WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈

Chapter 26: Remnants (2)

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Kyle_Dos: I was patrolling the area as usual.

It was a muggy day.

The air-raid shelter was filled with maddening heat and humidity.

Kyle_Dos had a generator, but it was small and its output was limited. He couldn't afford a luxury like air conditioning.

Artillery fire rang out from the north.

It looked like another Monster had emerged from the Rift.

Kyle_Dos had been lucky when the colossal-class monster appeared before.

It came within just 4 km of him, then suddenly changed direction.

Still, even Kyle_Dos, who knew little about Rifts, found it unsettling that nearby plants had changed into strange shapes and that the sunlight at dawn and dusk looked grayish-white instead of red.

Back then, Kyle_Dos's hobby was foraging.

Kyle_Dos had plenty of preserved rations dried until they were like bricks, as well as canned goods. But eating that kind of food for too long wasn't good for your mental health.

Kyle_Dos had prepared sweet foods like jam and sugar to fight depression, but if sweet food alone could cure it, nobody in the world would go to the hospital for depression or kill themselves.

For a change of pace, Kyle_Dos went to a nearby stream.

The wooden platforms once used by valley vendors, never dismantled, still stood there, covered in the grime of time.

Sitting on a suitable platform, Kyle_Dos used a military combat knife to catch large crayfish wriggling in the water.

They were crayfish, but as large as lobsters. Other than their ominous grayish-white color, they were full of meat and tasted quite good.

Kyle_Dos caught enough crayfish to fill a large pot, then headed home.

That was when Kyle_Dos saw flowers he had never seen before.

A grayish-white garden made up not of one or two flowers, but hundreds, thousands of them, lay before me as if by fate.

At the center of those flowers, blooming in chillingly perfect order, Kyle_Dos found something white and luminous, completely unlike the grayish-white around it, lying there and twitching.

A woman.

She was naked, badly beaten by someone, and unconscious. But that shape, those curves, undeniably belonged to a woman.

Kyle_Dos brought her to the air-raid shelter and cared for her devotedly.

Neither the scorching heat nor the stifling humidity of the shelter could stop him.

Wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead again and again with his sleeve, Kyle_Dos splinted the woman's broken arm, applied disinfectant to her scratches, and gently spread ointment over the bruised face that had been punched but still retained its beauty.

It took quite some time for the woman to regain consciousness.

When she finally awoke, she recoiled in shock. Covering herself with the thin blanket over her body, she asked in a trembling voice.

“I don't know exactly what happened, but please don't worry. I'm not your enemy. You're safe here. If you need anything, just tell me.”

That was Kyle_Dos's first meeting with the wife he'd picked up.

DragonC's prologue, containing the account above, was met with glowing praise.

Anonymous458: Damn, why don't women like that ever fall into my lap?

roka3218: What a beautiful story.

Anonymous848: Lucky bastard, Kyle_Dos! All I ever see around me are corpses.

kimcic: I don't usually read comics, but maybe because it's our story, I found myself wiping away tears.

unicorn18: Was she a virgin?......

But not everyone could think alike.

There were a few negative reactions, and I wouldn't deny being one of them.

Defender: It's just fantasy. Fantasy. Just bring up the status window already.

SKELTON: Hmm... Is it really that bad?

Defender and I happened to post one second apart, an absurdly short interval. That only made people more suspicious that I belonged to Defender's crowd, and I even acquired the dishonorable title of hate-comment crew.

Still, a few people knew my true worth.

Kyle_Dos, the protagonist of this story, was one of the few who recognized SKELTON's value.

He sent me a message.

Message from Kyle_Dos: SKELTON. I'm really sorry, but I have a favor to ask.

It was an extension of his previous request.

Another Capsule had appeared.

Not one, but two.

This wasn't good.

The Erosion was progressing faster than expected.

What DragonC described in the prologue, plants themselves changing, was clear proof that the area had already entered the early stage of Erosion.

Academics claimed that Erosion zones themselves had no harmful effect on humans, citing the two hundred million followers of the Church of Myriad Streams Returning to the Source, which had established its base in an Erosion zone.

I thought differently.

Humans couldn't live in Erosion zones.

Just as Monsters disappeared on Earth, humans lost something important too.

How should I put it? Everything became futile and meaningless.

Where had their two hundred million followers gone?

Erosion zones were truly dangerous.

I replied to Kyle_Dos.

SKELTON: The place where you live is extremely dangerous. The Capsules aren't the problem. Get out if you can.

Message from Kyle_Dos: Get out to where?

I thought for a moment.

I knew the model answer, but I couldn't easily give it.

I wasn't a purely selfless person.

