Apocalypse Hunter

On their way back, Leona poked Zin’s side and said, “You were pretty hard on them, Mister. They’re just kids.”

“… Did you forget what you said?” Zin retorted by saying that it was she who cursed at them, but Leona just shrugged it off.

“But I’m a kid just like them.”

She was saying that it was OK for her to be hard on them because she was a kid herself. Zin laughed at her ridiculous logic.

“Kids heading in the wrong direction should be straightened out fast.”

The children needed to be woken up from their fantasy in order to prevent many people from getting hurt. Leona nodded in agreement.

“Of course, it’s too late for you, but there is still hope for those boys.”

“Why are you picking a fight with me again?” asked Leona with her face bright red, and Zin just grinned. She didn’t realize that Zin was teasing her because he found her reactions funny. She was still just a kid, after all.

The proposal turned out to be a waste of time. And since they weren’t going to take the job, it seemed that their time in Shane was coming to an end.

“It bothers me a little,” Leona mumbled nervously. Zin looked at her, and she sighed in grief. “I’m sure you know it, too.”

“What?”

“Children can be dangerous when they’re angry.”

“That is true.” He nodded and glanced at Leona. Whenever she genuinely shared her feelings–regardless of whether she was upset or not–it scared Zin.

Of course, what they were talking about now was something different.

He knew very well that when you believed in something as a child, it didn’t change easily, and that they often thought nothing of giving up their lives if it would serve their beliefs.

“Whatever happens, it wouldn’t involve us,” said Zin as he put his hand on Leona’s shoulder. Wishing that to be true, she nodded.

—————-

After Zin and Leona left, the boys were silent. No one could say anything, not only because they were angry at the fact that the honor they believed in was ripped apart, but they also felt humiliated that they couldn’t get a word in before being hushed by a gun. To be more accurate, the boys kept their mouths shut because their boss, Turian, was quiet.

After a long silence, Turian said cooly, “Those cowards had some mouth on them.”

The boys nodded in agreement. With that, everything Leona and Zin had said turned into an excuse for their cowardice.

“Right? Why didn’t they just fess up to being afraid rather than saying all that?”

“Yeah, didn’t he seem like a fake hunter?”

“The hunter we saw last time wasn’t like him.”

“If only we had brought our guns… We could’ve killed them.”

Once Turian spoke, the boys,one after another, started to rally against Zin and Leona. The hunter didn’t take the job because he was afraid. Therefore, everything he said was invalid.

People had always learned to justify themselves this way. Denying the gang was denying their essence, and that was near impossible for the children.

The children slowly recovered their confidence by saying ludicrous statements bordering on cognitive dissonance. By joking around with each other and laughing, little by little, they bounced back from the humiliation the hunter had made them feel.

“We can do it on our own,” declared Turian.

“Send someone to the sheriff and Shandoo. We’re going to open the vault and drive out the Reaver assholes tonight.”

Sadly, rather than realizing the contradiction, the children of the gangs overcame the contradiction to carry out their will. There was one thing that Zin had misjudged: the children had not banded together after the Group had taken over Shane.

The kid gangs had always existed. Their resources were a lot more advanced than what one would expect from street lords. They had real weapons. The only reason they couldn’t shoot Zin and Leona was because those were stored somewhere else.

The adults’ weapons had been taken away, but ironically, the children–who were under relatively less surveillance–had kept theirs. The kid gangs were the only gangs in Shane that had weapons.

“This means war,” said Turian in a grave tone, and no one laughed. With serious facial expressions, all the boys nodded. Whatever the reason or logic, the children had decided to fight for their honor.

—————

Upon closer inspection, the gangs were Shane’s ruling class, and there were only a small number of them. Most kids were the children of merchants and farmers, and as the children of their underdog parents, they had studied how power dominated.

The strong dominated the weak, and the strong in Shane were the gangs. Having learned from their parents who grovelled at the feet of the gangs, those children also grovelled to the children of the gangs.

The number of children in the gangs was small, but the civilian children were many. However, the power structure of the adults had naturally passed down to the children, and the gangs’ children became the leaders of all children.

They knocked around any kid who was annoying or disrespectful, and no one could say anything.

Even adults could not get involved in their world.

The gangs’ children hung out together and talked about honor, but underneath the surface, it was a matter of survival.

The gangs ruled the adults, and the gangs’ children ruled the children. However, when the Group entered Shane, that power system was completely disintegrated. Still, the adults couldn’t challenge the gangsters due to their deep-seated fears, and although they thought about revenge, they couldn’t actually carry it out due to the Reaver’s surveillance.

