WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 145: Helena's Holy Nail
──────
Wheeeeeee!
The siren inside the base blared loudly.
The hurried stomp of military boots rang clearly through the corridors.
"They're here! Stop them somehow!"
"Bring everything we've got! Machine guns, heavy weapons, all of it!"
Indoor combat was a battlefield where heavy weapons held an absolute advantage.
There was no need to mention the effectiveness of submachine guns and shotguns in trench warfare. In cramped interiors, a machine gun spraying countless bullets became a chainsaw that ground infantry apart the moment it was mounted.
But there were simply too many of them.
【Screeeeeeeech!】
"Aaaah! What is that?!"
"I-it's a water deer?! A three-headed water deer is charging at us!"
"W-what's with that boar?! Bullets aren't even slowing it down!"
The makeshift defensive line was breached through the machine-gun fire.
"This is insane! How is it alive after taking a rocket?!"
They were not merely charging in by relying on numbers.
Marchosias's power was the fusion of animals, turning them into chimeras.
By combining the materials available, it could even create unusual individuals specialized for a particular purpose.
For example...
【Meeeeeeow!】
"W-what is that?! What is that thing?!"
"A three-headed cat is running across the ceiling!!"
Giving a cat spider legs so it could crawl along walls.
"C-comrade Major! The bullets won't penetrate! Even the heavy machine guns can't stop them!"
"That boar monster at the front is too huge and thick-skinned!"
Or layering the hides of other boars onto a boar to give it even thicker skin.
"Geez, why are there so many animal souls? They really gathered up every wild animal in North Korea."
The demons had brought in all sorts of creatures to use as familiars, even turning villagers into animals.
They must have used the bodies of an unbelievable number of animals to create those strange lifeforms. Thanks to that, I had an enormous number of animal souls under my command.
"Whew. If my spiritual power capacity hadn't increased, I might not have been able to make them all familiars."
If not for the recent large-scale demon extermination in Eastern Europe, I would never have amassed this much spiritual power.
"Hmm..."
Where the animal familiars had swept through, I could see traces of animals among the Korean People's Army corpses. Or rather, the piles of corpses left half-eaten.
I could turn them into familiars and expand my legion, but...
"I think it's about time to prepare for another fight."
I had already spent a considerable amount of spiritual power commanding thousands of beasts.
Rather than expanding my legion here, I should prepare for what came next.
Keeping my view synchronized with the familiars, I searched throughout the base.
I had to find the nuclear missiles.
If I found and destroyed either the nuclear material or the missiles, the prophecy of Seoul becoming a sea of fire would not come true.
"They're harder to find than I thought."
The search for the nuclear missiles took longer than expected.
"Hey, you. Yeah, you."
"Yes? Me, sir?"
"Yeah. Where are the nuclear rockets?"
"I-I don't know, sir!"
"You little shit. You don't even know what's at the place you're assigned to? Fuck!"
I tried capturing and interrogating several Korean People's Army soldiers, but they truly seemed to know nothing.
The senior officers were the same. They were only sacrificial puppets.
Well, it was not as if they were working with the demons. They were practically dead already.
It was only natural that they knew nothing.
"Maybe I need to find a wizard... or a demon to get a lead."
How long had I searched like that?
With thousands of familiars searching, it did not take long to scour the entire base.
And the conclusion I reached was...
"I'm fucked."
Seriously, how am I supposed to get out of here?
* * *
Falkenstein infiltrated the Korean People's Army missile base.
He had dealt with three sentries on the way.
Just like some of the people he had killed in the village, they transformed into monsters even after death.
"They act like ordinary people."
The villagers had been the same, but the Korean People's Army soldiers here carried out their duties normally.
As though they were normal.
They were already dead.
Bodies stuffed with animal flesh, waiting only to transform into monsters.
Falkenstein knew their souls were forcibly bound to their bodies, and he truly pitied them.
Though they were unbelievers from the Far East, they were all God's sons and daughters.
Pitiful souls who had never known God because of an oppressive regime and evil rulers.
"W-what? Who are you──?!"
He covered the mouth of the Korean People's Army soldier who spotted him, then twisted.
Crack!
