When I’m in my own territory, a single gunshot is an event that keeps my nerves taut not just for that day but for days afterward; inside Gong Gyeong-min’s bunker, gunfire is nothing more than part of the commonplace background noise.

Bang!

Tat-tat-tat!

Firefights break out all the time, in a variety of places.

Yesterday there was a small engagement to the north; today a fairly fierce skirmish went on for two hours to the west.

Covered in ashen fog and with the surface eroded as it is, it’s still proof that a lot of people are living in Seoul.

This scenery isn’t unfamiliar.

Back when we were in China, the scenery we always saw has simply shifted from some Chinese city to Korea.

As expected, the monster horde is now heading for Sejong.

The horde we witnessed—what we named KP-1—reached Sejong’s outskirts, and Sejong’s defense forces “handled” it in a so-called customized Kill Zone.

I don’t know what that customized Kill Zone is, but at least I’ve learned that Sejong has decent defensive capability.

Which means for the moment there’ll be no reason for Sejong to call on us.

That doesn’t mean we can just go kill Kang Han-min or Jeon Si-hoon on our own.

Contrary to his character, Gong Gyeong-min is even more logic-driven than I am, and I’ve got a reputation for excessive caution.

We may not have visible dates on a schedule, but the flow is fixed.

In the end, Sejong will call us.

It’s a current that can’t be resisted.

When they call depends on Sejong’s defensive strength—that’s the main reason we have to wait right now.

I don’t like wasting time.

Me, Gong Gyeong-min—school products are basically industrious by default.

Those who weren’t were all kicked out through the school gate.

There are exceptions like Cheon Young-jae, but the only reason he survived was because he came from a cohort at the point where conventional hunters were effectively sunset.

Well, he’s not someone you can trash for lack of skill either.

Let’s call him a rare lazy genius.

Anyway, while waiting for Sejong’s call, I did bunker maintenance with Gong Gyeong-min.

Since the foundation is a military bunker, its protection is flawless.

It has top-class resistance to every attack—nuclear, biochemical, and physical.

Gong Gyeong-min, in his “let’s turn the whole bunker into a gaming room” phase, had rebuilt it into something bizarre, and thanks to that I met him, but now we have to fix that damned setup.

But restoring facilities that took money, time, resources, and manpower isn’t easy.

We’ve got some building materials, but we lack construction machinery and tools; and smashing and rebuilding poured-concrete facilities is, at our current level of technology and equipment, close to impossible.

So, inevitably, we agreed to maintenance in the direction of sealing off the ventilation shaft I infiltrated through.

Even if we’d decided not to use it at first, to run Gong Gyeong-min’s nuclear battery generator we have no choice but to use the cooling system and its associated ventilation fans.

At first I didn’t think much about his generator.

On plan, we’d put a party together, nab Jeon Si-hoon, and bring down Kang Han-min in one smooth go.

But the schedule slipped, the wait dragged on, and suddenly it stood out to me.

A generator is a matter of consequence.

Personally, I assess the level of a bunker by the performance of the generator the owner runs.

Human civilization—especially modern civilization—stands on the magic called electricity.

I supposedly handled more money than the average person, but I still couldn’t be called upper class. The reason my bunker can stand comparison with bunkers built by people with hundreds of billions or trillions in assets is partly the excellent site I chose, but essentially because my generator is the kind you only see at conglomerate level.

The reason John Nae-non, now a star in the sky, was able to operate PaleNet in his final years was also because he had an outstanding generator based on a nuclear battery.

That’s right.

John Nae-non.

In a slack moment, the instant I recalled a nuclear battery generator I felt a fated impulse as hard to bear as the Eternal Hunger.

Stalled-out SkeltonNet.

A decisive stroke occurred to me to revive SkeltonNet, which has all but stopped.

Nothing fancy.

Do it like PaleNet.

Like a traditional internet portal, we shoulder all servers and traffic on the back of a powerful generator and scatter again the light of a civilized world called the internet to the people.

