WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Arsène
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈
Chapter 90: Soldiers - [4]
──────
I could tell what my expression looked like after coming out of the hallucination just by looking at the people around me.
I probably looked like I was about to explode. There was no doubt about it.
“Kim Geuk?”
Looking at Im Hyeongtaek staring at me, I could see that the face reflected in his eyes was far more vicious than I had expected.
Veins bulged across my rage-filled face like a web. I looked like I might do something at any moment.
Im seemed uneasy, so I explained.
“It’s fine. Hearing that just made me angry all over again.”
As I muttered, I rummaged through my wallet. Where had I put my business cards?
Damn it, I couldn’t see them properly.
My hands shook as I moved them, and my mouth kept moving too.
“I was... part of Korean Awakened Solidarity... an awakened people’s human-rights organization. So hearing things like this really makes me angry... You don’t know Korean Awakened Solidarity, right? The group Park Mihyeong worked with...”
“Ah, Councilwoman Park Mihyeong? She’s famous as Korea’s only brainwashing ability user...”
One of the soldiers muttered that, and I finally managed to smile.
“That’s right. I worked in the same organization as her. Whenever we heard an awakened person had been treated unfairly, we all went there together. My main job was creating an intimidating atmosphere with this body...”
Ah, there it was. My business card.
“And now... I can do more than just intimidate people.”
As I spoke, I held out the business card the Association had made for me.
It said something like Vice Chairman Kim Geuk of the Awakened Committee.
Kim Hyeongman, who founded the damn Awakened Committee, did not know exactly what it did, and neither did I, its vice chairman. That did not matter.
Sometimes, it was not the position that mattered, but who occupied it.
I handed each soldier a business card and said,
“Call me right away if you’re treated unfairly. Call me if you want to become a Hunter after you’re discharged but don’t know where to start. No matter how busy I am, I’ll make sure to look into it...”
They could probably tell I was not saying that lightly just from the expression I had worn a moment ago.
The soldiers nodded and carefully tucked the cards into their breast pockets. They even buttoned the pockets afterward, so I did not think I had to worry about them throwing the cards away later.
Then a roar echoed out.
“Uooooooooh!”
I had heard roars like that many times before.
An Ogre’s roar. The roar of a giant Monster.
Maybe Ogres liked roaring for no reason because they wanted to vent the resentment they had built up while living quietly as small, weak Goblins. That was what I had heard.
And Tungtung, the one living on Manisan, was especially prone to it.
I knew that because a soldier who came to see me in the hallucination had told me so.
The awakened soldiers who came to see me in the hallucination were not the same ones standing before me now. In that hallucination, the soldiers in front of me had already died.
The soldier in the hallucination had said this.
‘The previous cohort all got eaten... They went out to catch Tungtung, some Ogre, and every one of them died right there...’
‘Is that why you’re so scared? Because you think you’ll all become Monster food too?’
‘Yes... But they say if we refuse deployment and disobey orders or desert, the Special Forces will come after us instead of the military police... And they won’t arrest us properly and send us to an Army prison. There are rumors they’ll execute us on the spot...’
Remembering that hallucination made my anger surge again.
I took a deep breath and asked,
“Tungtung... Was that Ogre supposed to be around four meters tall?”
“Yes. That’s what I heard.”
I spread out my mental net and felt out the distant Monster’s body.
“No, I think it’s closer to five meters.”
“Five meters?”
“I’m sure. There are so many Monsters gathered here that it must have eaten a lot of them and grown. And you know those Monsters get stronger and tougher the bigger they are. That thing is a Force-Field Creature too, right?”
“Yes. It was hit with incendiary bombs once, but there wasn’t even a scorch mark...”
“Then its force-field exoskeleton must have grown a great deal too, so it’ll be incredibly tough. Gigantification puts strain on the joints, so gigantified creatures almost always have Super-Regeneration as well. Even if we somehow break through its force field and injure it, it’ll heal in an instant. That thing would probably survive a direct hit from an aerial bomb...”
