Building a Safe Zone with My Harem In The Post-Apocalyptic World-Chapter 122: What Survival Means

"SUMMER! FREYA! Where are you?! Please answer me!"

Delilah shouted, panic rising in her chest when no answer came back.

Her eyes darted across the flooded floor below, searching through the chaos, but all she could see were members of the defensive unit struggling to stay afloat, grabbing onto anything they could reach just to keep their heads above the water.

Her breath hitched as a terrible thought forced its way into her mind. What if they had been swept away by the flood?

They were small, fragile compared to the force of the water. And Freya... Freya couldn’t even swim.

The memory surfaced immediately. That child had begged her more than once to teach her how, especially after they survived the first flood.

Delilah had always put it off, telling herself there was no place to practice, no proper facility, no time.

Now that excuse felt meaningless.

If they were gone...

Her chest tightened painfully. It would be her fault.

Leon’s hand suddenly gripped her shoulder, steady but firm. "Don’t worry. You always believed in them, didn’t you? They’ll survive."

Delilah frowned, the words catching her off guard. For a moment, she almost asked him why he had changed so suddenly, but the question died in her throat before it could form.

Instead, her frustration found another outlet. She turned to him sharply.

"Why did you shoot the ceiling? You knew exactly what would happen." Her teeth clenched. "Did you do it on purpose? To prove something?"

The thought had been sitting at the back of her mind ever since it happened. He could have followed her plan, could have helped her weaken the creature, but instead he chose a method that endangered everything around them.

"What? Are you insane?" Leon snapped, his composure cracking just slightly. "Stop accusing me of something like that. They’re my daughters too."

"But—"

"Enough." His voice hardened. "I’ll find them myself. I’m done arguing with you. All you do is keep painting me as a bad father when you’re not doing anything but complaining."

Before she could respond, he moved past her, tossing his gun aside as if it no longer mattered, and jumped straight into the water. Without hesitation, he began swimming, calling out their names as he pushed forward.

The same man who had told her to abandon them earlier.

Delilah didn’t understand him. She didn’t even try anymore. She decided to follow.

The water was cold and heavy, slowing her movements as she forced herself forward, searching every corner she could reach, every shadow, every gap between debris. She called their names again and again, her voice growing hoarse, but there was no answer.

She turned into another corridor, her heart pounding harder with each second, and then—

"Mom! Dad!"

Her body froze. She knew that voice too well, It was Summer.

Delilah turned toward the sound, her eyes lit up as she finally saw them.

Both of her daughters were clinging to a member of the defensive unit, one held securely on his back and the other supported over his shoulder as he carefully moved through the flooded area, where the water now reached up to an adult man’s shoulders.

"Summer! Freya!"

Relief hit her so suddenly it almost made her dizzy. She pushed forward through the water, tears already forming in her eyes, but before she could reach them, Leon got there first.

He pulled them into his arms, holding them tightly as they cried against him, their small bodies trembling from fear and exhaustion.

He spoke softly to them, his voice gentle in a way that felt unfamiliar, and for a brief moment, irritation flickered through Delilah along with confusion.

What was he doing?

Why now?

But those thoughts didn’t last.

Leon looked up and gestured for her to come closer, and when she reached them, he loosened his hold so the girls could move to her instead.

They clung to her immediately, arms wrapping tightly around her as if afraid she would disappear.

"Mom, we were so scared!" Freya cried, her voice shaking as she buried her face against Delilah’s neck.

"Yeah! But we remembered what you said. Stay calm!"

Summer added quickly, pointing at the man beside them. "And this big brother helped us find a safe place!"

Delilah looked at the soldier, her voice thick with emotion. "Thank you... thank you so much."

He shook his head simply. "No problem, ma’am. It’s my job."

Delilah turned back to her daughters, pulling them closer, holding them as tightly as she could. "I’m so glad you’re safe... my girls... my sweet girls..."

The tension that had been crushing her chest finally broke. All the fear, all the dread she had been holding in spilled out at once as tears streamed down her face.

For a moment, she thought she had lost them, that everything would collapse, that nothing would matter anymore.

That kind of loss...

It would have been worse than the apocalypse itself.