“A generator? You want to see that? Hm. Sure.”

Gong Gyeong-min’s generator was hidden in the deepest part of the bunker.

In size and in the surface of the walls, the bunker’s underground connected to a natural cave rather than something dug by humans.

Guiding the way, he gave me a history of the bunker.

“Truth is, this bunker has quite a history. It started as a refuge when the Mongols invaded, and for a long time it was used as an evacuation hole. In the Japanese occupation it was used as a chemical-biological weapons store. After liberation, Korea took it over and decided to build a secret facility right here. Putting a school on top was a kind of camouflage.”

“And you took it over and turned it into what it is now?”

“Right. It was an asset they were going to abandon anyway. As you know, our country was in a truce for a long time. Military regimes held power for ages. You’d be surprised how many facilities like this are hidden all over Seoul.”

“There wasn’t anything like this under our school?”

“That area used to have a little stream. They filled it in after the Han River project turned ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) it into a dry bed and built over it.”

Listening to the bunker owner’s explanation, we stopped before the nuclear generator.

“Oh.”

“Hold it.”

Click.

Gong Gyeong-min took a picture.

Not of himself.

He posed a prone plush in his hand with the power plant in the background and took the shot.

I can’t understand it, but when he took that picture he wore a pure smile I hadn’t seen once since our estrangement.

I looked at the generator with a wry smile.

I don’t know much about nuclear battery generation, so all I can offer is a very short impression.

It’s big.

And it looks expensive.

Crude and blunt, but the remark hits the core.

A big generator means high output, and the subjective “looks expensive” means that, at a glance, a professional manufacturer built it from high-grade materials with excellent finish.

In front of the generator sat, as you’d expect for a nuclear-based plant, a big clock-like radiation meter.

Current radiation was slightly above ordinary background but, effectively, normal.

Korea is known to have a bit more natural background radiation than the world average.

“How many years can you run it?”

He held up two fingers.

“About two years.”

“Sounds like a short-life type?”

“There are longer ones, sure, but what’s the point of living long. That was my thought at the time.”

“Leakage risk?”

“Unless you set out to smash it to hell, won’t happen.”

“No accidents during cell replacement and such, right?”

“None of that. And what we’re using now is the last one anyway. No spares.”

“I see.”

I got the detailed specs.

I’d heard about nuclear battery-type generators in early Viva! Apocalypse!, but both of us are laymen.

Still, I got the key characteristics.

Short and thick.

Even “short” here is short for a nuclear-battery method; it’s not even comparable to fossil fuel methods.

The output is considerable.

With this output, I thought, we could run servers on the order of PaleNet, which John Nae-non operated.

“You know PaleNet, right? A private network run in Seoul after the war.”

“PaleNet? Sure. I even used it a few times.”

“Think we could run something like PaleNet here?”

He glanced at the generator and cocked his head.

“Maybe?”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Back in Jeju the intranet server we ran was about this level of generator. The user count was small, though.”

“How many, roughly?”

“About four hundred thousand lived on Jeju; I remember fewer than a hundred thousand had the leeway to access the intranet.”

“I see.”

I hesitated a moment.

With a thump of excitement I hadn’t felt in a while.

“...”

They say wishes are fickle—no matter how earnestly you want them they won’t be granted, then roll in on their own when you’re doing something unrelated.

This is exactly that case.

SkeltonNet’s motto is “a second PaleNet.”

And right now a perfect environment’s been built to operate that PaleNet.

It’s not even technically hard.

I’ve got the raw data PaleNet used before I reworked it into SkeltonNet.

And yet a thought comes.

Is this really right?

Well, even if you have servers, the internet doesn’t run by itself.

PaleNet’s servers were important, but it was possible because the government’s portable comms network was still alive.

That, and while the idea of opening a traditional physical-server-based PaleNet makes my heart race, something about it feels off.

An inner voice asks me:

If you’re going to do this, what were all those hardships and efforts for?

