After roaming all over the roads, he had no choice but to admit that he was trapped inside a barrier. He couldn’t be certain, but it seemed to be an enormous barrier that roughly covered the entire city. If he had some means of flying, the sky would probably be blocked at some point too.
In the end, unable to find any solution, he returned home, and a day passed.
“Ha……”
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Contract Mission - Have Sex
Have sex in any form before the deadline!
Time Remaining - 4 days
Reward - A skill bestowed by the 【King of the 72 Legions】
Failure Penalty - Your death
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The moment he opened his eyes and checked the mission window, the deadline had mercilessly decreased by one day.
“Fucking hell…… haa.”
Uju spat out a curse and a sigh, then fully got up from his spot, only to clench his fist with a puzzled expression.
“……?”
Yesterday, he had clearly fought a battle that skirted the line between life and death, hauled countless loads, and driven all over the city. Not only that, he had been so exhausted—and so irritated—that he had no appetite, skipping dinner before falling asleep.
But his current condition was not that of someone who had collapsed into sleep from exhaustion and missed a meal. If anything, he felt even more energetic than usual. He was hungry, yes, but not to the degree one would expect after skipping dinner and sleeping through it. In fact, it had only been around lunchtime yesterday that he’d thought his body had grown sluggish lately and that he should maybe exercise.
“……Hm.”
After thinking for a moment, he shook his head. Good was good. If anything, skipping a meal meant he had more time to move, so he decided it was fortunate.
Four days might seem like a long time, but once he actually tried to do something, it could feel short. Especially with his life on the line, he couldn’t do something stupid like dawdle for no reason and let the deadline pass.
“Whooo……”
After locking up as thoroughly as possible and finishing his preparations, he went outside. Learning from yesterday’s lesson, he brought one pistol, one submachine gun, one rifle, and finally, even one grenade.
He didn’t want to fight for his life like yesterday… but there was always the possibility that a situation would arise where he couldn’t run away and had no choice but to fight. And if that happened, he absolutely had to avoid going out armed as stupidly as he had yesterday, only to get beaten up by a hobgoblin because he lacked firepower.
Even if he avoided vital points like the spine, an impact of that magnitude would render him combat-incapable no matter where it hit.
“If I didn’t have it, that’d be one thing. Not using what I do have would make me an idiot.”
Uju looked at the car for a moment, then shook his head and turned away. What he had felt yesterday while circling the barrier by car was that it drew far too much aggro, whether from people or monsters. He had somehow managed to speed away and shake them all off, but doing that again today would leave his remaining fuel on fumes.
Of course, he could get gas by going to a gas station, but when he considered the possibility of being attacked by monsters while refueling, he really didn’t want to. More than the attack itself, if he fired a gun right next to a car being fueled and a spark flew, setting it on fire… he truly didn’t even want to imagine it.
So today’s target was a mart he could reach on foot.
He didn’t know how many people nearby had survived, but assuming there were some, there was a fairly high chance that people would head toward a mart to secure food. In order to meet such people, he intended to camp out at the mart for about a day.
“What if I don’t find anyone today?”
No matter what, he couldn’t give up his house. As long as he couldn’t move that many guns all at once, safely and discreetly, he absolutely couldn’t do that.
“It doesn’t smell yet.”
Unable to find an answer to his worries, he arrived at the mart.
Goblin corpses and human corpses still lay scattered everywhere, but fortunately, they didn’t seem to have decayed enough to stink in just one day.
—Crunch
It was good that there was no smell, but the quiet surroundings were not good. No matter how carefully someone inside the mart gathered supplies, there was no way the sound of Uju stepping on the broken glass shards as he entered would be the loudest noise. In other words, it meant there was no one there.
“Is anyone here?!”
Still, just in case, he shouted once to announce his presence, then let out a small sigh and headed toward the storage room whose location he had confirmed last time.
First, he left the storage room door slightly open so he wouldn’t miss the sound of anyone coming from outside. Then he rummaged through the storage room, found some sweets that weren’t snacks, and tore open the bag. He planned to fill his stomach with things like these while he waited.
And he had no intention of killing time meaninglessly. He had brought his phone because he’d assumed from the start that the chances of running into someone immediately upon arrival were low.
