WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 108: Unresolved

──────

"I can't do it."

I said, looking away from the prisoner onstage.

"I... I can't. The execution."

That wasn't what I truly wanted to kill.

I'd already lost that chance forever.

All my sins had begun with that.

So my punishment would be to watch that woman again, no, something that looked exactly like her, be killed by someone else's hand instead of mine.

"Then what are we supposed to do..."

"Doctor! You're a doctor..."

"R-right... You've probably, at least, done dissections before..."

Unable to execute their dead husband and mother themselves, the two clung to the Christian internist's sleeve.

Did they think it was better to watch someone else torture their family than to torture and kill them with their own hands?

For some reason, that felt even stranger to me.

Wasn't becoming an "audience member" the most humiliating and agonizing role of all?

"......"

Asked by two people to become the Executioner, Jeon Yeong-gwang stared blankly at me.

I bowed my head apologetically.

"Please."

There was nothing I could do about this.

I wasn't qualified to be the Executioner.

"Our Father in heaven..."

Jeon Yeong-gwang staggered over and perched on a seat. He lowered his head and recited a prayer for a long while before looking up.

The doctor's eyes were bloodshot. He'd made up his mind.

Step. Step.

The moment Jeon Yeong-gwang slowly walked toward the stage like someone being led to a slaughterhouse and placed a foot on the stairs.

「The Executioner is ascending the stage.」

The voice came from the prisoner, who was sitting with her back turned.

Helplessly, I placed a hand over my chest.

I'd heard it before in the parking garage, yet it still...

"Oh, god, how..."

Kim Hee-sook covered her mouth after hearing her husband's voice. Yun Geon-min's jaw trembled as he tried to hold back tears after hearing his mother's voice.

Jeon Yeong-gwang, not knowing exactly whose voice he'd heard, froze on the stairs as if he'd seen a ghost.

「All audience members, please take your seats. If there are empty seats in the front row, fill the front row first.」

I seated Kim Hee-sook and Yun Geon-min properly in the front row so they wouldn't break the rules.

「The execution will begin once all audience members are seated.」

According to survivor testimony, The Executioner’s Stage wasn't a Labyrinth that killed people simply for failing to follow its rules.

They just couldn't leave.

The Labyrinth couldn't be resolved until the execution was completed.

"You need to follow the instructions."

Click.

"Uh, what...?"

The instant they sat down, belts sprang from the chairs and tightly secured the audience members' bodies.

Their heads, so they couldn't look away. Their arms, so they couldn't hurt themselves. Their legs, so they couldn't run.

「Executioner, turn the chair so that the prisoner and audience members face one another.」

Jeon Yeong-gwang, now on the stage, had been staring blankly at the prisoner. At the announcement, he seemed to snap back to his senses and shook his head.

Scrape. Slide.

When the Executioner turned the chair halfway around, the audience members drew in sharp breaths at the sight of the prisoner's face.

"Suheon's dad...!"

"Ah, M-Mom..."

The audience members strapped into their "seat belts" screamed and thrashed, making their seats rattle.

"Ah..."

I stared blankly at the prisoner, now facing the audience.

The furrow between her brows, creased early from a long-standing habit of frowning. The mole positioned exactly where a dimple appeared like a well whenever she smiled. Those cold, black eyes that had never once looked fully at me.

It was that woman.

My Aunt, my family, my...

How could she look exactly the same?

As if she had truly come back to life.

Rattle. Clunk.

No. No.

I had no right to stand up there.

「Executioner, receive the tools.」

The prisoner said it as she handed the Executioner the item neatly placed on her lap.

It was a leather case rolled up like a scroll.

There were probably various tools needed for the execution tucked inside.

Jeon Yeong-gwang accepted the case with a faintly trembling hand.

「All stages of the execution will proceed according to my instructions.」

The prisoner was the one being tortured and executed.

Yet she also ruled this place.

The name The Executioner’s Stage was both intuitive and double-meaning.

That place was the prisoner's stage.

The prisoner was there from the beginning and would remain until the end, the true lead of the show.

And perhaps we were the ones truly being punished here.

In the end, the prisoner was our real Executioner.

「Begin the execution. The first procedure is the toenails.」

The Executioner’s Stage had begun.

* * *

「Ah, ngh, aaaaaagh...!」

The prisoner writhed in pain.

She bled in the body of the person I wanted most to return alive.

She screamed in the voice of the person I wanted most to return alive.

I needed to think about something else.

I needed to focus on something else.

But where?

"Urk, ugh..."

"Ah, sob..."

On the audience members suffering as though they themselves were being tortured?

"Father... I'm sorry, Father..."

Or on the Executioner, weeping and confessing to someone called Father, whether it was our Father in heaven or his actual father?

Who was the prisoner before his eyes, exactly, that he wasn't apologizing to her and was instead crying out for Father like that?

Either way, Jeon Yeong-gwang was managing reasonably well.

He vomited a few times and panicked, so the process kept getting delayed, but still.

If Kim Hee-sook or Yun Geon-min had been doing it, the delay would have been so severe that they'd have needed to replace the Executioner entirely.

A doctor's experience really was different.