The children, on the other hand, had had a relatively short time to learn fear. In the end, children were physically similar to each other, whether they were in gangs or not.

The underdogs had become equals, and the children who had been under control quickly realized that they were a majority.

The revenge of the underdogs was quite cruel. The children of the weak began to band together, and whenever they caught one of the gangsters’ children walking alone, they swarmed and attacked them viciously. Some children had broken arms and legs, and some were killed and buried in secret.

Once the new power structure began to take shape, a class system emerged among the weak kids and the children of the gangs were forced to stay put in their hideouts.

The reason the children of the three gangs were monitoring the ground around their hideouts wasn’t because of the other gangs, but because they were afraid of the kids they had treated with contempt in the past.

They had to hide from the underdogs, who were constantly seeking revenge, and travelled in groups in order to protect themselves from attacks.

“Hey! The little rice pups are passing by. Get out of the way.”

“Yes, yes, my brothers! Are you here? Safe travels to you!”

The children who couldn’t even look at them straight in the eye before were taunting them now. The children of the gangs were furious, but couldn’t lay a finger on them.

Their numbers weren’t high enough for the gangs’ children to dare to dream of revenge, even when one of their members was lynched.

The bottom-dog had become the top dog.

When the strong become weak, they cannot help but dream of being the top dog again. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to breathe in response to what they had done. Some were already dead, so honor this and honor that was just a mere cover-up.

They had to fight in order to survive. They had to make the city their own once again. Even if they were going to die after successfully taking over the city, they had no choice but to choose that path.

The Group merely ruled, but too many things had changed in Shane. The existence of a unified ruler, alone, had fundamentally changed the world.

“Are you ready?”

The three gangsters who had gathered in the abandoned building exchanged glances with each other under the night sky. There had been a long history of animosity and fighting between them.

What united them now was that they were in a weakened position. They also shared the reality that the adults were afraid of revenge and were hanging out in the basement of their homes, shooting up the drugs they had hidden in despair. There was no hope for the adults.

The heads of the two other gangs nodded to answer Turian. Turian was the youngest here, but he was the most determined.

It was Turian who had united the other two gangs. The leaders of the other two gangs, Shandoo Tribe and Sheriffs, were taller than Turian, but, deep inside, they respected him.

If they were to succeed in taking Shane back, they might split up again, but based on the way things were going right now, unification also seemed possible.

The gangs’ children were fed up with the war just the same. There was a growing sense in everyone’s mind that there was no reason not to have a grand reconciliation.

The sense of comradery they felt as the underdogs was opening the children’s minds.

Everyone was armed with the weapons they had hidden. The weapons they had were not single-shot, high-wire guns, but something similar to the M1s or the Mosin-Nagant, which could fire multiple shots.

They could’ve killed any child who threatened them with a gun, but since it was clear that they would get arrested by the Reavers if they were to shoot someone, they saved the use of their guns to the very end.

And that end was now.

When the adults fought, the children had hated each other, but by sharing the same crisis, they had developed a sense of comradery. Each of them exchanged glances with one another under the collective delusion that they were doing something noble.

In the moonlight, Turian stretched out his hands with a gun on his shoulder.

“Today, we are going to reclaim our land.”

“Let’s do it.”

“I had no idea we would be doing this together.”

“No one could have guessed. However, let each of us put aside our differences for now…”

The three of them joined hands, and the surrounding children watched as if mesmerized by the scene. After holding each others’ hands together for a while, Turian said, “Now, I’ll go over the plan.”

The war was real now.

—

“So, we need a safety measure for dealing with Asura–”

‘Ba–Bang! Bang!’

Jin and his party, who were talking to each other in the middle of the night, lost their words when they heard a distant gunfire.

‘Rat-tat-tat-tat! Bang! Bang!’

As if that was just the beginning, the sound of gunshots started coming from all over the place. Zin mumbled with a frown, “… Oh, Christ!”

“What could it be?” Ramphil went over to the open window and looked around.

‘Rat-tat! Bang!’

All around, were sounds similar to beans getting pan-fried over a stove.

“It’s an attack! Get the tools!”

“Get the citizens to safety!”

“Come on, move!”

The Reaver guards appeared on the street one by one, and everyone looked around with stiff faces. Leona, who had been sleeping, came running down with her disheveled hair.

“Wh–What? Did it start?”

“I think so.”

“What is this about?”

Zin quickly explained the children’s plans for a coup, and Ramphil’s eyes narrowed.

“Well, that’s ridiculous.”

