Hiding a House in the Apocalypse-Chapter 140: Timing

The first snow fell.

It was just past the fourth year since the war began.

When the weather turns cold, it becomes easier to find people.

“Three to the north. Two to the west. One to the south. None to the east.”

As temperatures drop, people light fires.

And it’s not just humans that become more visible.

Once the snow covered the ground, everything that didn’t have white fur stood out vividly in the landscape.

Mutations were among them.

“······Is that a wild boar?”

It looked like the wild boar Mutation pack from the south had made its way up to the outskirts of our territory.

The small ones were the size of compact cars, while the big ones were close to a one-ton truck.

At that size, our regular rifles might not pack enough firepower.

While I was debating what to do, Bang Jae-hyuk arrived with a promising weapon.

“I can handle it.”

Click.

“What do you think?”

It was a rifle designed for anti-Mutation use.

As the name suggests, it was a slightly modified version of the large-caliber rifle Baek Seung-hyun used, adjusted specifically for fighting Mutations.

“Looks good.”

With a high-powered weapon in the hands of someone like Bang Jae-hyuk, that wild boar pack shouldn’t be a problem.

The real issue, as always, was people.

I let out a sigh and stared at the two plumes of smoke rising from the north.

Bang! Bang!

Tat-tat-tat-tat!

Four years after the war began, the line between refugees and raiders is meaningless.

If someone is weaker and wealthier than you, killing them and taking what they have has become the natural order.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Two refugee groups had set up temporary camps on the far side of the ridge. They’d been in a pointless standoff for ten days.

The trigger was a ridiculous, utterly childish argument.

“Anyone here from K University? Looking for fellow K University alumni~!”

As is often the case with absurd incidents, the initial conversation over the public frequency was quite friendly.

Probably because they wanted to build some rapport with this unfamiliar group approaching from a distance.

“Oh. Class of ’99. Majored in philosophy.”

“Really? I graduated from the law school. Class of ’98.”

“Oh, is that so? Wow, law school. You must’ve been really smart.”

“Ha ha. No need to split ranks, we’re from the same university! Alumni are alumni!”

Blood ties, hometown ties, school ties—these are the only kinds of solid connections you can still count on in today’s world.

It’s not uncommon for newly encountered groups to build goodwill by identifying shared surname origins, hometowns, or schools in that order.

Especially those from so-called elite universities—they tend to band together tightly and display strong unity.

Anyway, up to that point, it didn’t seem like there was any chance of a fight breaking out between the two groups.

If anything, their union posed a potential threat to us.

Both refugee groups had about fifty people, gathered in family units, and both were armed with numerous weapons.

Frankly, we hoped they’d hurry up and retreat to Sejong.

The problem came out of nowhere.

“Ah. I miss the cafeteria food at Wonheung Hall. On chilly days like this, mixing ox tail soup with the radish kimchi juice always made for a solid meal.”

The guy who first called out for alumni said this, joking lightly.

There didn’t seem to be anything offensive in it.

But the other guy didn’t take it well.

“Wonheung Hall?”

The philosophy major replied curtly.

After a brief silence, the law school graduate chuckled awkwardly and asked cautiously:

“Why?”

The philosophy major answered:

“What cafeteria did you eat at in Wonheung? If anything, it’d be Changjo Hall.”

“What are you talking about? I ate there for four years!”

“Which campus did you attend?”

“Seoul campus.”

“I went to Seoul campus too.”

Hearing that, Bang Jae-hyuk muttered,

“······Here we go.”

He shook his head.

“One of them’s clearly bullshitting.”

Ha Tae-hoon added with a bit of context.

“You’d be surprised how common it is. A lot of refugees lie about their school background.”

“Why lie about that?”

I asked, curious.

“If you’re in a group of nobodies and say you went to a top school, people start treating you with a little more respect. It’s like, if you graduated from a good university, then you must be smart and maybe more fit to lead.”

“Really?”

“It happens a lot. Let’s be honest—no one wants to hand over leadership to someone with absolutely nothing going for them.”

Fair enough. I’d seen that kind of behavior before.

Back on Daram’s site, I pretended to be a doctor once, so I knew how it worked.

Meanwhile, the chatter over the radio was getting increasingly heated.

“I went to Seoul campus too. Whatever. Let’s just drop it. Let’s say you’re right.”

“What was that? You son of a bitch? You screw me over and then say let’s drop it?”

“Asabarikandafunk!”

“What the hell did you just say?”

“What, you don’t even know your own school’s festival chant? Asabarikandafunk!”

