WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 142: Suspicious Village
──────
The Yongrim Missile Base was a military facility nestled deep in mountainous terrain.
After leaving our companions waiting in the forest, we emerged to see a small village stretching along the mountainside.
"There's a missile base, and a village right below it."
"It's camouflage. Wouldn't it look suspicious if there weren't a village?"
"..."
So they were using civilians as meat shields.
It was a tactic rebels and guerrillas often used.
They built military facilities or barracks in civilian areas, then cried massacre when they got bombed.
It was an obvious human shield tactic, but more effective than one might think.
"For a place that calls itself a country..."
"Could the Republic possibly wage all-out war against South Korea? Even Pyongyang's air defense bases are built in residential areas."
"Getting out of North Korea was the right call, huh?"
"The sweet taste of South Korean capitalism. With McDonald's."
Cha Hyeran had really become a capitalist democratic citizen.
She'd been supported as a promising talent in North Korea, but when she told me she had never even had proper flounder sashimi, I took her to a fish market.
She enjoyed it. Someday, I should take her for Kyoto sushi... Jeez, why was I having such awful thoughts right now?
The village was made up of clusters of old thatched houses with slate roofs.
Every house had a small vegetable garden, while piles of firewood and farming tools lay along the roads.
It felt like one of those photos of rural Korea from fifty years ago, before the Saemaeul Movement.
"People are starting to appear."
"Try not to speak unless you have to. A Seoul accent stands out too much."
"Don't we already stand out? We're wearing North Korean uniforms, but won't we look strange?"
"Is something wrong?"
"The two of us... We're too well-fed compared to everyone else."
When we freed people from Aoji Prison Camp, I thought their condition could not be helped because they had been imprisoned.
But seeing the villagers up close, they were far too skinny.
If not for their East Asian features, they could have appeared in one of those donation appeal videos about Africa.
Meanwhile, we had the impossible-to-hide prosperity of fat pigs by comparison. Of course we stood out.
"Don't worry. In the Republic, they see Korean People's Army officers as people from another world."
I kept as quiet as possible and glanced at the villagers staring at us.
They stopped what they were doing to look our way, then tried not to draw attention with wary eyes.
"They're all scrambling to avoid us."
"The Korean People's Army is what the people fear most. If they get noticed, they'll have to give something up."
I felt like I had heard that before.
There had been news reports about the Korean People's Army, constantly short on supplies, frequently coming down to civilian homes to loot them.
"Villages near military bases are called requisition villages. Whenever the military needs something, they come down and requisition food, lumber, oil, whatever they want."
"Can a village like that even survive?"
"Even if they want to run, people in the Republic are punished for leaving their assigned residence. Unless they have a special reason, they have to live there for the rest of their lives."
Used as meat shields for military bases and loot farms, no wonder they were wary of soldiers.
Anyway, as long as we did not cross paths, there was no reason to worry about being discovered.
Just as I thought we would pass by without trouble, Cha Hyeran walked toward them.
"Comrade. There should be a military base nearby. Which way is it?"
The middle-aged man Hyeran singled out flinched.
"Th-the military base?"
"I came from Pyongyang. I'm here for an inspection, but this backwater has made my directions useless."
"I-is that so? If you take that road, you should come across a guard post."
"Is that right? Thank you. Keep up the good work, Comrade."
Thanks to him, we found the way, but Hyeran did not simply leave.
"Comrade. Got any cigarettes?"
"Pardon? I-I'm sorry, but I don't have..."
Smack!
Cha Hyeran suddenly struck the back of his head.
"Carry some around."
"I-I'm sorry."
The man did not resist even when a woman much younger than him hit him.
He only lowered his eyes and bowed deeply.
"Let's go."
After pulling that absurd power trip, Cha Hyeran calmly walked on.
"What was that just now?"
"If a Korean People's Army bastard meets a civilian and doesn't shake them down? That isn't the Korean People's Army. I had to at least pretend."
