WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Black Badger ◈
Chapter 74: The Inherited Sword (1)
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Ye-hyeon’s mother died giving birth to him.
They said Lee Seung-hyeon believed Lee Ye-hyeon was the son who had killed his mother by being born. That was why he could never grow attached to his biological son, even from infancy. Ye-hyeon learned the “real reason his father hated him” during his third year of middle school.
During his troubled adolescence, he rebelled and demanded to hear about his mother. Lee Seung-hyeon beat him brutally for it.
I could not hold back a comment.
“How does that make any sense?”
“Still, he didn’t hit me except when I rebelled.”
Ye-hyeon said something that was no help at all.
Beside him, Yoon rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Judging by his reaction, it seemed to be an excuse Ye-hyeon made often.
I barely suppressed my own urge to roll my eyes when Ye-hyeon continued.
“Anyway, that was also the year I realized my father wasn’t aging. It was creepy.”
Lee Seung-hyeon had always looked young.
Until his third year of middle school, Ye-hyeon had been too afraid of his father to properly look at him. Besides, Lee Seung-hyeon often left Ye-hyeon alone for days at a time. So he had never noticed anything strange. Then, when he began seriously rebelling, he noticed the anomaly.
Naturally, Lee Seung-hyeon did not explain.
Ye-hyeon rebelled several times, trying to force an answer out of him, but Lee Seung-hyeon was stubborn. At some point, Ye-hyeon gave up. He stopped crying, throwing tantrums, and getting slapped for talking back. He stopped combing through the internet and books for cases of people who did not age. He stopped imagining that Lee Seung-hyeon was not really his biological father, or fantasizing that he might be some kind of vampire.
It was not difficult to resign himself and accept reality as it was.
Without saying a word, Ye-hyeon accepted Lee Seung-hyeon’s cold indifference, his irritable nagging, and the fickle warmth that came rarely enough to count on one hand.
Until just before the war broke out.
“Just before?”
“About six months before?”
Ye-hyeon said, neatly cutting through his walnut pie crust with a fork.
“Or was it seven months? Anyway, it was less than a year.”
Lee Seung-hyeon suddenly came to see Ye-hyeon, who had been attending university in America, and started putting him through hell.
As always, there was no explanation. Ye-hyeon said he simply ran, got hit, hit back, and ran again as Lee Seung-hyeon ordered. He had to learn survival techniques that looked as though he would never use them in his life, along with all kinds of martial arts. It was a horrible time. Lee Seung-hyeon was an excellent soldier, but not a merciful teacher.
And that was when Ye-hyeon first saw Lee Seung-hyeon’s inhuman healing ability.
Ye-hyeon stopped moving, staring down at his plate of walnut pie, then dropped his fork with a clink.
“I found out by stabbing him with a knife.”
“I don’t understand why that became your trauma.”
Yoon grumbled quietly beside him.
“If it were me, I think I would’ve felt relieved. Weren’t you covered in bruises around then?”
“I stabbed someone in a fit of anger, and he was my biological father.”
Ye-hyeon murmured so quietly it was hard to hear, then suddenly gave a small shudder.
A crease formed between his brows, which rarely furrowed.
“It was truly horrible.”
While he was going through that physically and mentally awful time, the war broke out.
He received an enhanced body implant and was sent out onto the battlefield. Only then did Ye-hyeon realize that his biological father was neither Dracula nor some supernatural creature, but an enhanced body holder. It even seemed Lee Seung-hyeon had known in advance that the war would break out.
The many things he had taught Ye-hyeon proved useful.
My seniors did not tell me much about what the war itself had been like.
They probably did not want to revisit such terrible memories. It was not a story I particularly needed to hear, either.
What mattered was that Lee Seung-hyeon, perhaps unwilling to see his son die after all, occasionally came to visit his unit. He had an uncanny talent for finding Ye-hyeon, and after calling him out, he would usually nag him uncomfortably before leaving. Then one day, he dragged Ye-hyeon away from the front lines.
