WeTried Translations

Translator: Joy

Editor: Joy

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Damned Transmigration

Chapter 53

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Crimson Foot

An assassin lives and dies by what she can see.

This was the first truth Haryeong had been taught, before she could even hold a needle steady. The Dang Family's hidden weapons ranged from blades thinner than a hair to pellets small enough to be mistaken for grains of sand.

A woman who could not see her own weapon had no business using one. So her eyes had been trained, and trained, and trained again, until the world slowed for her in moments of violence.

Until now, those eyes had never truly failed her.

One moment Yuri stood at her side. The next, he was halfway across the junkyard, and ten men were on the ground. Each leg was broken at a different joint, all by a kick she had only caught the tail of.

'Thunder Cloud.'

She had known the name before she knew the man.

The Fist of the Rending Cloud married to the Art of the Violet Lightning Flash, speed and unpredictability wrapped in a sheath of lightning qi. They said watching his fists move at full speed was like watching a storm think. The cloud parts, the lightning answers.

He hadn't thrown a single punch. No lightning qi, either. Just footwork and a kicking technique she had never seen catalogued anywhere, because, she suspected, it did not exist anywhere except inside his head.

She had glimpsed a shadow of the Moonlit Reveller in his movements back in Logos.

His opponent then had been a goblin, the kind a reasonably determined farmer could put down with a spade. Even so, she had noticed something underneath the technique.

[What about the kicking technique?]

[I made one.]

A dry sound left her throat, something that was almost a laugh.

Of course he had. He hadn't spent the past two years sitting in a courtyard meditating on old texts. He had been out in the Underworld, working contracts, bleeding, winning, losing, and winning again, until the gaps in his arsenal made themselves felt through pain. Then he had simply filled them.

She thought of Estor Orsia. The Sword Dragon. The Orsia Family's gift to itself, five circles deep at twenty-one, tutored from childhood by the Sword Emperor personally, his body cultivated with elixirs that lesser families could not afford to name.

The world had agreed, without much argument, that talent like his did not come twice in a generation.

But Yuri had transmigrated at twenty with nothing yet three years later he stood here, and what she had just watched was the work of someone for whom talent was, frankly, an insufficient word.

Haryeong filed the thought away somewhere cold and continued watching.

One by one, the sounds from the junkyard entrance went quiet.

"Impressive."

Applause drifted from behind them, slow and unhurried.

Yuri ignored it. He moved between the scattered bodies with the same economy he brought to everything, checking each man, then dragging them deeper into the yard and dropping them among the refuse.

When he straightened, his gaze landed on what the rubbish mound had been concealing: naked bodies, stripped bare and laid out in rows. Eyes removed. Hair removed. They looked less like corpses than like something waiting to be filled.

"What the hell?"

Six men spilled out of a wooden shack behind the mound.

The ten Yuri had put down were nothing, barely third circle, the kind of muscle hired to stand in doorways and look unpleasant. These six were different. Their qi sat heavier on the air, and five of them had broadswords already clearing their scabbards. The sixth hung back, one hand drifting towards the short wand at his hip.

"An attack?"

The bald one leading the group had a face built for intimidation and eyes currently doing their best impression of fury. His Saber Qi flickered off the blade, white and unsteady at the edges but genuine enough.

"Shall I help?" Haryeong asked.

Yuri shook his head.

"That's a relief."

She settled her weight back on her heels.

"I'm not feeling my best."

"Why not?"

"The food yesterday. If I'd known it would come to this, I'd have broken their legs as well."

She was exaggerating. The tampered meal had been an insult to most people's constitutions, but the Dang Family had spent generations cataloguing poisons precisely so that its members would never be inconvenienced by them.

The bald man was still shouting.

"Who the fuck are you lot?"

His Saber Qi flared, and his four subordinates answered it with their own, weaker but coordinated.

Behind them, the mage had the wand out and his hands were moving in the particular way that hands moved when someone was trying very hard to look like they were not casting a spell.

Yuri's gaze moved to him, unhurried.

Haryeong had heard that transmigrators possessed an instinctive understanding of mana that most martial artists lacked. Standing beside Yuri now, she could almost see it at work, his attention sharpening on the mage in a way that had nothing to do with watching for the cast.

Three spell formulae collapsed into one.

The bald man's shout was a feint, a beat of noise to cover the mage. The surge of wind that came next was genuine enough, a wall of compressed air that should have taken them off their feet.

Yuri raised his leg to waist height and kicked empty air.

The wind died, killed.

His foot had found the centre of the spell's architecture the way a needle finds a gap in armour, and whatever he had pushed through it had reversed the flow from the inside. The mage stumbled, clutched his own chest, and coughed blood onto the dirt.

The saber masters had not finished processing this when Yuri was already among them.

The bald man swung.

The broadsword came down heavy and fast, and it met a foot wrapped in deep crimson Ganggi. The blade's Saber Qi shattered on contact, pieces of it scattering.

What happened next was too fast to track cleanly, but Haryeong tracked it anyway, teeth on edge with the effort.

His body moved like something with too many joints. The leg that had killed the Saber Qi twisted grotesquely mid-motion, bent at an angle that should not have been physically available, and the sole of his foot pressed flat against the bald man's sternum.

Thud.

No scream. The air came out of him all at once, along with a mouthful of blood, and he hit the ground before his men had finished raising their swords.

