“There it is.”
On the edge of a cliff where one wrong step would send him tumbling dozens of meters down, Bill stood with his arms crossed and looked below.
A massive power plant reflected in his eyes.
Concrete structures so numerous he couldn’t even begin to count them, and a vast expanse of land larger than any ordinary field.
In that space, under the harsh glare of the sun, grandeur was unmistakably taking shape.
“It’s a lot bigger than I expected.”
And the instant he saw the truth of the power plant, Bill couldn’t help making a dumbfounded face.
He had no choice.
The space spread out before them was just too strange.
They were standing in an utterly abnormal position, on a cliff nearly eighty meters high, yet below them lay a reality so absurd it was harder to find ordinary ground than it was to find the power plant itself.
And that meant one thing: an unimaginably grim future was waiting for them.
If this had only been about their original objective—finding an energy source—they wouldn’t have needed to wander around nearly this much.
All they had to do was prove that energy existed inside the power plant.
With evidence, they would report back to the Ark; without it, they would retreat. A simple mission.
Either way, aside from the time spent traveling there and back, they wouldn’t be spending long at the destination.
But the reason they were here now involved two things, not just the first.
In addition to the previous mission, they had to find something with no information at all—no name, no status, no purpose, no appearance.
And they had to do it in a stretch of land so huge that just walking around it could easily eat up a week.
It was the kind of difficulty that would make anyone understand if they simply refused the mission and chose to return to the Ark on the spot.
“I’m already losing motivation... Shifty. Still no Rapture?”
[Yes, still nothing detected. Honestly, when they’re this invisible, should I call it scary...? It feels suspicious on a level that makes me question my entire life so far.]
Shifty on the screen kept taking deep breaths over and over.
Like she was watching a horror movie, she was safe in the Ark, yet she couldn’t relax for a second because she had no idea what might be happening outside.
Her way of empathizing with the Nikkes and Commander out on the operation.
Bill understood then why Shifty was so popular among Commanders—the truth behind that secret popularity poll.
“Commander.”
As they rested, Rapi called out to him.
Bill didn’t answer. Instead, he turned his arm and checked the time; the ticking hand pointed to eleven o’clock.
Her call was probably the signal to start moving again.
“Wait a second.”
Before taking a step, Bill closed his eyes, then opened them wide and looked up at the sky.
He didn’t really believe in superstitions like feng shui or anything, but a person’s state of mind could be surprisingly sensitive to little things.
Even something as small as finding 500 won on the way out in the morning could make the whole day feel better than usual.
So, to soothe his nerves even a little, he took the sky into his eyes.
The place he stood was still dim.
By contrast, the entire grounds of the power plant they were about to enter were bathed in sunlight’s grace.
The sun was a symbol of positivity.
A radiant sphere of light, the light that illuminated the future.
From darkness to light.
That was surely an auspicious sign.
But for some reason, the sunlight in his eyes felt like it meant something other than what it should.
Like the lure of an anglerfish’s antennae—brightening the way, while darkness gathered just ahead.
The farther he walked, the closer he came to the entrance of the power plant, the more it felt like he was walking straight into a predator’s mouth.
In the end, his attempt seemed to bring about a result very different from what he had intended.
“Tsk.”
Bill clicked his tongue softly.
His plan to interpret things in a positive way and calm his uneasy heart had been a total failure.
He had leaped hard to catch relief, only to swing and miss with an aluminum bat instead of a wooden one, sending it so far out of the field he couldn’t even find it anymore.
Rather, his restless feelings only grew stronger, and his anxiety intensified.
Of course, regardless of his mood, Bill kept moving, stepping forward without stopping.
He couldn’t halt this expedition just because something felt suspicious.
There were plenty of reasons—like Absolute would object—but he wasn’t advancing simply because he had seen a grave.
For himself in the narrow sense, and more broadly for the Ark and the women walking beside him.
Bill carried a lot of thoughts with him.
