The store used to beep.

That was the first thing Yumi Kisaragi noticed when the power went out — not the darkness, not the smell, not even the blood drying on the floor — but the silence where sound effects should have been.

No cheerful chime when the doors slid open.
No scan tone at the register.
No countdown timers blinking near the microwaves.
No background music looping the same song until customers went numb.

Just breathing.

Not hers.

Yumi stood in the center aisle, legs braced, red boots planted on broken tile. The shelves leaned inward like crooked teeth, their contents spilled across the floor where something had come through hard. Sunlight poured through a jagged hole punched through the wall near the freezer section, dust motes floating lazily in the beam like pixels stuck mid-animation.

The store felt wrong without its noise. Like a game with the sound muted — playable, but unsettling.

Three zombies staggered toward her from the back.

They moved badly. Knees locking. Shoulders listing. One dragged a foot that left a wet smear across the tile. Their mouths worked constantly, opening and closing as if chewing something that wasn’t there.

“Okay,” Yumi said lightly. “Hard mode.”

Her voice echoed more than she expected. The acoustics were off now that the ceiling panels had collapsed. Every sound felt louder, sharper, like the store was amplifying mistakes.

She looked down at what she was holding.

An alarm clock.
Duct tape wrapped tight around its cracked casing.
Two aerosol cans wired to the sides.
Copper strands stripped from a battery lantern, twisted with practiced fingers.

The whole thing hummed faintly, ticking in a way that felt reassuring. Honest. Predictable.

Yumi smiled.

She hadn’t planned to build a bomb today.

But she’d spent years in arcades — fingers dancing across buttons, eyes tracking chaos in blinking lights and split-second timing. She understood systems. How they broke. How they failed under pressure. She knew that if you pushed the wrong piece at the wrong time, everything cascaded.

And she knew that if you pushed the right pieces together, something always happened.

The first zombie lunged.

Yumi sidestepped automatically and cracked it across the face with the metal flashlight in her other hand. Bone popped. Teeth scattered across the floor like loose tokens. She spun away, boots splashing through something wet, already moving toward the counter.

She didn’t look back.

She set the device down gently, exactly where the counter had once held gum and lottery tickets.

“Don’t fail me now,” she murmured.

The clock ticked louder.

One zombie tripped over a fallen display and crawled, fingers scraping uselessly against the tile. Another slammed into the counter, knocking loose candy bars, batteries, cheap plastic lighters.

Yumi’s eyes flicked to the lighters.

She grabbed two and shoved them into her pocket without thinking.

Always loot between waves.

She slapped the clock face once — hard enough to wake it up — and stepped back.

The ticking accelerated.

The zombies converged on the counter, hands slapping against laminate, bodies pressing together in a way that reminded her of crowds around arcade cabinets on tournament nights. Too close. Too hungry. No sense of personal space.

The explosion wasn’t big.

It didn’t need to be.

The aerosol cans ruptured with a sharp whump, pressure blasting outward in a concussive wave that punched the air flat. Shelving exploded. Glass shattered. Packaging became shrapnel — snack bags, toys, plastic bottles, all of it weaponized in an instant.

The sound was brief but total.

Yumi dove behind the counter, hands over her head, laughing despite herself as the blast rattled her bones.

“Yes,” she breathed. “Still got it.”

When the dust settled, nothing moved.

Fire crackled softly where the freezer doors had blown open, frost hissing into steam. Smoke curled toward the broken ceiling tiles, thick with the chemical tang of burned plastic and propellant. The smell was awful.

It was also comforting.

Silence returned — but this time it felt earned.

Yumi stood and brushed debris from her skirt, surveying the damage like a player checking a cleared level. She noted what had survived. What hadn’t. What could still be useful.

Her brain never stopped running.

“Messy,” she said. “But effective.”

She stepped carefully over what remained of the bodies, avoiding slick patches on instinct. Her heart was still racing, but her hands were steady now. The fear had burned off, replaced by focus.

She reached the wall near the exit and pulled a red spray can from her pocket. The rattle sounded absurdly loud in the quiet.

She shook it hard.

Then she painted.

Fast, confident strokes across the concrete:

INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE

She added a small arrow beneath it, pointing toward the exit.

“Rules are rules,” she said.

The graffiti wasn’t just decoration. It was a marker. A signal. If someone else came through here alive, they’d know someone had been thinking. Planning. Playing offense instead of hiding.

Outside, the street was worse.

Abandoned cars clogged the road at crooked angles, some still idling, others smashed into poles or storefronts. Smoke drifted from a dozen places. Shapes moved between the vehicles — slow, erratic, drawn by sound like bugs to a light.

Too many to fight cleanly.

Yumi paused in the doorway, rain starting to fall in a thin mist that turned ash into gray paste. She glanced back into the store, already cataloging what was left.

Propane tanks near the back.
Extension cords.
Cleaning chemicals under the sink.
A second explosion was absolutely possible.

But not necessary.

That was the lesson.

You didn’t have to clear every level. You just had to survive it.

She adjusted her grip on the flashlight and jogged out through the side door, boots crunching glass as she went. Behind her, smoke poured from the store like a signal flare.

Yumi didn’t slow down.

If the world was ending, she wasn’t going to creep through it quietly. She was going to make noise. Leave marks. Turn panic into spectacle — and spectacle into survival.

Something groaned behind her.

Yumi grinned and broke into a run, already thinking about what she’d build next.

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