Black Badger - Chapter 14

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Natty

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Black Badger ◈

Chapter 14: Center Core (2)

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I thought I was late because I had been on my phone, but Yoon had simply come out early.

What were we doing from today? Was I going to get beaten up again like last time?

I worried, but things went in a reasonable direction.

First, we warmed up and ran. We left the cabin, took a long route around, and returned to it. Everything was neatly arranged where it was needed. The city baked beneath the warm sunlight, and Yoon and I stayed silent as we ran.

Afterward, we walked ten minutes to a gym and did strength training. The gym was spacious, full of well-maintained, state-of-the-art equipment, and completely empty.

That was too strange to ignore, so I asked.

“Why is there nobody here?”

“Because this gym is mine.”

Crazy.

“Come work out whenever you want if I’m busy. I’ll register your fingerprints.”

He was seriously rich.

I had guessed as much from the vehicle, but I had not realized he was this rich.

Anyway, we worked out there. Maybe Yoon was testing my abilities, because he had me do a variety of exercises. Lower body, upper body, flexibility training, and more.

For some reason, my body was not keeping up.

It had been like that during the run too. I felt like I should be able to run faster and farther, but my body would not cooperate. The same went for the weights, sets, and reps during strength training. My ankles seemed less flexible too, and when I tried juggling, my dynamic visual acuity had clearly declined.

How had this happened...?

This?

“Were you a trainer?”

I straightened up.

“Sorry?”

“Even if you are out of practice, you have the posture of someone who worked out for years.”

Yoon narrowed his eyes as he studied me.

He slipped his hands into the pockets of his black windbreaker and frowned slightly.

“It looks like you stopped exercising for a few months, but you use proper form no matter what I have you do. You also know how to target the right muscles.”

“Is that so? That is a relief. I do think I took a few months off. I was just thinking that my body was not keeping up....”

“Do you not remember working out?”

Not really.

Whenever Yoon gave me an exercise, I instinctively knew how to do it. How to deadlift, bench press, do push-ups, pull-ups, and so on.

When I told him that, Yoon fell silent in thought for a moment.

Then he said, “You used a breakfall naturally when that mushroom smacked you around too.”

Had I?

“How much muscle were you planning to build?”

“I do not want to build too much. That would reduce my flexibility, which would lead to more injuries and limit my movements.”

“See?”

Yoon said, “You were not someone who exercised as a hobby. You either worked out professionally, served in the military or police, or were a stunt performer.”

Was that true?

As expected, I did not remember.

But Yoon did not pay much attention to my answer. Once we finished a round of strength training, he dragged my exhausted self to a shooting range.

The shooting range was beneath the gym.

Just how rich was he?

“I take back what I said about you possibly being military or police.”

That was Yoon’s assessment as soon as I finished shooting.

“You are good at exercising, so why are you so bad with a gun?”

Sorry about that.

Yoon made me practice shooting all afternoon. As though live ammunition was not precious at all, he let me fire until I had enough. Then he dragged my utterly exhausted body to his home.

More precisely, he took me to the spacious laboratory beneath his house.

It was cool and smelled faintly of disinfectant.

There, he showed me a model of a small core.

A glass dome shaped like a half-sphere snow globe covered a city model.

“It is made from the exact same material as the Breath protecting Center Core.”

“Breath?”

“The barrier’s original name is Breath. Most people call it the Core, but that is not accurate. Strictly speaking, a Core is the entire area enclosed by the barrier. The exact name for the barrier itself is Breath.”

“I see.”

“John Mueln created Breath. I commercialized it.”

“Sorry?”

I was so startled that my pronunciation came out strange. I looked up at the man beside me.

“Is that not an incredible achievement?”

“It is, if you put it that way.”

He was not humble.

Still, I could understand why he was so rich now. There had to be patents involved. It would be stranger if someone who helped commercialize a device essential to human life was not rich.

Yoon looked down at the toy-like small core and pressed somewhere on its base.

A small opening appeared at the bottom of the dome. It was shaped like an arch, as though it were a tiny door for little people.

Yoon pointed to it.

“When you go outside a Core, you make a door in the barrier like this.”

“People go outside?”

Why would they? Was the Breath not wrapped around the city to protect it from creatures like those strange mushrooms and spiders?

A dry voice answered me.

“Ordinary people do not go outside. We do.”

His low voice explained, “We have to reclaim the land we lost.”

A strange feeling suddenly came over me.

I did not know exactly what I was feeling or why I felt that way. I only knew that the flat explanation had made me feel strange.

Something like a brief afterimage seemed to pass before my eyes. It felt as though a forgotten memory had surfaced and vanished. It was too fast for me to make out clearly.

I stared at my senior partner.

“What is outside?”

The answer came lazily.

“Creatures.”

Then once I had enough experience, I would go outside the Core!

“You need experience before you can come inside the Core.”

What?

“The Core is full of civilians.”

That was true.

Yoon turned on the screen mounted to the laboratory wall.

The display quickly split into several sections, like a bank of security cameras. It began showing strange things. Every background was different. Some showed bluish grasslands, while others were gray and desolate, like something from an apocalypse movie.

