The next day, Donghoon set out to find a fire station.
Four blocks east of the base. That was where he estimated a fire station would be. If this area had been densely residential, there had to be one. Donghoon had only been in this neighborhood for a week since his military discharge, but reading the city's layout wasn't difficult. Follow a major road and you'd find government offices. Basic stuff.
As he walked, Donghoon checked his physical condition.
That strange sensation he'd felt after killing the Crawler yesterday. The warm feeling that had flowed from his fingertips to his elbow. It hadn't been there when he woke up that morning. His physical condition was normal, too. He wasn't in pain, but he didn't feel especially good either.
It probably had just been his imagination.
Donghoon put the thought aside and kept walking.
He found the fire station on the third block. It was closer than he'd expected. The building was half collapsed, but the first-floor garage was still intact. A fire truck sat inside. Its tires were flat, and the body was rusted. After three years, that was to be expected.
Donghoon searched the garage. There was an equipment locker. It was locked, but he smashed the padlock with his hammer.
There it was.
A fire axe. A red handle and a silver blade. It was a little rusty, but the edge was still good. Donghoon picked up the axe and tested its weight. It was lighter than the hammer. And it had a blade. He could chop with it.
Donghoon tucked the axe at his waist and put the hammer in his backpack. He'd found the backpack at the fire station, too. A rescue worker's pack. Sturdy.
He added other things to it. Two flashlights, batteries, a first-aid kit, and another coil of rope. The fire station was a treasure trove. Now he understood why the protagonist in the novel had gone to the fire station first.
Donghoon left the fire station and was about to return to the base when he stopped.
A building caught his eye. The one next to the fire station. Three stories tall. A pharmacy occupied the first floor. Its sign was still there.
Pharmacy.
Donghoon went inside. There was no shutter. The glass door was broken, so he simply walked in.
The inside had been turned upside down. Medicine boxes were scattered across the floor, and the shelves had toppled over. But it hadn't all been taken. It was different from the bottled water at the market. There were many kinds of medicine, and only people who knew what they needed could pick through it and take the right things. The rest had been abandoned.
Donghoon checked the medicine boxes one by one. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Disinfectant. Bandages. He selected what he needed and put it in his backpack.
Then he found something on the back wall of the pharmacy.
Photographs.
Several photographs had been taped to the wall. Pictures of people. Passport-photo size. A name and dates had been written beneath each one.
Donghoon stepped closer and looked.
There were two dates beside each name. One was a start date, and the other was an end date. Some had an X marked beside the end date.
It was a list of the dead.
Donghoon checked the dates. The oldest was from around two months after the ruin. The most recent was from two years and eight months after the ruin. There were no new photographs after that.
Had no one died after two years and eight months? Or had whoever kept the records disappeared?
Donghoon stared at the photographs for a long time. Faces. Men, women, young people, old people. Twenty-three photographs. Twenty-three people had died here.
No, not here. They had died in this area. Zone 3. The writing he'd seen on the barricade yesterday.
Donghoon left the pharmacy.
As he walked, he thought. The survivors of Zone 3. An organized group—organized enough to build barricades, divide up the area, and record the dead. But the records stopped after two years and eight months. Something had happened.
On the way back to the base, Donghoon examined the other buildings as well. Signs that people had lived there remained everywhere. Buildings with their windows boarded up, buildings with rainwater collectors installed on the rooftops, buildings with zone numbers written on the walls.
But there were no people.
Only traces remained, with no people left. Where had the people who lived here for three years gone?
They could have died. They could have moved somewhere else. There was no way to know.
Donghoon returned to the base. The fourth-floor office. He shut the door and pushed a desk against it.
He sat on the floor and rested the fire axe across his knees, just as he'd rested the hammer there yesterday.
He touched the axe blade with his finger. It was sharp. If he chopped into the back of a Crawler's neck with this, it would be much more effective than the hammer.
Donghoon set the axe down and opened a can of saury. He thought as he ate.
He needed to organize the contents of the novel.
Donghoon took out a pen he'd brought from the fire station. The paper came from an office cabinet. A4 sheets.
Donghoon began writing down what he remembered.
'Monster grades.'
Crawler ── Grade 1. Four legs. Relies on hearing. Nocturnal. Weakness: the back of the neck. Acts in groups.
Howler ── Grade 2. Two legs. Fast. Summons allies with its cry. The first opponent the protagonist struggled against in the novel.
Hunter ── Grade 3. Intelligent. Sets traps, drives prey toward others, acts strategically. Weakness: the spinal connection at the back.
Whisperer ── Grade 4. Uses human language. Capable of psychological warfare. Its outer shell is nearly impossible to penetrate. Weakness: the core inside its body.
Overlord ── Grade 5. Controls lower-grade monsters. Exists only near rifts. Final-boss level.
There were four more grades above that, from Grade 6 to Grade 9. The Devourer, the Rememberer, the Abyssal One, and finally the Grade 9 Endbringer. He'd read about all of them in the novel. All the way to the ending. Right up to the scene where the protagonist defeated the Grade 9 monster and closed the rift. He'd read it dozens of times, so he remembered even the details.
Donghoon wrote the next section.
'Survival rules.'
1. Don't make a sound. 2. Don't move at night. 3. Don't go beneath the rift. 4. Establish your base somewhere high. 5. Secure water, food, and weapons—in that order.
All of it came from the novel. Donghoon added one more rule.