Ye-hyeon rebelled, insisting he would remain at the front, and was beaten until he was nearly dead.
“Of course, he didn’t explain.”
“No. Ah, he did say one thing when I rebelled, saying I intended to die on the front lines.”
Ye-hyeon explained to me, someone who fully understood why my senior partner had made an insult about his father.
“He told me not to worry. If I wanted to die that badly, he would find me a place to die.”
Why did he have to phrase it like that?
Yoon exhaled a quiet sigh and rolled his eyes upward. The new atrocities he was hearing about Lee Seung-hyeon did not seem to surprise him. I was starting to lose control of my expression too. Ye-hyeon recounted the past in a flat voice, but I was not stupid enough to miss what lay behind those calm sentences.
How had he grown up with no one to rely on?
With not a single warm embrace, amid neglect and abuse.
Whether he noticed my darkening gaze or not, Ye-hyeon continued. According to him, this was where the important part began.
Lee Seung-hyeon slung the battered Ye-hyeon over his back and returned to an area where civilians were gathered.
Then he abruptly put a greatsword in Ye-hyeon’s hands.
A greatsword.
“The one from the video?”
When I asked quietly, Ye-hyeon smiled for a long moment.
“He didn’t give me that one from the start.”
But they sparred with a sword of exactly the same width.
He said he was not allowed to leave the unidentified building until he had perfectly learned the swordsmanship Lee Seung-hyeon taught him. He attempted to escape several times to return to the front, where his comrades Yoon, Ami, and Joo were, but failed every time. People presumed to be Lee Seung-hyeon’s associates also prevented Ye-hyeon from escaping.
And they all said the same thing.
They would soon find him a place to die, so there was no need to worry.
Just as they had said, it did not take long for them to find him one.
“You said you watched the video.”
I nodded at Ye-hyeon’s question.
“It only showed the last part of the battle. Hundreds of Badgers died because of that one thing.”
A disaster that came when they had seized the advantage in the war.
Even when bombs were dropped on it and Badger units charged it, it would not die. It revived again and again, slaughtering everything in sight.
The damage it inflicted was so devastating that every available force converged on it.
Several names I knew came up in the explanation.
The unit led by Richard Green was annihilated, leaving only Richard and two others alive. The unit Choi Yoon belonged to was annihilated, leaving only Choi Yoon and three others alive.
Richard and Yoon were seriously injured in the process and transported to the hospital, so neither saw its end.
The fighter aircraft Choi Ami was flying crashed, and Ami fell into a coma for two years from the impact. Most of Joo’s unit was caught in an explosion and left unable to fight.
Lee Seung-hyeon and his associates also did not see its end. Lee Seung-hyeon succeeded in cutting off the creature’s arm, but suffered a fatal injury in return. Eric’s red-haired subordinate, called Shashinsky, did not see its end either. Many of the Elders’ subordinates also died there.
But those who had received enhanced bodies far earlier than ordinary people dealt it a heavy blow.
And Jason Tvein and Lee Ye-hyeon witnessed the end.
Tvein was injured, but he did not leave.
If Ye-hyeon failed, he planned to take a bomb and die together with the creature. On the day Ye-hyeon received Lee Seung-hyeon’s permission to leave and returned to the battlefield, he was assigned to Jason Tvein’s unit.
They were the last force.
If Tvein’s unit failed as well, a nuclear bomb would be dropped.
Defeat hung heavily over the place. Before they entered the ruins where it was running wild, Jason Tvein received a high-performance bomb, and Ye-hyeon was handed a sword.
And that was when Ye-hyeon first met Jaeyeon.
A woman with long, fox-like eyes and a sleek hazel bob.
She held a sword in her arms.
‘You look disgustingly like Lee Seung-hyeon.’
‘Excuse me?’
The woman, who had suddenly appeared and inspected Ye-hyeon’s face, smiled softly at his flustered expression.
She held out the sword she had been carrying.
‘A gift from Hilde.’
‘What?’
‘He said we should place our hopes on this.’
The woman with the bob continued saying things Ye-hyeon could not understand.
