"Holy shit, it's f*cking freezing."
Soft daylight slipped in through the window and filled the pretty girl's room.
Hit directly by the light, Kyoko finally opened her eyes, revealing gleaming golden irises. She parted her lips and let out a long yawn, her short black hair a complete mess from sleep.
"Ah… ahhh… I'm exhausted."
Her whole body felt limp and weak, like she had just come back from partying all night.
The moment Takashiro Kyoko stretched a hand out from under the blanket, the cold inside the room startled her fully awake. Wrapped in her bedding, she hurried over to check the thermometer built into the clock.
"Seven degrees Celsius indoors? Did the people at the heating company all drop dead?!"
Still cursing, Kyoko dressed as fast as she could.
The blanket fell back onto the bed, exposing the girl's pale body. Shivering, she pulled her clothes on starting from her underwear, not stopping until she had even stuffed herself into a thick down jacket.
Frozen to the bone, Kyoko swore she would never sleep naked again.
Once fully bundled up, she checked the electric meter and the faucets in the apartment, only to discover that the heating had stopped. The water was off. The power was out too.
She snatched up her phone and frantically checked her messages.
"No way… it's the seventh? I slept for a whole week?"
The time on the phone, along with the content of the messages, left the just-awakened Kyoko utterly stunned.
"Do I really sleep that deeply? I just went to sleep naturally, and when I wake up seven days later the world's already ended?"
A bad feeling hit her at once. She looked through the huge pile of missed calls on her phone, but when she tried to call back, she discovered there was no signal.
The official apocalypse warnings on the phone stopped on the second. Kawano Chiyo's call had come in on the first, and it included a voicemail.
"Kyoko, don't go to the Tokyo shelter. It's over here. There's… garbled text… garbled text—sorry, Kyoko. There's no way for me to get back to Fukushima and save you. I got on a boat headed for Hawaii. If you're still alive, come there."
Reading that, Kyoko felt a headache coming on. Out of absolutely nowhere, the apocalypse had arrived.
Even having lived two lives, she still wasn't even thirty-six years old in total, and this was a lot for Miss Kyoko to deal with.
"Looks like Japan collapsed fast. As long as Sis Chiyo can keep herself alive, that's enough. Anyone who still has the spare capacity to rescue other people in a situation like this must be some kind of god."
As for the fact that Kawano Chiyo had simply run for it, Kyoko didn't really have anything to say. She could understand it. When even the government couldn't handle a catastrophe like this, what could one middle-aged woman possibly do?
She looked out the window.
The snow-covered earth looked like a blank canvas, one whose main composition was made of mutilated corpses, blood, and the wreckage of vehicles.
In the distance, a few fires that the heavy snow had not yet extinguished still burned, adding color to the scene. Around the flames, blurry figures moved about. Maybe they were warming themselves.
The streets were a complete disaster. Looking farther out, she could see hundreds—no, thousands—of monsters wandering aimlessly.
A full apocalyptic landscape spread before the eyes of Takashiro Kyoko, who had just slept through an entire week.
At the sight of it, the first thing she thought was that this shitty world had finally gone to hell, and the apocalypse fantasies she used to daydream about had finally come true.
Then she remembered that all the comforts of modern civilization were gone too. The convenient life where she could stay indoors and enjoy products from all over the world without ever leaving home was over.
"Mr. Phone, Mr. Computer, the internet… and all my online friends… I'll miss you. Ugh…"
"Seriously? Two lives, and I still get screwed over at eighteen in both of them? I really can't get past this age, huh?"
She was on the verge of tears, cursing inwardly.
Grumble all she wanted, though, she still carefully sorted through the pitifully small amount of information she had.
Before doing that, she thoroughly checked the apartment, looked outside again, locked the security door, and only then returned to her bedroom.
"Source of infection unknown. Multiple modes of transmission."
Knowing it would be hard to keep charging her phone in the future, Kyoko dug out a notebook. While scrolling through her phone, she copied down the important information by hand.
"Airborne transmission, bodily fluid transmission, aerosol transmission, animal carriers… early symptoms resemble a cold: dizziness, fever, unconsciousness. During this phase, antibodies may develop. If antibody production succeeds, all negative symptoms are removed."
"Hah. Weren't those exactly the symptoms I had not long ago?"
At that point, Kyoko recalled how she had felt before passing out. No wonder she had slept for so long. While she was unconscious, her immune system had apparently been fighting the virus for dear life.
A chill ran through her at the thought. Luckily, fate had been on her side and she had made it through.
She kept reading and continued taking notes.