“I only studied, I didn’t have time for crap like that. I started prepping for the bar from freshman year. You think I had time to mess around?”

“God, what a load of crap.”

“Oh, yeah? You want me to show you what crap really looks like?”

As ridiculous as it sounds, this was the trigger that led the two groups into a full-blown, no-holds-barred fight.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Both sides built up defenses, sent out small assault teams, and exchanged gunfire while searching for weak points.

Even as the temperature plummeted, their scattered skirmishes continued—and now, the first snow had come.

I held a small hope that the snow might make even these hopeless humans stop fighting.

Ha Tae-hoon wasn’t so optimistic.

“This fight won’t stop until one side’s crushed.”

“Really? Over something that stupid?”

“······From the looks of it, one of them lied about their school and got made the leader. If it were you, would you just step down?”

Just as Ha Tae-hoon predicted, the first snow didn’t stop the fight between the two groups.

If anything, they exchanged fire even more frequently.

Two unaffiliated groups killing each other would normally be a good thing for us—but the problem was, they were fighting too close to our territory.

At first, the battles were beyond the golf course.

Then they moved into the golf course itself.

Yesterday, they were even shooting near the old U.S. base.

Naturally, both sides launched drones like it was planned.

Once, they even used a large-scale fire attack straight out of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Staring at the black smoke rising from the northern mountain, I gathered my team.

“What do you think we should do?”

I figured it was time to hear their opinions.

“No need for us to get involved.”

This translation is the intellectual property of Novelight.

“Those bastards only band together when they see someone weaker with more stuff. No reason for us to show ourselves.”

“If they cross into our side, then we act. Not before.”

Everyone agreed.

We’d wait and watch.

That was fine with me too, so I decided to just observe for now.

As the fighting dragged on, both sides began conserving ammunition.

They replaced guns with what’s called a Judge Killer—a type of crossbow.

Their combat shifted into defense. ƒrēenovelkiss.com

Both sides had dug into defensible positions, just waiting for the other to come to them.

The primary weapons may have reverted to melee types, but since they still had a few friends with guns, the battle lines remained tight.

Bang!

The two groups each sent up smoke signals after the hollow gunshots echoed at dusk.

Looked like both sides had reached their limit.

I figured they’d keep up the psychological standoff for a bit longer and then settle things with a compromise before withdrawing.

Didn’t seem like there had been many casualties either.

But the world doesn’t move so conveniently—

Especially not in the apocalypse.

In the early hours of the morning, Suu spotted a pack of mutated wild boars.

“Skelton. Those boars... They’re circling around where the people are.”

She may be young, but Suu had spent a long time standing guard in this ruined world.

She understands the meaning behind things—and the behavior of creatures—with accuracy.

“······Looks like they’re waiting for the humans to get exhausted.”

I nodded in agreement.

Once those wild boars become confident that the humans’ remaining firepower can’t pierce their hides or skulls, they’ll attack at night.

And they’ll feast on the powerless, like a buffet.

I didn’t want to get involved in some pointless human squabble, but in this case, stepping in was the right thing to do.

After getting everyone’s consent, I used the K-walkie-talkie to send our message.

“This is just a passerby, but we’ve spotted a group of mutated wild boars. You see them prowling beyond the frozen river to the east? If you don’t want to become pig feed, cut it out and head for Sejong.”

The warning was given.

Refugees aren’t complete fools. As soon as they received our transmission, they responded with peace.

“······Yeah. We saw them too.”

“······We saw them.”

“Who wants to go first?”

“We should go together. We’re all human, right?”

“Let’s keep a safe distance and move together.”

“Sounds good.”

The long, drawn-out standoff had finally come to an end.

No matter how foolish they’d been, they’d survived four years into the apocalypse. They had the sense to assess the threat of a Mutation and the flexibility to join hands with people they’d nearly killed hours earlier.

The fact that there hadn’t been many casualties was likely another reason both sides quickly agreed to a ceasefire.

From our observations, there were no deaths—just about three minor injuries.

The two groups moved with a distance of about 400 meters between them.

Armed with probably empty rifles and crossbows, pulling carts, they passed through our territory and made their way toward Sejong.

Later that evening, Rebecca reported that the boar pack was following them.

I briefly considered warning them again, but it was a danger they were already aware of—and doing so might only give away our position. So I didn’t.

That night, gunfire erupted in the south.

We couldn’t tell exactly what kind of fight was going on just from the flashes,

but judging from the spacing, frequency, and direction, a grim conclusion presented itself.

It probably wasn’t humans versus Mutations.

It was humans versus humans.

Ha Tae-hoon’s drone gave us a cold report of reality.