SKELTON: Anywhere but there. If you stay there, death is certain. I know because I've been there myself. Your area has already undergone Erosion. It has become Monster territory.

Message from Kyle_Dos: Thanks for the advice, but I have no intention of leaving. My wife is happy living here too. Or should I come to your air-raid shelter?

“...”

Message from Kyle_Dos: That's ridiculous. There are many reasons, but you know better than anyone what I'm worried about, don't you?

SKELTON: I think I do.

Message from Kyle_Dos: And now that I think about it, telling you to come here isn't something a person should say either. There's a war going on down there right now. Well, I'll figure something out.

That was our last conversation.

* * *

DragonC: I suddenly can't get in touch with Kyle_Dos. Does anyone have contact with him?

When I heard Kyle_Dos had disappeared, what I felt was less shock than the sense that what was bound to happen had happened.

But wasn't it too soon?

There should have been more time.

He had a wife, didn't he?

If she had said even one thing, Kyle_Dos would have found some way to escape that place and build a new refuge for himself and his wife.

He might even have shamelessly come to burden me with his problems.

The board was full of theories about Kyle_Dos's disappearance.

Anonymous848: Didn't the soldiers get him? Honestly, aren't they scarier than the Pioneers?

The theory with the most support was that soldiers had done it.

Certainly, it was the most plausible explanation.

But there shouldn't have been soldiers in that area anymore.

They had all redirected their forces toward Seoul for the civil war.

It was possible if deserters were roaming around, but what gutsy bastard would wander through an Erosion zone where Capsules appeared?

There were other opinions too.

Defender: About Kyle_Dos's wife. Honestly, wasn't she kidnapped instead of picked up? I mean, why would a pretty woman willingly enter some filthy widower-smelling air-raid shelter? He said the woman was injured, but maybe Kyle_Dos beat her up?

Defender's opinion was tangled as ever, but it contained a certain truth. It received plenty of criticism, though to me, it seemed reasonably possible too.

After all, not everything people said on the board was true.

Wasn't it a fact that, in an online community where people wore anonymity as a mask, there would naturally be more lies than truth?

In my case, people treated even the truth as bullshit.

After that, everyone offered their own opinions about Kyle_Dos's fate, but not one of them struck me as convincing.

“...Hoo.”

I drank coffee and thought it over in my own way.

But I didn't think too deeply, because I knew it was pointless.

The only way to learn Kyle_Dos's fate was to go there and see for myself.

It was around the time the question weighing on me like indigestion had gradually faded.

The civil war stopped.

It ended as suddenly as it had begun.

A shortwave radio broadcast announced a temporary ceasefire.

Among the various reasons given was the opening of a humanitarian corridor for refugees. The moment I heard that news, I sensed fate calling.

I had to go.

* * *

At three in the morning, I left my air-raid shelter and headed for the nearest refugee camp indicated by the shortwave broadcast.

I had no business with the refugees.

I was looking for soldiers, specifically an officer with authority.

“I'm terribly sorry, but my parents are in Paju. I lost contact with them after the civil war began, and I'm worried, so I'm trying to find them.”

What moved their hearts wasn't my heartfelt story, but cigarettes.

“This is your travel pass. Take this route. We can't guarantee your safety if you take another route. Above all, do not enter Seoul no matter what. They say there's a ceasefire, but the standoff is still vicious.”

Following their advice, I passed through Anyang and entered Incheon.

Since it was under military control, public order was surprisingly good and the roads were clean.

It was my first time visiting Incheon since the war began. Almost nothing of its former appearance remained, while enormous refugee camps had taken over the place.

People were selling slop stew of unknown origin on the streets.

The smell alone made me nauseated, so I didn't eat it. Instead, I gave it to someone else and obtained a few scraps of information.

A refugee flotilla was soon leaving for Jeju.

A massive fleet carrying hundreds of thousands of people.

“It's a kind of revenge.”

The old man who told me this spat on the ground.

Apparently, there had been something in his slop stew.

“They're feeding human bombs to those fucking bastards who ran off to Jeju first so they could live well among themselves. It's not like they'd sink their fellow citizens, right?”

I headed straight for Paju.

It took time, but I had been there once before, so finding Kyle_Dos's location wasn't difficult.

I stopped my bicycle at the entrance to the dirt road leading to the air-raid shelter and stared for a long time at the land that had turned grayish-white.

I looked at the grass and trees.

The trees' surfaces had shriveled as if dried out, their branches bent into endlessly coiling spirals, while reddish, repulsive grasses resembling lugworms grew thick around their roots.

The Erosion was progressing faster than I had expected.

I took out a mask and covered my nose and mouth.

