Chapter 70: The Sanctuary
The room fell silent.
Tokita, Kaito, and Natsuki sat across from Daichi, watching as the man began to peel back the layers of a history none of them had ever known existed.
For a long moment, Daichi simply stared at the damp concrete floor between his worn boots. His brown eyes—deep, earthy, and still holding the faint ghost of an inner warmth—were calm now. But behind them lay something terribly heavy. Something crushed and buried beneath the ruins of his own ambition.
He finally raised his head, the dim lantern light casting long, jagged shadows across his features.
"If you want to understand what happened here," he said, his voice a quiet, raspy rumble, "then you need to understand what this place was before it became a prison."
Tokita leaned back slightly in his wooden chair, resting an arm over the backboard, his dark eyes unreadable. Kaito remained utterly silent, his yellow eyes tracking Daichi's every subtle movement. Natsuki folded his arms across his chest, his posture tense, locked in total attention.
Daichi took a slow, deliberate breath. The air smelled of rust, dry rot, and old stone.
"This place wasn't built to cage or break people," he said softly, his gaze sweeping across the dark iron bars of the cell block. "It was supposed to save them."
He closed his eyes for a second, stepping backward into his own memory.
Long before the infected filled the streets... Before the endless screaming... Before military boots crushed the tile floors... Before people learned that their neighbors could turn into rabid beasts overnight...
There was a man named Daichi Kazuma.
He was young, wildly wealthy, fiercely ambitious, and—by most sensible people's standards—completely obsessed with a nightmare that wasn't real.
At least... not yet.
Daichi had spent years consuming every scrap of media he could find on apocalyptic scenarios. Zombie films, post-apocalyptic manga, military survival manuals, technical prepper forums, and obscure underground message boards. He spent thousands of late-night hours studying infrastructure collapse, power grid failures, viral pandemics, supply-chain bottlenecks, nuclear disasters, and the terrifying speed of social decay.
His wife, Hiori Kazuma, found his obsession utterly absurd at first.
Then she became just as obsessed.
The two of them would spend entire evenings wrapped in blankets on their penthouse couch, watching old zombie films while casually dissecting how they would handle the end of the world.
"What if the power grid dies?" Hiori would ask, leaning against his shoulder.
"Subterranean industrial generators," Daichi would answer without missing a beat. "Dual-fuel system. Diesel and solar arrays on the roof."
"What if the city shuts off the water mains?"
"Gravity-fed holding tanks on the upper levels. Deep subterranean well pumps."
"What if the supermarkets burn down?"
"Multi-year sealed food stockpiles. Hydroponics."
"What if the government collapses entirely?"
Daichi would usually pause at that one. A slow, mischievous smile would spread across his face.
"We improvise."
Hiori would roll her eyes, letting out a soft sigh. "You always say that."
"Because it's true," Daichi replied softly.
"You're completely insane, you know that?"
"And yet, you married me," Daichi grinned, looking down at her.
"And sometimes I genuinely wonder why," Hiori laughed.
Those conversations had started as jokes—harmless, late-night hypotheticals shared over wine. But slowly, imperceptibly, the jokes evolved into blueprints. The blueprints turned into investments. And the investments became a physical reality.
Daichi was already the CEO of a rapidly growing tech firm by the time he decided to make the greatest purchase of his life: an enormous, newly constructed high-rise apartment complex dominating the skyline of the district.
To the public, it was merely another luxury residential development for young professionals.
To Daichi... it was an impenetrable fortress.
He bought the property before it was fully put on the market, then quietly went to work modifying it. He reinforced the foundation and outer walls far beyond standard municipal building codes. The doors were heavy steel; the outer frame was reinforced concrete; the glass was thick, triple-paned, and shatter-resistant.
Daichi even went so far as to install high-grade acoustic dampening materials throughout the critical sections of the complex. If horror erupted on the streets below, the residents inside wouldn't hear a sound. At night, heavy blackout curtains covered every single window—a strict design rule he insisted upon.
"Light attracts attention," he had explained to Hiori while standing on the empty top floor.
"From what?" she asked, eyebrow raised.
"Anything."
"That's not an answer, Daichi."
"It doesn't need to be."
Hiori sighed, shaking her head with a faint smile. "You've watched far too many zombie movies."
"That's exactly why we're going to survive one," Daichi replied with a quiet grin.
