WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
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◈ Black Badger ◈
Chapter 52: Subway (1)
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I sprang to my feet.
My head spun, but I did not collapse. Covering the communicator dangling from my ear with my palm, I stared blankly ahead.
Where am I right now? How did I end up in this situation?
The last thing I remembered was falling with the creature.
And...
Right. I hit the water.
A broad river ran beneath the gorge. My last memory was crashing into it. I must have blacked out after hitting the surface wrong.
I sat there blankly, then slowly looked down at myself.
My combat uniform was soaked with water. The sharp smell of blood stung my nose. But it did not seem to be my blood.
It must have been the blood sprayed by the creature I stabbed with my sword. I had felt the blade pierce its body.
Clearly, with both hands...
Ah?
My sword.
My sword. Where is my sword?
I frantically patted myself down. The sword I had driven into the creature's body.
Why was it gone?
[Hilde!]
As I searched around in a panic, a sharp voice pierced my ear.
[Get a grip!]
“Yes?”
My senses returned.
My awareness opened. Sight and sound flooded in at once. A sight I felt I had never seen in my life imprinted itself on my eyes. The surroundings were quiet. A river flowed right beside me. Beyond it lay a bleak open field.
The sun did not seem to have set yet, but everything around me was dark. The trees were not especially dense, there were barely any traces of a city, and what little remained was covered in faded grass.
And lying in the grayish clearing was a long corpse.
It was the creature that had climbed up the gorge.
I straightened up.
“Assistant.”
[Report your situation.]
There was unmistakable tension in Ska's voice.
[Keep your head on straight.]
He had always been so at ease. I had thought Ska was the most relaxed person I had met among the Badgers. If Yoon was weary and Ye-hyeon seasoned, Ska was at ease.
But not now.
I pressed the communicator barely hanging from my ear with my palm.
“I think I lost consciousness after hitting the river. I'm currently on the plain beneath the gorge, and the creature that fell with me is dead across the river.”
[Are there any other creatures?]
“I don't see any...”
I quickly looked around.
There was not even the sound of insects, let alone any sign of something nearby. It was quiet enough to grate on my nerves.
And why was it so dark? The grass was faded gray, and the few trees had no life or color to them.
Only the tracks covered in vegetation and the old train lying beside them showed that people had once lived here.
Keeping my nerves taut, I answered slowly.
“There is nothing around me.”
[Hilde.]
Ska's voice was heavy when he replied.
[What's beneath your feet?]
Beneath my feet?
“Under me?”
[There's nothing beneath your feet?]
I lowered my gaze.
How could there be anything beneath my feet...?
Then I realized why the surroundings were dark.
I also understood why Ska's voice had been so tense. Frozen, I looked down at the ground beneath me. Faced with something I had never expected, I forgot how to speak for a moment.
A place where nature had reclaimed control because humans no longer lived there.
The ground was covered in black mold.
“No, is it a mushroom rather than mold?”
[A mushroom is a fungus.]
Ska gently corrected my mutter.
I reflexively marveled at how gentle that correction was. Ska's voice carried none of the disdain someone might feel toward another person's stupidity. If it had been Yoon, his voice would have made it clear that he was thinking, Talking to someone dumber than a chimpanzee is exhausting.
That was not important right now.
[More precisely, it isn't so much a mushroom as mycelium. Creature mycelium.]
Ska spoke.
[Soon, the fruiting body of that creature covering A Zone will rise from the ground and try to devour you and the dead creature. Can you see it moving?]
“Yes.”
The enormous black mold was slowly spreading outward.
I slowly got to my feet, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground. The black mold, like a dense net, was creeping closer beneath my feet.
This is driving me insane.
It looked grotesque, covering the vast ground like this, but was it really that dangerous?
As I carefully lifted my right foot from the ground, the Assistant continued.
[The main body is deep underground. Cutting off the fruiting bodies won't kill it. Its mycelium is absurdly large too. Run the moment a fruiting body rises from the ground. We still haven't found a way to kill it.]
