exolerate
The world had not ended yet.
But it had already started to rot.
They didn't notice it immediately - the small disappearances, the sudden quarantines in rural towns, the animals found torn apart on the edges of highways. People blamed wolves, cults, starvation, anything except the truth.
The first infected were quiet.
A family in Gangwon-do vanished.
A bus driver collapsed mid-route, twitching, foaming, then dying.
A fisherman was found drifting in his boat with his eyes open and pupils pale.
Doctors called it a "severe neurological infection."
The government called it "containable."
The public called it "stress."
But Yuri Kwon knew something was wrong.
It had been one month since her eighteenth birthday - one month since she watched her parents get torn apart, screaming her name as their bodies twisted, convulsed, and turned. She had been dragged away by Captain Kwon Taesik, barely conscious, barely alive.
Now she lived inside Z.E.R.O - the only private organization brave enough to fight back. They trained her with VR, with real corpses, with simulation rooms that smelled of metal and disinfectant. Yuri moved with cold focus, her archery skills perfect, her fencing and taekwondo lessons sharp as her breath.
Every day, she tried not to remember the blood on her mother's neck... the sound of teeth cracking bone.
On the other side of the city.
Jinwoo Kang, nineteen, exhausted and broke, was stacking cans in a convenience store - unaware that the infection was already crawling its way through the alleyways of small neighborhoods.
He didn't know that in one month, he would be running for his life.
No one knew.
Not yet.
But the outbreak had already begun.
He twitched.
Snapped forward.
Then ran.
by the time the news stations scrambled to alert the public, by the time the infected swarmed through quiet towns and crowded apartments-
It was too late.
Humanity's last month of peace had already ended.
And the real story was about to begin.