While I muttered, Seong Munyeong asked,
“So what are you saying? That it’s too strong for us to kill?”
“No. I’m saying we have to kill it, no matter what.”
Apparently, that sounded like some impressive line.
I saw the cameraman following Naito focusing on me. Jeong Jinyeong even gave me a thumbs-up.
Still, nothing had really changed. We just had to carry out the hunt we had already planned more thoroughly.
* * *
After we finished hunting for the day, I found the colonel in command and asked him for military supplies.
“Could you give us all the military explosives you have?”
“Explosives? What do you plan to use them for...?”
“We need to kill Tungtung, don’t we?”
As I spoke, I looked at the colonel. I thought about this man, who was not only non-awakened trash but clearly one of those Seoul types.
Could what happened in the hallucination have been his doing?
If so, would awakened soldiers stop being used up as expendable supplies if I used Spatial Teleportation to send him to the middle of the ocean and quietly killed him there?
I did not know.
Just looking at his face filled me with disgust, but I barely held it in.
It was not as hard as I had expected.
The military’s treatment of awakened soldiers in the hallucination had been horrible and disgusting, but there had been someone even more disgusting in that hallucination.
Me.
Even from where I stood now, that bastard was revolting.
That crazy bastard had pretended to help the soldiers while carrying out his own delusions.
Helping a student being bullied by putting a submachine gun meant for firing indiscriminately in a classroom into their hands was not helping them.
The bullies might die after the student opened fire, but the student’s own life would fall into ruin as well. Once what the student did made the nine o’clock news, the only person having fun would be the one who lent them the submachine gun.
That person could feel satisfied, thinking they had planned some refreshing revenge, no matter how thoroughly the student’s life was destroyed.
What I had done in the hallucination was the same.
I claimed to help desperate people, pretended to avenge my awakened brethren, then pushed them off a cliff.
I turned my usual fantasy of non-awakened people becoming slaves to awakened people into reality and felt satisfied all by myself. I did not care what would happen to the soldiers forced to move to Soweol.
I had seen how the me in the hallucination died and thought he was pathetic, but I had not realized he was this disgusting.
Come to think of it, he was the one who tried to kill Kang Jun-chi because he was getting in the way of Seoul’s destruction, wasn’t he?
Now I could roughly understand how that bastard thought.
Even if someone was an awakened person like him, he would not leave them alone unless they acted in ways he liked.
He would send them to another world, saying he would make them into proper awakened people, or call them an obstacle and try to kill them with a tactical nuclear weapon.
Every one of those actions disgusted me. It made me want to use him as a negative example and make sure I did not become like that.
And I would make a choice that the me in the hallucination would not have made, or could not have made.
It was nothing complicated. The proposal I was making now was that choice.
“Tungtung? Everyone knows Manisan is a Monster den, but they have not been able to do anything about it because of that one thing. Shouldn’t we deal with it while we’re here?”
The me in the hallucination could not have offered to personally kill such a powerful Monster and take the risk in place of brethren weaker than himself. He had not been as strong as I was now.
But I could do it now. That was the decisive difference between me and him.
“You’re right. We should eliminate it while we have the chance...”
The colonel soon agreed to my request.
We continued hunting, and about a week passed on Ganghwa Island.
By then, we Hunters were staying and eating at an inn on Ganghwa Island. We had finished for the day and were about to rest when a loud noise rang out from the military base.
“What’s going on?”
It was an irritating sound. I did not know the details, but I understood it was an emergency signal. What had happened so suddenly?
Then the phone rang. A soldier shouted through the receiver.
“Hunter Kim Geuk? A Gate has opened here! Please come right aw-”
I hurriedly gathered the Hunters and joined the soldiers.
Inside the military base, all personnel, officers and enlisted soldiers alike, moved with perfect coordination. Not a single person was panicking, and I could not help thinking they were all elite troops.