Are you serious?
[The creature carrying you in its mouth while you were unconscious probably got swept into this area and was eaten by it.]
I raised my head.
I looked at the corpse across the river. Only after seeing it again did I realize it was covered in black mold.
This is insane. Ska was right.
And a tracking device had been implanted beneath my finger. The leadership had put it there to protect me from an unknown person called Jaeyeon. They must have been able to confirm my location through it. They could not tell the seniors dispatched outside the Core, but they would have checked my location as soon as they received the report.
Perhaps the signal traveled along the river before stopping somewhere around here.
[It must have left you alone because it was digesting that creature.]
As soon as he finished speaking, the ground beneath my feet began to squirm.
I stared dumbly at the creature's corpse, which was rapidly shrinking.
“The ground beneath me is moving.”
[It'll rise in thirty seconds.]
Ska calmly advised me.
[Run like your life depends on it. If you have any last words, say them now.]
“Yes. Like my life depends... What? Last words?”
[The leadership does not give detailed instructions to Badgers outside the Core unless it is a territory reclamation battle.]
The net beneath my feet had become thick and seamless.
The moment I tensed my calves, Ska's heavy voice struck my ears.
[Unless a Badger's life is in immediate danger.]
Swoosh!
Swoosh! Swoosh! Fruiting bodies rose up. My vision filled with tentacle-like things in an instant. Black stalks burst from the ground.
I ran in terror.
Mold trying to pierce my legs and cover my body.
What the hell is this?!
I did not want to die to mold. I especially did not want to die to mold that covered the ground like grotesque nerves.
“Argh!”
I ran.
I ran like crazy. Then I nearly fell. A fruiting body shooting up wildly from underground had struck my heel.
This won't work. I need to get to the river.
Feeling the ground rise wherever my feet landed, I ran desperately.
That place with flowing water should be safe...
[Don't go to the river!]
At the sharp rebuke, I barely stopped at the riverbank.
[Jumping into the water will only slow you down! Do you think there isn't any of that beneath the river?!]
Splash!
Black fruiting bodies burst through the surface.
Water droplets scattered in every direction. Behind me as I twisted and ran, uneven growths of mold shot up. Fuck! Is this really mold? I clenched my teeth and ran wherever my feet took me. It could regrow even if cut, it was incredibly fast, its main body was under the ground, and it was absurdly huge.
How did something this grotesque come to exist?
How had something like this taken root on Earth? No one answered the questions that sprang to mind. I did not have the spare attention to think about them either. I ran stupidly wherever my feet took me. I knew that if I stumbled or fell even once, those tentacles would pierce me, cover me, and digest me.
It did not seem to hold any particular grudge against me.
It was simply trying to devour every living thing indiscriminately. Ska ordered me to hold on through the communicator at my ear as I ran. Until I got off the ground it covered. He said it did not matter which direction I ran.
That was fortunate, at least. I did not have time to consider a direction. If I had spent even one more second on the ground, the tops of my feet would have been pierced.
I fell into the trance brought on by running.
A blissful state where I could hear only the wind around me.
But it would not last long. I was already gasping for breath.
My legs were turning as hard as stone. Several times, I slowed down a little and nearly had my feet pierced.
How far does this thing even stretch? Tears welled up in my eyes from the wind. Whether they were merely physical tears or tears because I sensed a futile death approaching, I did not know.
Ska shouted something, but I could not hear him clearly.
Wow.
I'm really at my limit now...
“Hey!”
A sharp shout pulled me from my runner's high.
My eyes widened.
The owner of the voice was sticking his head out from a subway entrance several meters away.
“Run this way!”
Into the subway?
Angela had told me never to go down into the subway.
But this was not the time to argue about that. I had to do something to escape the creature covering the ground.
Besides, while the building around that subway entrance was covered in black mold, the inside looked clean.
There was no other option now anyway.
First, survive!
I ran toward the human sticking his head out.
“Get inside, quickly!”
He grabbed my arm as I reached the subway entrance.