What kind of image did Cha Hyeran have of the Korean People's Army?
We crossed the village.
We ran into a couple more villagers along the way, and each time Hyeran picked a fight and shook them down.
She stole the artificial-meat rice they had been eating and extorted bits of junk from them.
It was not something she wanted to do. It was just for our disguise.
"I think I've gotten used to South Korean meat and rice. I used to be desperate to eat even this."
Cha Hyeran forced down the artificial-meat rice she had taken, frowning.
It seemed the sweet capitalist taste of South Korea had rubbed off on her.
As we walked through the village, it turned out to be bigger than expected.
I released several Gugu and looked down from the sky. A road cut into the mountainside stretched on, connecting one part of the village to the next.
"At this size, there must be over a thousand villagers."
"They do sometimes pack people into villages meant for looting, but even considering that, this is quite large."
Around two to three hundred houses lined the mountain valley, along with a small school, clinic, and market.
I was surprised that it had a decent range of facilities.
Most of the villagers seemed to farm, and villagers were gathered at what appeared to be a communist-style collective farm.
No wonder we had not seen many people.
"Let's get a look at the military base."
"Go ahead."
While Cha Hyeran stood guard in a corner of the village, I focused on the Gugu and surveyed the base from above.
There were guard posts and barbed wire.
Since it was a nuclear missile base, security was definitely tight.
Getting through the guard posts would be difficult.
"What about riding Jinju in and dropping from the air..."
"We'll be caught on radar."
Unless we wanted to get hit by anti-aircraft missiles, we should avoid that.
"Can't we get inside with Spatial Leap?"
"I can only leap to ground I've stepped on before. If I could go anywhere, I'd go to Pyongyang and kidnap Kim Jong Un."
"...Don't say things like that. I'm scared because it sounds like something you'd really do."
Anyway, I was considering how to infiltrate the military base when it happened.
"Hm?"
"What's wrong?"
"No, there's a strange smell."
There had been a musty odor ever since we entered the village.
But I thought it might be an ordinary rural smell, and it was too faint for me to be certain...
"Come with me."
I followed the smell deeper into the village.
It led to a house among the clustered homes.
It looked like something from a shantytown, with a slate-covered roof and a small storage building.
"Are you sure it's here?"
"Yeah. The smell is coming from here."
"..."
After confirming no one was inside, Cha Hyeran began searching the yard.
"Uh, is this okay?"
"If we get caught, we'll just say we came to requisition something. Let's see... Here it is."
When she lifted an old wooden hatch, a cool chill brushed against my face.
Along with a horrible stench.
"Ugh... What is this place?"
"It's a kimchi cellar. They keep jars of kimchi and fermented pastes in these underground pits."
Was it like a North Korean kimchi refrigerator?
It was a small underground space dug into the earth. Its walls were rough-packed dirt, and several jars stood side by side inside.
The sour smell of napa cabbage kimchi mixed with the smell of earth, but an overpowering stench filled the place.
"Is there rotten meat or something?"
"Let's go down and see."
We descended the narrow stairs and quickly reached the end of the kimchi cellar.
And what we saw there was...
"Holy shit..."
"My God."
A thick stalk hung from the low ceiling.
Something black dangled limply beneath it.
A person?
No, something shaped like a person.
It hung upside down from an iron hook embedded in the ceiling.
Its limp arms and fingers were longer than a person's. Its gray skin had dried out, with dark red stains hardened in places.
Its face was even worse.
Where its eyes should have been were deep hollows, and its mouth had been split open all the way beneath its jaw.
It had far too many teeth, tiny and sharp things packed tightly together, nothing like human teeth...
"I don't think it's a yokai. Could it be a demon?"
Its otherworldly appearance certainly brought demons to mind.
"It has a stench similar to a demon's..."
But something was different.
Then I noticed something strange about the corpse.
