Rebate King: I fed them to rule the apocalypse

Chapter 2: High stakes and crimson eyes

The cold rain continued to beat down on the ruined asphalt of Mapo-gu, but the silence between us felt heavier than the storm.

The hooded girl stood ten paces away, the point of her jagged machete aimed squarely at my throat. Her crimson eyes didn’t blink. They caught the faint, dying light of the afternoon sky, glowing with an unnatural intensity that made my skin crawl. This wasn't a scared civilian, and she definitely wasn't a Lurker. She was something else entirely.

Behind me, Sarah let out a small, terrified whimper, pressing her back harder against the brick wall.

My fingers tightened around the textured grip of my newly acquired shotgun. The metal was solid, cold, and a definitive reality check. A few minutes ago, I was a broke nobody starving in a Seoul alley. Now, I had a weapon that could blow a hole through a brick wall, but looking at the calm demeanor of the girl in the cloak, I didn't feel safe. Not even a little.

"I don't like repeating myself," she said, her voice eerily melodic amid the ruin. "The food. Leave it and walk away."

Before I could answer, that sharp, crystalline chime sounded inside my skull again. The blue text unfurled across my vision, though this time it was tinted with an ominous shade of red.

**[Target: Raven (True Name Locked)]**

**[Identity: Infected Awakened / S-Rank Threat]**

**[Trust Level: 0% (Immediate Hostility / Lethal Intent)]**

**[System Note: S-Rank targets present extreme danger but yield catastrophic rebate multipliers. Current survival rate if engaged in combat: 12%.]**

Twelve percent. The system wasn't sugarcoating it. If I pulled the trigger, there was an eighty-eight percent chance she’d cut my throat before the buckshot even left the barrel. She was moving with a fluid, terrifying grace that suggested her body didn't operate on human physics anymore.

"What if we share?" I said, keeping my voice level, pitching it low so it wouldn't shake. I kept the shotgun leveled at her chest, showing her I wasn't just going to roll over.

Raven didn't flinch. "You don't dictate terms with a corpse."

She took a half-step forward, and the wet concrete beneath her boot seemed to crack faintly under an unseen pressure. The air temperature dropped instantly, my breath turning into thick plumes of white vapor.

*If I fight, I die,* I thought, my mind racing through the options with a speed born of pure adrenaline. *But the system rewards giving things away. And the lower the trust... the higher the reward.*

She trusted me at absolute zero percent. She literally wanted to kill me.

Behind me, the delivery van contained the massive military wooden crate that had just materialized—dozens of MREs and heavy plastic jugs of water. If I gave her some, what would the system do?

"Hold on," I said, slowly lowering the barrel of the shotgun by an inch to signal a pause, though I didn't take my finger off the trigger guard. "You want food? I have food. More than I can carry. I don't need to die over a meal, and neither do you."

Her crimson eyes narrowed slightly, the jagged machete dipping a fraction of an inch. "You're lying. Scavengers don't share."

**[Target’s suspicion remains absolute. Trust Level: 0%.]**

"Watch me," I muttered.

I kept my left hand on the shotgun, using my right to reach blindly behind me into the broken window of the van. My fingers brushed against the rough wood of the crate, sliding over the smooth, plastic packaging of a military MRE. I grabbed it, pulling it out. It was a heavy, vacuum-sealed ration pack—beef stew, according to the label.

With a smooth, non-threatening motion, I tossed the MRE through the rain. It skittered across the wet asphalt, splashing through a puddle before sliding to a stop right at her mud-caked boots.

"There," I said. "Clean, sealed, high-calorie food. Take it."

Raven looked down at the package, then back up at me. Her expression didn't change, but her grip on the machete tightened. She didn't pick it up. In her mind, a man offering a feast in hell was either insane, pulling a trick, or using poisoned bait.

The blue interface exploded into a blinding flash of crimson and gold text directly across my retinas.

**[Transaction validated. Host has gifted: Military MRE (Grade A) x1.]**

**[Calculating Multiplier based on Target Threat Level (S-Rank) and Trust Level (0% - Absolute Hostility)...]**

**[Critical Multiplier Triggered: 100x Crimson Rebate!]**

**[Reward granted: Active Skill Unlock — 'Perception Acceleration' (Level 1)]**

**[Reward granted: Upgraded Munitions — High-Explosive Dragon’s Breath Shells x12]**

A violent jolt of electricity shot up my spine, grounding itself directly in the back of my brain. For a split second, my vision went completely white, and my heart stopped, frozen by a sudden influx of raw, unnatural knowledge.

When my vision cleared, the world had changed.

The falling raindrops didn't look like streaks anymore; they were individual, crystalline beads hanging suspended in the air, falling at an agonizingly slow crawl. I could hear the faint, rapid thumping of Sarah's heartbeat behind me, and more importantly, I could see the microscopic twitch of Raven’s leg muscles under her cloak.

