WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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Chapter 31: Memories of Murder (2)

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Dead raised both hands.

I sheathed my sword in a hurry.

The door of the last car burst open, and Infected shoved their way in.

Cramming their limbs through the narrow doorway all at once, they looked exactly like a pack of zombies.

Dead pulled a gun from his waist.

Not a modern pistol, more like some older, dated model.

At our first meeting, Dead had introduced himself as a soldier.

Carrying a gun wasn't strange at all, then.

Dead fired at the chest of an Infected closing in on him.

Bang.

The Infected stumbled and toppled forward under the shot.

The gun didn't look particularly powerful.

Something else was odd too.

Normally, a fired gun should eject a casing the instant it goes off.

Did that just disappear?

The casing had ejected, sure, but it vanished in an instant.

I was pretty sure I hadn't imagined it.

Between the silence that fell over everything when magic activated and this old-fashioned gun, something about this world was just strange.

Dead spoke to me while I stood there dazed.

"Hey. How long are you gonna stand there like that?"

Dead fired at another Infected near the entrance.

He moved ahead and tipped his chin toward the door of the last compartment.

Dead and I entered the car at almost the same moment.

I raised my sword to cut down an Infected lunging at me.

The one about to sink its teeth into me froze mid-motion.

"What?"

Something felt off, and I lowered my sword.

The Infected were behaving strangely.

It was like time itself had stopped.

Watching it happen sent a chill through me, like a scene straight out of a horror movie.

The Infected creaked like broken puppets.

I kept a tight grip on my sword and stayed wary of the frozen Infected.

While I held my guard, Dead's voice cut through.

"So that's how it is."

Dead was crouched over the corpse of a dead Infected on the floor, studying it.

In this frozen moment, only Dead and I moved freely.

Hearing his voice, I asked what he meant.

"I'm talking about Lia Angelina's taboo."

Come to think of it, I did remember hearing something about a taboo earlier.

"How do you know that?"

Dead straightened up and pointed at his own eyes.

In the dim lighting of the train, his eyes glowed gold.

Less like human eyes, more like a cat's.

"An ability."

"Is that so."

"Not going to ask what kind of ability it is?"

"Not interested."

I swung my sword and cut down the throat of an Infected in front of me.

I didn't understand the mechanics, but I had a rough sense of what kind of ability it must be.

Dead had figured out Lia's taboo through the Infected's corpse.

That was enough for me.

"People kept going missing in the territory where she lived. And her taboo is..."

Dead fired at the very back row of seats.

A female Infected who'd taken the shot for someone else collapsed to the floor.

"Cannibalism, most likely."

I didn't know exactly what a taboo was supposed to mean, but the meaning that word carried was clear enough.

Something you must never do.

Dead had just said her taboo was cannibalism.

Had I misheard something?

"Cannibalism, as in eating people?"

"What else would it be?"

Dead gave me a look like I'd asked something painfully obvious.

Well, that was true, but still.

That was when Lia appeared from the very back car.

Her lips were stained red, and the white dress she wore was soaked through with blood.

"Oh my, Yuhan-ssi."

The click of her heels rang in my ears like sleigh bells.

Standing among the corpses, Lia was smiling.

"You're not asleep."

"Couldn't sleep."

Lia took a step closer.

I gripped my sword and watched her warily.

Keeping a careful distance, Lia blinked at me.

"Right, you were curious what the jerky I gave you was made from, weren't you?"

"Don't tell me you ate something that woman gave you."

Hearing her words, Dead turned his head to the side, gun still aimed forward.

The look on his face was unmistakably one of disappointment.

I had eaten it, swept up in the mood of the moment.

Even I knew that had been a mistake.

But she hadn't answered when I actually asked back then. Why bring it up now, out of nowhere...

Don't tell me.

"What do you think it was made from?"

The moment she said it, my eyes landed on the Infected surrounding us.

Lia still wore that same innocent, childlike expression.

The image of the jerky she'd handed me rose up in my mind, along with that unidentifiable taste and texture in my mouth.

The train lurched hard.

I braced a hand against the wall.

My stomach turned.

"Ugh!"

Dry heaves rose from somewhere deep inside me.

Bracing against the wall, I emptied out everything inside me.

All that came up was what I'd eaten at dinner and stomach acid.

Was she out of her mind? Ugh...

I didn't know how to even put this disgust into words.

I didn't care anymore about Muels or taboos or whatever Dead was going on about.

Wasn't Lia human too?

How could anyone do something like that?

"Hey! Snap out of it!"

"Jer... ugh!"

Even getting the word out took everything I had.

I cursed every filthy word I knew, internally.

Dead managed to pat my back.

Our eyes met.

"Since you're still alive, it probably wasn't poison, so you'd best just forget about it. At least for now."

Dead's gaze shifted to the frozen Infected.

He seemed to have roughly guessed what I'd eaten.

With that ominous name of his and a face like some retired neighborhood uncle, I couldn't figure out how he stayed so calm.

Though I suppose that made sense, given he'd introduced himself as a soldier.

I pulled myself together and nodded.

"I should have killed her from the start."

I muttered it through gritted teeth.

This was my fault.

If I'd killed Lia, none of this would have spiraled this far.

A moment's hesitation had brought on a much bigger disaster.

While I was deep in self-reproach, Dead spoke.

"I didn't expect much from you to begin with."

"...Excuse me?"

"You've never killed anyone before, have you?"

Dead pointed at his own eyes again.

"Your eyes are different."

Eyes?

I had no idea what he was even talking about, bringing that up out of nowhere.

Did killing someone change your eye color or something?

Dead let out a short sigh and raised his gun.

Lia stretched out a hand.