Just like Lee Seung-hyeon and his associates, who never gave proper explanations.
‘Good luck. I don’t care which side wins.’
‘...Excuse me, but who are you?’
‘Don’t look at me like that. You’re the same, aren’t you?’
Jaeyeon reached out with a hand painted in red nail polish and tucked Ye-hyeon’s hair behind his ear.
Their eyes met in midair. A man who had not even been able to wash after rolling through the battlefield, and a woman so clean and beautiful that she seemed eerie.
Jaeyeon quietly examined Ye-hyeon’s eyes, then smiled brightly.
‘You wish the world would just trample over you and move on, don’t you?’
Ye-hyeon succeeded in killing the creature.
* * *
The story was over.
When the quiet voice stopped, silence descended on the high-ceilinged living room. For a long while, I could say nothing as I looked at Ye-hyeon.
It was midnight. The day had ended before I knew it. Darkness like ebony had settled beyond the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, and the scent of night had seeped into the cool space that smelled of wind. The silence was heavy enough to weigh on my shoulders. The ticking of the clock’s second hand struck my ears.
The weight of the silence kept choking off my breath.
I took in Ye-hyeon, watching me with unreadable eyes, and Yoon, watching Ye-hyeon inscrutably. My lips moved.
No proper voice came out.
“My sword.”
“Yes.”
Ye-hyeon answered in a husky voice.
“The sword you gave me.”
“I....”
The sword I had named hope and handed over.
“My greatsword.”
“Do you want to hold it again?”
The pale man asked as though he had not heard my stumbling voice.
“Do you want to hold it again, Hilde? I have it.”
I could not breathe.
I had begun shedding tears without realizing it, and unable to manage my own breathing, I started gasping. I gripped my wildly heaving lungs with both hands. I coughed as I made a futile effort to calm my breath.
My vision blurred by tears, my breathing growing faster and faster.
My heart hurt.
“Hilde!”
“He’s hyperventilating.”
My seniors’ voices rang in my ears.
“I’ll get a paper bag. Stay still.”
“Cup your hands over your mouth, Hilde. Cover your mouth with both hands.”
Memories burst forth.
I sobbed through coughing. My sword. The sword I always carried, the one I gripped whenever I swept through battlefields alongside Kyle. There had been no reason to use a sword on Earth. Humans used guns, bombs, and robots instead of long, heavy chunks of metal.
So my sword had lain in its sheath for a long time, rusting under the name of precarious peace.
I had cherished it like another self, so I had never intended to let it leave my hand.
“Ye-hyeon, the paper bag.”
“Hilde.”
A white paper bag appeared in front of me.
“Hilde, take the bag.”
In the end, I give the sword away.
To a human.
To the ally I had ultimately chosen. But someone I did not even know.
On a day I could not remember exactly, I left that sword, whether it would ever be used or not, to an unknown person along with a brief video message.
The memory surfaced.
‘Take this.’
I recorded the message in an empty room.
‘If the worst happens, if mutual destruction becomes the only path left, take this and charge in before you press the nuclear bomb switch.
And hope they have one scrap of feeling left. Hope they recognize the weapon of the comrade who stood beside them for so long, and hesitate, even if only for a moment.
I hope you are calm and capable enough to drive the blade into their heart in that moment of hesitation.
And if no fragment of feeling remains, I hope you are prepared to embrace them and die together, or that you have no attachment to life.’
A message left for a pitiful human among the last remaining forces, one who knew how to use a sword.
‘Let’s hope for that. The odds are slim, but still.’
Lee Ye-hyeon takes hold of my sword.
My sword. Something like my other self. Something my own kind recognized at once. Something I had carried dearly all the way to Earth. It passed into the hands of a human who had no attachment to life, yet ironically remained standing on the battlefield until the very end, a human who had developed judgment and courage amid abuse and neglect.
To the child kneeling before me now, desperately trying to calm my breathing.
“Hildebert.”
“Ye-hyeon.”
I forced his name out through my ragged breaths.
“You received my sword.”
Humanity won the First War.
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