*Perception Acceleration.* I could think, see, and react faster than the human body was ever meant to.

At the same time, the heavy tactical vest on my chest grew slightly heavier. I glanced down with my accelerated vision. The red shells in the carrier on the side of my shotgun had turned a deep, metallic orange, etched with faint, glowing gold runes.

Raven moved.

Even with my accelerated perception, she was terrifyingly fast. She didn't pick up the food. Instead, she blurred forward, her cloaked form cutting through the suspended raindrops like a ghost. The jagged machete whistled through the damp air, aiming for a clean, horizontal decapitation.

In normal time, I would already be dead. My head would be rolling into the gutter.

But in my accelerated state, I saw the trajectory. I twisted my torso backward, the blade passing so close to my face that the cold wind of its passing sliced a tiny nick into the bridge of my nose. Blood welled up, but I was already moving.

I brought the stock of the shotgun up, aiming from the hip, and jammed the muzzle directly toward her midsection.

Raven’s eyes widened in genuine shock—she hadn't expected a normal human to evade her strike, let alone counter-attack. She twisted her body mid-air with impossible agility, using the flat of her machete to swat the shotgun's barrel away.

*Boom!*

I pulled the trigger anyway.

The Dragon's Breath shell didn't just fire lead; it unleashed a roaring, violent torrent of white-hot, chemical fire. A localized sun erupted in the narrow alleyway. The blinding, magnesium-fueled explosion engulfed the space between us, the sheer pressure wave throwing me backward against the delivery van.

The heat was immense, instantly vaporizing the falling rain into a thick, choking cloud of white steam.

I hit the side of the van hard, the breath leaving my lungs in a sharp gasp. My perception returned to normal speed, the sudden transition making my head spin with severe vertigo. I blinked away the flashing spots in my eyes, racking the slide of the shotgun. Another orange shell locked into the chamber with a heavy, mechanical *clack*.

"Get up," I barked at Sarah, not looking back. "If you want to live, get inside the van now!"

Sarah, utterly paralyzed by the explosion of fire and light, scrambled on her hands and knees, dragging her sprained ankle through the dirt as she hauled herself into the back of the rusted vehicle, hiding behind the wooden crate.

I kept my eyes locked on the steam cloud. The white fog billowed, catching the faint orange glow of the burning puddles on the ground.

A figure emerged from the smoke.

Raven was still standing. Her dark cloak was badly scorched, the edges smoldering with embers, and her left sleeve had been entirely burned away, revealing a pale, slender arm. But her skin wasn't burned. Instead, her arm was covered in a network of faint, pulsing crimson veins that seemed to absorb the heat, slowly fading back beneath her skin.

She wasn't bleeding. But she was breathing heavily, her crimson eyes staring at me not with simple malice anymore, but with a cold, analytical curiosity.

She looked down at the MRE package, which had somehow survived the blast, sitting near her feet. Slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on me, she reached down, picked up the ration pack with her left hand, and slid it into the folds of her ruined cloak.

The blue text flickered back into my view.

**[Target has accepted the gift. Trust Level: 1% (Extreme Caution).]**

**[Danger status: Neutralized (Temporary).]**

Raven lowered her machete, the tip pointing back toward the ground. The oppressive, freezing aura around her began to dissipate, the air returning to its normal, damp chill.

"You're not a normal scavenger," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper that carried perfectly over the sound of the rain.

"I'm just a guy trying to survive," I replied, keeping the shotgun leveled squarely at her chest. I wasn't going to let my guard down just because the system said she was temporarily neutral. One wrong move and she’d test my twelve percent survival rate again.

Raven took a step back into the deep fog of the alleyway, her figure instantly beginning to dissolve into the gray mist.

"The fire weapon won't save you next time, Ethan Vale."

My heart skipped a beat. Cold sweat broke out across my forehead. *How the hell does she know my name?* I hadn't said a word about who I was. The system had identified her as 'Raven,' but it hadn't given her my details—or had it? Did she have a system too?

"Wait!" I called out, taking a step forward. "How do you—"

"Enjoy your scraps while you can," her voice echoed from the fog, appearing to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. "They didn't kill the people in the high-rises... they were already dead before the sky broke."

With those words, the fog swallowed her completely. The metallic scraping of her machete faded into the distance until there was nothing left but the sound of the pouring rain.

I stood alone in the alley, the shotgun heavy in my hands, my nose bleeding slightly onto my collar. I turned around slowly, looking at the rusted van where Sarah was hiding, and then down at the blue interface still floating quietly in the corner of my eye.

*They were already dead?* What the hell did that mean?

I looked at my hands, realizing they were no longer shaking. The cold, calculating calm that had taken over during the fight wasn't fading. It was settling in, becoming a permanent part of who I was.

The system wasn't just giving me weapons. It was changing me.