The snapped head turned far beyond the point where it should have been able to turn.
For an ordinary person, that would mean instant death.
Biologically, it was an obvious outcome, but...
Craaaack!
As if its broken neck were in the way, it tore at its own neck, revealing a hoof.
Falkenstein grabbed that hoof before it could fully emerge.
──??
The leg he had seized lifted into the air.
The body dragged upward by its leg was driven straight into the ground.
──!!
As a living creature, the impact traveling through its entire body stunned it for a moment.
What people often called having the breath knocked out of them.
But the headless monster had no way to expel breath.
At that moment, Falkenstein's hand axe swiftly cut through the monster's spine.
The lower cervical and thoracic vertebrae.
Damage to motor function from paralysis of the nerves in its arms and legs.
The monster, which had been about to thrash wildly, struggled in convulsions as its motor signals malfunctioned.
"Its organs and nervous system are the same as a human's."
Its basic foundation must be human.
As an Inquisitor, Falkenstein had learned the structure of the human body by torturing countless worshippers of evil spawn.
Where to cut for malfunctions to occur.
Where to break for the most efficient destruction.
Where to stab to inflict the greatest pain.
For Inquisitors who had repeatedly conducted all manner of experimental interrogations on people called evil spawn, severing the structures of the human body was something they could do with their eyes closed.
"I removed the organ you use to make sounds first. There is nothing you can do."
Falkenstein hid the Korean People's Army soldier, now little more than a vegetable, and continued his infiltration.
His infiltration was skilled and precise.
Though he was lean, he stood out far too much compared to Korean People's Army soldiers, whose average height was slightly over 160 centimeters.
The uniform he had prepared took care of his clothes, but as a Westerner, posing as an officer from Pyongyang was out of the question.
Still, he could cover that with his skills as well.
He picked up the sounds of footsteps indoors to minimize the chance of encounters and moved through the blind spots of surveillance cameras.
Wheeeeeee!
Then the siren sounded.
A warning that an intruder was inside the base.
"Hmm..."
Had he been discovered already?
He had delayed it as much as possible, but it seemed they had somehow found him.
"Ugh... S-stop... Please, spare me..."
When the alarm went off, he was in the missile base's command center.
Before him was the commander, tied to a chair with nails hammered through his entire body, weeping miserably.
"Comrade Commander! There is an intruder──?!"
The forehead of the Korean People's Army soldier who rushed in to report was split open by a flying axe.
The soldier who entered afterward hurriedly raised a rifle, but Falkenstein had already grabbed a nail and charged.
"Uh, uh?!"
Thud!
The nail drove into the Korean People's Army soldier's neck.
They choked and gagged, but it did not last long.
Both the soldier whose forehead had been split and the soldier with a nail in his neck began transforming into monsters.
Whenever they suffered an irrecoverable severe injury, they forgot that they were human and transformed.
It had paid off to interrogate the commander without killing them.
After dealing with the two transformed soldiers, Falkenstein prepared for the Korean People's Army troops who would soon come flooding in, even as he sank into thought.
Something was strange.
He had searched the entire base, yet there were no nuclear bombs, only transformed humans.
He had not encountered the others on his way here either.
Yohan, the angel Gari, and the Eight-Foot Sisters were not beings one could easily miss.
Furthermore, his subordinate Inquisitors would have reached the same conclusion and infiltrated the base, yet he had not met any of them.
'The commander's hands were too rough for a commander, too.'
Falkenstein had traveled all over the world and seen many military generals.
What they had in common was that they had received their positions through their class background, with bodies that had never known hardship.
Generals in dictatorships were usually especially fat. Most North Korean generals were bloated pigs as well.
But the commander he had captured here was so thin that Falkenstein suspected malnutrition.
"It isn't real."
There were many reasons for suspicion.
His companions, absent amid all this chaos.
Facilities and personnel that seemed somehow assembled just to fill out appearances.
He concluded that this space was not real.
Just as Falkenstein reached for the thing in his pocket.
Vwoooom!
In an instant, the space before him changed.
His vision went dark, and when it returned, he was falling.
"...!"
The space had changed.
Into a space designed to make him fall to his death.
