Chapter 2
The people shrouded in darkness all held their breaths in tension, staring at the closed door.
How strong were those tentacles? Could this steel door really withstand them?
For a while, the only sound in the shelter was the monster repeatedly hitting the door, unwilling to give up its prey.
However, those flabby tentacles seemed unable to break through the nuclear blast-resistant steel door.
When the door showed no signs of breaking no matter how hard the tentacles pounded it, the people finally began letting out the breaths they had been holding.
“It’s a relief we closed the door in time…”
“Otherwise, we’d all be dead…”
There were no words of gratitude directed at me for taking the action everyone avoided.
Instead, someone asked from the darkness.
“…Now what?”
“Does anyone have a light? I can’t see a thing in here.”
“What were those monsters?! A disaster alert just came out of nowhere…”
“Ah, that’s right, I have my phone!”
With those words, someone turned on their phone’s flashlight.
Soon, a beam of white light illuminated the narrow shelter corridor.
It was still too dim to make out faces, but there seemed to be around ten people.
I thought about the emergency rations in the shelter and my backpack.
Those were all prepared, assuming I would be alone here.
So if nearly ten people ate them, even eating sparingly, the food would run out in just a week.
‘Even if we endure the hunger somehow, water will be an issue…’
But my thoughts didn’t last long, as a woman suddenly emerged from the darkness and started yelling at me.
“You… You! What the hell was that just now?!”
A familiar voice. That irritable tone I knew too well.
“You… you! What the hell did you just do!”
A familiar voice. An irritable tone I knew well.
“Oh. You followed me?”
Frowning, I looked at the middle-aged woman pointing her finger at me, and the young woman clinging tightly to her side.
Well, since we fled from the same house, it’s not surprising they followed me.
They are my mother and step-sister, after all.
“This psychopath! In the end, in the end, you killed someone, didn’t you?! Just like your father!”
My mother lost her senses and viciously lashed out at me.
Her words made the people huddled behind us start murmuring.
“Psychopath? For real?”
“…Come to think of it, did you see her shove that guy earlier? Plus why has she been so calm this whole time?”
Ah, here we go again.
The familiar feeling made my expression settle into calm indifference.
“They say she’s a psychopath.”
“Really? How do you know that?”
“Why? You know that famous serial killer, right? ‘Devil Worshiper’ Yoo Hyun-min. Apparently, she’s his daughter.”
The world seems doomed, yet even in this world, I’m still that man’s daughter, the child of a murderer.
The bitter feeling made a wry smile form on my face.
“Look at her smiling at a time like this! You really, you really take after your father too much…”
Looking at my mother’s expression of deep loathing towards me.
“I should never have given birth to the likes of you! You ruined my life!”
Her reactions like this are so familiar that I don’t even feel anything anymore.
‘So we all should have just died out there?’
…I was about to open my mouth with a sullen retort when.
“Please stop.”
A low baritone voice echoed through the shelter corridor.
An inexplicable power in that voice made everyone who had been murmuring instantly seal their lips.
The man who had been tending to the fallen middle-aged woman in the depths of the shelter stood up and walked towards us.
Even in the dim shelter, the man was stunningly handsome enough to catch the eye instantly.
It was as if he alone had a spotlight shining on him from behind.
‘Huh?’
But the moment I saw the man, a chilling premonition pierced my chest.
“What, what did you say? Are you siding with her now?”
“If we hadn’t closed the door in time, we’d all have been caught by that monster’s tentacles.”
The curt military-like tone. The decisive actions for the greater good.
More than anything, that righteous character of not leaving the weak behind.
My mother and step-sister fell silent in the face of the inexplicable charisma he exuded.
“Are you all right?”
A clichéd, moral line that was the epitome of bland.
‘No way, no way…’
It can’t be. This can’t happen.
I stared blankly at the chillingly handsome man’s face, then forced my tightened jaw to move and barely got out of the question.
“By, by any chance, your name is…”
“Ah. …I haven’t introduced myself yet.”
The man muttered to himself, then flashed a smile with a breathtakingly handsome face and continued.
“I’m Baek Yi-heon.”
That distinctly protagonistic name that anyone would recognize.