Then again, these were not normal times.
The military commanders had probably made the soldiers cultivate military farms while training them diligently. Even if it caused controversy over overworking the troops, they would have done it. Sending awakened soldiers into deadly situations was likely done in much the same way.
Of course, I had no intention of understanding it. Ever.
Baek Dambi hurriedly opened a small Gate, stuck only her head inside, then pulled it back out.
“I found the Gate!”
She found the location of another Gate beyond it and gave me its rough position. I used Spatial Teleportation myself and identified where it had opened.
When I relayed that information to everyone over the radio, an alarmed response came back.
“What? That’s the ammunition depot...”
I listened further and learned that an attack could cause a sympathetic detonation.
Still, we had identified the Gate’s location, so the soldiers set up a defensive line around it and deployed mortars.
The Deathclaws pouring out of the Gate were swept away by the already-established field of fire. Even if they ran in zigzags, they could not avoid the rain of bullets when there was no room to dodge at all.
One Force-Field Creature mixed among them was struck repeatedly by mortar rounds and sent flying through the air. I wondered if this situation might end without much trouble.
“Ah...!”
Then I heard a roar. It was mixed with infrasound, making the Hunters around me tremble as I gripped the object in my hand tightly.
A wall of the steel container that made up the ammunition depot soon caved in.
A massive Monster tore through that steel wall as if it were paper and revealed itself. The soldiers who recognized it shouted,
“Tungtung!”
They said it loved roaring, and sure enough, it roared again.
“Uooooooooh!”
* * *
This time, it was probably roaring to vent its anger. We Hunters had spent the past week stirring up the Monsters’ territory over there.
The Monsters living on Manisan, or perhaps some elemental, must have felt threatened and launched this raid.
Tungtung seemed to be something like the Manisan Monsters’ ultimate weapon.
The moment it emerged from the ammunition depot, it charged straight through the field of fire already set up.
Rifle bullets simply bounced off its force field. It dodged the falling mortar rounds with absurd speed, and even when one occasionally struck it, it showed no sign of being hurt and just kept running.
“Fuck!”
“Crazy!”
Screams broke out everywhere. That Monster was worse than a tank, both in the physical force it could produce and in its durability.
I moved when Tungtung had charged about a hundred and fifty meters away from the ammunition depot.
After confirming the distance, I used Spatial Teleportation.
With eight hundred kilograms of C4 explosives.
It would have been nice to have more, but that was all the explosives we could gather nearby.
I attached them to the running Ogre’s neck, used Spatial Teleportation again, and detonated them at the same time.
A deafening boom rang out, like thunder exploding on the ground.
They said several hundred kilograms of explosives were enough to blow apart an entire building, and seeing the aftermath made me understand that all over again.
A cloud of dust rose with the thunder and blocked my vision completely. Tungtung’s five-meter body was hidden so thoroughly that I could not even make out its outline through the dust cloud.
The soldiers who saw that overwhelming sight shouted,
“We got it!”
But they had not.
They said powerful awakened rebels could survive even attacks meant to blow apart entire buildings, frustrating every attempt the government made to suppress them. Tungtung had done exactly that.
“Uooooooooh!”
Tungtung roared from inside the dust cloud.
This time, it was an angry roar. When I spread out my mental net, I realized it was not merely alive and angry. It had not suffered a single injury.
“When I feel it out with the net, I don’t think even its force field broke...”
As I muttered, Lee Jongho asked beside me in a stunned voice,
“Then can we really kill that thing?”
I had the same thought. If it was not injured even by that, I did not know how we were supposed to kill it. It was a real Monster, one so powerful that even I might not be able to handle it.
To raise my fighting spirit before it broke, I reminded myself that if I killed it, all that immense strength would become mine.
As the Ogre burst out of the dust cloud and charged forward, I took out my Hunter Rifle and used Spatial Teleportation.
* * *
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