‘Rat-tat-tat! Bang!’

Regardless of whether it was an effective plan or not, it was happening.

“I can’t believe they have weapons…”

Because his gun had silenced the kids, he had thought they had been poorly armed. He had misjudged the situation and he had had no idea that they would start this daring attack.

It turned out that it was Leona who had correctly predicted the situation. Leona had seen something that he had failed to see.

She knew how foolish and stupid people could be.

‘Kaboom!’

“They have chipbusters, too?”

The children not only had guns, but they also had chipbusters, which could blow up the entire metropolitan area.

“What do we do?” asked Leona. Zin remained silent for a moment. The Reavers on the street started heading in the direction the gunshots were coming from and getting shot by a flash of bullets from the roof of the building.

“Aah!”

A bullet hit a Reaver’s thigh, just missing an artery. The Reaver collapsed, and Zin noticed a young boy on the roof of the building aiming at his next victim.

Anyone could shoot a gun, but hitting a target wasn’t so easy. It seemed like the boy had practiced shooting many times.

The boys’ shooting skills were on point, but the Reaver troops began to retaliate.

‘Rat-tat-tat-at!’

People held their breaths inside their houses. Once his location was exposed, the boy was shot by an assault rifle instantly, and he fell off the building with a huge hole in his body.

‘Thunk!’

The boy’s corpse contorted in a strange manner, and when the Reavers flipped it over, they grimaced.

“It’s a freaking kid.”

“What the hell?” muttered the Reaver unable to believe that a child was involved in that chaos. He isolated the fallen soldier and began first-aid treatment.

“It’s a mess.”

Just as it was with hunting, the ones who struck first had the advantage in war. The mere fact that the children began their attack on the exposed enemy–even if their overall conditions were insufficient– was extremely advantageous for them.

The number of Reavers that controlled Shane was only a hundred in total, and the number of the three gangs was about that as well. Even though the Reavers’ firepower was superior, the children, born and raised here, could effectively use the terrain, including Shane’s alleys and routes that moved through the abandoned buildings.

The children, who were born and raised here, versus the ones who controlled the unfamiliar city with high-powered weapons. It was hard to say who had the advantage, and this wasn’t Zin and his team’s war, so there was no reason to fight for either side.

“We better just watch–” Zin stopped talking abruptly. “Something’s coming this way.”

The change in Ramphil’s eyes indicated that he understood. When Zin pointed to the wall by the door, everyone understood it, and they pressed their bodies against the wall near the door. Leona grabbed her weapon, and Zin, too, took out his Saiga shotgun.

‘Tak-tak-tak’

Leona could hear a few footsteps coming up the stairs, and she suddenly remembered that she had let the children know where they were staying.

“It’s the children. Three of them.”

Because of the relatively light sound of the footsteps, Zin could tell who was coming. While the children planned the coup, they had also prepared a small revenge on the hunter and his teammate who had insulted them.

Since they had their backs against the wall, they could avoid getting shot. As if to say ‘let’s wait and see what our opponents are going to do,’ Zin held up his hand to silence everyone. Their opponents weren’t just simple gang kids anymore. They were enemies armed with guns.

Then, the enemy swiftly went into action.

‘Crreeak…’

As soon as the lockless door opened quietly, something rolled in through it.

‘Tk, tk, tk…”

It had a blue gleam emanating from it, and it was clear that it was about to explode any minute. The enemy had chosen to blow up the room to pieces rather than take them down by force. It was a very wise, and at the same time, deadly tactic.

“Fuck!” Leona was first to react with her voice, and the next person to move was Ramphil.

‘Whoop!’

Ramphil snatched the chipbuster in front of him with animal-like reflexes and threw it precisely out the window. It was a perfect defensive move with no wasted movements.

‘Ba-Ba-Bababam!’

The chipbuster that flew out of the window exploded and shook the air. With no time to react to Ramphil’s quick response, Zin looked at Leona.

Leona understood and nodded. Zin kicked the door and went outside, and Leona followed behind him right away.

Before the three children–who were far from the door to escape the explosion and didn’t expect anyone to come through the door–could even grab their weapons…

‘Boom! Boom!’

‘Bang! Bang!’

The Saiga flared twice and blew off the head of one child and the shoulder of another, and Leona put two bullets into the other boy, one in his philtrum and the other in his neck.

Two children died before they could even scream, but the child with his shoulder blown off started to scream.

“Ah! Aah! M-My arm!”

The child, whose right arm was completely detached because his shoulder was blown away, had lost his gun and was flailing with his feet in the air.