WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 477: That Woman D IV
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Whether you're delivering pizza or delivering coffee, when is the scariest moment for someone whose job is to deliver something?
"Yeees. Coffee delivery's here..."
It's the moment you get back from a run and find that the friends who were perfectly fine a little while ago have somehow ended up like this: one shot full of holes, another with his skull cracked open, blood pooling across the floor, and the whole scene even catching fire and blazing away.
"...here?"
Silence.
Nobody answered the Undertaker.
"?"
The Undertaker tilted his head, both hands clutching coffee carriers stacked one on top of another.
Of course, nothing was literally on fire. It was only a mental landscape.
'What was that?'
The Undertaker blinked.
And the scene in front of him snapped back to normal. The lawn wasn't burning. The slaughterhouse where people stabbed each other and blood sprayed everywhere had, naturally, never existed in the first place.
'Did I just hallucinate that?'
If the world were still in the middle of an anomaly-apocalypse, the Undertaker would have reacted at once: 'An anomaly?'
But these days were squarely an age of peace.
The era was so well-governed that even a reborn Cao Mengde would write "capable minister"[1] in the box for future aspirations, so no matter how professional a connoisseur of anomalies the Undertaker was, he couldn't help wavering, uncertain.
"Uh..., so. I made the coffee."
"Ah. Um, thanks. Mister."
Oh Dok-seo reacted first.
"Oh, yeah. Dok-seo. Here's your espresso."
"Mm..."
This part itself wasn't strange. The very person who'd pawned the coffee-delivery chore off onto the Undertaker was none other than Oh Dok-seo.
"Eep!"
"?"
But when their fingers brushed for just a second as she took the espresso, she gave a live demonstration of what the onomatopoeia 'flinch!' looks like as a physical action, and then her cheeks flushed faintly, which by any common sense was utterly impossible to understand.
The Undertaker barely managed to keep the coffee from spilling.
"What's gotten into you all of a sudden?"
"U-uhm..."
Oh Dok-seo twisted bashfully in place.
Forced to witness the whole display up close, the Undertaker had a single thought flash across his mind: 'What fresh nonsense is this?'
"Um. So, I really never knew this until now. The non-member reader who always left the first comment every time I uploaded a chapter... It, it was you, Mister."
"?!"
The Undertaker was startled.
'H-how did she figure it out?!'
The truth was, the Undertaker had felt sorry that LiteraryGirl was constantly getting beaten like a dog on SG Net over the hiatus issue.
But showing that pity directly would lead to an obvious future. Oh Dok-seo, already a mental wreck, would only end up leaning on him even harder.
So the Undertaker... had always been strict with Oh Dok-seo to her face, while on SG Net he operated as a mysterious legion of non-members, forever fighting for the honor of 'LiteraryGirl'!
To list out, from a vibes-based recollection, some of the comments the masked man Undertaker had secretly dropped:
-Anonymous: But honestly LiteraryGirl < there's just no author who whips up such a tasty whump-fest like this person does...lol...
-Anonymous: The upload schedule's wrecked, sure, but nobody can talk trash about the writing skill, yep yep
-Anonymous: A superstar who drives both haters and stans insane? Upvote, lolololol
-Anonymous: LiteraryGirl is like a legendary three-Michelin-star fine dining place. The chef only opens up when they feel like it, which makes it rarer.
And so on.
For the record, every comment was posted with the IP swapped using Administrator privileges. The phrasing and tone were subtly different each time.
What was there to hide?
The grumbling that occasionally went up on the board, that is, 'wait, why is this LiteraryGirl bastard, a vicious habitual hiatus-fiend, so damn popular?', that recurring SG Net mystery, was in large part...! down to this very masked-clone technique of the Undertaker's...!
The reason the Undertaker steadily seeded Romance of the Three Kingdoms bait under his real handle may well have been thanks to advice (feat. Infinite Metagame): that, while putting on these anonymous masked performances, the single act of not talking about the Three Kingdoms let him melt into the shadows of the crowd.
Of course, whether that advice had ever truly existed remained shrouded in a veil.
