The world was grey that morning. Not the soft grey of a sleepy dawn, but the hard, flat grey of a tombstone.
The air in the courtyard was so still and cold it felt solid. The rescue team stood by their truck, not looking at each other, their breath making little clouds in the dead air.
Hyejun stood a little apart from the others. He'd changed. It wasn't just the new weapons—two heavy, black steel batons he held loosely in his hands.
They were simple, brutal things, the kind used to break bones and not much else. It was the way he stood.
The air around him felt thick, like the moment before a lightning strike. He wasn't just a man anymore. He was something that made the world feel quieter, more fragile.
Saeko watched him, her own katana feeling familiar and almost gentle in comparison. She saw the raw, untamed power coiled in his stillness and felt a thrill that was equal parts awe and fear.
This was the man she had given herself to, a force of nature contained in human skin.
Rei gripped her spear, her knuckles white. She remembered the boyish crush she'd had on Takashi and the simple dramas of school.
Looking at Hyejun now, that world felt like a childish dream. He was reality, brutal and absolute.
Takashi just felt sick. He clutched his axe, his thoughts a storm of fear for his mother. But watching Hyejun, a colder fear crept in.
The zombies were monsters, but you understood their hunger. But what did he hunger for?
He moved with a purpose that went beyond survival, into something darker.
Kohta couldn't look away from his screens. The data was a comfort, a world of numbers and logic.
Hyejun was the opposite—a living weapon that broke all the rules. It was terrifying.
Saya walked up, her face all business. "The bridge is damaged. The other way is longer, through the woods. Your call."
Hyejun's eyes, dark and depthless, didn't leave the map. "The bridge. We're short on time."
Saya nodded. "Alice's signal is gone. You're going in blind."
"We'll find her," he said. It wasn't a promise. It was a fact, simple and unchangeable.
The truck's engine roared, an ugly sound in the quiet. The gates opened, then closed behind them with a sound of finality. They were on their own.
Outside the walls, the world was a corpse picked clean. Houses were empty shells. Cars were rusted tombs. The only sounds were their truck and the crunch of things breaking under their tires.
After an hour of this, the bridge came into view. It was a wreck. A huge cable had snapped, leaving the road tilted at a crazy angle.
A long section of the railing was gone, showing a drop that made your stomach lurch.
"It's worse than I thought," Saya's voice came over the radio, tight.
"We cross," Hyejun said.
The truck edged onto the slanted surface. The whole structure groaned under the weight. They were most of the way across when Kohta's voice turned sharp. "Contacts! A whole bunch of them! They're blocking the way out!"
Through the windshield, they saw them. A crowd of shambling figures, maybe thirty, stumbling out of the trees ahead. They were slow, but there were so many, and they filled the only exit.
"Damn it!" Takashi snarled, surging to his feet.
"We can't go back on this slope!" Rei said, her voice high with panic.
Hyejun was already moving. "Asami, stay with the truck. Keep it running. Everyone else, with me. We clear the path."
The doors swung open. The team stepped out onto the tilted, treacherous world of the bridge.
The moment Hyejun's boots touched the cracked asphalt, something changed. He didn't get a message.
He just knew. The world snapped into a new, horrifying focus. He could see the fight before it happened.
He could see the weak points in the zombies, not as ideas, but as glowing patches on their bodies, places where a single hit would make them come apart.
He saw the flow of the whole fight like a river, and he saw exactly where to stand to break its current.
"Twenty-eight of them," he said, his voice flat and cold. "They move together. We break them apart."
Then he moved.
It wasn't like watching a man fight. It was like watching a disaster happen. He flowed through the zombies, and they didn't stand a chance.
He didn't swing wildly. His movements were short, brutal, and perfect. The batons in his hands were like living things.
He didn't aim for the head. He'd take a single step, and a baton would snap forward, hitting a shoulder. The entire arm would tear off with a wet, cracking sound.
He'd twist, and the other baton would smash into a knee, and the leg would buckle the wrong way. He moved through them like a farmer scything wheat, and the zombies were the stalks.
He used their own bodies against them, hooking a leg to make one fall into another, creating openings that shouldn't exist.
The sounds were awful—the crunch of bone, the wet tear of muscle, and the dull thuds of bodies hitting the slanted concrete.
For a moment, Takashi froze, his axe hanging uselessly in his hand. He was staring at Hyejun's back, and a cold, sick feeling washed over him.
The zombies were monsters, but they were just… things. Hungry, stupid things. Hyejun was something else.
In that moment, as he dismantled the undead with a calm, terrifying efficiency, he was the most frightening thing on the bridge. He was a storm made flesh, and they were standing in the middle of it.
Rei felt her blood run cold. This wasn't the strong protector she admired. This was a level of violence so absolute it felt alien.
She saw the way he broke a zombie's spine with a single, precise tap, and she understood that the power that kept them safe could, in a blink, erase them just as easily.
Even Saeko, who craved the thrill of battle, felt a shiver that was not pleasure. This was not the art of the sword.
This was the raw, ugly truth of ending life, stripped of all beauty and honor. It was magnificent and it was horrible, and she couldn't look away.
Kohta, watching from the truck, felt his stomach turn. On his screen, Hyejun was a blur of motion, a variable his equations couldn't process.
He was a god of death operating on a logic that had nothing to do with humanity.
Hyejun was a machine of perfect violence. He was the calm in the center of the horror he was creating.
The fight was a whirlwind of snapping limbs and collapsing bodies. Under his relentless, surgical destruction, the horde fell apart.
They became confused, turning on each other, stumbling blindly.
In less than three minutes, it was over. The exit ramp was clear, littered with twitching, broken things.
Hyejun stood in the middle of it all, the batons hanging at his sides. He wasn't even breathing hard. He turned and looked at the truck, his face calm. He gave a single nod.
Asami, her face pale, put the truck in gear. It rolled forward, off the broken bridge and onto solid ground.
The team climbed back in. The smell of blood and something metallic filled the cabin. The doors closed, sealing them in with the silence.
Hyejun looked out the window toward the dark, waiting mountains. The bridge was behind them. The real test was ahead.
He had just shown them a glimpse of the true power he wielded.
The hunt for Alice and Ayame had begun, and they all now understood, with a chilling certainty, that the man leading them was more dangerous than anything they might find in the woods.