The Apocalypse Has Been Downloaded – Chapter 1

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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: JayM
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January 31st, 2022. Monday. 8:30 AM.

The first day of the Lunar New Year holiday, excluding the weekend.

Room 301 of a shabby, corridor-style apartment.

A single man sat alone in the dark, damp room.

Jang Jo-joon was a 30-year-old single man with no family, lover, or real-life friends. The only contacts saved in his phone were work colleagues he didn’t even want to talk to.

He hadn’t stepped outside his apartment all day, eating only instant ramen for all of his three meals. His phone, which never received calls anyway, was abandoned in a corner as he focused solely on the TV screen.

The epitome of a homebody, Jo-joon was spending his entire holiday holed up in his apartment, even cutting back on his sleep to enjoy the games he’d put off due to his busy schedule.

“Ha… This is the life…”

Jo-joon sighed contentedly as he sliced a zombie’s head clean off with a katana on the TV screen.

Mindlessly slaughtering zombies without a single thought or worry made all his anxieties melt away.

He didn’t like drinking, nor did he like going outside. His only hobby was playing console games quietly at home.

He was especially excited to be able to play the new zombie parkour action survival game he had neglected for two months during the holidays.

“This is so fucking fun. Ah, I don’t want to go back to work.”

Of course, happy times fly by fast. This undeniable truth made Jo-joon a little anxious. He wanted to see the game’s ending before this sweet time ended in three days.

After all, console games like this naturally lost their appeal the longer you dragged them out. It was best to finish them off in one go.

“Ha… I wish everything would just go to hell… so I don’t have to go to work…”

It was just a half-hearted complaint he muttered to himself out of his aversion to work.

But perhaps a god overheard his grumbling.

Or maybe the collective desire of those who didn’t want to return to their daily lives awakened a slumbering evil god.

Right after Jang Jo-joon uttered his lament, all of humanity heard a single voice.

[Thank you for enjoying ‘The Earth’.]
[Thanks to your support, the DLC ‘Eternal Night’ is downloading.]
[We appreciate your continued support.]

It was a very inorganic system notification sound. It was the voice of God that was heard simultaneously by everyone on Earth.

“What the fuck was that… A game sound?”

An emotionless, monotonous, inorganic voice.

Unfortunately, Jo-joon, wearing his headset, dismissed the voice of God as mere in-game noise. The voice of God was strikingly similar to the in-game AI’s voice.

Moreover, before Jo-joon could focus on the voice, the constant groans of the in-game zombies half-buried the god’s message in his memory.

He quickly dismissed it. He had to swing his katana at the zombies waving their arms at him on the screen.

With the holiday ending the day after tomorrow, Jo-joon immersed himself in the game, driven by the thought that he needed to progress as much as possible. Who knew when he’d be able to focus on gaming like this again after the holiday?

Three days passed just like that.

It was quite noisy outside during that time, but he just shrugged it off, assuming it was the usual drunken brawls and crazy old people in his neighborhood.

“Ha… That was fulfilling…”

Jo-joon felt elated, knowing he was about to see the ending credits. He rubbed his eyes, moved by the feeling of having finished a game during the Lunar New Year holiday.

His eyes were sore from playing too much. His ears also felt a little muffled from wearing the headset for so long.

“Ugh… Ha~awn… Should I wash my face…?”

He paused the game just before the ending and took off his headset. At that moment, he heard the now-familiar sound of someone pounding on his front door.

-Bang! Bang! Bang!

‘Damn it… Is it that crazy bastard from the 4th floor again? He’s been quiet lately, but it looks like he’s at it again. I don’t know why he always comes here when he’s drunk.’

A surprise visit from the drunken upstairs neighbor. He’d get completely wasted, mistake the floor, and come here, banging on his door like it owed him money.

It wasn’t a frequent occurrence, but it happened two to three times a month.

All sorts of weirdos lived in his shabby, corridor-style apartment, and the middle-aged man living directly above him was one of them.

-Bang! Bang! Bang!!!

But the banging was particularly intense today. Usually, the drunkard would eventually leave, but today he was relentlessly pounding on the door like he was trying to break it down.

-Bang! Bang! Bang!

‘Is he really crazy…’

He was so close to the ending. Just three more zombies to kill.

Having poured his entire precious holiday into this game, he wanted to savor the ending’s afterglow alone. But the sudden visit from the upstairs lunatic was breaking his concentration.

“Ha, shit. This is so annoying.”

Finally, he strode to the front door and flung it open.

He usually tried to avoid conflict with his neighbors, but he was so fed up with the guy upstairs that he was ready to unleash a torrent of curses.

“Sir, this isn’t your apartment…”

Jo-joon, who was ready to tell the man to get lost, was taken aback by the sight of his upstairs neighbor standing blankly at his doorstep.

“Uuuhhh…”

The upstairs neighbor was dripping with blood.

His eyes were filled with a white substance, as if he had cataracts, and his entire body was covered in blood, the source of which was unknown.

Especially with his yellowed teeth showing between his torn cheeks and the long gash on his forehead…

He looked eerily similar to the creatures Jo-joon had been watching on his screen just moments ago.

“A zombie…?”

“Uuuhhh!!!”

The zombified upstairs neighbor pushed his way into the apartment while gnashing his teeth.

“Agh! What the fuck!”

Naturally, the transformed neighbor tried to bite Jo-joon. He intended to bite, taste, and enjoy, then turn him into one of his own!

“Rrrraaargh!!!”

Jo-joon was pushed back and fell down. The middle-aged zombie climbed on top of him.

Jo-joon wasn’t the type to panic and scream at every little thing. Years of experience working at a crazy small company had given him the composure to accept situations as they were.

