush at me and say you want to kill me?”

“No, she fell down and cried. I know because I’ve tried it here at least once. That woman, Hayura, took the child who was lying down like that and put him back to normal. Ta-da! ”

In those words, we could feel Hayura’s solitude and the resignation of the unit members, including Lieutenant Lee.

“Ha Yu-ra I also asked that woman to restrain herself as much as possible. From our perspective, she has a lot of experience, so I thought it would be better to listen to her than to cause problems and make us suffer more, so I hung out with her. I couldn’t leave that woman in the first place.”

“So how many times a month do you get hit?”

“Everyone should do it three times a day? Kyungjin next to you does it once every one and a half days?”

Sergeant Jeong and Jeong Gyeong-jin nodded, receiving the lieutenant’s gaze.

As someone who was following the story well, I suddenly frowned as I wondered what it meant when it suddenly went off in another direction.

Unlike me, the old man somehow managed to understand, frowned, and scratched his head. No matter how much I thought about it, only one thing came to mind, so I just threw it out.

“Are you talking about medicine?”

“Huh…? Mr. Danhwa knows too? But isn’t Mr. Danhwa normal?”

“I know to some extent because of you.”

“Hey, it’s a good thing the Republic is completely ruined. Even if it’s someone you know, what would happen if you tell them what you wrote in a secret oath? If it were like before, you’d be sent straight to a concentration camp. ”

At those words, the old man shrugged his shoulders as if he was a part-timer and just emptied his beer.

“Is that right? I skipped the direct report class and didn’t get any job placement, but instead I got a discharge gift. If you’re not satisfied, take me.”

“Hey, Sergeant Kwon! You have guts? Yeah, a man should have that much distribution.”

“So why is it hard? At this scale, it shouldn’t be a problem to wipe out zombies? Screamers… Is that what they call them here? Those screaming monsters.”

“Ah, mutants? Dealing with them… It’s not hard anymore, it’s part of everyday life.”

It was a legitimate curiosity. The old man was alone, but he was actually very active as a problem solver in the city.

Even if the old man was exceptionally strong, there were a lot of superhumans similar to him here, so it didn’t seem like it would be difficult.

“I don’t know how much you’ve seen, but we divide mutants into two major types, right?”

“Two types?”

I asked what was going on. The old man seemed to be the same, as he was focused on the lieutenant just like me.

“A mutant-alpha, or Sergeant Kwon calls it a Screamer, is a rare zombie that usually appears. If it undergoes another mutation, we call it a mutant. It gets a bit tricky when you get to that point.”

The lieutenant stroked his chin as he spoke, then paused for a moment.

“And… the mutants in question – Beta – are what happens when superhumans like us turn into zombies.”

“Does that make sense? No matter how much we have, we’re still going to get caught by those slow guys?”

The old man gave a negative answer. However, the lieutenant responded calmly, making a gesture as if it was nothing.

“Why not? It’s not like we won’t die if we get hit by a sword, and we don’t have infinite power. And after you left, a huge incident happened at the lab. In fact, that’s the decisive reason why there are only 11 of us left.”