Delilah knew it then, clearer than anything else.

She would rather die with them than live alone in a world like this.

"But it was really a miracle that the ceiling holding the rainwater suddenly broke like that," the man said, still catching his breath.

"At least we’re safe for now. All the monsters seem to share the same trait. They take in too much and then... explode."

He gestured toward the scattered remains being carried away by the water.

Leon let out a short laugh, straightening slightly as if he had been waiting for this moment. "It wasn’t a coincidence, sir. I shot that container on purpose after figuring out their weakness. If I hadn’t done that, everyone in this bunker would have died."

The man’s expression brightened instantly. "As expected of one of the researchers. That was brilliant. You saved all of us!"

From there, everything turned into a spectacle. People gathered, voices overlapping as they praised him. Even Summer and Freya looked up at him with shining eyes, as if he had just become something larger than life.

Delilah watched it all in silence, feeling a mix of disbelief and irritation as she saw his posture subtly change, his confidence swelling under their attention.

"Mom, Dad is so cool!"

"Yeah! He’s like a hero!"

"Of course," Leon said smoothly, his tone warm as he looked down at them. "But your mother did just as much. She searched everywhere for you. You should thank her too."

Delilah blinked, caught off guard by that. The way he spoke, the way he smiled at their daughters, the way he seemed genuinely relieved to have found them... it didn’t match what he had said earlier.

For a moment, she wondered if he had truly meant it, if he was trying to change, or if this was just another side of him she didn’t fully understand.

***

"After that, we finally saw the outside world again for the first time," Delilah continued, her voice quieter now.

"The bunker was no longer habitable, so we had no choice but to move. But what we found outside..."

She paused briefly. "It was a desert. There were no forests, no rivers, no lakes. Everything had turned into dust. Only the mountain ranges were still standing, like the last remnants of what used to exist."

"We asked the defensive unit, even the bunker director, but all they could say was the same thing. Yesterday, everything was still normal."

She exhaled slowly. "So we came to one conclusion. The change happened in a single day. And that was when the real apocalypse began."

Silence settled inside the vehicle after that. Gideon didn’t speak immediately, his mind turning over everything she had said.

The image alone was enough to unsettle him, an entire world stripped of life in a single sweep. Even the aberrants felt different now, more terrifying when seen through the eyes of people who had lived through that moment.

Then he broke the silence. "Leon sounds like a terrible person."

That earned a soft laugh from Delilah. "He was. When I think about it now, he always wanted to be seen as a hero. That’s why he kept doing reckless things, hoping people would praise him, notice him."

She shook her head slightly. "In reality, he just dragged everyone into trouble and kept pushing himself closer to being seen as a failure."

"And you still stayed with him that long," Gideon said, glancing at her.

Delilah gave a small, self-deprecating smile. "Yeah. I was even more foolish than he was. I couldn’t imagine my daughters growing up without a father."

"Leon was a bad husband, but he was a good father in his own way. And in the middle of the apocalypse... I thought they needed that."

Gideon didn’t fully relate to that. If anything, his own experience made him think the opposite.

Still, he could understand her perspective. She wasn’t weak. She was just trying to protect what she thought mattered most.

"Let’s forget about Leon," he said after a moment. "He’s ’dead’ anyway."

He shifted slightly before continuing, "Then why did the government lie about the meteor? I still don’t get that part."

Delilah cleared her throat. "Politics. The meteorite was said to have landed near the border between our country, Estron, and Astrain. The two nations were already in conflict over uranium resources."

"To even retrieve it, they needed Astrain’s agreement since it was located between both territories. Based on the documents we saw, the egg itself was eventually moved into Astrain during the research phase." She paused, thinking carefully before continuing.

"And here’s my second theory. Our government failed to destroy it, and it eventually hatched. The reason they kept insisting it was just a meteor was to hide the truth. Whatever came out of that egg... is still alive somewhere in this world."

Gideon fell silent.

The weight of that realization settled in slowly. That thing had already caused an apocalypse once, just by existing. If it was still alive, then it wasn’t a question of if something would happen again.

And when that day came, when another calamity swept across the world, he wondered if he and everything he had built...

would be enough to survive it.