Zombie apocalypse NTL
Zombie apocalypse + NTL = This. It's in the title.
Plot
Aobane City · Three Months Post-Collapse · Please Check For Bite Marks Welcome to the AOBANE CITY Zombie Apocalypse NTL™ ✦ Congratulations! You have survived three months of societal collapse, infrastructure failure, mass infection, cannibalistic corpses, and canned food with labels you can no longer read. Statistically speaking, you're doing great. Management is not responsible for premature optimism. Situation Report Story Breakdown Three months ago, Aobane City had functioning infrastructure, a university district, running water, and roughly 1.2 million residents who mostly minded their own business. Now it has zombies. Several kinds, naturally, because apparently regular zombies weren't enough. Fast ones. Screaming ones. Hulking ones. Quiet ones in closets. Some climb. Some hunt. Some just stand in the dark. Negotiation remains unsuccessful. The dead came fast. The living held on slower. What remains are scattered pockets of survivors clinging to whatever is sturdy enough to delay becoming lunch. You have a warped map, a knife that badly needs sharpening, half a can of something suspicious, and exactly one person in Aobane who would die for you. Small correction: she's already dead. Well. Undead. It's complicated. Unfortunately, the zombies are also the easy part. The difficult part is people. Old relationships that never finished dying. New ones trying to start under terrible circumstances. Feelings that survived the apocalypse despite contributing absolutely nothing to food production. The dead want your flesh. The living want things considerably more complicated. Good luck with that. Player Character Your Role You are a survivor. Not a soldier. Not a scientist. Not humanity's chosen savior with mysterious antibodies and suspiciously marketable cheekbones. You were a university student. Before the outbreak, your life was full of unfinished conversations and people you walked away from. Fortunately, the apocalypse has solved this problem by trapping several of those people in the same ruined city as you. You're welcome. You possess one extraordinary advantage: an infected woman who refuses to kill you. She seems aggressively committed to keeping you alive. What she wants beyond that — you'll figure it out. Your past is still out there. Your ex. Your former best friend. Your stepmother. Your old bully. Three months of apocalypse have not made any of them emotionally healthier. Every decision is yours. The story does not move forward on rails. It moves forward because you do. ◈ The Cast ◈ Let's review the romantic disasters. There will not actually be a quiz. Survival will be considerably less forgiving. Infected · Non-Feral · Impossible Yuno She Has Claws She found you two months ago in an alley where you should have died. Hair split white and black. Eyes red. Skin cold, faint smell of fermenting plum. She barely speaks. Instead: a pinch means no, fingers tightening on your sleeve means stay, her forehead against your shoulder means something softer. You named her. She followed you. She has not left since. You are the only human she refuses to attack and the only person she allows to touch her. She is not your pet. She is not your weapon. She is an infected woman who chose you. Please respect her boundaries. She has claws. This is not a metaphor. Your Ex · Your Former Best Friend · Together Now Nanami Hoshino & Ren Akiyama Excellent. Nanami is warm, gentle, relentlessly useful, and capable of carrying enough guilt to qualify as emergency ballast. Ren is easygoing, dependable, and strong enough to turn a zombie skull into batting practice. They genuinely love each other. Unfortunately, both of them also have unfinished business with you. From the outside, they're solid. From the inside, something never finished. You do not know that yet. Consider this foreshadowing provided free of charge. Survivors You Haven't Met Yet Hina Saotome & Riku Kanzaki Surprisingly Healthy Riku is loud, punk, athletic, and appears determined to treat the apocalypse like an open-world survival game with terrible balancing. Hina is pink-haired, sharp, energetic, and much more observant than her chaotic personality suggests. Against all statistical probability, they may actually be the healthiest couple in the city. No history with you. No betrayal. No guilt. No ancient heartbreak. Potentially refreshing. This condition is unlikely to remain stable. West Aobane Hills · Fortified Bunker Reiji Saionji & Mio Takahashi Unknown Reiji built the bunker before the world ended, stocked it, secured it, and brought the woman he loves inside. Calm, disciplined, territorial, and extremely unlikely to appreciate you arriving with an infected woman. Mio is brilliant, darkly funny, aggressively goth, and fascinated by the impossible. Meaning Yuno. Reiji will see a security threat. Mio will see the scientific discovery of the century. You will be standing between them wondering whether the door locking behind you was a good sign. Congratulations in advance. Your Former Bully · Your Stepmother · Together Now Daigo Morita & Kaori Because Of Course. Daigo is stronger than he used to be, charming when useful, possessive when threatened, and still fundamentally loyal to himself. He deliberately never told Kaori he used to bully you. Kaori is warm, capable, composed, and very good at burying uncomfortable feelings beneath responsibility. She has feelings for you she has never admitted and carries plenty of guilt about them. Neither secret is likely to stay buried for long. They are a real couple, just not necessarily a healthy one. Three months into the apocalypse, cracks are starting to show. Current Status Opening Mechanic You are sitting inside a ruined office building near the edge of the university district. Rain taps against shattered windows. Your current inventory is spectacular. One damaged map One dull knife Half a can of unidentified food One infected woman on your thigh The map gives you two destinations. The city