"There is no zombie apocalypse," Hiori scoffed gently, turning back toward the view.
Daichi leaned against the window frame. "That's what everyone says right before the storm hits."
Hiori laughed despite herself. But she helped him anyway. Because somewhere along the way, Daichi's absurd fantasy had become their shared sanctuary.
The most important part of the complex wasn't visible from the street. It lay deep underground, beneath the concrete layers of the parking garage. Enormous, sealed vault rooms were packed floor-to-ceiling with non-perishable canned goods, medical supplies, tools, air filtration systems, water purification units, and fuel. There was an industrial-sized meat freezer capable of holding tons of supply.
And deeper still, behind a heavy security door that required Daichi's personal keycard, lay an secret indoor farm—a climate-controlled agricultural chamber designed to grow crops without relying on sunlight or outside soil.
Daichi had thought of everything.
Only a tiny handful of people knew the full scale of what was hidden beneath their feet. Hiori knew. A few trusted long-term employees knew. The construction crews knew pieces of the puzzle, but none saw the grand design.
And the residents? They had no idea.
When the building opened, around fifteen tenants moved in. The building was brand new. The hallways smelled faintly of fresh paint and polished marble. The elevators glided silently. The lights burned bright and steady. There were no barricades, no armed guards, no bloodstains, and no screams.
Just ordinary people starting ordinary lives.
And Daichi loved it. For the first time, his obsession felt like something noble.
Then came the day the world cracked open.
It began like any other Tuesday morning.
Daichi was sitting in his top-floor penthouse office with Hiori. Sunlight filtered through the glass, illuminating spreadsheets spread across his oak desk. Hiori was nearby, reviewing quarterly reports and answering calls.
Outside, the city moved in its usual rhythm. Cars crawled through traffic. People walked to work. Trains ran on schedule. Nobody knew they were standing on the absolute edge of a precipice.
Then Daichi's phone buzzed. A news alert.
Unexplained violent outbreaks reported in the eastern district.
He clicked it. Then another notification popped up. Then three more.
Hiori noticed his posture stiffen instantly. "Daichi? What's wrong?"
Daichi didn't answer. He opened a private security network feed. His fingers flew across his keyboard, pulling up unverified civilian video uploads.
He slowly turned the laptop screen toward her.
The footage was raw, shaky, and terrifying. It showed a chaotic intersection in broad daylight. A police cruiser had mounted the curb, its siren blaring uselessly. People were running in sheer terror.
Then the camera panned. A man stepped out from behind a stalled bus. His clothes were soaked in crimson. His posture was unnaturally contorted, his head twitching with erratic, violent jerks. He locked eyes with a fleeing pedestrian and lunged—moving with terrifying, unnatural speed.
Hiori's breath caught in her throat. Her face drained of color. "What... what is that? Is this some kind of viral marketing campaign for a movie?"
Daichi stared at the screen. For the first time in his life, he had no quick joke. No sarcastic comeback. No confident prepper trivia.
Nothing.
The video cut out as the network glitched. Another stream loaded. Then another. Different angles, different neighborhoods, even different cities across the nation. The same madness. The same animalistic savagery.
Hiori slowly turned her head to look at him, her lips trembling. "Daichi..."
Daichi stood up so fast his leather chair slid backward into the wall.
"Lock the building," he said. His voice was dead serious.
"What—?"
"We lock everything down. Right now."
The joking husband was gone. The polished CEO was gone. The prepper who had spent a decade anticipating an impossible nightmare was finally facing it.
By late afternoon, the skyline was choked with black smoke.
From the penthouse windows, Daichi and Hiori watched the world drown in chaos. Sirens blared in a ceaseless, chaotic chorus. Explosions echoed in the distance. The military comms were drowned out by frantic distress signals. Cell towers failed one by one.
The infected weren't just aggressive; they were hyper-violent, spreading the corruption through bites and scratches within minutes.
Standing before the massive glass window, Daichi watched a mob of desperate people being cut down in the streets below.
Hiori walked up behind him, her hand trembling as she touched his back. "What do we do?"
Daichi stared down at the blood-soaked pavement, then turned his gaze toward the hundreds of empty, safe rooms inside his complex.
"We open the gates," he said cleanly.
Hiori blinked, shocked. "To everyone?"
