Genius Archer’s Streaming - Chapter 316
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The Genius Archer’s Streaming Season 2 Episode 36
12. Brain VS Hodu (3)
Sohee Yun scrolled upward through the messages, her eyes narrowing.
Her expression shifted noticeably.
‘What is it? What changed?’
Speech patterns were subtle shifts in nuance. She lacked the eloquence to articulate such minute differences to the other children.
‘Emoticons!’
Whether or not emoticons were being used—that was something she could definitely voice.
“You know that emoticon Jang Seong-su always uses? Why isn’t he using it?”
The children tilted their heads in confusion.
Was that really such an important issue?
“Should we ask him?”
“Are you insane?”
Sohee Yun flared up in anger.
If they asked about that and Jang Seong-su’s phone was actually in the enemies’ hands, they’d be handing them a way to avoid suspicion.
“Why are you getting mad? Don’t tell me… you think his phone is with them?”
One child waved his phone as he asked.
“The next Sentry didn’t mention anything unusual.”
He said there was no way that could be true.
The Sentry who went next hadn’t reported any anomalies.
The other children agreed.
“You’re being paranoid.”
“What, you thought of that?”
Puhaha.
The children laughed, dismissing Sohee Yun’s concern as excessive.
Until a deep voice cut through.
“Shut up, you brats.”
It was Baek Jun-su, lying on his side with his eyes covered.
He pointed at his watch while still lying down.
“Aren’t you going to sleep? If you can’t get up when we leave at 2 AM, I’m putting you in front as a shield.”
“….”
At his words, the children fell silent and lay down in their spots like mice.
“And you.”
One child who had been the last to lie down was singled out.
“Huh…?”
“Yeah. Donghyun Park. You. Check what Sohee said.”
“What, what is it?”
“What do you mean what. Go check on the Sentry who went downstairs. Make sure he’s okay.”
That made sense.
It was faster to just check directly.
It’s not like I’m being sent off for hours of work. It’s just the floor below us.
Of course, from the perspective of the one being singled out, having to slip out of here alone and make it all the way down to the Basement wasn’t exactly appealing.
“…Understood.”
But I nod my head.
I couldn’t defy Baek Jun-su’s orders.
Hadn’t I watched with my own eyes as he beat Wujung Kim mercilessly? I couldn’t even tell if Wujung Kim had actually been bitten at that moment.
If Baek Jun-su said it was so, then it was.
It had always been that way. His word was law.
“I’ll be right back.”
The time it took him to return after leaving wasn’t very long.
Shortly after.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The urgent sound of someone pounding on the infirmary door.
“It’s me. It’s me. Donghyun Park.”
The door opened.
He rushes in with vacant eyes as if he’d seen a ghost.
Without even hearing his words, I could already tell what the situation was.
“Th, th, that’s… S, something terrible happened!”
* * *
A dimly lit music room.
Jang Seong-su, the first Sentry.
He sits with his limbs bound, stripped of his phone, weapons, and everything else.
In this state, he can only wait to die.
To think my life ends like this, starving to death with my eyes open. Jang Seong-su stares blankly at the ceiling with a hollow expression.
The friend beside him has already given up on life, no longer even crying.
That’s when it happened.
Crash!
The music room door burst open roughly, half-destroyed.
Bright light pierced into the darkened music room.
The silhouettes of those backlit by the light appeared as saviors descending from heaven. At least to Jang Seong-su’s eyes, they did.
The revealed figure is Baek Jun-su.
A being far from a savior.
Yet hope overflowed from Jang Seong-su’s eyes.
“Mmph! Mmmph!”
With his mouth bound in tape, he desperately called out to his savior.
At Baek Jun-su’s gesture, a student darts forward and tears off the duct tape.
Rip.
“Gasp! Haa… Damn it… I, I thought I was dying.”
“What happened?”
Baek Jun-su asked from a distance away.
Jang Seong-su had rambled on, but somehow managed to explain the situation.
“…So, Juhyeok Kim just walked straight at you and beat you up?”
When Baek Jun-su neatly summarized the result, it came out like this.
Not a surprise attack from behind, but opening the convenience store door, moving aside the barricade, walking out, and beating him like a dog with a mop handle.
