Chapter 55: What Was That Noise?
Wolffy wasn't joking around. He really did strip off every last piece of equipment on his body, disassembled it all into individual components, and began reassembling them at blistering speed.
The wolf's hands-on engineering skills were the real deal—every invention built from scratch with his own two paws.
If this guy had existed on Earth in a previous life…
He'd probably rank above Einstein.
As for the "fog generator" Wolffy had mentioned, it apparently wasn't all that difficult to build.
Because Ryū watched Wolffy finish roughly seventy to eighty percent of a backpack-sized machine in under an hour.
Whether it actually worked… only Wolffy would know.
Another thirty minutes of waiting. Then Wolffy tossed aside his screwdriver.
He wiped the sweat that had beaded across his forehead from sheer overwork.
On that scarred, narrow face of his—
A confident grin finally appeared.
"The Great Wolf King truly is a genius! Though honestly, a fog generator isn't that complicated in principle—it's fairly straightforward to build. The only real headache was not having enough proper parts, so I had to Frankenstein a lot of it together."
Wolffy fiddled with the boxy, backpack-sized machine.
He continued muttering to himself:
"But for producing a thick blanket of fog? Absolutely no issues. It'll probably break down after three or four uses, though."
Yukari smiled lightly at that.
"Three or four times should be more than enough, no?"
Ryū nodded.
"The total number of infected is only around forty to fifty thousand. If this machine can blanket a wide area in fog and we mix the serum into it, three or four rounds will do the job."
Ryū opened the Camera feed again and pinged the entire group.
* * *
RawrSoFierce: "@Everyone Wolffy's research is done! Next up: eliminating the zombie virus. Whether this works comes down to the next move."
RawrSoFierce: "Gotta say—in this entire mission, Wolffy carried the hardest as a first-timer. Bar none."
Kaguya-sama: "Agreed! When Wolffy-san gets serious, he really goes all out!"
RawrSoFierce: "The perfect house-husband wolf, after all. Good at everything except catching goats."
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: "Ara ara~ This one didn't expect to be riding coattails this time around. How… miscalculated of me."
RawrSoFierce: "Coattail-rider +1…"
Kaguya-sama: "Coattail-rider +1…"
Green Grasslands Wolf King: "Now, now—let's not sell yourselves short. Without Kaguya-sama's intel, we'd never have located the traverser that quickly."
Green Grasslands Wolf King: "Without Admin-dono's strategy, we wouldn't have come up with a virus solution that fast. And without Yukari-dono's Gap corridors, we couldn't have reached the site at all."
You had to hand it to Wolffy—he was genuinely humble. And he wasn't wrong, either.
Yukari and the others kept calling themselves freeloaders who'd just tagged along for the Points.
But in truth, each of them had pulled their weight—both visibly and behind the scenes.
Wolffy, who'd had a front-row seat to all of it, was perfectly aware.
He was simply one contributor among several.
RawrSoFierce: "Either way—if this works, that's 5,000 Points in the bank. Add the 2,000 from before, and we're sitting on 7,000!"
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: "7,000… finally back in four-digit territory!"
Kaguya-sama: "Hm? Yukari-nee-sama, didn't you do a Group Quest before? The reward was 3,000 Points, if I recall."
Kaguya-sama: "If you had 3,000 Points, why say you're 'finally' back in four digits?"
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: "Because this one already spent them all~"
Kaguya-sama: "Pfft… Is that so?"
RawrSoFierce: "My Points were cleaned out too. If this quest hadn't come along, I'd have been poverty-stricken for days—the kind of broke where your balance doesn't even hit triple digits."
Kaguya-sama: "Come to think of it, I blew through all my Points as well… lol~"
The Camera feed Ryū had shared quickly showed four viewers watching.
Which meant the others were lurking even if they hadn't said a word.
* * *
Ryū pulled his consciousness out of the Dimensional Chat Group and turned to Wolffy.
"The machine's ready to go, right?"
Wolffy nodded.
"Ready, Admin-dono."
Ryū grinned.
"Then let's take it outside for a test run."
If they wanted to lure every zombie in the area into a single mass, they needed to produce a sound loud enough to reach every corner of the quarantine zone.
Making a big noise was infinitely easier than developing a serum.
The group found an abandoned electronics shop, completely deserted.
They cleaned it out of every speaker it had.
Then handed the lot over to Wolffy for a full overhaul.
The resulting array of Wolffy-modified mega-speakers was hauled to a large open clearing within the zombie-infested zone—spacious enough to hold a massive crowd.
Once the speakers were wired up, everyone put in high-grade noise-canceling earplugs.
Then Ryū pressed a green button.
A terrifying wall of sound erupted from the modified speakers.
Even through top-of-the-line earplugs, the noise was anything but ordinary.
* * *
The sonic blast carried across a ten-kilometer radius. The SDF soldiers guarding the quarantine perimeter, the police, the foreign research teams—every last one of them heard the bizarre sound.
And the zombies inside the zone? Tens of thousands of them erupted into a frenzy simultaneously.
"What's happening?! Why—why is there a sound like that coming from inside?!"
An elderly American professor stood slack-jawed with shock.
He couldn't help muttering to himself:
"Are there survivors in there? Good God… someone actually stayed alive in that place for over two weeks? Or does this mean they have some kind of natural resistance to the virus?!"
"Damn it… if only we could capture a specimen, we'd have so much to study. But ever since that SDF squad got wiped out trying to grab one, those useless…"
He cursed under his breath, frustration written all over his face.
A zombie specimen would be captured eventually—once they ran out of other options.
But every second of delay in studying this bizarre new "species" felt like a personal loss.
The SDF's response wasn't slow, either. They'd also realized something was off.
"Move, move, move! Get some drones in the air! I want long-range aerial footage, now!"
☆☆☆
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