The remaining four were reasonably skilled at fighting in formation, but this did not help them. His kicks bent like whips, threaded with magic.

Haryeong had been considering throwing a hidden weapon purely out of boredom, however settled on watching instead.

She reached one conclusion: in the past two years, the man had also been studying magic.

The yard went still.

The bald man opened his eyes to find himself looking up at the only subordinate still breathing, the mage, whose face had taken on the particular grey of a man who had abruptly run out of options.

"Your name's Mak-cheol."

He did not phrase it as a question. Yuri dropped onto a large crate as though it were a throne.

"I kept you alive because you looked like the one worth talking to. I have questions. Keep your mouth civil, or you'll be answering them without teeth."

"You son of a bitch, do you have any idea where you-?!"

Crack.

Yuri's foot came down on Mak-cheol's toes. The scream that followed was high and wet, and the man’s body went rigid with it.

"You said teeth! You said teeth!!"

Smack.

The back of a hand.

The teeth that left Mak-cheol's mouth landed in the dirt, wrapped in blood.

"I crushed your toes because I thought it'd be harder to talk without them. Your attitude made the rest unavoidable."

"What..." Mak-cheol spat a string of red.

"What do you want to ask..."

Beneath the words, his internal energy was shifting, slow and careful, looking for an opening.

Thwack.

The tip of Yuri's foot jabbed him precisely in the dantian. The internal energy scattered. Mak-cheol's eyes rolled white.

"I'll admit you've improved," Haryeong said, stepping forward, "but you have no instinct for this."

Yuri leaned back.

"Be my guest."

"Torture isn't just pain. Pain teaches a man to endure. Have you never heard of the carrot and the stick?"

"I haven't got a carrot."

"I have something better."

She drew a small pouch from her sleeve and shook two pills into her palm. Round, pale, faintly sweet-smelling.

Yuri looked at them. Then at her.

“Why are you only producing those now?"

"I was curious to see your method first."

She grabbed the mage's jaw, prised it open, and placed the first pill on his tongue.

"Truth serum. Before you panic," she added, glancing at Mak-cheol, "it doesn't hurt."

"Wait, I don't need it, I won't li-"

She dropped the second pill into his mouth while he was still talking.

"One more thing," Yuri said, as the serum began its work.

"Younger. If you can manage it."

Haryeong looked at him.

She did not say anything. There was no need.

Yuri was looking for a transmigrator.

***

The residents of Sector 4 called it the Foul Village.

Biyeon sat in the window frame with one knee drawn up, scratching the edge of the mask covering her face with one fingernail. Below, the streets moved in the particular way of places where laws exist but nobody has bothered to enforce them in a very long time.

Commerce happened. Arguments happened. People who had lost everything in the outside world pushed through alleyways shoulder to shoulder with people who had never been welcome there to begin with.

"What are you thinking about?"

The voice came from the darkness behind her.

"That it looks like Shinjeong."

She kept her eyes on the street.

"The same logic. The strong eat whoever is below them. Whatever they call it here, it runs on the same principle."

Her voice was cracked and hoarse, worn at the edges.

"It wants to be another Shinjeong. It just hasn't grown into itself yet."

It had been fifty years since Ranalsa became a Rift. Long enough for the filth to develop its own customs, its own hierarchies, its own justifications for the way things were. Long enough for the Sword Emperor to calculate that moving against the sectors directly would cost him more in reputation than it would gain him in territory.

So he waited, patient and careful as a man who had decided that caution and cowardice were interchangeable virtues.

"He's hoping they'll give him a reason," Biyeon said.

"A riot. Something the Orsia Family can respond to with a sword rather than an argument. He doesn't act because he doesn't want to be seen acting without cause."

"Exactly the Leader's assessment."

"He called him a coward who had mistaken himself for a strategist."

She turned back to the window.

She had come because of an order, and the order was simple in the way that impossible things often are: find the Withered Crone, and kill her.

She was a sixth-circle mage who deserted from the Rudella Mage Tower a decade ago, retreated here, and either stagnated or grew since.

She had no way of knowing which.

If she had spent ten years in the dark quietly pushing through the wall to the seventh circle, then the question of whether she could kill her became academic. She would be fortunate to escape with the same number of limbs she had arrived with.

Her master had told her to come back alive regardless.

'He just told me to come back alive.'

Which meant failure was within the acceptable range of outcomes and the lesson was the point. Biyeon understood this and found it unhelpful.

Scrape.

Below, a child was curled against the wall of an alley, arms over his head.

A man with the build and temperament of someone who had decided that controlling a stretch of garbage-strewn street constituted an empire stood over him, putting the boot in.

Apparently the alley was gang territory and the child had been picking pockets in it without paying the appropriate tribute.

"Shall I intervene?"

"It's the law of this place."

Biyeon watched the child absorb another kick.

"Not our business."

Thud. Thud.

The sounds were unpleasant. They cut across the quiet she had been cultivating since she sat down.

She had learned, seven years ago in the middle of a fire, that the world would not stop being unpleasant because she found it so. Weakness had consequences. It was a fact, and the child below her was in the process of learning it.

Biyeon was stronger than the man doing the kicking. Under the laws of this place, that made whatever she chose to do next entirely permissible. The noise was interrupting her thinking. That was, by the Foul Village's own logic, reason enough.

However, when she opened her eyes…

Crack.

The scream that followed did not belong to the child.

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