After Alice disappeared, Dawn did not waste time looking around, crying out when a car flew right over her head and crushed a couple. "Sweet Jesus!!" Dawn felt like breaking out into tears. All her life, Dawn lived a boring and average existence.
Yet today, she was experiencing things only seen in movies and those webtoons she loved so much.
"I can't stop now!" Dawn forced her eyes away from the tragic scene and kept on running, ignoring the pleading screams of the helpless. After minutes of running, relief flooded Dawn's system when she saw a warehouse in the near distance.
Dawn mentally chanted in her head how she was not ready to die and joined the crowd of people who ran through the open door. Once inside, Dawn made her way to a corner and immediately dropped to her knees, vaguely hearing the ones holding the door open ushering others to hurry inside.
"Jim, we can't hold the door open any longer! It's getting crowded here!" Dawn heard the voice of the man say to the one standing next to the door.
"But, Roger, there are still people on the streets!" the blonde man argued, but Roger was not ready to listen.
Marching over in his expensive-looking black suit, he heartlessly pressed the button to the hanger, ignoring the desperate cries of the people who begged to be let inside, watching the hope slowly slip away.
"Roger! How could you do that? There are people still out there!" Jim exploded in fury, grabbing Roger by the collar of his shirt.
"That has nothing to do with me! The world is collapsing! Only a few will survive! We can not waste such compassion on those who are unfortunate!" Roger pushed himself away and straightened his expensive jacket suit, shooting Jim a glare.
"The old world no longer exists, Jim. If you wish to survive, you must become cold-hearted," advised Roger as Jim looked at the ground in shame and anger yet did nothing when the people outside began banging on the door, begging to be let inside.
Dawn folded her knees to her chest, mind in a thick haze. The things she saw and experienced were not figments of her imagination. 'Why is all of this happening? What's going to happen to my mom and my brother? Will I live or will I die?'
Holding her knees to her chest, Dawn buried her head in her knees, and let out all of her tears. For three days straight, she was nothing but an empty shell.
She slowly came out by the fourth day, and before she knew it, three weeks had gone by and Dawn had re-adjusted her mindset.
The trigger for re-adjustment was mostly thanks to Roger, who had assigned himself as leader over the warehouse. Things were fine for the first couple of days. After discovering this was in fact a furniture warehouse, everyone was provided a mattress, blankets, and pillows.
Luckily the building had a kitchen and the cabinets were still stocked with food, but the situation took a turn when the food ran out and people realized in order to survive a group would have to go out and hunt for food. Scavenging through houses or any stores that sold food.
Not many dared to do such a thing.
Outside, roaming the streets, were giant man-eating rats and vultures. Who would be suicidal enough to place their life on the line?
A little over a hundred people took refuge inside the warehouse, and it was Roger who came up with the idea to draw sticks to organize the group that would go out and hunt for food.
When the lady on the left passed Dawn the bucket, the girl mentally jumped for joy when she pulled a long stick and smirked when she saw Roger was one of the ones who drew the short end. A few other guys also pulled out a short stick, including Jim.
After their first day of hunting, only Roger and two other guys survived. Jim had sadly perished. But such joy did not last long. Something outside triggered Roger and his group to grow stronger and even possess fantasy-like abilities.
Once again straws were drawn and three more guys joined this group, but this time the entire group returned and this was when things took a turn.
Dawn woke up one day and discovered she could see a word followed by a number floating over the heads of Roger's hunting group, which read {Pawn-Lvl.5}. Noting that only those of the hunting crew had this status over their heads, she realized it signified the group's power level.
Now that Roger had a taste for defeating monsters which in turn triggered him to awaken a magical ability that allowed him to manipulate fire, he relished in this power, holding it over the others and embedding fear in the rest of the refugees to obey his orders.
The rest of the refugees grew scared after Roger displayed his fire powers and bowed their heads in submission.
Happy that he was now in control, Roger and his hunting crew began providing the other refugees with only small scraps of the food that they scavenged while he and his group ate like kings. The result of this move caused the other refugees to feel angsty, and they bullied each other for their food.
Even Dawn almost had her small scrap forcibly taken away, but lucky for her, a boy stepped in and saved her from her harassers. It took Dawn two days to summon her courage and properly thank her savior, but by then the boy had disappeared to Dawn's disappointment.
Back in the present, it seemed today Roger's hunting crew was handing out granola bars to the refugees. Dawn took a bite of her chocolate granola bar and enviously stared at the fully cooked chicken Roger ordered one of the women assigned to the kitchen staff to cook.
'Perverted son of a bitch.' Dawn looked on in disgust as the group inappropriately leered at the women as they exited the kitchen, setting extra food on the table like well-mannered maids.
Not only was Roger's hunting crew a greedy bunch, but also a group of misogynists who took pleasure in ordering the women around and touching them inappropriately without consent.
It was Roger's idea to create a kitchen staff consisting of only women, hand-picking only the best-looking girls stationed at the base, and ordering them to cook their meals using the food they scavenged from their hunt.
If that wasn't worse, they would verbally say disgusting lewd remarks and sexually harass the women.
"Why, aren't you just a pretty doll with a great rack~!" whistled a man with a accent, who Dawn believed his name was Joe.
Sitting reluctantly in his lap was a girl with pretty blonde hair, in her early twenties, and looking uncomfortable as Joe ogle at her chest. Joe was not an attractive man, far from it actually.
A man in his late forties with a pot belly and a tangled mane of dark hair and a bushy beard.
Witnessing such a scene, Dawn no longer had the urge to vomit, but it didn't mean she liked seeing such scenes, narrowing her eyes when she saw Joe's hand rubbing the girl's inner thigh.
Turning her head away, Dawn felt bad for the girl and hated Roger and his group's guts, but there was nothing she could do.
'Roger and his group are Pawn-Lvl.5, and I don't even have a digit. If I tried to play hero now, defeat or something much worse would only be waiting for me.' Dawn occupied a corner spot to herself, currently going over her system.
{Name: Dawn}
{Rank: None}
{Skill: None}
{Banker: She-Who-Shall-Not-Be Named}
{Coins: 300}
'Yep, my Banker is a Harry Potter fan, but who on earth are they? Well at least they were kind enough to loan me 300 coins. Now that I think about it, I'm positive I have seen these scenarios before.'
Once again, Dawn felt oddly familiar about some of the events that had taken place. Brows knotted in deep concentration, Dawn pondered deeply on this question.
'But where was it from…? World Savior! This is exactly how World Savior started off in the beginning!' A lightbulb clicked on inside Dawn's head.
Delighted that she found the answer to the odd sensation in her gut that had been weighing on her mind, Dawn began to analyze the situation.
'I have read a lot of webtoons in my days. Usually, in these situations, the heroine either reincarnated, transmigrated, or regressed, but...' None of those things happened to Dawn.
'Maybe it has, and I don't know it. The only way I can confirm these thoughts is by following certain events that happened in the story, but how should I go about it?'
Dawn took out her phone and opened her notes. For the remainder of the night she began jotting down all the details she remembered from the story.
While typing in her notes, a part of Dawn wished she could've called her mother and brother to check up on them, but the satellite was down. Luckily, the electricity was still working and Dawn brought her charger with her and was able to keep her phone charged.