To others it might look like some luxurious dilemma, but what matters is what I, the person involved, think.

As I lingered, Gong Gyeong-min read me and asked:

“Why? Thinking of making a PaleNet-like thing?”

“Mm...”

Hard to answer right away.

I do want to make it.

But not like this.

It might sound like a boyish notion, but I want to make SkeltonNet in a form more like myself.

It would also be repayment to the great Ballantine, who became another star.

Still, I couldn’t deny I had lingering attachment, so I asked, obliquely:

“We could run servers here, sure, but for PaleNet to run, don’t you have to broadcast from cell-tower-like base stations?”

I asked this fully expecting the answer to be no.

Posing a question that doesn’t stand from the start and hearing the answer is a mental victory tactic that’s proved useful since long ago.

But—

“We can broadcast.”

Not the answer I expected.

“Broadcast?”

“Yeah. You know the VR game we ran is originally Chinese, right?”

“Uh, yeah, but...”

“When those Chinese guys built the game, they wanted not only the rich upper class but also any riff-raff like migrant workers to be able to log on, right? Before we modded it, we actually considered running a similar architecture. I opposed it, but people’s happiness is relative, you know? Even if you get a perfect score on a test, it’s better when you’re the only one who gets it—if every dog and cow gets a hundred, it’s lame.”

It’s true enough.

But it misses the point.

So I asked again:

“Do you have equipment that can broadcast radio?”

That’s the crux.

He stared at me and nodded.

“Of course.”

“...”

“Why that face? Not like you. Isn’t it good if we’ve got it?”

“No, that’s not it. At what level does it operate?”

“Whatever else, this is a military base. In fact, it was meant to be a headquarters. Of course we’ve got gear to send signals outside. It’s going to blast pretty strong. In wartime you get all kinds of jamming; you have to transmit strong enough to beat that.”

“So you’re saying it’s not for civilian use?”

“No. I just told you we used it for our game. We modified that part too. This buddy here.”

This isn’t it.

I get the feeling this isn’t it.

To be exact, I’m happy, but also a bit wrong-footed.

“Come on, you say you’re opening PaleNet and keep wearing that sulky face, why?”

“I had a face?”

“No. You’re expressionless, but I’ve been with you long enough. I can tell.”

He let out a shallow sigh and turned away.

“I don’t know why, but you look like you’re hesitating. If you feel like talking, tell me.”

“...Got it.”

“And that’s something you can only do if you’ve got leeway. You know, right? The situation we’re in?”

After he left, I stood before the massive generator and thought for a while.

Unexpectedly, one form of the dream I wanted had dropped straight into my hands.

A so-called Turn-key.

Turn the key, and what I wanted happens just like that.

For people like us, with no time to spare and frankly not much future left, there’s no better opportunity.

So why do I hesitate?

The old me wouldn’t have hesitated for a second.

“...Hm.”

It’s probably the Skelton persona manifesting.

I want to lay my cornerstone—my own way—for the finale and peak of my myth.

Making a second PaleNet is fine.

It’s my hope, and it’s good for others too.

But if you ask whether it matches Skelton’s ideal, no.

A repeat of the same PaleNet.

Functionally useful, maybe, but as a chapter in Skelton’s history, not all that compelling.

I nodded.

Put it off for now.

They say blessings that come too easily go too easily.

To be exact, it’s greed.

Even if I launched a second PaleNet this way, would I really be satisfied?

So the bunker’s comms facility was doomed to remain sealed, never to be used—but in this world you can’t see an inch ahead.

Even here, inside this ashen-eroded Seoul, I made a new connection.

“I’m sorry, Hunter Park. Could you help us?”

Jeon Si-hoon’s friend and aide, Yeom Dda-wan, suddenly radioed in.

“You know Jade, right?”

“Of course I do.”

“She went missing on patrol today.”

It feels bad.

There were an unusually large number of monsters, especially Annihilator-types, roaming outside the bunker today.