Just what did the Three Kingdoms mean to this man? A mystery the whole world wondered about.
Whether a grand foreshadowing built up across a full 476 chapters had finally been paid off, or whether a character setup stacked up over a long stretch had simply collapsed for the sake of convenience, also remained shrouded in a veil.
Either way, the veil, the anonymous mask the Undertaker so loved to wear, had shattered completely in that very moment.
'No, no. This can't be! I worked this out with Infinite Metagame too, made absolutely sure Dok-seo would never catch on?!'
The Undertaker was a master of imagination. To beat back anomalies, he had to wring out the very limits of imagination.
But even an Undertaker like that surely could not have imagined this one thing.
That in some bad-ending cycle he didn't remember, Yu Ji-won had cut down Go Yuri, and as a result the bond level between the Undertaker and Yu Ji-won had broken past 15, and seeing that, Cheon Yo-hwa had felt defeat and inferiority, but rather than despairing she had sent her own romantic feelings, despair, and hope into a time capsule, and the abbreviation for that time capsule's location was SU, meaning Stanford University, and this was that place, and fifteen minutes before the Undertaker arrived the time capsule had been dug up, and as Pandora's box opened every member of the alliance had been irradiated with the 'despair' of the bad endings, and among them, astonishingly, there even existed the bad ending of Madam LiteraryGirl, who'd been so cocky going 'I'll definitely be safe', and the condition for that ending was 'the Undertaker's masked-play act will be exposed', so the freshly despair-infected Oh Dok-seo had even come to realize that the Undertaker was her nameless devoted reader.
Truly, not even in his dreams could he have imagined it...!
"Mister, I. You know."
"Uh, uhh?"
"The truth is, for a long time now, Mister..."
KAWHUMP!
A human flew. Whoosh, just like that. That is, if there's a biologist generous enough to classify Oh Dok-seo as a subspecies of human.
Watching a person sail away like a sorghum stalk right in front of him, the Undertaker could not suppress his shock.
"My apologies."
The culprit was even more shocking. The one who'd sent Oh Dok-seo flying was Yu Ji-won.
True, by now the Outer God's authority had gone flat like a watermelon with the sweetness sucked out, but from the start Yu Ji-won had steadily trained her body in preparation for the apocalypse.
Her physical durability was on a wholly different level from an author with scoliosis whose birthplace and grave were both reserved at the spot in front of a computer keyboard. She could treat someone like Oh Dok-seo as a baseball anytime she felt like it.
That 'felt like it' part was exactly the source of the shock. Yu Ji-won was famous for a way of handling people that rarely made enemies. Why her, of all people? Why would she suddenly use Oh Dok-seo for home-run practice?
"I don't particularly care who Mr. Matiz shares love with."
"What?"
"Whether it's Jeong Ye-ji, the most-revered Cheon Yo-hwa twins, Her Excellency Lee Ha-yul, Noh Do-hwa, Dang Seo-rin, or even Sim Ah-ryeon, I don't care. Even if you build a household with all of them, it stirs no particular feeling in me."
"What??"
"But Oh Dok-seo is not allowed."
Yu Ji-won was expressionless.
"Even so, I believe Mr. Matiz is human, and humans ought to be joined with humans."
"What on earth are you talking about, Ji-won??"
"I am offering counsel that the tragedy must be avoided."
Yu Ji-won took the Undertaker's hand. The Undertaker, proving he was every bit the reader to match that author, likewise gave a 'flinch!' of surprise.
"J-Ji-won?"
The Undertaker's voice went timid.
Ji-won reaching out for skin contact like this was common enough in itself. Since she couldn't make out faces by sight, she often tried to recognize him by touch.
But like this, out in the open? Maybe back in middle school, when she hadn't yet gotten used to the perfume identification method, but now? Why?
"Ji-won. Sorry, but right now I'm extremely, intensely, tremendously confused, you understand? Couldn't you give me a reasonable explanation for what in the world is going on?"
"It's a very simple matter."
Yu Ji-won nodded.
"Tell me that you love me."
"???"