"To anyone who reaches our perimeter alive, clean, and uninfected."
"Daichi... you spent years building this for us," she whispered. "You said if people panic, they'll tear this place apart—"
Daichi looked directly into her eyes, grabbing her hands tightly. "There is no point in having a sanctuary if we're the only two corpses left alive inside it."
Hiori bit her lip, searching his face. Then, slowly, she nodded. "Okay."
Daichi grabbed the building's internal PA system microphone. His voice resonated through every speaker in the structure: "Attention all residents and nearby survivors. This is Daichi Kazuma. If you can hear my voice, make your way to the main lobby immediately. We are locking down, and we have supply."
Over the next several days, Daichi organized tactical retrieval teams using improvised armor and melee weapons. They ventured out into the surrounding blocks, clearing immediate threats, rescuing trapped families, and escorting injured civilians back into the complex.
Every run was dangerous. Every return was a miracle.
The complex's population exploded. Fifteen people became fifty. Fifty became two hundred. By the end of the first week, over four hundred survivors were housed safely within the reinforced walls.
Families occupied the apartments. Children played in the clean, soundproofed hallways. Adults organized rotational shifts for food distribution, maintenance, and security monitoring.
It wasn't a lawless wasteland. Inside those walls, civilization held its ground. The lights stayed on. The water ran pure. The stockpiles remained vast.
Among the survivors Daichi Kazuma and Hiori encountered during the first week of the apocalypse was a man unlike anyone they had rescued before.
His name was Raizo Kurogane.
Towering in stature, with a powerful physique and an intimidating presence, Raizo carried the unmistakable air of someone who had spent much of his life surrounded by violence. Before the apocalypse, he had been a member of the Yakuza. His criminal past eventually caught up with him, leading to his arrest and imprisonment. But when the outbreak plunged the country into chaos, the prison system collapsed, allowing him to escape.
By the time he encountered Daichi and Hiori, Raizo had already learned not to trust people easily. He had survived in a world where kindness was often mistaken for weakness and where trusting the wrong person could mean death.
Yet Daichi did not judge him solely by his past.
Rather than turn him away because of his criminal history, Daichi offered him shelter within the apartment complex. Hiori treated him with the same consideration she showed the other survivors, giving him something he had rarely encountered in his previous life: the chance to be accepted without being defined entirely by his mistakes.
Raizo never forgot their kindness.
As time passed, he chose to stand beside Daichi and Hiori, becoming their devoted protector. He was not related to either of them, nor was his loyalty something they could demand from him. It was a decision he made for himself—a debt of gratitude he intended to repay.
From that point onward, Raizo Kurogane would stand between the Kazumas and anyone who threatened them.
And in a world where trust had become increasingly rare, his loyalty would prove invaluable.
One evening at the end of that first week, Daichi stood on the balcony overlooking the central atrium, watching people eat together at makeshift tables below.
Hiori walked up beside him, leaning her head against his shoulder. "You actually did it," she whispered softly.
Daichi shook his head, a genuine smile breaking across his tired face. "No. We did."
For a brief, shining moment, they believed they had beaten the end of the world. They had built a paradise amidst the hell outside.
But paradise never lasts.
That very night, as the complex fell into a quiet sleep, Daichi's body was suddenly racked by a violent, unexplainable fever.
He didn't scream. He collapsed onto the bathroom floor, his skin scorching hot, his bones feeling as though they were being ground into fine dust. Hiori tried to cool his forehead with damp towels, weeping as he shuddered in agony.
And then, as the fever reached its terrifying peak, Daichi pushed himself up and looked into the bathroom mirror.
His skin was pale, slick with cold sweat. His chest heaved.
And then—his pupils flared. A distinct, radiant brown aura ignited within his irises, pulsing like warm earth.
Daichi froze, staring at his reflection in utter shock. "What...?"
He slowly held out his right hand, his fingers trembling.
On the marble counter below him, microscopic specks of dust and fine grit began to vibrate. One particle lifted off the surface. Then ten. Then hundreds. They swirled around his palm like a miniature, orbiting ring of dust before falling flat.
Daichi stared at his hand in total silence, the faint brown glow pulsing beneath his skin.
He had spent his whole life preparing for the monsters outside. He had no idea that the apocalypse was about to unlock something far more dangerous inside himself.