“Graaagh!!!”

So, even with his neck about to be bitten, he calmly replicated the actions of his game character.

It wasn’t that complicated. He simply twisted his body with all his might and slammed his elbow into the zombie’s jaw as hard as he could.

Crack! Crunch!

Something crumpled with a sickening sound from his surprise elbow strike, and the zombie tumbled sideways, its jaw twisted at an unnatural angle.

“You fucking bastard! Even in death, you’re causing trouble at my door!”

He jumped to his feet and, while putting emphasis on his words, kicked the zombified middle-aged man in the neck. After stomping on its neck area mercilessly three or four times, the zombie convulsed and trembled.

“You son of a bitch! I’ve always wanted to beat the shit out of you, and now I get my chance! Die!”

Jo-joon quickly slammed the door shut before any other zombies could join in. He’d be helpless against a horde of zombies without any weapons.

After closing the door, he rushed to the kitchen, grabbed a spotless frying pan, and smashed it against the head of the zombie still writhing on the floor.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Smash!

“Gurgle…”

The zombie, already unable to stand with its cervical vertebrae shattered from Jo-joon’s kicks, could only helplessly twitch as it received blow after blow from the frying pan.

Meanwhile, zombies gathered at the front door, scratching and groaning grotesquely.

“Get lost! You fuckers!”

“Rrrraaargh!!!”

Those weak, stupid zombies had no way of breaking down the door right now, so he decided to ignore their groaning.

He just kept hitting the twitching zombie’s head with the frying pan until it stopped moving completely.

Soon, the zombie’s head was half-crushed and pulped.

Squish!

A stream of rotten blood spurted from the shattered skull.

“Ugh… Yuck, damn it… Disgusting…”

Blood splattered on Jo-joon’s face. Only then did he stop swinging. The zombie’s head was completely mangled. The frying pan in his hand was also twisted beyond recognition.

“Phew… Shit… What the hell is going on…”

Wiping the blood off his face with the back of his hand, he looked down at the motionless zombie with disgust.

The pungent, sickening smell of blood permeated the apartment.

Jo-joon fished a cigarette out of his coat pocket, lit it in front of the dead body of his upstairs neighbor, and took a drag. He didn’t usually smoke much, but he craved one today. As he exhaled a plume of smoke, something appeared before his eyes.

He tossed the frying pan, which he was still holding, aside and rubbed his forehead as he exhaled the cigarette smoke.

“Ha… Am I going crazy?”

The status window soon disappeared.

“What the hell is happening…”

His hands, clothes, and the entrance were all covered in zombie blood.

It was a highly unpleasant and unsanitary sight.

What made it even worse was the putrid smell emanating from the dead body and the thick stench of blood.

“Ugh, this bastard… Why is he crawling into my house even after he’s dead?”

He finished his cigarette, and then stubbed it out on the dead zombie’s body. The smell of the rotting corpse was somewhat masked by the cigarette smoke.

“Ugh… When am I going to clean this up?”

The thought of cleaning up the zombie corpse made his stomach churn.

Scratching his head, he decided to ignore the problem for now.

“Phew.”

He casually went to the bathroom.

He washed his hands and wiped the blood off his face.

After washing up, he returned to the TV and sat down.

He resumed his paused game and finished off the remaining zombies.

He mechanically searched for zombies and sliced them down with his katana.

-THE END.

The TV screen went black, and the ending credits rolled.

Jo-joon watched the screen for a moment, then tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and let out a deep sigh.

The profound afterglow of the game’s ending, achieved after sacrificing his entire holiday, washed over him. Jo-joon remained still for a long time as he savored it.

After enjoying the afterglow for about 10 minutes, he got up and approached the dead upstairs neighbor again.

Until a moment ago, he wasn’t sure if it was all a dream or reality. But seeing the dead body again confirmed that this was no dream.

It wasn’t some unpleasant nightmare. It was the reality unfolding before his eyes.

The corpse lay on the floor by the entrance, still drenched in putrid blood. Jo-joon wondered why this was happening to him.

He checked his phone, which he had abandoned in the corner for days.

[Emergency Alert Message (132)]

There were emergency alert messages and several sporadic personal safety check messages.

All the messages contained extraordinary information. Warnings about abnormal situations such as the appearance of zombies. He would have dismissed them as nonsense if he hadn’t seen a zombie himself.

It seemed like even those messages had stopped coming after yesterday.

‘A zombie virus in the new year, of all times.’

He examined the messages more closely.
Among the emergency alerts, there were a few messages even more bizarre than the ones about zombies.

‘This world is actually a game… and a new content update started three days ago…? What the hell is this bullshit…’

The content of the messages was bewildering.

The world had ended, zombies were roaming around, and for some reason, there were people like him who could see status windows.

Reading the messages that described the world transforming into a game, he couldn’t help but sigh.

Jo-joon didn’t know if he was going crazy or if the world was.

He wondered if he had finally lost his mind after spending days cooped up in his room while killing zombies on a screen.

But no matter how much he thought about it, this horrific scene was too real to be a hallucination brought about by insanity.

The dead zombie with its head smashed open, the stench that assaulted his nostrils, and the groans of the other zombies outside constantly pounding on his front door since earlier.

None of this could be a hallucination or fake.

“I’m fucked. Shit…”

Jo-joon realized that it wasn’t only his life, but the lives of all of humanity had plummeted into the abyss.

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T/N – First chapter done! What do you guys think? I’m actually a bit intrigued about what comes next after the zombie apocalypse DLC. Pretty good concept, let’s see how the author executes it.

If you find any mistakes, feel free to point them out in the comments.