"Hyeran, don't these legs... look like hooves?"
"Now that you mention it..."
Just as we were about to take a closer look...
"Who's there?!"
A voice rang out from outside the kimchi cellar, along with the sound of someone approaching.
A person.
We might have been able to bluff our way through using our Korean People's Army identities, but this was a house keeping a crazy corpse in its kimchi cellar.
They might not let us off easily.
I grabbed Cha Hyeran and made a Spatial Leap.
"What is it? Did a cat leave it open?"
There was no one in the kimchi cellar.
No one at all.
* * *
"Whew! We almost got caught!"
Our Spatial Leap took us to a secluded corner of the village.
We talked about the corpse we had just seen in the kimchi cellar.
"What the hell was that? Why would they keep something like that in a kimchi cellar?"
"How should I know? Could we have happened to enter a demon worshipper's house?"
"Did the resident smell bad?"
"...I couldn't tell."
The corpse's stench made it impossible to distinguish any other smells.
Still, if they were a demon worshipper, I should not have missed it so easily.
"Hyeran, let's search some other houses."
"Yes, it won't hurt to check."
Cha Hyeran and I searched the kimchi cellars of other homes.
And without exception, we found grotesque corpses.
After finding one in a third house, we made another Spatial Leap, now certain.
"Brother! You're back?"
Father Falkenstein and the companions waiting in the forest welcomed us.
"Bingo! It has to be here! If this isn't the pit of some conspiracy, that would be even more troubling!"
We hurriedly told them what we had seen in the village.
"Grotesque corpses... You mean every house has them?"
"No matter how I think about it, this is strange."
"C-could they all be sorcerers raising yokai?"
We each offered our opinions, but the conclusion was one.
This was a demon den.
An evil conspiracy was unfolding in that village, and the military base would be at its center.
"There is no need to see any more. We should strike them all at once."
I agreed with Father Falkenstein, but there was one concern.
"If there are things like that in the village before the military base, won't they have prepared something serious?"
"They will have. Something connected to demonic power. But the longer we delay, the closer a nuclear attack becomes."
It did not seem like we had any other choice.
We waited for a night raid.
Passing through the village would not be difficult.
Now that we knew this was a demon den, we had to account for the Eight-Foot Sisters and Gari, as spirit bodies, being discovered.
We would bring our greatest force and hit the base all at once.
That was the conclusion we reached.
Then night fell.
We arrived at the entrance of the village.
"The fog... is thick."
"There wasn't any fog during the day..."
With no streetlights in the village, it was so pitch-black that we could barely make out what was right in front of us.
"Let's go."
We entered the village at once.
We knew the road, so all we had to do was run to the military base...
Whoooom!
A strange sensation came over me.
A floating feeling, like when making a Spatial Leap, rose through me, and my vision blurred.
"Is everyone okay?!"
I hurriedly looked around, but no answer came back.
Not Father Falkenstein, Cha Hyeran, the Mountain Lord, Kohaku, the Eight-Foot Sisters... not even Gari.
As though everyone had been thrown into different spaces at once, all I could see was the hazy outline of the village through the fog.
"Shit..."
What was this?
Uneasy, I fumbled with the Gutenberg holy paper in my pocket.
I needed to be ready to turn it into a sword at any time.
"Is someone there?"
Then I heard a voice.
I approached cautiously. A faint shadow emerged, and a person appeared.
"Excuse me?"
"No, you're with the Korean People's Army."
She was an elderly grandmother with a kindly face.
She seemed to have mistaken me for a Korean People's Army soldier because of my uniform.
"It's dangerous with so much fog. Why are you out here?"
"Uh, well... What about you, Comrade? Why are you out here?"
"One of the livestock I was raising got loose, so I came looking for it."
As I approached the grandmother, I pulled something from my pocket.
She showed no wariness toward me in my uniform, so...
Trickle...!
I poured holy water over her first.
Better safe than sorry.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