"That Mr. Matiz cherishes me, that he would not flinch even from throwing his life away for my sake, that he loves the human being that is me, beyond mere lust, is something I already know well. The process Mr. Matiz needs right now is simply to reconfirm an obvious truth as an obvious truth. Please."
"Ji-won, have you been drinking?"
"Or perhaps, do you not love me?"
"No. No, no. That, of course..."
KAWHUMP!
A human flew. Whoosh, just like that. That is, if there's a Confucian scholar generous enough to gladly classify as human a murder prodigy who, born with her emotions castrated, killed her parents and dumped them in a wooded hill.
"Teacher!"
"Sunbae! Run!"
The culprits were the Cheon Yo-hwa twins. If Yu Ji-won had trained her body since middle school, the two young ladies had simply leveled up their physical stats from the moment they were born.
If the two joined forces, sending someone like Yu Ji-won flying was no trouble at all.
Of course, it was an extremely rare sight, with the minor problem that the Undertaker's sanity, having witnessed the scene, flew off right along with her.
"Run, you say, but why..."
"Something like an anomaly phenomenon has gone off!"
"What."
"Just understand it roughly as a Valentine anomaly or something like that! These people aren't normal! Undertaker!"
"They're all trying to confess to Teacher! What was it, what was it, there was that Savior anomaly, right! It's similar to that!"
"If you accept these people's confessions, the Valentine anomaly gets locked in and the world will turn into eternal lovey-dovey chocolate!"
The sanity that had run away from the Undertaker's skull became a ghost, and even in ghost form it realized it could still reason.
'Valentine anomaly? But it's not even February? And what's lovey-dovey chocolate?'
Grab. Grab.
Both his hands were seized by the Cheon Yo-hwas.
And not just seized. The Cheon Yo-hwas ran with perfectly identical timing, like a seasoned ballet troupe, hauling the Undertaker along.
"So!"
"Right now you have to trust us sisters, the only, no, the two who escaped the Valentine anomaly! Sunbae!"
"We'll have the congregants hold those people back. We'll take the chance to flee to the hotel and figure out a plan for how to exterminate the anomaly..."
That was when it happened.
"Guild Leeeeaderrr! Th-these people! They got their memories of the old cycles baaaack!!"
A Lion's Roar erupted[2].
A jolt. Everyone stiffened all at once.
Eyes converged.
There stood the green-haired former Saintess, the one no expert, be they biologist, Confucian scholar, sociologist, jurist, or mathematician, could come and confidently swear was 'human', the one whose very existence threw down a gauntlet to humanity's scholarship and civilization, who in three syllables was, well, Sim Ah-ryeon.
Boldly letting loose a Lion's Roar.
"Uh... Ah-ryeon? Memories, you say..."
"Don't, Sunbae!"
"Teacher! Don't listen to her! That thing's an anomaly! You'll be bewitched!"
The Cheon Yo-hwa twins frantically covered the Undertaker's left ear and right ear. But, you know? Human hearing is unexpectedly well developed.
A shoddy little blockade like that couldn't possibly stop the Lion's Roar let loose by the plain-as-day 'enemy of humanity'.
"Bad endings! Th-the endings even you don't remember, Guild Leader! The ones caught in Udumbara[3] and wiped clean away! The memories of those endings were here, in this box, alllll of theeem!"
As expected of Sim Ah-ryeon. A summary worthy of the OldManGoryeo[4] villain.
It wasn't for nothing that she'd reigned as the most popular author on the novel-serialization board on SG Net, slapping LiteraryGirl across the face the whole time.
"Wh-what are you doing..."
"Stop her! Stop her, you commoners!"
At the Cheon Yo-hwa twins' command, the congregants who'd been standing by all around rushed in en masse, but Sim Ah-ryeon dodged this way and that.
It wasn't that Sim Ah-ryeon's lightness-skill had reached its peak. Line up the alliance members by physical ability and she'd put up a nice bottom-rung contest against Oh Dok-seo, so it couldn't possibly be that.
It was simply that her clothes and body were so slick with grease that no matter how the congregants tried to grab her, she slipped through like a loach, sliiide sliiide sliiide.