"There are also asymptomatic carriers. In the middle stage, subjects become violently irritable, feel less pain, and develop an intense craving for living beings. In the late stage, they are fully transformed into monsters, lose all humanity, and attack all living things in a frenzy, violently biting prey. Those bitten are almost guaranteed to be infected."
"Ugh… and there are all these mutated strains too."
The descriptions of those mutant types reminded Kyoko of the apocalypse stories and games from her previous life.
Hopefully the mutations would not be too ridiculous. But if even the government had already gone into exile, then there was no point clinging to naïve hopes about these monsters.
About thirty minutes later, Kyoko had organized all the information she had and finally put down the notebook.
Having slept for seven days, she was both starving and thirsty. She usually lived on delivery food, so she did not keep much food stocked at home. The fridge, on the other hand, had been packed with drinks.
But she had been drinking through them the whole winter break without restocking, so she had no idea how much was left.
She walked into the kitchen and opened the powerless refrigerator. The last bit of cold air inside made its escape.
"One, two, three, four… eighteen. Still eighteen bottles of happy water."
Kyoko casually grabbed one and chugged it. After refueling on sugar, she felt full of strength again. She wanted more, and didn't stop until she had downed four bottles in a row.
After setting the remaining cola back in place, she took inventory of the food in the kitchen.
"Mm… yeah, this already smells off. The remaining fresh stuff is definitely no good anymore."
Aside from the drinks, she had twelve packets of instant noodles left, two packs of pickled mustard greens, four vacuum-sealed chicken legs, and just one can of beef sauce.
She dealt with the spoiled ingredients next, stuffing them all into a plastic bag. She had a feeling they might come in handy later.
"If I ration it carefully, this food should last three days. There's also a bag of candy in the room, plus the water dispenser and one spare bottle of water. Water should be enough for the next few days too."
Looking at her supplies made her feel a little safer. She also kept a small stash of medicine at home. At the very least, she would not have to walk straight outside and face unknown dangers immediately.
Things out there had to be awful. Not to mention anything else, from the kitchen window she had just seen that the apartment across the central air shaft was a total mess, and she could hear faint growls from somewhere nearby.
The place she lived in was an apartment building about twenty stories high, with four units per floor. Assuming three people per household, that meant roughly 240 people in this building alone—and the real number was probably even higher. There were too many uncertainties.
And her apartment stood right by a major intersection, surrounded by dense residential neighborhoods.
Looked at that way, this place was a hellhole.
Even if some people had fled, there would still be others hiding in their apartments, fantasizing that they could survive.
And when those people gradually turned into infected…
their sweet little homes would become prison cells for the walking dead.
Sooner or later, any survivors' food and water would run out. Going outside would become unavoidable. And when they finally opened their doors, if infected came lunging at them right away…
Yeah. That would be one hell of a surprise.
Kyoko glanced at the time and saw that it was already two in the afternoon. After a moment's thought, she decided to go out and scout around. She needed to plan ahead. There were far too many unknowns waiting in the future.
So she set her sights on the apartments on her own floor and the floor above. She lived on the fifteenth floor. Under normal circumstances, only actual residents should be up this high—unless something unusual had happened, monsters probably would not climb that many flights just to get here.
That was a theory based on the zombie fiction from her previous life, of course, so it was hardly reliable.
She had no way of knowing exactly how real infected behaved, but this cautious plan seemed like the best option for now.
Outside the building, there were definitely things even harder to deal with.
Before heading out, Kyoko went to her bedroom. She lifted the bed board and revealed several objects wrapped in black cloth.
"So the stuff I bought years ago is finally going to be useful."
As she unwrapped them, four blades of different lengths came into view. She might be a shut-in now, but she had once been the captain of her school's kendo club. It was only after her parents died that she had gradually turned into the person she was now.
She had always liked watching survival channels and had bought gear herself: more than ten cold weapons, a stab-resistant vest, a set of fishing tools, a recurve bow, a chest rig, a waist pack, a tiny crude drone with a camera, and various survival gadgets.
In truth, most of her money had gone into this kind of thing, at least until Kawano Chiyo found out and made her cut back a little.
Over her down jacket she strapped on the stab-resistant vest. Given the cramped indoor environment, she chose a wakizashi with a fifty-centimeter blade and a total length of seventy-five centimeters, along with a dagger and a length of wire. She slung on a backpack and put on tactical gloves. She left the chest rig and waist pack behind. She was only checking nearby apartments, so there was no need to bring that much.
She peered through the peephole. Nothing unusual. Tightening her mask, she set a helmet on her head and lowered the visor. After mentally preparing herself, she opened the door.
With a creaking groan, the heavy security door swung open.