He hadn’t brought it to play mobile games, but to look up the news once again. Even if there had been no news yet, a full day had passed since the incident occurred. By now, it wouldn’t be strange for people outside the barrier to start feeling that something was off, so if he roamed around the internet, he might be able to obtain even the tiniest bit of information.
“What’s the point of trapping people and letting the internet work… hm. Hm……”
Should he call this fortunate? When he entered a major portal site, the very first news item on the main page was about the current situation.
He swallowed his snack and read through the news intently.
He searched not only the first portal site he had visited, but others too… that is, portal sites around second or third place in popularity, and on top of that, even trashy little news sites that turned online gossip into articles. Surprisingly, he was able to obtain more information from the latter.
Since they wrote articles by simply spreading things as they were without fact-checking, conversely, they provided raw information as-is.
‘As expected, it’s not a Gate Break.’
He had been more than half certain that would be the case, but having it shoved in his face as fact like this still made him feel somewhat unsettled.
In any case, when he pieced together the information from the news, it was like this.
Something opaque had covered major cities across the entire Earth that met a certain population threshold. It could not be confirmed even by satellite imagery. For now, five cities in South Korea were said to have been isolated. Other countries were apparently in similar situations, but details such as the numbers were still unavailable.
He had expected as much since the internet worked well enough for Uju to be using it now, but it seemed phone calls were possible from inside as well.
An extremely small number of people had apparently awakened superpowers and were claiming to have been chosen by gods. This was probably referring to the status window that Uju could also see right now. Then were the superpowers something like a [Unique Skill]? He suspected they might be the thing one could obtain after completing the mission given by the 【King of the 72 Legions】.
Whether they had possessed them from the start or their missions had simply been easy, he could only envy those bastards.
‘Is there any other information I need to remember? ……Huh?’
He absentmindedly clicked on a newly posted article, and it contained extremely important information.
Surprisingly, an online cafe for survivors had already been created. Since people without status windows had no way of knowing that this situation would last for six days, it seemed to have been made under the pretext of exchanging information for survival.
Of course, there was no guarantee it would truly end after six days, but for now, what was being shown right before his eyes said so, so he had no choice but to believe it.
In any case, since only a single day had passed, the site wasn’t widely known and apparently had few members… but if he came up empty here today, joining that place, pretending to be a good person, and looking for women under the guise of rescuing them didn’t seem like a bad idea.
If he uploaded a video of himself shooting goblins to death with a gun or something like that, women begging him to help them would line up. Then he could just pick a reasonably pretty one.
“Haha…”
If that was the case, didn’t he have nothing to worry about anymore? The tension drained right out of him.
Uju no longer bothered paying attention to hear sounds from outside and comfortably ate his sweets. His mindset had changed to, if someone came, good; if not, whatever.
Few people wanted to die. It was fair to say there were none. The people who survived would be making their own plans to stay alive. He had made too much of a fuss, thinking that if he couldn’t get a woman, he would have to stick it in a man.
“Yeah, it’s not like people have to die once to not want to die.”
Uju leisurely searched for information until his phone was just about to run out of battery, then got to his feet.
“Tsk.”
In the end, no one came, so it had been a wasted trip, but he wasn’t resentful or irritated. He had found another method. He simply smacked his lips once and left the storage room.
However, even his steps on the way back were not light. He desperately wanted them to be, but he couldn’t allow that, not knowing where these damn goblin bastards might be hiding and causing trouble.
If there were no goblin poison-darters, he wouldn’t be scared at all, since the stupid bastards would come charging while screaming… but as if proving that poison-darters weren’t called sinister poison-darters for nothing, they were the only ones who didn’t shout when attacking. So in the current situation, when he didn’t know whether he could obtain another antidote potion, they could be called the scariest ones.
As Uju moved slowly while staying on guard like that, he suddenly realized something strange.
‘Wait. But why does my knowledge apply?’
The current series of events was not the Gate Break Uju had known. Then why were the goblins he knew appearing, with exactly the same traits as the common knowledge Uju possessed?
“Kyaaaaaaah!!”
“……A woman’s scream!”
Uju’s brief thoughts were cut off by the sudden sharp scream. There was no need to wonder what kind of situation it was. A woman’s scream—that was enough.
As luck would have it, the scream had come from the direction he had been walking, so he immediately broke into a run.