It was surely the demon's scheme, but at this rate, he would die from the fall.
If he landed headfirst.
'The vampire elixir has about fifteen minutes of effect left. I only need to protect my head.'
"Hup!"
In that instant, Falkenstein spun his body around.
The moment he landed, a terrible sound rang out as both legs struck the ground.
Crack!
"Ghk!"
Falkenstein, having landed feet-first, instantly knew they were thoroughly broken.
His left leg had fractured from the sole upward, and his right leg had bent in a direction it should never bend.
Even if he trusted the vampire elixir's regenerative power, that did not erase the pain of the impact itself.
And then...
Screeeech!
The monsters rushed in.
Judging by the severity of his injuries, regeneration would take another one to two minutes.
Falkenstein crawled to the wall with both arms and leaned his back against it.
At least that would prevent them from ambushing him from behind.
"Hoo!"
The moment he leaned against the wall, a monster charged at him.
But a swinging hammer awaited it.
Crack!
With the impact caving in its face, the monster flopped to the ground.
But there was not only one monster.
They came rushing in as if they had laid a trap and waited for him.
Falkenstein's axe and hammer flashed as he struck down several, but with both legs broken, he could not evade their attacks.
Slash!
Riiip!
Sharp claws tore him apart.
Even through the pain of his entire body being ripped open, Falkenstein remained calm.
He brought his hammer down on a forehead, then slashed the throat of a thick-skinned monster with his axe.
One strike, one kill.
One at a time, without rushing, calmly.
When his hands were not enough, he tore at their necks with his teeth.
Falkenstein calmly slaughtered them one by one without tending to his own wounds or pain. It was a sight of audacity beyond measure.
By the time both legs had regenerated and he stood, there was a Paladin covered in blood, wounded even more severely than when his legs had been shattered.
Step. Step.
The monsters approached.
A smile spread across Falkenstein's lips as he watched them.
"I always knew! This day would come!"
For thirty years, he had lived hunting evil spawn and monsters.
With nothing but a human body, he had stood against countless monsters and ghosts.
"Today is the day the Lord takes me! The day of my martyrdom!!"
Falkenstein held an axe in one hand and a hammer in the other, letting out laughter bordering on a snarl.
"Come! Come at meeeee!! I am Falkenstein of the Vatican! Come and kill me! I am ready for martyrdom! I am ready for martyrdom! Hurry and come kill me!!"
His roar shook the entire space.
"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want!"
Falkenstein swung his axe. Its blade embedded itself in the wall, sending stone dust flying.
Without caring, he pounded his fist against his chest.
"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death! I will fear no evil! For You are with me!"
Screeeech!
One of the monsters lunged at him.
Moving nimbly on four legs, it traced the feline arc of a leap, and its sharp claws slashed his face.
Slash!
Blood sprayed, and his head snapped aside. But the monster found itself facing a human glaring at it with utterly deranged eyes.
Crack!
The monster's skull was crushed beneath his axe.
He continued his prayer.
"Lord, behold! Your servant is here!"
He spread his arms wide, holding out the axe and hammer.
"Take my flesh! Take my blood! Break my bones! So that I may shatter even one more evil spawn!!"
His smile now gleamed.
A smile prepared for death... no, a smile filled with madness.
Even the monsters felt fear at those crazed eyes and stepped back.
"Come on! Quickly! Quickly! More! More of you! Even one more!"
The monsters were overwhelmed by the Paladin's force as he welcomed his enemies.
Then Falkenstein realized that something in his pocket was glowing.
"Oh..."
It was the Holy Nail.
The three nails driven through Christ's hands and feet as He was crucified on Golgotha Hill.
A holy relic sharing its origin with Longinus' Spear, symbolizing Jesus's sacrifice.
It was a holy relic granted to him by the Vatican as a Paladin.
Why was it glowing at this very moment?
He did not know.
The Holy Nail was used to declare a temporary sanctuary through the blood of a saint.
Then...
"Hup!"
Falkenstein fixed the Holy Nail to the floor.
The moment he struck it with his hammer.
Baaang!
A sound like space shattering rang out, and something came down.
"Ugh... Hup! What the hell? Why all of a sudden?"
It was Yohan.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
