Chapter 10
Soccer Guy shouted again.
“I knew it! I was uneasy about being with someone like you from the start!”
I looked at the expressions of the people gathered in the room with calm eyes. Soccer Guy, his face red, continued to yell.
Mom’s face was turning pale at his words.
Park Ji-in couldn’t hide her expression of relief that I had become the target.
Even the suit guy, who had been apathetic throughout, was looking at me like I was a bug.
Even the mother hurriedly hugged her child, trying to get as far away from me as possible.
“Mom, why are you like that?”
“Come here, don’t go near…”
“…”
I tried to maintain a calm expression, hiding my bitter feelings.
“You ate all that food, didn’t you?! Huh?! What are you going to do now? What are you going to do?!”
“Noah, why did you really do that? Apologize to everyone quickly.”
“Will that be enough? We need a stronger punishment…”
“……”
I observed the people pressuring me with sharp eyes.
The reason they’re pushing me to such extremes now is because all the food has disappeared.
So, if food appears, their thoughts might change.
‘Especially if it’s food that someone has been hiding all along.’
I slowly opened my mouth.
“…Is it okay to stay in the same room as a thief?”
“What, what? Don’t say weird things just because you’re at a disadvantage… Hey!”
I lunged at Park Ji-in and pulled off the padded jacket she was wearing.
The expensive white padded jacket she hadn’t taken off even once in the past week.
Then, chocolate bars fell to the floor from the inside pockets of the jacket, which were bulging more than her body.
Different kinds of shock swept across people’s faces.
“How… How could you do this?!”
The child’s mother was the most surprised and angry.
She, who had eaten almost nothing but the broth from canned peaches for the past 5 days, howled like a beast in a desperate voice.
“How can you do this while pretending to be human!! We’re all struggling equally! How can you be so brazen and pretend not to know!”
“What, what! Would you have done any differently in that situation, Ahjumma?!”
Park Ji-in shouted frantically, with an expression mixed with embarrassment and viciousness.
“So why did you get taken advantage of like an idiot? In a situation like this, being stupid…”
“Wait. Wait. Then…”
The Mother muttered with crazed, shining eyes.
“That day. The ones who first explored the food storage room were… you, your mom, and that man!”
“Mom… What’s going on? Why are you like this…?”
The child shouted, anxious at her mother’s outburst, but she, already blinded by anger, couldn’t hear anything.
“You all, you all, you were in this together?! That—”
Thud—! Flop…
She couldn’t finish her sentence and collapsed right there.
“So noisy…”
Suit Guy, who appeared behind her, muttered roughly, holding something in his hand.
It was the multi-purpose knife from my survival kit.
‘What is this…?’
Even I hadn’t expected this situation at all.
In that moment of shock when I was frozen in place, the suit guy lunged at me instantly.
“Noah!”
Baek Yi-heon’s rough shout echoed through the bunker.
Suit Guy was already behind me.
He restrained me from behind and dragged me towards the wall.
Still unable to shake off the shock, I mumbled, opening and closing my mouth.
“You… You, from the beginning…?”
“No, from the middle.”
Suit Guy whispered in a chilling voice, his mouth close to my ear.
“I caught the three of them secretly sharing chocolate bars… I joined their group in exchange for keeping quiet.”
I finally came to my senses and quickly raised my head.
Only Baek Yi-heon showed a sign of surprise.
The other three people had composed expressions, as if they had anticipated this situation.
Four out of nine, half of them had been deceiving the rest.
‘No, if I include myself, that makes five.’
Once again, a deep-rooted hatred for humanity surged from the depths of my heart.
“You killed that glasses guy too, didn’t you?”
At my quiet words, Soccer Guy, who had been smirking unpleasantly, burst into laughter.
Mom bowed her head, her face pale blue.
“Yeah! He should have just slept quietly. Coming out at night unnecessarily… He made such a fuss when he found out we were hiding food.”
Soccer Guy said with a smug face.
“So we killed him, of course. One less mouth to feed.”
Soccer Guy suddenly pulled out a piece of metal from his pocket. It was a sharply ground can lid.
Looking at me, restrained, he licked his lips and added.
“This is actually better. We can reduce even more mouths.”
“Hey, you! Get on your knees!”
Suit Guy shouted at Baek Yi-heon, pressing the knife closer to my neck.
I felt a stinging sensation and hot blood trickling down my collarbone.
I swallowed hard and looked at Baek Yi-heon with tense eyes.
“……”
After glaring at the suit guy, the soccer guy, and me with terrifying eyes for a moment, Baek Yi-heon… slowly got on his knees.
With a body trained like steel, from a special forces background.
If he were to face them alone, these guys would be nothing.
I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood.
Yes. Now I understand.
There’s no way the morally upright male lead would have abandoned people and run away to survive alone, so how did he end up being the sole survivor?
It was probably because a slaughter for food broke out among them inside the bunker.
‘At this rate, everyone except the protagonist will die.’
Of course, that included me.
✦
“Hahaha! You’re nothing! Acting all high and mighty!”
The sound of Soccer Guy laughing loudly came from outside the room.
The sound of beating followed.
I was locked in a large room with my hands tied behind my back.
In the room, there was only the groaning aunt and her child crying beside her.
‘I never thought people would become a bigger threat than monsters…’
I underestimated human selfishness. It was my mistake.
Where could Baek Yi-heon be locked up?
I could hear them having a heated discussion in the corridor.
It was a discussion about how to deal with us.
Unsurprisingly, the words weren’t very pleasant. They were saying it was actually better to have fewer mouths to feed.
‘Damn it. I didn’t want to do this.’
Originally, if an extra does something they weren’t supposed to do from the start of the novel, it greatly distorts the original work.
This was an absolute rule of novels I learned from reading various survival stories.
So the plan was to run to the shelter and stay as quiet as possible until the novel ended, but…
‘I have no choice.’
Having made my final decision, I crawled on the floor with my arms tied behind my back.
A wooden stick in the corner.
I painfully grabbed it behind my back and started tapping the bunker floor with the stick.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
✦
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