The frozen Infected all lunged at once.

I dodged the attack, spun my sword, and cut off an Infected's arm.

Killing Lia felt repulsive, but killing the Infected in front of me left me feeling nothing at all.

Why was that?

What was the difference between Lia and the dead man in front of me?

The back car had far more Infected packed into it than the others.

Between the bunk beds and the cramped space of the train, fighting wasn't easy.

Sure enough, my arm caught on the railing of a bunk.

While I fumbled with that, another Infected dropped from above. A child who'd been on the top bunk.

The child, mouth wide open, clung to me.

Blood streamed from the child's eyes like tears.

"Uh... Mom... help..."

Mixed into the blood running down the cheeks, I could just make out a faint trace of actual tears.

I reached for my waist to draw the dagger Dead had given me.

Dead's shot to the child's head came far faster than my dagger could have reached its chest.

The child's body collapsed to the floor after the shot.

"Thank you for helping..."

A wet thud.

A hand burst out through Dead's body.

Covered in purple fur, the beastlike hand looked nothing like a human hand at all.

A monster?

Lia stood visible behind Dead's back.

Not a monster. Lia's hand.

Lia, a girl barely into her teens, with the massive arm of a beast attached to her body, looked utterly grotesque.

I swung my sword at the arm still buried in Dead's chest.

Lia yanked her arm free in an instant.

Thud.

Dead's body dropped forward with a heavy sound.

Lia licked Dead's blood off her fingers, just a little.

"If he hadn't helped you, he would have survived. What a shame."

In Lia's hand was something that looked like it might be one of Dead's organs.

Caked in blood, I couldn't tell what it actually was.

I dropped to my knees and pulled Dead into my arms.

"Cough! Listen carefully. No matter what happens, you have to kill Lia. Don't let her become an incursion entity..."

Dead forced the words out through the hole in his stomach.

He closed his eyes before he could finish the sentence.

Seeing Dead like that, my head went cold and clear.

I laid him down carefully and stood up.

The smell of blood stabbed at my nose in the cramped train car.

The time I'd spent with Dead had been so short.

But he was the person who'd treated me the most like a human being since I entered the tower.

I thought I'd at least tear up.

Instead, Dead's death felt strangely numb, enough that I wondered if I'd become this coldhearted.

I drew the dagger instead of the sword.

The remaining Infected lunged all at once.

I kept using the skill I'd learned through the god Soter.

Once the Infected went down, I quickly tipped mana potions into my mouth.

Could've given me a bigger one.

I downed three at once, but the mana that came back barely amounted to anything.

I killed off the last Infected.

Corpses rolled around the train car.

Even as Infected, they'd once been human, and looking at them now, they still looked no different from ordinary people.

I should have killed Lia.

I'd brought this on myself.

Now I understood exactly why he'd been so reluctant to talk about failure.

Assassinating one girl barely in her teens, or killing something that had infected everyone on the train and turned into a monster itself.

It was obvious which option would have been better.

Rather than feeling afraid of this situation, I felt like laughing.

Lia's body twisted, warped strangely.

Her right hand had already changed, and now her left hand followed, contorting into the same grotesque shape.

Dangerous.

The narrow train car floor was littered with corpses and debris from the interior.

It was obvious who had the disadvantage here.

Lia's hand shot toward my head.

I slid across the floor to dodge the strike.

I threw myself through a broken window.

I pulled myself through the window and onto the roof of the train.

Rough wind cut across the wound on my cheek.

Thumping sounds came from inside the train.

Keeping my balance wasn't easy, but it still beat fighting inside.

The roof of the train tore open, and Lia rose up through it.

A girl barely in her teens with a beast's arm, what a strange combination.

"You know. Why are you trying to kill me? Why? It's not like I've caused you any harm."

"If you're hoping I'll pretend I didn't see any of this, it won't work."

"Not really? That's not really what I meant? I'm genuinely curious, that's all? Why are you trying to kill me?"

I kept my sword up and stayed wary of her.

"Because you got assigned an assassination job? You had plenty of chances to kill me and didn't. But now you're trying to."

"Didn't you infect everyone on this train?"

"Is there anyone among the savages on this train who has any connection to you?"

Her question left me silent.

The people on the train had nothing to do with me at all.

If anyone had a connection to me, it was, at most, Dead, and he'd died at her hands.

"If I have to die on the grounds of infecting a bunch of savages, then Yuhan-ssi, who killed them, should have to die the same way, shouldn't he?"

"What are you trying to say?"

This was an unpleasant conversation.

Lia's claw grazed past my arm.

Even that light graze tore through flesh, and blood dripped down.

I wasn't joking. Even one solid hit from her would probably finish me off.

"I may not look it, but I'm a pacifist at heart. You and I are both murderers anyway, so murderers should be able to get along just fine, don't you think?"

What kind of twisted logic was that.

I couldn't even be bothered to argue against it.

Instead, I scrambled for some excuse that might pass.

"That's not going to happen."

"Why not?"

"Because you killed my friend."

I wasn't sure exactly when he'd become a friend.

But let's just call him that.

I figured Dead would understand.

Lia stepped back slightly, looking taken aback as her face pinched into a prim little pout.

"Fair enough, I suppose."

"So you should just di..."

"How about this? I'll compensate you for the soldier I killed."

"Compensation?"

"Yes. I told you there's delicious cheesecake in the capital, remember? I'll buy you cheesecake, just like I promised. Wouldn't that be more than enough compensation?"

Dead.

Guess your life was only worth that much.

I kicked off the roof and leaped over Lia's head.

"You know. What's your taboo?"

What was she even saying.

Just die already.

Footnotes:

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