Scholars claimed the air in Erosion zones was harmless, but speaking from experience, the air here was definitely harmful.

I spotted Kyle_Dos's air-raid shelter through the pale grayish-white mist.

It appeared to be a factory-made, prefabricated buried shelter. Like all cheap shelters of that kind, you entered through a ladder.

The hatch was open.

I prepared my gun and axe, then observed the surroundings.

There was no sign of life inside the shelter.

Instead, the stench of rotting corpses was so thick it penetrated even my mask.

I switched on my lantern and went inside.

I found what seemed to be the light switch and pressed it. To my surprise, the lights came on.

The moment they did, dozens of women in swimsuits filled my view.

Nearly the entire shelter wall was covered in photographs of women.

Some were obscene photos with their breasts exposed.

But even all those beautiful women couldn't conceal how cramped the air-raid shelter was.

A corpse was rotting on the bed, hanging by the neck.

The decomposition was too severe to identify the body properly, but the clothes it wore, its long hair hardened with maggots and bodily fluids, and the shape of its bones told me that its owner was the same sex as the women covering the shelter walls.

The death appeared recent. There was no sign that raiders had come through.

The food, laptop, and satellite equipment were all intact.

Was there about a year's worth of food left?

The especially abundant selection of medicine caught my attention.

I opened the laptop.

It was in sleep mode, but at my touch it started up like magic, just like the lights, and showed me exactly what its former owner had been doing.

It was the message board.

Kyle_Dos had been writing a message.

- I'm going to the flower garden with my wife. The place where I met her. I'll organize my thoughts there and tell you the next part of the story. Just wait a little. Don't rush me.

The recipient was DragonC.

Perhaps he had been about to explain the next plot of the webtoon.

As I dragged the corpse outside and cleared it away, I searched the area.

I found two more corpses.

They had decayed much more than the woman, so it was difficult to determine the exact cause of death. But both were male, and it looked like they had been shot from behind.

“...”

I continued searching the area.

At the place where the Capsule had been before, there was a new Capsule. Behind it, another had calmly settled into place like a tumor.

Transporting them was impossible.

They were far too large and heavy to load onto my bicycle.

I took everything I could carry from the air-raid shelter, focusing especially on valuables and painkillers. Then I closed the hatch, covered it with dirt and fallen leaves, and carved marks into nearby trees.

I was about to leave, but Kyle_Dos's final post to DragonC came to mind.

He said he was going to the flower garden.

I looked for it.

There was no flower garden anywhere.

I followed the valley from the webtoon upstream, but it was useless.

It was the season when all the flowers would have withered and died anyway. Besides, the forest was too sparse for there to be room for a flower garden in the first place.

Just as I gave up and turned away, a possibility passed before my eyes as if from a dream.

Kyle_Dos said he found his wife, rescued her, slowly became close to her, and formed a marital bond with her.

But what if that was a lie?

What if his story contained distortions that differed from the truth?

Then there were several possibilities to consider.

The first was that the woman had been dead from the beginning.

The woman Kyle_Dos claimed had been badly beaten and unconscious was already dead when he found her.

Kyle_Dos brought the corpse to his hideout, stitched the wounds of a corpse that would never wake, talked to it, confessed his love to it, and slept in the same bed with it.

Then, as the corpse decayed, he applied makeup and even propped it upright with ropes. But ultimately, with no idea what to do, Kyle_Dos left the air-raid shelter and vanished.

The second possibility was more horrific.

While patrolling, Kyle_Dos happened upon a group of survivors that included a mysterious young woman.

He meant to let them go, but upon seeing her beauty, Kyle_Dos awakened to instincts he had suppressed.

By the time he came to his senses, everyone but the woman was dead, and Kyle_Dos had made her his.

Their newlywed life, stained by violence and coercion, ended with the woman's suicide. Only then did Kyle_Dos realize his wrongdoing, leave the air-raid shelter, and disappear somewhere.

The final possibility was this.

I hoped it was the truth.

Everything, including the woman, was a fictional product Kyle_Dos had created.

In other words, the woman had never existed in the first place, and he had never brought one into the air-raid shelter.

For a long time, trapped in that cramped little room seeped through with the madness of another world, unable to bear his loneliness, he created an ideal woman woven from the net of his imagination. Together with her, he attained the ideal love he had desired.

In the haziness where dreams and reality mixed, Kyle_Dos left the air-raid shelter with his wife to go on a date. Then, afterward, a completely unrelated woman came to the shelter and hanged herself.

That was probably the whole story.

I was looking at it.

The flower garden where Kyle_Dos had planned to go with his wife at the end.

It was made up of thousands of Capsules.

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