This world was already very different from the one he had known.
He couldn’t tell whether it had always been that way, or whether the change had arisen because an existence that had never been there before—Bill—had been born into it.
But whichever it was, once he had recognized the change, it was clear it would not help him.
So he had to see.
Before the unknown past arrived like a storm, checking it was only natural.
ㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡ
The group was advancing along the steep edge of the cliff toward the power plant.
The information floating beside Shifty explained that their current height was roughly fifty meters.
Considering the original height was eighty meters, they had already descended about forty percent.
But the slope became gentler the farther they went, and their rate of descent slowed.
It meant the two squads were still a long way from facing the power plant directly.
“Haaah... this is boring...”
Anis let out a huge yawn before she even realized it, bored stiff by the unchanging scenery where all she could see was orange dirt, no matter how long she looked.
Of course, Eunhwa immediately glared at her and snapped a rebuke, but—
“Don’t make it obvious. What, are you hoping a Rapture will shoot you in the head or something?”
“I’d honestly rather see a Rapture...”
Her free-spirited attitude gave Eunhwa’s words no damage at all.
Maybe because she had no reason to care about anyone’s gaze except one person’s, she even stretched and twisted her stiff body.
“Mmm... that feels good. I should’ve done that sooner.”
“What, you’re bored because you haven’t seen any Raptures? But isn’t it better when they’re not around? Yesterday, every time I saw one, it was such a pain in the ass.”
“Oh, really? We were the ones doing all the fighting, though?”
“Then should the Commander run out there with a gun?”
“That doesn’t sound bad.”
“Go ahead and be a good little subordinate, then~.”
And as they moved, the completely useless conversation from the day before kept going.
Last night had been serious, of course, but that didn’t mean they could stay depressed all the way into the next day.
Normally, with no attacks every hour, it was only natural for tension to loosen after five hours had passed.
But the world was not about to let them finish the mission comfortably.
“Hm? What’s that?”
By chance.
Yes.
By chance.
If Anis, who had been walking while looking ahead, hadn’t held back another yawn and looked toward the entrance of the power plant, she might never have noticed it.
“Raptures!!”
At Anis’s shout, everyone dropped flat at once.
Of course, everyone here had long since transcended ordinary human reflexes, so before her voice even finished, they were already pressed tight against the ground.
Rapi, the closest to the cliff edge, slowly leaned out and looked below.
Her Nikke eyes, which didn’t need binoculars, easily picked out the Raptures moving across the vast land.
There were six of them.
Normally, a combat unit numbered just over fifteen, so those Raptures were a reconnaissance squad.
Rapi’s heart pounded.
The sudden appearance of Raptures.
Shifty, with a screen floating beside her, also looked like she couldn’t understand what was happening.
Which meant they hadn’t been detected even by the operator who should have been constantly watching for Raptures.
In other words, stealth.
—They aren’t looking at us... are they...
Fortunately, because they were quite far away, their eyes weren’t aimed at them.
Rapi exhaled the breath she had been holding in relief.
“They don’t seem to have found us. Commander, what should we do?”
But no answer came back.
Rapi wanted to know what was happening behind her, but the other Nikkes were watching from the rear and no one had come forward, so she couldn’t take her eyes off the Raptures.
“Commander? Is something wrong?”
The second question.
Still no answer.
Growing frustrated, Rapi asked Shifty to keep watch ahead, then turned to look for him—but—
“Commander?”
He was nowhere to be seen.
Where had he gone, when he had just been there a moment ago?
The question only grew larger because it wasn’t easy to hide a broad set of shoulders like his.
But soon, she noticed that there was a place where everyone’s gaze except her own had gathered.
There, near where Emma’s legs were positioned, a man’s hand was sticking out.
There was only one man here, so Rapi was about to call to him again, assuming that hand must be his.
But apparently, what was faster was—
Anis’s fist, descending at high speed.
ㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡ
A little earlier.
Bill had been walking as far from the cliff as possible because it was dangerous.
Of course, ordinary Raptures weren’t any threat to him.
Even if they poured countless bullets into him, they’d probably just bounce off like his whole body had been coated in oil.
He was only pretending to be careful because the four who didn’t know his secret were with him right now.
“Raptures!!!!!!!”
That was when Anis’s shout rang out.
If anything had been a little dangerous, it was the difference in reaction speed.
Literally, he had almost dropped to the ground faster than the Nikkes.
Fortunately, his body only twitched, and he didn’t move again until everyone except him had already gone prone.
He had forced himself to stop for a beat, which might have looked suspicious, but since no one seemed to be looking at him, he figured it was fine.
He cooled the heat in his chest, opened his eyes, and tried to look ahead—but—
Something blocked his view.
—A leg?
Brown stockings, the kind women commonly chose, ran up the length of a straight leg and all the way to the side of his head.
And looking upward along that leg, he saw a black skirt and the two large hills lifting it.
That wasn’t all.
A white pair of panties, nestled between thighs that pressed together.
Without a doubt, the owner was...
“Newbie, what are you looking at so intently?”
But the dream didn’t last long.
As soon as Eunhwa’s voice came from his right ear, Bill hurriedly closed his eyes.
He didn’t even need to see what shape her eyes had taken while looking at him.
Probably the kind of eyes you’d use to look at trash.
No, they had always been like that.
Even so, the reason she didn’t say anything else was probably because the appearance of the Raptures had made her rein herself in too.
Still, Bill wanted so badly to open his eyes.
The forbidden zone inside a skirt was right in front of him.
Not even from far away, but at a distance where he could reach out and touch it. Not looking would be rude to himself. (No, it wouldn’t.)
And yet he had already been caught by Eunhwa while trying to burn Emma’s underwear into his eyes.
A Nikke’s eyes were no ordinary thing, so even if he only opened them to a slit, he wouldn’t escape her watch.
If he moved even a little, she might not be able to shoot him, but a pistol would definitely be shoved against his head.
—No.
Would a man really close his eyes over a mere threat?
Not many would give this up.
Men were strange creatures—full of worry, yet their bodies moved differently from their minds.
—White...
Smack.
But had someone noticed the sly plan unfolding only in his head?
Something slammed hard into the back of his head as he slowly widened his field of vision just enough to keep Eunhwa from noticing.
His face slammed into the ground, leaving an imprint there, and dirt scattered everywhere, forcing him to taste the soil that flew into his mouth.
“Who was that!!”
Bill lifted his buried head and immediately looked for the person who had hit him.
And then Anis’s voice followed, as if she herself were the culprit.
“A Rapture showed up, and you’re using the chance to peek at someone else’s panties?”
Bill couldn’t argue, and at the same time he felt wronged.
Sure, he had looked because he liked it, but he hadn’t done it on purpose.
All he had done was drop at the Rapture’s appearance and then open his eyes.
Emma just happened to be a little too close, and the position was a little too perfect.
Anyway, it wasn’t his fault.
But Anis’s eyes on him were cold.
It was a look that clearly wouldn’t be convinced by that alone.
He started to explain anyway, but—
“No, I opened my eyes and there were panties right there...”
“So you didn’t look?”
That was the end of the excuse.
The person in front of him probably hadn’t intended to listen to his words in the first place.
Just the act itself had apparently crossed the line.
“I did look...”
“Ugh...”
Something felt strange.
The surrounding gazes had subtly changed, and his skin felt a little colder.
Just when the image he had built up seemed like it might vanish forever from their minds—
[Um... shouldn’t we deal with the Raptures first?]
The atmosphere, which seemed like it would never end, was quickly cut off by Shifty’s interjection.
—Thank you!! Shifty!!!
Bill decided that someday, if he ever met Shifty in person, he would buy her a meal.
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register