Chapter 103: 103: The Major Antagonist Arrives

[Today’s release count: 3/3]

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Ivan shrugged. "Guess I’ll just have to hope the next fantasy world has what I need."

Overall, he was pretty satisfied with what he’d gained in Sweet Home. His healing, strength, and speed had all improved. Plus, aside from the gluttony boost, both Adaptive Self-Healing and Heart Engine had real potential for growth.

Meanwhile.

Seo Yi-kyung, who had just returned from the hospital, tracked down Cha Hyun-soo. Yeah, she had somehow survived.

Thanks to the documents her husband left behind, she now understood this apocalypse didn’t just pop up out of nowhere.

Infected people weren’t hopeless either. If they survived fifteen days, they could become something special.

She walked straight up to him and sliced the back of his hand with a knife.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Cha Hyun-soo asked, staring at her in confusion.

Seo Yi-kyung didn’t answer. She grabbed his hand and watched the wound close up at an insane speed.

"What was your first symptom? Nosebleed? Passing out? When exactly did it start? Give me the exact date."

"Huh?"

She kept pressing him for more details about his symptoms after infection, but the answers left her disappointed. Cha Hyun-soo couldn’t remember the precise day he got infected.

"Why are you asking me all this?"

"Because other people are fighting hard against turning into monsters. The government is experimenting on them, trying to find a way to stop the process from getting worse." Seo Yi-kyung told him everything that happened with the military and admitted she had already given them Cha Hyun-soo’s information to save her own skin.

Cha Hyun-soo didn’t blame her. He just asked, "Experiments? Did they work?"

Seo Yi-kyung shook her head silently, tears in her eyes. She could only imagine the kind of torture her husband went through as a test subject.

That night.

Everyone had gathered to listen to Ahn Gil-seop tell stories when a disoriented man suddenly barged in. He ignored the scared group, grabbed food off the table, and started shoving it into his mouth like a starving animal. Then Seo Yi-kyung walked in behind him.

"Don’t worry. He’s just a deserter."

It was already late and the guy clearly wasn’t right in the head, so they decided to question the deserter properly tomorrow about what the hell had happened to him.

The next day.

The first thing Ivan did after waking up was throw on his white lab coat and head toward the elevator.

"Old friend," Ivan muttered as he pressed the button.

When the elevator reached the first floor and the doors slid open, the security guard appeared again. Only this time he had fully turned into a monster. He was still wearing his security uniform, clutching a running lawnmower, and stank like rotting meat.

Buzz buzz buzz!! His head spun a full 360 degrees, face completely covered in flies.

The monster raised the lawnmower to slice Ivan apart, but stopped halfway. It seemed to recognize him.

"Dr... Dr. Greevs..." it said in a stiff, broken voice.

Ivan hadn’t expected the old security guard to still have some sanity left. "You doing okay? Need me to check you out?"

"I want to kill them," the guard said. He didn’t want to hurt Ivan.

"They’re already dead. Cha Jin-ok is dead. A lot of people got killed by monsters," Ivan said calmly.

"Dead?" The guard froze for a second, then looked around in confusion. Buzz! The flies on his face suddenly flew away. With a loud clang, he dropped the lawnmower and leaned against the elevator wall before slowly sliding down into a squat.

Clearly, unlike the original story, he hadn’t completely lost his mind. He still remembered that Ivan was the only one who had helped him when others gave him shit.

"How... how did this happen?" His voice started soft, then grew louder until he was roaring.

Right after, Ivan watched the security guard cover his face with both hands and start sobbing like a broken man.

As the mutations on the guard’s body slowly faded away...

On the other side of the building, Seo Yi-kyung and Lee Eun-hyuk were questioning the deserter. "What exactly happened to you? What unit are you from?"

Suddenly, the walkie-talkie on the deserter crackled to life. Lee Eun-hyuk quickly grabbed it and pressed the button. Gunshots blasted through the speaker. The two of them exchanged a tense look. Shit just got real.

Seo Yi-kyung immediately went to find Cha Hyun-soo and Byeon Sang-wook with a serious face. She told them to tear down the SOS banner on the roof.