“W, well, it’s not exactly like that when you put it that way. There’s some truth to it though….”
“Huh?”
Baek Jun-su tilted his head and rested the crowbar on his shoulder.
Jang Seong-su flinched and squirmed.
But Baek Jun-su didn’t swing the crowbar down. His gaze turned to the next sentry in line after Jang Seong-su.
“How did you get hit.”
“I, I went down to the basement to do the baton pass. Then suddenly that thug jumped out from behind!”
“So you got ambushed from behind.”
“Y, yes! I, I was ambushed!”
Baek Jun-su stepped back for a moment and exchanged various details with the children.
“Is that all.”
“…A, and they took my phone… and took my weapon too….”
“No.”
Baek Jun-su cut him off as if asking why he was reporting something he already knew.
“Where did they go. Why did they leave you here.”
“…?”
The eyes of the questioned person went blank.
How would he know that.
He’d been lying on the ground, so he couldn’t see the situation outside properly.
“Th, they’re probably in the convenience store, right?”
It was just a guess he managed to squeeze out.
“Mm.”
Baek Jun-su stroked his chin.
And he asks the one beside him.
“What do you think. Choi Gi-su.”
Choi Gi-su shrugged his shoulders.
“They probably didn’t abandon the convenience store.”
There was no reason for those thugs to abandon the convenience store and go somewhere else.
“They probably wanted to buy time by tying up these guys here and setting up a barricade.”
Choi Gi-su speaks while looking at the music room desks scattered here and there.
Jang Seong-su, who had been lying down, chimes in.
“Gi-su’s right! Those guys said they’d take out the desks and block this place!”
The moment it seemed Choi Gi-su’s guess was correct.
Baek Jun-su countered.
“But why can’t we see a trace of them. If they were in the middle of setting up a barricade, they wouldn’t be able to escape in time when we arrived.”
“….”
Everyone fell silent.
Choi Gi-su nodded.
“Right. That’s what bothers me too. But does that mean abandoning the convenience store? That’s too extreme. Even if we assume the infirmary is hidden somewhere to raid an empty house….”
Choi Gi-su was reasoning close to the correct answer.
Yet he couldn’t quite reach it.
“Does that even make sense? Trading the convenience store for the infirmary? We’d just take it back from them anytime.”
Without grasping Almond’s combat prowess—the crucial element—he couldn’t arrive at a proper analysis.
“So where are they, Choi Gi-su?”
When Baek Jun-su asked again, he reached this conclusion.
“They’re probably inside the convenience store. They were monitoring our movements through their phones. They might have sensed something was off and evacuated beforehand. But….”
“?”
“There’s about a 30% chance they’ve fled to a third location.”
Baek Jun-su nodded.
“Fine. We’re breaking into the convenience store now. These bastards might’ve been bitten by zombies, so leave them here for the rest of the day.”
The children were startled.
Not by the order to leave them behind, but because the plan had been moved up. Wasn’t it supposed to happen at 2 AM?
“N-now!?”
“There are only three of them. And they’ve been reading our entire group chat. A 2 AM surprise attack is pointless.”
Baek Jun-su had no hesitation.
“Bring tools.”
“Okay. A drill too?”
A drill carried risks.
They didn’t even know how to use it, and the enemies already knew from the group chat that they didn’t know how.
Even a fake threat wouldn’t work, and it was just dangerous.
“Just bring a crowbar. That should be enough.”
“Got it.”
The children rushed to the infirmary and returned with several crowbars. They were iron pry bars meant for tearing open doors, and they were surprisingly effective.
“Insert them.”
“Okay.”
Screeeech.
The children wedged the crowbars in from the bottom and both sides. The starting edges were sharp and thin, so once inserted, they slid smoothly inward with gentle rocking.
“One, two── three!”
Creak!
The door shrieked and crumpled.
“Listen.”
Baek Jun-su stood before the door, peering through the lock and shouted.
“I’m giving you a chance. You have one minute from now. Come out in that time, and I’ll spare your lives.”
Meanwhile, the children continued chanting “One, two, three” as they pushed the crowbars.
Using leverage, the front edge gradually made the metal door creak upward.
