세상의 끝: End of the World

Zombie Emperor

Piercing sirens whirred in Lee Minho's mind.
Hongjoong was a zombie!
He shifted to the side just as a claw sliced through the air next to his heart. The long, black fingernails pierced through the leather gloves.

In a breath, Lee Minho's body coursed with lightning. He grasped the outstretched arm. Hundreds of millions of volts of electric current snapped the atmosphere of the room in half. For a moment, everything slowed down, before a sonic boom exploded and broke everything in a bright flash of light.

The walls of the office collapsed into dust and rubble, and outside came the sound of shouts. Lee Minho quickly glanced and saw the SKZ members starting to fight in the chaos. He couldn't spare more than a few seconds of attention before Hongjoong recovered and pounced at him.

The triad boss's human veneer had torn off; he was a high-level zombie, but not at the level of the other man. His eyes had become a terrible reddish-black, and when he opened his mouth, the long and inhuman fangs dripped with viscous saliva. A deep hatred filled his gaze as he tried to tear his claws into Lee Minho.
Lee Minho's reflexes were faster. He deftly kicked Hongjoong in the head and cast down another bolt of lightning. The sonic boom shook the entire base, and pieces of the ceiling crumbled and fell overhead. Without waiting for Hongjoong to get up, Lee Minho crossed the distance in less than a second. His eyes turned white with electricity as he readied to tear off Hongjoong's head.

With inhuman speed, Hongjoong dodged. Lee Minho's attack tore off half the skull, but had missed the core. Lee Minho flicked off the piece of jaw in his hand. Hongjoong's face looked more and more ghoulish, but the wounds were already healing in fractions of seconds. It seemed that though Hongjoong didn't unleash an offensive ability when he became a zombie, his physical constitution and regeneration had become monstrous.

The two men traded blows, Lee Minho blasting off pieces of Hongjoong's body with every attack. Yet with every lost limb and piece of flesh, another grew in its place. The sharp claws and fangs nearly tore into Lee Minho several times. If Lee Minho were injured even once, it would be the end for him, so he had to protect himself from the rabid bites and swipes with shields made of lightning.

Lee Minho's power drained slowly; less than a minute had passed, when Lee Minho suddenly realized he couldn't hear any fighting from the outside corridor anymore. With a boom from another hit he had landed on Hongjoong, the entire room rattled, and dust kicked in the air. In that short moment, Lee Minho focused his senses out the room to check on his elite SKZ guards.
And at that moment.

A cold, chilly aura of dread solidified in the air, aimed straight at Lee Minho's core.
He was suddenly frozen. It was like he couldn't move an inch. Or, more accurately, a force weighed him down, making him feel as though his body was trapped in amber.

A beautiful, ethereal man walked through the rubble. He dragged the corpse of one of the SKZ members behind him. The body's neck was torn open, the spine visible within the open flesh. The man casually finished swallowing the flesh he had eaten, and wiped his mouth with a blood-stained finger.

Lee Minho could do nothing but watch this horrifying scene. His elite SKZ, the friends he'd brought with him, had all been annihilated in an instant... His hand trembled, the fury crackling in his eyes as he looked at the culprit. Hongjoong, still healing in his grasp, grinned and laughed mockingly at him.

It was then that the zombie emperor looked up, the black sclera of his eyes like a deep void.
A bloody hand seized Lee Minho by the throat and threw him across the room. The abandoned the corpse of the SKZ member was left laying carelessly on the ground. The zombie fished Hongjoong up with the other hand, his posture was like picking up garbage.
Lee Minho knew that this situation had gone straight to hell.