There were no infected wandering in the hall. Apartments 1501 and 1503 both had their doors shut tight, while the door to 1504 stood open. The stairwell door was closed, and the elevator was dead because of the blackout.
A foul stench hung in the air, so strong that even her mask could not block it. Following the smell, she saw that the liquid oozing out from under the door of 1504 was the culprit.
Looks like she would have to check 1504 first, though she had originally planned to go to 1503. Really, whichever apartment she chose would be a mystery. Even after living in this building for years, she did not know any of her neighbors.
She gripped the sword with both hands, holding it horizontally so she could kill any infected in a single strike—as long as there were not too many of them.
She was afraid to make noise. She did not want to attract more infected and create a situation she could not handle.
Stepping lightly through what was probably corpse fluid, she pushed the door open and took her stance at the entrance. Honestly, this was a gamble. Entering like this without knowing the situation was not safe at all.
But contrary to her expectations, nothing lunged at her.
The liquid on the floor came from a highly decomposed corpse. The body had been chewed into an unrecognizable mess; it was impossible to tell whether it had been male or female. The wounds did not look as though they had been made by teeth. They looked more like chunks had been scooped out with some sort of circular mold.
Bulging eyes. A distended abdomen. The corpse was bloated to an advanced stage, with putrid fluids leaking everywhere.
To most people, the sight would have been horrifying. But to Kyoko, who had read piles of forensic books and even dissected animals before, it was child's play. The smell of decay was disgusting, sure, but after being assaulted by canned surströmming not long ago, she was barely fazed.
Even though it was a fellow human being, Kyoko stood there almost without emotion, calmly inspecting the corpse.
"These wounds look like holes bored into fruit by insects."
Each of the palm-sized pits looked grotesque enough to make her think of worms tunneling through flesh like bugs eating fruit.
The apartment itself, however, was relatively neat. There were no signs of a struggle.
That only confused her more. If that was the case, then how had this person ended up like this?
And strangely enough, even though she had been standing at the door in a defensive stance the whole time, nothing had come out.
Just as she was about to step farther inside, she heard a faint scraping noise from the back of the room. She whirled and slashed—
and hit nothing.
There was nothing at eye level.
But then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something pale crawling low across the floor.
Acting on instinct, she brought the blade down hard and chopped the thing in half. She followed up with more strikes, blood splashing everywhere—but before she could get a proper look at the thing, the corpse behind her moved.
That swollen abdomen had not been bloating after all.
It had been a parasite.
A giant worm, as big as a washbasin, burst straight out of the dead person's belly.
"That thing's disgusting. Don't tell me this virus affects every living creature?"
With an easy vertical cut, Kyoko split the worm neatly open, spilling out a mess of half-digested matter from inside it.
The stuff splattered across the floor and nearly made her vomit. The smell was unbearably sharp.
"What the hell? How does it regenerate this fast?"
The worm, now chopped into pieces, split into four separate segments and sprang at her. In the face of sudden danger, she had to use both hands and feet just to beat them back.
Only after she hacked the thing into mince did it finally stop moving, leaving behind reeking slime that smelled absolutely vile.
But Kyoko had no time to care about that now.
The sounds of the fight had already sent the infected inside 1503 into a frenzy. It was slamming against the door. Judging by the noise, there was only one. Kyoko did not hesitate—she decided to kill it immediately.
If she left it alone, it would probably attract even more trouble. So she smashed the peephole with her blade, threaded the wire inside, and twisted the inner handle of the security door until it opened.
Because the door swung outward, she first braced it with force, a dagger in one hand and the wire clenched in the other.
After adjusting her position, she suddenly retreated back into 1504. The door slammed violently against the frame of 1504 with a huge crash.
"Shit. I was so focused on killing that thing I forgot about that."
Kyoko grimaced in regret. If she had just stood off to one side of the door and stabbed inward, she probably could have killed the infected cleanly with one thrust. Now she had made a massive noise, and that was definitely going to cause problems.
But there was no point regretting it now.
She had to finish this fast.
She switched to the shorter dagger, since she no longer had the space to keep distance from the infected. Fortunately, her protective gear was solid enough that she dared to fight at close range.
When the infected lunged, she kicked it down hard with her tall boot, then dropped into a crouch and drove the dagger straight through its skull, twisting hard before pulling free.
A clean kill.
Blood splashed onto Kyoko's face shield, blurring her vision, but she had no time to care. She immediately ran toward the emergency stairwell. There were no infected inside, though their howls still echoed into her ears from somewhere nearby.
That was all she could manage for now.
She locked the fire door that the worm had shoved open and then dragged two fire equipment cabinets in front of it as a barricade before finally stopping.
"Hah… hah…"
Kyoko breathed hard. In less than ten minutes, she had scored three kills, and the effort had left her drained. She was getting hungry.
Once she was sure it was safe, she grabbed a sofa throw from the nearby couch and wiped the blood off her visor so she could see clearly again.
It also helped keep infected blood from touching her skin.
The sword and dagger had both been splashed with blood as well, so she wiped them down too.
She was not about to drink any unsealed water she found in someone else's house, so she used the neighbor's water supply to thoroughly rinse her weapons instead.
It was winter, and sunset came early. She needed to finish looting the neighboring apartments by around five o'clock. Once it got dark, that would be the end of it.
She checked the wall clock in the neighbor's apartment. It was now 3:15. She had less than two hours left.
Inside the bedroom of apartment 1503, she found a ghastly scene: two corpses, one large and one small, gnawed down to almost nothing. They were probably the wife and child of the male infected she had just killed.
Kyoko did not linger on the tragedy.
Right now, she could only think about herself.
"I still have to survive. The dead can rest here in peace."
There was not much emotional reaction in her heart. She simply started searching for anything useful.
By the time five o'clock rolled around, Kyoko had gathered everything she needed for now.
From apartment 1503 she found several bottles of high-proof liquor, a bag of unopened dried fruit, a medicine kit, and three phones that still had battery power.
She also pried the batteries out of every remote control in the apartment. As for the flour and rice in the kitchen, the packages had already been opened. She could not be sure whether the infected had touched them, so she left them behind.
Food went into the body. If something went wrong there, she would be finished.
As for 1504, there was not much to gain. Judging by the place, the neighbor had been an elderly person living alone. The apartment contained almost nothing useful. The phone was dead, there was no food, and the fridge was full of vegetables and raw meat that had already spoiled.
The medicine kit contained drugs Kyoko did not currently need, but who would complain about having too many supplies? More meant more security. Better that than desperately needing something later and not being able to find it. So she took all the sealed blister packs with her.
The other worthwhile prize was a few unopened packs of adult diapers belonging to the old neighbor.
Of course, Kyoko did not have any particular problem with incontinence—these were simply for emergencies.
Before leaving, she moved several larger pieces of furniture to reinforce the stairwell barricade, replacing the fire cabinets with something sturdier. Once she was satisfied, she returned to her own apartment.
As for apartment 1501, since she had not heard anything from it the whole time, there probably were no infected inside.
But Kyoko was already exhausted, so she ignored it and headed straight home.
After all the intense movement, bundled so heavily in all that gear, she was drenched in sweat. She removed her helmet and mask, revealing a flushed face and hair so wet it could practically be wrung out.
Sticking out the tip of her tongue playfully, she breathed in great gulps while stripping off the stab-resistant vest and backpack with quick, efficient movements.
She could not take off anything else, though. The room temperature was too cold. Any more and she would probably catch a cold.
After drying her soaked hair with a towel, Kyoko was finally able to rest for a while. It was six in the evening now. The afterglow of sunset still lingered over the earth, but dangerous nightfall was fast approaching.
The apartment was dim, but Kyoko had no real need to light it up—not even though she had a lighter, her phones, a flashlight, and a whole bucket of glow sticks.
At night, bright light sources were easy for enemies to spot.
It was not that she was afraid of using fire.
It was just that, after thinking it through, the risks outweighed the benefits.
There was no telling whether any infected might be highly sensitive to light. And if other survivors saw it—well, whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing was anyone's guess.
Fire could provide light and warmth, sure, but she did not really have anything she needed to do tonight. Even if she wanted to handle some private business, she did not need the lights on for that.
As for warmth—what, was she trying to get herself smoked to death by lighting a fire indoors? Better to just pile on extra blankets.
So before true darkness fell, Kyoko ended the day's activities. She drank a full quarter of the water from the dispenser bottle, dry-ate one packet of instant noodles and one chicken leg, and still was not full, so she also ate some of the dried fruit her neighbor had so generously "given" her.
Only then was she finally done.
"I feel like I'm eating more than usual… maybe I'm just that tired."
With that thought in mind, the exhausted Takashiro Kyoko fell asleep.
[Daily settlement in progress.]
[Day One of apocalyptic exploration survival complete. Kills today: 3. Exploration value: 2. Mission "First Blood" completed: 100.]
[Total reward: 105. Will be credited tomorrow at 8:00 AM.]
A mechanical voice rang out.
But Kyoko was fast asleep and noticed nothing at all.
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 (Chapter108)
"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 70
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 99
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 95
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 99
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 92
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 47
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 44
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player 43
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 26
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