WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 445: That Woman N IV
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* * *
There had never been a time when life was not like this, but lately the Undertaker had been especially confused.
"Did you sleep well...?"
"Ah. Yes. You too, Ms. Noh Do-hwa."
There was no need to point out who had caused the confusion.
Aside from the Undertaker himself, there was only one human left on earth anyway.
"Hmm."
Noh Do-hwa, receiving his morning greeting from the bed, smiled with sleep still lingering in her eyes.
"Even after all this, it's still Ms. Noh Do-hwa? You're impressively tiresome..."
The Undertaker was speechless for a moment.
A glance should not carry any fragrance.
And yet, from her look, a lemon scent seemed to bloom all at once, and the Undertaker shook his head as if to brush the body scent from his hair.
"...Back then, I always addressed you by your full rank, Management Captain Noh Do-hwa. Even now, from my perspective, this feels rather awkward."
"Hmm? Well, isn't that something. No, then again, that's none of my business. If anything, I like it. Please, keep finding it awkward."
"..."
At this point, even the Undertaker, who lived trapped in the past, could not help but notice.
The Noh Do-hwa before him wanted to be treated as someone who existed once and only once.
Uniqueness. Was this too something that ought to be called the aesthetics of the fleeting moment?
Noh Do-hwa calmly did things that would have been unimaginable in previous cycles.
As if all the "Noh Do-hwa data" he had collected until now were utterly useless.
For example, she was like that even now.
"Mmm."
"..."
Noh Do-hwa grabbed both his cheeks, then suddenly kissed him. No. Calling it a kiss was far too tame.
It was a motion like she meant to bite his tongue off.
As if she could not forgive him for the very act of drawing oxygen from the world, as if the only air he was allowed to receive had to be air filtered through her own lungs.
A tenacious, sticky act of breath-eating.
"..."
"..."
Their breathing shifted, and shadow seeped into the bed.
It was not because clouds had covered the sunlight beyond the window. It was only that two portions of shadow had overlapped and fallen across each other's bodies.
Just as breath, filtered through breath, seemed to take on poison, there was a faint addictiveness to bodies slipping into shadow too.
"Today..."
The shadow tilted up the corner of its lips.
"Do you have plans...?"
"Yes. I do."
"That's wonderful..."
"May I ask why that's wonderful?"
"Because it means there is still plenty of your time for me to ruin today as well..."
Watching the shadow deepen a little more right in front of him, the Undertaker suddenly thought:
Ah.
He might have come to cherish this poison.
* * *
After laying the last human down, who had rolled from a night's sleep straight into an afternoon nap, the Undertaker went down to the beach and found a woman sitting on a lonely bench.
"Good morning... No, good afternoon, Undertaker."
The woman's hair carried a pink hue.
In truth, from the Undertaker's point of view, even calling this thing a woman was inappropriate. It was not human, so how could he call it a person?
It was certainly an anomaly. But there was not even a clue to guess what kind of anomaly it was.
"...Go Yuri."
So all he could do was call her by her proper name.
"Yes! Hwaah. Now that everybody's gone, it suddenly feels so lonely. Ah, Guild Leader, sit here."
Go Yuri squirmed toward the edge of the bench and patted the empty seat beside her.
"..."
After a moment's thought, the Undertaker perched on the far tip of the bench, as far away from Go Yuri as possible.
Seeing that, Go Yuri giggled, then suddenly lifted her head.
"Oh, right, right. I brought a present for you, Guild Leader!"
"A present?"
"Here."
Go Yuri pulled out a placard from somewhere. Before he could even wonder how something had popped out of thin air, clunk.
Go Yuri hung the placard around the Undertaker's neck.
Written on it in elegant brush calligraphy were the following words.
[I am a promiscuous and obscene failure.]
"..."
"Lewd stuff is bad!!"
Go Yuri crossed her arms in an X, while making the beep-beep-beep sound herself with her mouth.
The Undertaker was dumbfounded.
"No, what..."
"Ah. That line just now was a parody of something. You didn't catch it? Was it too old? Mmm, well. Of course you wouldn't get it. This cycle's Guild Leader never got close to Oh Dok-seo in the first place."
"...Oh Dok-seo?"
The Undertaker frowned.
"Who is that... Wait. Don't tell me you mean the child who was summoned to the Busan Station concourse?"
"Yep!"
"I don't know why you suddenly brought that child up. It's been thousands of years since I've even heard that name. Was that child, by any chance, one of your followers?"
"Haah."
Go Yuri sighed.
"A Guild Leader who still hasn't learned either the method or the habit of letting go of himself isn't very interesting."
Why was it? The instant he witnessed that sigh from right in front of him, a chill ran down the back of the Undertaker's neck.
The source of that dread was her eyes.
The eyelids of the person who had always smiled with narrowed eyes were now lifted, and she was staring straight at him.
For an instant, everything seemed to stop.
"..."
Blink. Only after Go Yuri withdrew her gaze did the Undertaker realize that he had forgotten to breathe for a moment.
And that, before he knew it, he had already risen from the bench and taken hold of his sword hilt, ready to draw at any moment.
"..."
Looking at the Undertaker as he dropped into a combat stance, Go Yuri smiled again.
"Hmm. Your instincts are still alive, at least. That's impressive in its own way. To think your instincts still haven't died, even after you've declined this much."