"Security uncle?" Yoon Ji-soo was drinking porridge when she spotted a familiar figure behind Ivan.

That’s right. Just like Ahn Sun-young who lost her child, the security guard had returned to a normal-looking human after regaining his sanity.

Right now he was drowning in guilt. If he hadn’t locked all the apartment passages, maybe so many people wouldn’t have died.

Ivan didn’t say anything as the conversation unfolded.

"It’s okay, uncle. This was all God’s will," Pastor Jung Jae-heon said, showing no blame toward the security guard. In his eyes, locking the gates hadn’t hurt anyone. It had actually protected them.

In the original story, he would’ve died together with the guard. That clearly wasn’t happening now.

"Here, drink something warm first."

Lee Eun-hyuk handed the security guard a bowl of hot porridge.

Suddenly, Kim Young-soo, who was watching from the window, spotted something. "Grandpa, look over there!"

He tapped Ahn Gil-seop’s shoulder. Ahn Gil-seop took the binoculars, looked outside, and after a few seconds passed them to Seo Yi-kyung. Her expression grew darker and darker as the military armored vehicle got closer.

"Are the soldiers here to save us?" Kim Young-soo asked.

Ahn Gil-seop turned to Seo Yi-kyung. "You do what you need to do. I’ll personally welcome our guests. You’ve never lived through chaotic times, so you don’t know. You can’t trust soldiers in a world like this."

Having survived special periods in history, Ahn Gil-seop knew exactly how terrifying soldiers could become once they lost discipline and purpose.

"I understand."

Down in the first-floor lobby, a man was pressed against the iron gate, peeking through the gap. When he saw the armored vehicle wasn’t slowing down at all, he stumbled back in panic. "Shit, they’re coming straight at us!"

Bang!

The second the words left his mouth, the armored vehicle smashed through the iron gate amid screams from the residents.

The men who jumped out didn’t look like soldiers. They looked like a pack of thugs.

Their leader, a scarred man, immediately spotted the deserter in the crowd. Without saying a word, he pulled out a knife and stabbed the guy in the gut, then stabbed him another seven or eight times.

"How you been?" Scarface asked before tossing the deserter to his men.

His subordinates ignored the deserter’s begging and chopped off his thumb. They handed it to Jung Yi-myung, who pressed the severed thumb against a black box, trying to open it with the fingerprint.

It didn’t work.

"Can’t open it," Jung Yi-myung said.

"Fuck. Failed again."

Scarface shot the deserter dead on the spot, then ordered his men to round up everyone in the apartment.

From Ivan’s guess, that black box probably contained secret military research documents. Of course, that shit meant nothing to him.

What actually interested him right now was Jung Yi-myung. As a special infected, the waves coming off this kid were surprisingly stable.

While the thugs were busy rounding up Byeon Sang-wook and the others, Ivan used his analysis ability on him.

"You, and all of you, get over here."

The thugs drew a red circle on the floor and started herding everyone inside it.

Ivan didn’t resist. He stood at the back of the group, quietly observing the bandits.

"Feels like this circle’s a bit bigger than the last one."

Ivan Greevs stood quietly at the back, watching everything unfold.

"Do I have to measure the square footage every fucking time?" the thugs joked, grinning like idiots.

Once the circle was drawn, one of them sneered at Ivan’s group. "This is your prison now. Don’t even think about stepping out."

A woman didn’t make it inside the circle fast enough. Scarface casually raised his gun and shot her dead.

The gunshot made everyone flinch and cram tighter into the center of the circle.

Cha Hyun-soo froze on the spot, staring at the body on the floor. After everything they’d been through, he had started seeing every survivor here as family. The shock hit him hard. His eyes slowly turned darker.

Then it got worse. Two thugs laughed as they pushed Han Doo-shik’s wheelchair and flipped it over, dumping him onto the ground. "Look at this. The cripple was hiding pretty well."

"It’s starting," Ivan muttered, eyes locked on Cha Hyun-soo who was on the verge of blackening out. At that moment, the analysis result appeared in front of him.

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Next Chapter- Going back to The Boys

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Read 12 Advance Chapters—P@t- Captain69