6. This world is like the novel, but the timing is different. Don't blindly trust the novel's information.
Donghoon put down his pen and looked at the paper.
It wasn't enough. It was far from enough. But this was all he had right now.
Donghoon folded the paper and put it in his backpack.
The sun began to set. The gray sky grew darker. Night was coming.
Donghoon planned not to sleep tonight either. But he knew he'd eventually fallen asleep yesterday. His body didn't listen to him.
So he prepared.
He stacked chairs in front of the office door. If the door opened, the chairs would fall and make noise. An alarm system. Primitive, but effective. The protagonist in the novel had done the same thing early on.
He hung cans by the window as well. He tied three empty cans to a rope and draped it over the window frame. If something came in through the window, the cans would collide and make noise.
Donghoon hugged the axe to his chest and sat against the wall.
Darkness fell.
The sounds began. Just like yesterday. Scraping. Multiple footsteps. The Crawlers were starting to move.
Then came a cry.
It was closer than yesterday. Donghoon held his breath.
A Howler. He hadn't encountered one yet. He didn't want to, either. But in this world, three years into the ruin, he couldn't just keep avoiding Howlers.
The cry continued for a long time. Then, as if answering it, another cry came from a different direction. Two of them. No, three.
Donghoon gripped the axe tighter.
The night was long.
Around dawn, Donghoon fell asleep again. This time, the chair alarm didn't go off. That meant nothing had come up. Killing the Crawler yesterday might have helped. The novel said Crawlers avoided places where one of their kind had died. They remembered the smell of corpses.
When Donghoon opened his eyes in the morning, he felt something strange.
His body felt light.
He'd slept on the floor two nights in a row, hadn't eaten properly, and had even fought a Crawler yesterday. He should have felt heavy. He should have been sore.
But he felt light. He didn't have any muscle pain, either. If anything, he felt better than he had on mornings after a good night's sleep in the military.
Donghoon felt his arm. Nothing had changed. He hadn't suddenly gained muscle, and his body hadn't grown larger. On the outside, he looked exactly the same.
But it felt different.
Donghoon stood up and stretched out his arms. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He did a few squats. His body moved well. Too well.
"...What is this?"
Donghoon muttered to himself.
He remembered the sensation he'd felt after killing the Crawler yesterday. The warm feeling that had flowed from his fingertips to his elbow. At the time, he'd thought it was adrenaline.
Maybe it hadn't been adrenaline.
In the novel, the protagonist began to change after killing several Crawlers. He didn't realize it at first. He noticed a few days later.
Donghoon shook his head.
He'd only killed one. Feeling good could simply mean his body had optimized itself while he was in a state of tension. Even in the military, there had been times when his body felt lighter during training. It was adaptation. Nothing more, nothing less.
Donghoon put the thought aside.
He had things to do today. He needed to strengthen the base's defenses. He had to block the stairs between the second and third floors. And he needed to secure more water.
Donghoon picked up the axe and left the office.
He stopped on the second floor as he went down the stairs. The second floor had three offices and a bathroom. He tried opening the office doors. There were desks and chairs inside. Donghoon dragged the desks over and began stacking them at the stair entrance.
They were heavy. But he moved them. More easily than yesterday.
Donghoon stopped.
It was easier than yesterday. Definitely. A desk of the same size felt lighter than it had yesterday.
Donghoon took his hands off the desk and looked at his arm.
He said nothing. Instead, he grabbed the desk again and lifted it. It came up. When he'd pushed a desk on the fourth floor yesterday, he'd had to drag it across the floor. Now he could lift it.
Donghoon set the desk down.
His heart began to race. It wasn't fear. It was another emotion. What should he call it? The urge to confirm. The need to know if this was real.
Donghoon finished stacking the barricade on the stairs and went down to the first floor. He went outside. After confirming there was nothing around, he ran.
An all-out sprint.
He was fast.
Definitely fast. Faster than when he'd taken the physical fitness tests in the military. The wind struck his face. He wasn't out of breath. His legs felt light.
Donghoon came to a stop. He panted. Not because he was out of breath, but because he was excited.
It was real.
It was like the novel. Killing monsters changed the body. There was no status window, no level-up notification. The body simply changed. At some point, you realized you were different.
Donghoon looked down at his hands.
Hands that had been ordinary until yesterday. Aside from the calluses he'd developed in the military, there had been nothing special about them. Now those hands could lift a desk.
After killing just one. One Crawler.
What would happen if he killed more?
As Donghoon thought about it, he got goosebumps. Not because he was afraid, but because the thought had come so naturally to him.
Donghoon returned to the base.
Sitting in the fourth-floor office, he took out the paper he'd written on yesterday. At the very bottom, he added one line.
'After killing one Crawler ── Slightly improved strength, stamina, and speed. No status window. Values cannot be checked. Only perceptible through physical sensation.'
Donghoon put down his pen.
This was how the protagonist in the novel had started. Kill a Crawler, grow a little stronger, kill a stronger monster, grow stronger again. The cycle repeated.
Donghoon could walk the same path.
No, he had to. In this world, three years into the ruin, an ordinary human couldn't survive. He could deal with a Crawler using a hammer and an axe, but what about a Howler? And the grades above it?
He had to get stronger.
Donghoon looked out the window. The gray sky. The black rift.
Tonight, he would hunt Crawlers.
Donghoon touched the axe blade with his finger and waited for night.