Of course, as an internist, he probably had little reason to see anything that horrific.

"Ah, Father... Please, my..."

He suffered appropriately and somehow endured.

It was the ordinary reaction I'd expect from a doctor.

Still, something about it bothered me. Like bugs crawling around inside my head, leaving behind an itchy feeling.

Why?

「Ngh, ugh... N-next, ngh, the next procedure is...」

...Ah. Was something else bothering me?

The fact that The Executioner’s Stage had appeared in Agent Team 1's office.

That certainly bothered me.

When this contact-type Labyrinth began appearing, a debate naturally arose over whether someone should be sent in to serve as the Executioner.

Unlike other contact-type Labyrinths, they couldn't casually send a guild's Red Threads inside.

Every Executioner suffered from PTSD, or eventually took their own life after suffering through it.

The audience members weren't much different, but the Executioners had it worse.

That was true in terms of public perception as well.

"Then what about using prisoners who have already committed murder and have antisocial personality disorder?"

That callous suggestion, made purely out of interest, only added fuel to the debate.

"Since experience as an Executioner could increase psychopathic tendencies, wouldn't it be better to send in someone whose tendencies are already high? There are already plenty of people with high psychopathic tendencies who live stable, functional lives in society. Wouldn't society become more unstable if more people suddenly developed those tendencies because of Labyrinths?"

That argument naturally drew rebuttals.

"Wouldn't that be a reward for a psychopathic murderer? That's absurd."

When someone objected like that, the other opponents became so frustrated they practically started speaking in tongues.

"The purpose of incarcerating criminals isn't simply isolation. More fundamentally, it is rehabilitation, correction, and reintegration. How could forcing that individual to commit what amounts to murder at the state's hands, under the excuse of public interest, possibly help them? It would ultimately be another form of violence against them."

Then some supporters would shout this.

"Why should we care about criminals' human rights? Are you saying it's fine for ordinary people who have never committed a crime to torture and kill someone, then commit suicide from the trauma? Wouldn't it be better to send in professionals, whether psychopathic prisoners or special forces soldiers, and resolve it with as little delay as possible?"

I only wondered.

How people who believed themselves to be "good and righteous," people who took pride in being different from "psychopaths" like that, could be so indifferent to the pain and death of others.

And why they were considered "normal" people while I wasn't.

「...Sob, ah...」

"...As we forgive those who trespass against us..."

Anyway, that debate had dragged on since it began six years ago, only to be quietly shelved. The policy for The Executioner’s Stage became the same as for invasive-type Labyrinths: no one was sent in.

Its occurrence rate was nearly as low as an invasive-type Labyrinth's, which probably played a part.

So, as things stood, no guild could send Red Threads into The Executioner’s Stage. In principle.

But if this sixth floor operated under the same rules as the seventh floor, that meant one of the Red Threads handled by Agent Team 1 specialized in resolving The Executioner’s Stage.

And that meant...

...Those bastards at the Labyrinth Management Bureau again.

The Labyrinth Management Bureau had decided to send Red Threads in without ordinary citizens knowing, and at least one of them was contracted with Uiwi Guild.

Since when? Was this recent? Or had it been going on for a long time? Why not send their own agents, and instead go through the trouble of using Red Threads from a private guild...

No. There was no point thinking about it. It was a decision made by people who put their heads together over political games beyond anything I could keep up with.

「Ah. Ah... Now, the final... procedure is... the heart...」

I no longer needed to focus on anything else.

「Audience... members, ngh, I hope you... enjoy the execution... until the very end...」

That was the last complete sentence the prisoner managed to make.

* * *

"......"

The prisoner's head drooped limply behind the chair.

Crunch, thud.

The Executioner's tools fell from his hand, and Jeon Yeong-gwang finally collapsed on the stage.

Click.

At the same time, the belts binding the audience members' bodies came loose.

"Ah..."

"Ugh, sob..."

The audience members, who had repeatedly fainted and regained consciousness throughout the execution, couldn't rise from their seats.

I stretched my stiff body and climbed onto the dark red stage.

The collapsed internist's body was drenched in sweat.

He seemed to have passed out briefly from exhaustion.

Torture like sawing through limbs, bone and all, skinning someone, or carving out their insides must have been exhausting.

Mentally and physically.

Suppressing the sudden surge of anger, I looked away from the Executioner.

Slide.

He'd wake up in a few minutes, so I decided to sit on the floor for just a moment.

"......"

Looking at the prisoner's blood-soaked body, whose eyes had been gouged out, leaving no eyes to close.

Just for a moment, like this...

* * *

You should have died in front of me.

I wanted to wrap my hands around your throat and squeeze until you stopped breathing. With my own hands.

I wanted to carve the moment your breath stopped into my eyes.

You surely wanted that too.

Because I was the only one who could deal with you.

So if you had known.

If you had known that I was the only person who could understand you, yes, the only fucking family you had, and that I would be the only one forever.

If you had known.

If you had understood.

You would have thought of me as you died.

"Rather than die like this, I'd rather die by that brat's hand."

At the very moment your last breath left your body.

Only then would I finally have been in your heart.

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried