January 15
By the afternoon of January 15, peace had finally settled over Kyoko's side. Most of the infected in the surrounding area had already drifted away from her residential block. With her survival pressure practically gone, Kyoko was now gleefully turning into a full-time scavenger, stripping the neighborhood clean and recycling everything she could get her hands on.
The mighty horde that had once filled the streets below, together with that overbearing Monarch-class infected, had vanished just like Fu Jian's vaunted army at the Battle of Fei River—an overwhelming force that had seemed invincible, only to collapse into nothing overnight.
And with the horde gone, poor Kyoko found herself facing an entirely different kind of suffering:
How was she supposed to loot and move all this stuff by herself?
It was a very luxurious kind of headache.
Most of the supplies in the complex were now hers for the taking, and the few scattered infected left behind were no longer a real threat. At this point, Kyoko already had everything she needed for early survival in the apocalypse. She lacked for neither weapons nor basic supplies, and what she had stockpiled was more than enough to support both her and Huaxiu for a long time. She had even solved the electricity problem by installing solar panels.
If not for the infected, her current life would have been almost perfect.
Meanwhile, on the other side, things were not going nearly so well for the trio.
Doris Christian, Miranda Christian, and Brent Hood—the three survivors of the shipwreck—had finally found a place to take shelter on land.
Before sunset, after a full day of travel, they managed to settle in a small hotel near the harbor. There were not many infected nearby, most likely because the earlier storm had simply blown a great number of them away. The few that remained were dealt with quickly by Brent, who cut them down in two or three strikes.
They took over the largest guest room, which had a balcony overlooking the pale blue sea. The ocean breeze carried the salty smell of the water inland, but after everything they had suffered, none of the three had the slightest fondness left for the sea.
What had started as a winter holiday had become a nightmare.
Miranda and her party of eight had traveled all the way from Italy to Hokkaido for vacation, only to run headlong into disaster. Of the guards who had come with them, only the bodyguard personally assigned to them by their mother remained.
When the infected attacked in the tourist district, they had fled in panic. Four people died along the way. Later, after finally finding a boat and attempting to make for the Tokyo region—believing there might still be a government-run safe zone there—fate played another cruel joke on them. A roaring tsunami had smashed their vessel apart. Another guard died. In the end, only the three of them were left, clinging to a lifeboat and a handful of emergency supplies as they drifted into the coastal waters off Fukushima.
Fortunately, the boat had stayed near shore. If the currents had dragged them out into the open ocean, they would have been done for.
They had traveled with excruciating caution, half-starved and freezing, avoiding large clusters of infected and sticking to remote roads wherever possible. That was the only reason they had managed to survive.
Now, though, the three of them had almost nothing left worth mentioning. Their once-expensive clothes were dirty, torn, and in terrible condition. Food was gone. The only water they had managed to find in the hotel kitchen amounted to less than half a bucket.
Weapons, at least, were not the problem.
They still had four handguns—Force 99/2002 pistols, the same model their bodyguard had carried. As for melee weapons, Japan's knife shops had effectively become open stockrooms. In a world like this, nobody was coming to enforce regulations anymore.
Without weapons, there was no way they could have escaped Hokkaido at all.
But using firearms was heavily restricted by circumstance. Leaving aside the matter of ammunition, their bodyguard had never been some sort of mercenary. Her guns had been for deterring ordinary people, not fighting a war. She had only brought four spare magazines at most.
And without suppressors, every gunshot was the equivalent of ringing a dinner bell.
The infected would come running toward whoever fired.
Inside the room, a campfire crackled. Doris, sick with a cold, sat wrapped in blankets near the flames, warming herself. Miranda was busy trying to tidy up their already miserable living space. Exhausted as she was, they had at least found temporary shelter, and that meant hygiene still mattered.
The hotel had already been picked over by panicked survivors. The place was a wreck. Brent had searched the front desk for a long time and found almost nothing—just some candy stuffed away in a drawer. The medicine cabinet was mostly empty bottles or damp stock that had already gone bad.
There was no ibuprofen. No acetaminophen. No aspirin. No fever reducers of any kind. And no other usable medicine either.
Going outside again that night was unrealistic. Even setting aside the infected, none of them knew the local layout. Wandering around blindly in the dark and stumbling into some hellish nest of monsters…
No. It was better to come back.
Otherwise the two young ladies would start to panic.
And so Brent returned empty-handed.
Even so, she still intended to say that she had found fever medicine.
At a time like this, they could not afford another emotional collapse.