The backgrounds changed rapidly, like game stages switching, while creatures wandered through them.

None of them showed any sign of people.

So that was outside the Core.

“The area around a Core is relatively safe. The Badgers establish a foothold there. It gets more dangerous the farther you go, and there are areas where drones disappear for unknown reasons. The regions are classified by risk level. But you cannot really grasp it just from watching videos, can you?”

I had a bad feeling.

I immediately gave a respectful reply.

“The video quality is excellent. It feels as vivid as reality right before my eyes.”

“Explaining it does not make it stick in your head.”

Yoon had no intention of listening to me.

He tapped at the keyboard and changed the footage. I grew more and more intimidated as I watched the images switch.

What were those unknowable things that sometimes appeared on the screen...?

My senior partner did not care about my expression and continued explaining.

“If creature danger levels run from 1 to 10, the danger levels of the zones outside a Core run from A to F. A is the last zone Badgers can enter, while F is where recruits begin.”

“Ah. Then is that place crawling with creatures in the top-right corner an A Zone?”

“That is an off-limits S Zone.”

“Excuse me?”

Were there not only zones up to A?

Without taking his eyes off the screen, Yoon explained.

“There are places even experienced Badgers should not enter. We group all such places together and call them S Zones.”

“Then how was that footage recorded?”

“By drone.”

I see.

“It is a relief that it is an S Zone. I will hardly ever have to face one.”

“Someday, we will turn S Zones into F Zones and bring them inside the Core. That is why we go outside.”

“Let me revise that. It is a relief that this is a very distant future for me.”

“Let us go outside in a week.”

I knew it!

I knew this would happen! I had gotten a bad feeling the moment he said explanations would not make it stick in my head.

This person... I had felt it ever since the mushroom creature incident, but he clearly believed people had to learn by experiencing things firsthand.

Yoon raised an eyebrow at me as I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

“What is with that expression?”

“Are you seriously asking because you do not know?”

“No.”

Unbelievable.

Yoon turned off the screen.

Everything my senior partner did felt efficient. There was no wasted movement at all.

He took out what looked like a tablet from beneath the desk.

“For the week before we go out, let us build up your stamina.”

“Can that be done in a week?”

“You are not in such bad shape right now.”

Really?

I asked, unable to hide the happiness in my voice.

“That is a relief. I was really worried....”

“You are still far from ready to send into the field.”

Was that supposed to make me feel better or worse?

Once again, my senior partner ignored my reaction.

He flipped through the tablet and explained my training schedule for the next week.

Exercise from nine after breakfast. Lunch. Rest, then exercise again from two. Once we finished at six, I was to study about the world online on my own. If I had questions, I could message him whenever I felt like it.

It was more reasonable than I had expected. It was also nice that I would have legitimate time to use the internet after six.

Thinking about the introductions in a week made my stomach twist, but the week ahead itself seemed better than expected. That put me in a good mood.

“He said he would pay you one month’s salary in advance, considering your circumstances. Use that to support yourself.”

After we left Yoon’s house, before I returned to the cabin, Yoon handed me a card and said that.

My face brightened as I accepted it.

“Thank you.”

Having money I could use made me feel much better. I should check how much was in the account at an ATM. I had a place to sleep and a place to work now, so I only needed basic things like clothes and groceries.

Ah.

I had worried constantly, but it seemed like everything was working out. I was so happ...

Boom!

“What was that?”

“What do you think? A creature.”

Yoon knocked away a creature the size of a wild dog as it leaped at my face, using his phone.

The creature crashed to the ground together with the phone’s screen.

A phone was not a ping-pong paddle. I stared blankly at the creature trembling on the ground while thinking that, and Yoon lazily walked toward it.

My senior partner bent down and checked the creature as it sprang up from the ground.

“Strange. I was trying to lure it toward me. Why did it leap at you?”

It was a creature similar to a whale.

Really, it was close enough to call it a whale.

Crunch!

Yoon crushed it to death beneath his foot.

What a waste.

That thought crossed my mind.

...Huh?

“Why is that a waste?”

“What?”

I muttered to myself because I could not understand why I had felt regret. Yoon straightened up and asked.

I quickly shook my head.

“It is nothing. But can you lure them?”

“Yeah. These things cry at a frequency humans cannot hear. The creature alarm had been going off for a while, and it kept getting closer, so I decided to lure it in and catch it by making a sound with my phone.”

Yoon arched an eyebrow as he said that.

Then he narrowed his eyes at me.

“Why did it attack you?”

“It must have thought I looked like an easier target.”

If I had been that creature, I would not have wanted to attack Yoon either.

I had not known him long, but Yoon was still an unreadable person who moved strangely little and carried an intimidating air.

“We were not that far apart, either.”

For some reason, Yoon did not seem convinced by my answer.

He did not say anything, though.

He simply studied me for a while, then sent me back to the cabin. He said that if we reported the body, a cleanup team would come and remove it.

I nodded and returned to the cabin.

As I walked back, I kept thinking it was a shame, though I could not understand why.