"You are..."
The Undertaker moved his lips.
In truth, he wanted to move his hand. He wanted to draw his sword right away and cut that neck open.
He had already tried that dozens of times in the past.
He remained motionless only because he knew death meant nothing to the being before him.
Even so, the Undertaker's mind had to labor without rest to keep a bridle on his killing intent.
"What exactly are you?"
"I'm nothing at all."
Go Yuri brushed off her knees and stood.
Then, with a playful hup, she took a boxer's stance and smiled.
"And I'm everything too."
"..."
"Wow. Seriously. Don't tell me you don't know this one either? That's disappointing. <Kingdom of Heaven> is a work with unbelievably good marching scenes. Even if you're going to die, make sure you watch it at least once, no, three times. The heroine isn't my type, though."
Go Yuri laughed.
"Then again, compared with the heroine you're with right now, she'd count as ordinary."
"Are you human?"
"Ah. Good question. Though an even better question is [Am I human?]."
"..."
"I haven't lived a life that was somebody's workbook or prep sheet, enough to let a person who can't answer their own question first see my answer sheet. A person always has to be a question unto themselves, and only ever the real test. It wouldn't do to settle for being nothing more than somebody else's practice."
What on earth was she talking about?
The Undertaker, as he was now, had trouble understanding it.
Go Yuri smiled faintly.
"Wave."
"What?"
"It's pretty. The wave."
She gestured toward the horizon.
Drawn by that finger, the Undertaker turned his head aside without thinking.
Waves were breaking. A deep navy that existed only as the shadow of sunlight layered over itself again and again, lending a depth that sunlight had never possessed on its own.
Go Yuri had said it was pretty. The Undertaker too lost himself for a moment, looking at the wave, at its sound, and at its boundless blue.
What was beauty?
"..."
There was no beauty in describing sunlight as sunlight.
To call sunlight beautiful, first an entire mass of rock had to be coated in nothing but water. It was the shadow of water.
Life had to become a single tree, blocking sunlight and letting it through again. It was the shadow of the earth.
Sunlight was still sunlight, and yet now it had become the deep navy of the sea and the blue of the tree.
Had he, perhaps, spent his whole life trying only to become sunlight?
Every human was born as foul water and filth. A shallow stream, too meager for anyone even to swim in.
For one stream of filth to become a sea, it had no choice but to accept all the other filth as well.
Otherwise, it could only become a swamp.
That was something Zarathustra had said.
The Undertaker was the one who remembered everything, the human who had lived the longest. But whose filth had he ever accepted, even once?
Was he, at present, a sea, or a swamp?
That question brushed past the Undertaker like a waking dream.
When he turned back to look beside him again, Go Yuri was already gone.
"..."
She had always seemed bizarre and strange to him, yet for some reason, her vanishing from that spot did not feel strange at all.
And the Undertaker was certain.
He would never again meet the being called Go Yuri.
The Undertaker turned away from the beach.
Rustle. Crunch. Listening to his footsteps stamping the sand, he felt that he was closer to sand than to the sea.
"Ah. You're back...?"
At the hotel Azit, Noh Do-hwa, who had woken up late, was waiting for him. She had been working on something.
She wore little more than a doctor's coat.
"Yes. Our food was about to run out, so I brought a few supplies. But Noh Do-hwa, what are you working on?"
"Ah. This...?"
Noh Do-hwa smiled faintly.
"Your eye..."
"Sorry?"
"Your eye. Your left eyeball. You said that if you closed your right eye and looked at the world only through your left, those shitty memories of the past would flash back on their own and torment you so badly that you couldn't even live a normal life, right...?"
Shake.
Noh Do-hwa shook the tool and the thing she was working on. Sure enough, one of the parts was a rounded lens.
"Pull your eye out..."
"..."
The Undertaker closed his lips.
A moment later, he spoke.
"I treat those visions as a kind of responsibility. They are all people I sent away. Whether they make me happy or sad, all of that is the portion assigned to me."
"Well, I figured you were probably jerking yourself off with some excuse like that..."
Noh Do-hwa parted her lips.
"But do you need it? That...?"
"..."
"Please look only at me..."
The sound of waves came in.
Even if sunlight stopped, the waves were always crashing there.
"Ah."
He was a swamp. Even so, if there were a night that would call the stench and rot of that swamp beautiful, then living as a swamp and dying as a swamp might not be so bad. He ended up thinking that.
"Yes."
The Undertaker nodded.
"Please perform the procedure."
"..."
Noh Do-hwa set down the tools and the work. Then, with her doctor's coat fluttering, she walked up to the Undertaker and hugged him tight.
She rose onto her toes. That still was not quite enough. The Undertaker lowered his head a little, and only then did their breaths overlap.
"Do you have plans today...?"
"Not particularly."
"Tomorrow...?"
"Tomorrow too."
"And the day after that...?"
"I don't think I have plans for any of them."
The Undertaker hugged Noh Do-hwa and lightly lifted her up. Their eyes met at the same height.
"Noh Do-hwa. From now on, my time is yours."
"..."
A lemon scent flowed from Noh Do-hwa's lips.
"Then you may take all of my time as well..."
The next day.
The Undertaker lost his left eye.
The newly transplanted eye always gave off a lemon-tasting body scent.
Footnotes:
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