With a pale face, I muttered under my breath.
“It can’t be…”
“…?”
I know this man. Or rather, I’ve read about him before.
<The Only Awakener in the Apocalypse>
Or ‘TOAA’ for short.
This man was the boring, moralistic protagonist of that apocalypse novel series.
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To me, someone called a psychopath, this world was sheer boredom itself.
“…It’s strange. I’ve had this feeling that this world will eventually be ruined.”
My mother mocked me, asking if I had a personality disorder with delusions, but at some point, I became strangely convinced of it.
So, I immersed myself in anything related to dystopias, apocalypses, and other survival stories, whether movies or novels.
My hobbies were collecting survival gear and scouting out survival sites like air-raid shelters.
Finding the empty nuclear shelter in the neighborhood was a stroke of luck.
I stocked it with food and imagined living there happily alone after all the humans died out.
A place without my murderer biological father, my contemptuous family, or gossiping people—it would probably be heaven.
<The Only Awakener in the Apocalypse> was also one of the many survival stories I had read.
The plot went like this:
One day, seven massive towers suddenly rose up in major cities around the world.
And the monsters pouring out from those towers brought humanity to the brink of extinction in an instant.
But of course, the title wasn’t <The Only Awakener in the Apocalypse> for nothing.
The protagonist, Baek Yi-heon becomes the first human to awaken transcendent power by making a contract with God to fight against the monsters.
From then on, it’s pretty predictable.
Like a hero, he subdues monsters, finds companions, topples the towers, and embarks on an adventure to save the remaining humans.
After closing the epic seven-volume novel series, my review was:
“Dreadfully boring.”
As someone who likes dark stories, the bland moral hero didn’t appeal to my tastes.
Nevertheless, I read it to the end because it was one of the rare stories with a bad ending.
After more than 10 years of adventure and challenges, the protagonist, Baek Yi-heon, ultimately fails to conquer the tower.
By the end, the protagonist dies, his companions die, and all the humans on Earth perish.
A complete extinction ending.
This was exactly the apocalyptic ending I had been looking for! The end of the world! The doom of humanity!
That’s what I had exclaimed…
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“I’m Baek Yi-heon.”
Now.
The flawlessly handsome man standing before me was introducing himself by that name.
The name of the protagonist from that human extinction novel, a bleak survival story.
“It can’t be…”
That the novel became reality?
Falling into shock, I blankly muttered while the man carefully watched me.
The man, who was watching me mutter in shock, asked in a low voice.
“And your name is?”
“Ah, I’m…”
Right. Since he stated his name first, I should properly introduce myself too.
Still in a bit of a daze, I muttered my reply.
“Noah. Yoo Noah.”
“Noah…”
He softly enunciated my name in his deep, mellifluous voice.
In the meantime, I recalled the plot of ‘TOAA’.
No matter how much I racked my memory, there was no mention of a character named ‘Noah’ in the novel.
If my name had been mentioned, I would have remembered it.
So, I was likely just an extra whose name wasn’t even referenced.
A world where humanity perished. That was exactly what I had wished for, so being an extra was fine. Rather, it was preferable.
But that’s not all.
‘Shelter.’
There was definitely a shelter in the latter part of the novel that no one knew about.
If I could just reach that shelter, even a worthless extra like me could surely survive.
That shelter was stocked with enough food to last ten years for one person.
However, that was all contingent on safely arriving at the shelter, and the problem was…
‘Did an air-raid shelter appear in the novel…oh…’
“When the ‘outbreak’ first happened, I was fortunate to find an air-raid shelter to hide in. Thanks to that, I survived.”
It seemed to be a scene where the protagonist was telling the heroine about his past.
“Back then, I hadn’t awakened yet, so I couldn’t even fight back against low-rank monster.”
“If you hadn’t awakened, how did you survive? Ah! You joined forces with the people in the shelter and escaped together, right?”
“No.”
“Huh?”
And the protagonist answered like this.
“…Besides me, everyone in that shelter died.”
Haha. Right, that’s right. I remember now. There was that bit in the early parts of the novel!
…Sh*t.
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Thank you for reading! ♡
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