“Yup. They fought each other after all.”

Someone had betrayed the other.

Despite agreeing to head to Sejong together, they launched a cowardly ambush as soon as night fell.

There wasn’t a clear victor.

Maybe the ambushed side had been somewhat prepared,

and most importantly, the threat we had warned them about had stepped in.

Mutations.

On the battlefield where the fight had taken place, there were traces of a wild boar pack that had rampaged through without stopping.

A few survivors had fled south in a hurry.

The rest had been left behind—dead or unmoving.

We assembled a team and headed to the site.

It wasn’t for some charitable act of humanitarian rescue.

It ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) was to recover any supplies we could use.

The Mutation pack was no joke, so we mobilized everyone except Rebecca and her daughter.

Our main firepower, of course, was Bang Jae-hyuk.

Wearing thermal gear, he had mounted the anti-Mutation rifle on the truck’s upper rack and was ready to fire at any moment.

The scene was worse than we imagined.

Blood, flesh, hair, and torn clothing were scattered grotesquely over the snowy ground.

At least a dozen had been eaten.

If they were lucky, they died before being eaten.

If not, they were alive when it started.

There were quite a few bodies that hadn’t been touched yet.

Roughly twenty corpses lay in large ‘大’ shapes or stretched out straight, unmoving but strangely gathered together in one place.

“Mutations did this,” Bang Jae-hyuk muttered as he spat on the ground.

“They piled them up to save for later.”

Leaving Bang Jae-hyuk and Ha Tae-hoon to keep watch, I checked the bodies with Cheon Yeong-jae.

Someone pretending to be dead could still turn on us with a gun.

“Here.”

This was where Cheon Yeong-jae’s ability shone during this kind of search.

“One of them’s alive.”

We found a man lying face down, probably with a broken spine.

Mid-forties, broad face, stubborn-looking features—and horrifically, still conscious.

“Hey,” Cheon Yeong-jae said as he drew his handgun. “Want me to make it painless?”

The man replied, “Help me. Please... help me.”

That voice.

It was familiar.

Right—he was one of the guys involved in that absurd school argument.

“Law school?”

Cheon Yeong-jae recognized the voice too.

The man nodded.

Cheon Yeong-jae smirked.

“Hey, sir. You can’t feel your legs, can you?”

“N-No, I can! I can!”

Liar.

Cheon Yeong-jae was lightly pressing down on the man’s leg with his large knife.

Deep enough that a normal person would scream.

“No one accepts able-bodied people these days, let alone someone like you.”

“Please... I have connections! In Jeju, in Sejong too! Yes! I even know King! I know King!”

Cheon Yeong-jae gave me a bitter smile and looked over.

I nodded.

We left the man and continued the search.

There were things scattered everywhere, but we managed to retrieve some food, medicine, and several electronic devices.

The guns were crude, and the bullets homemade. No point taking them.

We kept just one pistol and tossed the rest onto the corpse pile.

After setting the pile on fire, we scanned the surroundings.

If any Mutations came, we were ready to kill them all.

Sure enough, one wild boar was watching us from afar—but turned and fled into the white snow without hesitation.

“What should we do?” Bang Jae-hyuk asked.

“Ignore it.”

Some of them lay ambushes.

No need to fight in a bad spot.

“Could you... could you leave just the pistol? Just one pistol...”

The man with the broken spine begged us with a trembling voice.

I asked him,

“Who started it?”

Then I handed him the pistol we’d recovered.

I had intended to leave it with him from the beginning.

That was the only mercy we could offer.

I looked into his bloodshot eyes and waited for an answer.

His gaze flicked left and right—

Then locked onto me.

“······We started it.”

“Good answer.”

I handed over the pistol.

“Don’t disable the safety until we’re gone.”

I climbed onto the truck first.

The last to remain was Cheon Yeong-jae.

He crouched before the man and asked bluntly:

“Who was the one who lied?”

Bang Jae-hyuk and I exchanged glances.

We both thought it was this guy.

I mean, even from an outsider’s view, his logic had been flimsy from the start.

The man answered:

“It was me.”

Cheon Yeong-jae stood up.

We started the engine and prepared to leave.

The man was watching us.

Our eyes met—and he spoke with a resolute expression.

The pistol’s muzzle was pressed to his temple.

“In this country, you know... even when you make a mistake, you must never admit it.”

I ignored him.

“You understand what I’m saying? Admitting fault—that’s the real mistake.”

It was absurd nonsense.

But I vaguely understood what he meant.

Bang!

I guess we all get stained with the times eventually.

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