“Before those things get in!”
The man threw me onto the stairs, then held a machine out in front of him.
The machine generated a strange barrier. My legs gave out, and I stared dumbly as the black fruiting bodies densely covered the transparent membrane.
Thankfully, it ended quickly. The mold was stopped by the translucent barrier. The cement floor was hard. The man who had sealed the subway entrance carried me down the stairs, lifted the steel door, and entered the subway.
Then he lowered the steel door again, blocking out the sunlight from above.
A gray space spread out before me.
Once again, I had survived.
* * *
The communicator could not get a signal.
I had heard communicators did not work well inside subways. Crackle, crackle. When static suddenly mixed into my communicator and I frowned, the other person approached me. Then he pulled the communicator right out of my ear as I sat there.
“Let me see.”
The man casually took it from me, inspected it from every angle, and clicked his tongue.
He shoved the communicator into his pocket.
“It is completely dead.”
Then he curled a finger at me as I continued gasping for breath.
“Follow me once you've caught your breath. You can't sit around forever.”
The man did not remove his black mask the entire time he spoke.
“You aren't going to sprawl out and sleep here, are you?”
So I had been following the nameless man for ten minutes now.
A subway without any sign of people. A bleak space where our footsteps echoed. I trudged along, staring at the man's back ahead of me.
For some reason, the electricity was on in the subway corridor. He walked beside a stopped escalator. Since we started walking, he had not spoken to me or turned around to look at me.
He had not asked my name.
Nor had he given his own.
“Excuse me.”
My quiet voice struck the empty subway walls and echoed.
“Who are you?”
“Your esteemed senior.”
The man replied without turning around.
His footsteps were neat and even. I trudged behind him and spoke in a tired voice.
“Are you human?”
“Can't you tell by looking?”
“A Badger?”
“That's right.”
“But you can't be an official Badger.”
The man walking ahead stopped at my mutter.
I stopped with him. Then I watched the person standing still with his back to me.
A gray space. A place so clean it was difficult to believe it was outside the Core.
Standing in a place like a downtown subway at two in the morning, I looked at the unmoving human.
“If you were an official Badger, Assistant Ska would have surely told me someone was coming to rescue me...”
“Maybe he didn't know I was here.”
“You don't even have a communicator...”
“I told you, signals don't work well down here.”
“Did my communicator stop working?”
“You were the one who said there was static.”
“The thing hanging from your waist.”
The man shifted slightly.
“That's my sword, isn't it?”
“...Yeah. I picked it up.”
“And the thing on your left is a signal jammer.”
He slowly turned his head.
I did not move. I had not recovered the strength to move yet, and I was not sure what moving would accomplish. So I simply watched him in my exhausted state.
The man slowly turned his body. I quietly looked into his sharp eyes.
They were green. Far clearer than Ricardo's.
Very human eyes.
“I've seen one in Yoon's laboratory.”
“Ah. Is that bastard still alive?”
The man casually asked, then gave a crooked smile.
He slowly pulled at his mask. As it came off, his features were gradually revealed.
Long hair fell loosely over his shoulders. I could see the beard on his jaw, which he clearly had not shaved for a long time.
A face characteristic of someone who had been cut off from civilization for a long time.
The man threw the mask onto the floor.
“I figured Ye-hyeon had finally died when that brat Ska started giving orders. Looks like everyone's alive? No. Who knows. If Yoon died, Ye-hyeon would be dead too. But Yoon would not necessarily die just because Ye-hyeon did.”
“Are you a deserter?”
I whispered tiredly.
“Did you run away outside the Core?”
Like I had fled from Jaeyeon.
Outside the Core. Outside civilization. Outside the organization. Fleeing everything that bound you.
A place where creatures might be everywhere, but where there was freedom. Perhaps a place where freedom was all there was.
“Have you been living alone outside the Core after going missing? I figured there had to be Badgers like you.”
“Smart junior.”
He quietly approached and put a knife to my throat.
“Follow me quietly.”
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