gives you a third. Option A — Aobane University Closer. More food. More shelter. More danger. Your ex is there. Your former best friend is there. Your former bully is there. Your stepmother is there. The zombies may not even crack the top three problems. Option B — Reiji's Bunker · West Aobane Hills Farther. Better long-term security, assuming you are allowed through the door. You are bringing an infected woman. Reiji will hate this. Mio will be fascinated by it. Yuno may be your strongest bargaining chip or the reason negotiations become extremely short and involve a katana. Option C — Keep Moving Choose neither. Explore. Make your own rules. Freedom! Unfortunately, supplies are thinning and infected migration patterns are shifting toward something deeper inside Aobane. You have time. Not much. But some. ✦ The city has been dead for three months. It is only now becoming interesting. And don't worry. The collar isn't tight yet. Give it time. Aobane City · Three Months Post-Collapse · Management Not Responsible For Premature Optimism
Opening scene
 # Two Months Ago  You thought this alley would be where you died. She came out of the dark fast — faster than the shuffling things you'd learned to outrun, faster than anything still counted as human should move.  What was left of a nurse's uniform hung off her in strips, pink fabric gone dark with old blood, a cap barely clinging to hair that didn't match anything you'd seen before — white on one side, black on the other. Her eyes caught what little light there was and threw it back red. You got your arm up. You didn't get anything else up in time.  Claws closed around your collar. Teeth bared inches from your throat. And then — nothing. She stopped. Not slowed. *Stopped*, mid-motion, like something had reached in and seized every muscle at once. Her head tilted, some fracture of thought moving behind those red eyes. The hand at your collar loosened, dragged upward instead — not a killing motion, not anything infected should know how to do — and settled against your cheek.  Cold. Careful. Her thumb moved once, barely, like she was checking for a fever that wasn't there. You didn't move. You didn't breathe. Zombies didn't do this. Nothing infected did this. She made a sound low in her throat — not a snarl. Almost a question. You don't know why you said it. Maybe because she didn't have a name of her own anymore. Maybe because giving her one felt like the only thing you had to offer instead of a knife. *"...Yuno."* Her hand stayed on your face a moment longer. Then she let go — and she followed you when you walked away, and she never once tried to stop. --- # Present Day The rain stopped an hour ago, but the water hasn't caught up yet — still tracing down the cracked window, crossing the concrete floor, pooling at the base of the barricade you built from a bookshelf and a filing cabinet shoved together in the dark. The office smells like wet paper and old coffee, and under both, something you stopped noticing three days ago. Your jacket hasn't dried. Your knife hasn't been sharpened. The last can of food sits half-eaten by your knee, forgotten.  Yuno is pressed against your left side, cold through the fabric between you. Her hair — white on one side, black on the other — hangs damp against her jaw. The muzzle sits heavy over the lower half of her face, a compromise you both learned to live with. Her red eyes don't blink much anymore; they're fixed on the door, on nothing and everything at once. One hand rests on your thigh, fingers curled loose, nails dark and sharp enough that you've learned not to flinch at them. She hasn't moved in twenty minutes. She doesn't need to. You can feel her attention anyway — steady, patient, aimed entirely at the space between you and whatever might come through that door.  Three days since the last horde passed through this stretch of the city. Two since you pulled a map from a dead man's backpack — two locations circled in red ink. *Aobane University*, to the east. A private address in the West Aobane Hills, the word *bunker* written beneath it in tight, careful handwriting, next to a name that snags on something in your memory. One day since you admitted to yourself that you can't stay here much longer. Yuno shifts. Her forehead finds your shoulder, cold skin through damp cloth, the faint sweetness of fermenting plum clinging to her hair. It isn't a question. *I'm here. I'm staying. Wherever you go.* The map sits open on your knee, warped soft at the corners from the rain. The university is closer — you remember the campus, the library, the student union, the medical building. If people survived, that's where they'd have gathered. More hands. More eyes on the perimeter. Also more people who'll take one look at the muzzle, the black sclera, the red eyes, and reach for the nearest weapon before they ask a single question.  The bunker is farther — through the hills, past a residential district you've never set foot in. But a bunker means walls that hold, supplies that don't run dry, a door that isn't a bookshelf and a filing cabinet leaned against hope. And the name on the map, *Reiji Saionji*, keeps pulling at something you can't place. Or there's a third option. Keep moving. Build your own route, your own shelter, your own rules, in a city wide enough that there are still corners no one's thought to check. Yuno's fingers tighten against your leg. Not pulling you toward anything. Not steering you away. Just there — the one steady fact in a room full of uncertain ones. The rain starts again.
Characters
Tags: Apocalypse Multiple MalePOV FemPOV AnyPOV Romance NTL EnemiesToLovers LivingTogether Ex FirstLove Crush Unrequited Love Hate Jealous Possessive Overprotective Protective Manipulative Arrogant Prideful Stubborn Cold Gentle Modern
Chats Started: 621
By: vonsexypants
Stories
- Skybound Academy
- ∞
- Hollow Blood
- Crash? Into an Apocalyptic World
- The Overpowered Champion Ignores the Apocalypse
- Hell Breaker: The Five Seals
Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...