Screeeeeech…!
From the sound of it, the door was definitely opening.
Baek Jun-su believed they would certainly emerge within a minute.
But….
CRASH!
Even as the door was ripped clean off its hinges, they never came out. Not a single word.
“….”
The door collapsed, kicking up a cloud of dark dust.
Standing atop it, Baek Jun-su muttered savagely.
“Damn it.”
They were gone.
The thugs had already vanished.
* * *
Creak, creak.
Thud.
As the children cleared away the barricade, they continued to be bewildered.
“What? There’s really nothing here.”
“Huh?”
“What is this?”
They already knew there was nothing, but it kept surprising them.
They couldn’t understand it. Why would they flee and abandon this convenience store?
“There’s still bread here too?”
“Right?”
There was even food remaining.
Since they had no way of knowing how much had been there initially, it was difficult to determine whether the CEO had taken enough bread to last them a week or what exactly had happened.
There had simply been too much to begin with.
“Wow, we’re rich now!”
“There’s frozen food too. Damn. We’re living like kings.”
The children were too busy celebrating the fact that they’d secured a massive food supply. After surviving three days on nothing but Choco Pies, they could finally have something resembling a proper meal. It was only natural.
“Let’s eat first.”
Baek Jun-su, apparently hungry as well, started with a meal.
They heated frozen food in the microwave and laid out a feast.
For the first five minutes they ate ravenously, but afterward they focused on making sense of the situation.
“They didn’t run because they were scared of us, right?”
“Yeah. They must’ve seen all our messages.”
“They fled to prepare for our attack! That’s it!”
Considering that they’d been watching their phones, the puzzle pieces fit together.
After seeing the photo of the pry bar, the CEO had decided to relocate.
But the problem was—where had they gone?
“Where did they go? There’s no sign of anyone touching any of the doors on the first floor.”
The main gate on the first floor still had zombies crowded in front of it, and the back door was locked with a key from the outside. But it was locked right now.
That meant they hadn’t left.
There was only one conclusion.
“The second floor…?”
They must have gone to the second floor.
* * *
After the meal.
Baek Jun-su’s gang crowded toward the fire door leading to the second floor to check it.
“…It’s locked.”
“Is there any way to open this and get in?”
However, the fire door leading to the second floor was firmly locked as well. It was unthinkable that they’d picked it open with a hairpin and then locked it again from inside. Even if someone suggested such a thing, no one would accept it.
“So those bastards just vanished? Search the entire first floor.”
Baek Jun-su concluded that they must have taken shelter somewhere on the first floor.
But…
One hour passed, then two hours, and still no word came.
The newly created group chat only filled with messages saying they found nothing.
The only clue they discovered was just one thing.
[There’s a piece of cardboard here by the stairs going to the second floor.]
The cardboard had been discovered unexpectedly by the western staircase.
[Gather there]
Baek Jun-su’s gang crowded over to check it.
There was a board made of several layers of cardboard stacked together.
But the large cardboard wasn’t intact—it was torn.
It was a fragment torn when rolling a cart upward, something Suhyeon had failed to notice and simply passed by.
“…They went to the second floor.”
So they had gone to the second floor.
Baek Jun-su checked the time.
“Five hours have already passed.”
At least five hours since those bastards left.
The corners of his mouth lifted.
Now Baek Jun-su could be certain.
“They’re already dead.”
Those bastards were dead.
“There’s a monster up there.”
He gazed out the window as if recalling something.
4 PM.
Since it was summer, the sun was still blazing brightly.
Perhaps because of that? He failed to notice someone standing far away in the backlighting.
Even if I had known, there was nothing I could do about it. One person standing far outside the window was hardly a matter of concern.
The weather was truly clear. It was the kind of day that suited the moment when everything had been resolved.
Such idle musings felt oddly more significant than they should have been.
“Now there’s nothing bothersome left──”
──CRASH!
Swallowing my words, the corridor window shattered.
Whoooosh──
In that instant, what I saw was an enormous piece of metal.
No, actually it was an extremely small arrowhead.
It only appeared massive because it was about to embed itself in my eye.
──Thunk!
“…!?”
Half my vision went dark.
“AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!”
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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