A person's mental state mattered greatly in a disaster. A negative mindset and an optimistic one led to completely different outcomes. In that sense, the kind of cheerful, absurdly upbeat personality possessed by certain pink little mascot dragons would probably have been ideal for surviving the apocalypse.
Brent and the elder sister were holding together, more or less.
The younger sister was another matter.
Crushing the candy in her hand into powder, Brent prepared to use it as a temporary stopgap against the despair pressing down on them. Her heart felt heavy on the way back. She struggled with the lie even as she walked.
Doris was still half-delirious, weak to the point of collapse, her face flushed from fever. Miranda could only watch her sister suffer, powerless to do anything about it, and the helplessness tore at her.
The moment Brent came back, Miranda lit up with hope. She had not truly dared expect success, but Brent was carrying something in her hand.
Could it really be medicine?
"Miss, I found the medicine. Is the water boiled yet?"
Looking at Doris, who had already sunk into despair, Brent steeled herself and forced the lie out.
"Almost. Brent… you found some?"
"Yes, Miss. I found it."
Those words hit Miranda like a miraculous gift. She nearly jumped to her feet on the spot.
But when Brent saw the hope on Miranda's face, she could not bear to deceive her completely. She gave her a look instead—a clear signal that they needed to talk privately.
Miranda caught it immediately, and the two women stepped out onto the balcony, away from Doris.
The kettle on the boil had already begun to shriek, steam rising hard from beneath the lid.
"Miss… this was all I found downstairs."
Brent opened her hand.
What lay in her palm was wrapped in bright, colorful packaging.
It was obviously not medicine.
The last hope Miranda had been holding onto finally died. But in truth, she had never allowed herself much hope in the first place.
There was nothing to blame Brent for. In the situation they were in, there simply was not much that could be done. If not for this fiercely loyal bodyguard, both she and her sister would have died long ago.
"Don't blame yourself, Brent. We both already knew it would probably come to this, didn't we? We'll just have to keep going one step at a time. For now, we'll hide the truth from Doris. Dissolve the candy into the water and let her drink it. At least it'll give her some sugar…"
"…Understood."
Brent was moved by how understanding Miranda was. She herself was not the sort to forget kindness. If Miranda's parents had not taken her in all those years ago, she would likely have died somewhere in Africa.
They poured the boiled water over the crushed candy and set it aside on the table to cool to a drinkable temperature.
Dinner that night consisted of snacks they had found by chance in the room—items the hotel had stocked for high-end guests. In a small storage room nearby, they had even found wine.
But the place where they found it had quite a story attached.
While cleaning earlier, Miranda had discovered a small door between the master bedroom and the second bedroom. She herself had been too weak to open it, so Brent took over.
One kick sent the flimsy wooden door flying inward.
A wave of overwhelming stench came rolling out.
"So disgusting—what even is that? Cough! Cough—!"
"Something must've rotted in there. I'll check. Miss, please go back to the younger lady first—cough—!"
The smell of decomposition—a horrific mixture of hydrogen sulfide, putrescine, and other gases—surged out of the cramped storage room and nearly choked them both.
Holding her breath, Brent finally got a look inside.
It was a corpse, long dead, already grotesquely swollen with decomposition bloat.
The entire body was distended and misshapen, especially the face and abdomen. Black putrefactive fluid had spread across the floor. Judging by the uniform, it appeared to have been a hotel employee.
The body was covered in patches of corpse green, the discoloration beginning in the lower right abdomen and spreading across the skin, caused by hydrogen sulfide reacting with hemoglobin to form sulfhemoglobin. Trapped gases had raised blisters beneath the skin, and dark green marbling had spread along the veins. The eyes were clouded white, the globes bulging horribly from the sockets. At least, because it was winter and the space had remained sealed, there were no maggots or flies.
Even so, Brent quickly noticed that this little room was actually a storage area, and beyond the corpse, shelves of liquor still stood behind the glass.
Without hesitation—having already crawled through far worse battlefields in Africa—Brent grabbed several bottles of passable-looking wine. It was not that she liked drinking. But wine was liquid, and liquid meant survival. In the apocalypse, having anything to consume at all was already a blessing.
That night, wrapped in blankets, the three of them fell asleep together on the same large bed. Outside, the temperature slowly dropped. The fire in the room dimmed. A new day arrived.
January 16 had begun.
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 115)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter116)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter82)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter144)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 77
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 118
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 111
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 80
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 112
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 95
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 89
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player 53
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 61
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 65
Uma Musume: From Beginner 61
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 37
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