"N-no. That thing...!"
"Gross! So freaking gross!"
Whether those around her were horrified or not, Sim Ah-ryeon kept her Lion's Roar going.
"But in the bad endings, all of them, every single one! They say they got all lovey-dovey with you, Guild Leader! So now they all think you're theirs!"
"Kyaaaaaaah!"
Cheon Yo-hwa screamed.
"A-are you insane? You? Are you actually insane?! It's only been ten minutes since we promised to keep each other's secret! No matter how shameless you are, breaking the promise in literally ten minutes!"
"Hm? But I didn't break the promise, though?"
"Huh?"
"We spelled it out in the agreement..."
◇ If, in a situation where the 'secret' has not been disclosed, Go Yuir comes to love someone, all of us shall cleanly accept defeat.
"Th-that is. If the secret does get disclosed..."
Sim Ah-ryeon said.
"It means the exact same thing as: there's no need to cleanly accept defeat, doesn't it...?"
"..."
That's right.
Sim Ah-ryeon had run the thought experiment with all-too-honest rigor. The Cheon Yo-hwa twins trying to kidnap the Undertaker had caught her eye, and she'd judged that at this rate her physical odds were shrinking.
So... 'Then even if the Guild Leader accepts the Cheon Yo-hwas' confession, if I crack the secret open in advance right here and now, doesn't that mean I won't have to accept defeat later?', she'd derived this miracle of a conclusion.
"Insane."
Cheon Yo-hwa groaned. She'd known for ages that her opponent wasn't human, but who'd have thought it ran this deep.
That's right.
From the very start, Sim Ah-ryeon had not the slightest, not the truly tiniest speck of intention to accept her own defeat...!
There was a limit to cliché-breaking, too.
Normally, when this kind of chaotic free-for-all broke out in a romantic comedy, the gentlewomen's agreement struck among the parties was, by and large, thoroughly upheld.
It would pass through scenes roughly like 'so even if you end up with someone else, you'll understand, right?' 'Yeah! Because apart from love, we're friends!'.
No matter how agonizing the pain of heartbreak, no matter how hard it was to truly let that person go, even so, recalling the gentlewomen's agreement they'd pledged in the past, they would, with great difficulty, send their love off..., that sort of thing.
A truly beautiful tradition and culture (which can give the loser-faction supporters cancer) existed in the romantic comedy genre.
But Sim Ah-ryeon knew no such thing.
Earth's traditions, its culture, its romantic comedies were all still a bit too immature to take in an existence like Sim Ah-ryeon.
Gentlewomen's agreement, my foot. If it looks like things are turning against me, I'd better dump it faster than King Seonjo abandoned Hanyang[5].
The result. The pact had broken less than fifteen minutes after it was struck, setting a Guinness record that would forever live on in the annals of romantic comedy.
The Cheon Yo-hwa twins ground their teeth.
"Tch. Despicable!"
"If I'd known it'd come to this, I'd have kidnapped Teacher from the start, even at the cost of losing Ye-ji..."
'What the.'
The Undertaker's hair stood on end!
Footnotes:
[1] Cao Mengde is the courtesy name of Cao Cao, the warlord of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The line alludes to a famous prophecy told to him: that he would be "a capable minister in an age of peace, a treacherous hero in an age of chaos"; here, with the world at peace, even Cao Cao would aspire to be a loyal minister rather than a usurper.
[2] Lion's Roar (sajahu) is a term from Buddhism (the Buddha's authoritative teaching, Sanskrit simhanada) widely repurposed in wuxia and Korean martial-arts fiction as a devastating sonic shout that overwhelms or stuns those who hear it.
[3] The udumbara is a legendary Buddhist flower said to bloom only once every 3,000 years, a symbol of supremely rare events. Here it names a memory-erasing power/anomaly that wiped the cast's recollection of certain endings.
[4] Refers to goryeojang, the (apocryphal) Korean legend of abandoning elderly parents in the mountains to die once they became a burden. The handle casts Sim Ah-ryeon as a callously pragmatic "villain."
[5] An allusion to King Seonjo fleeing the capital Hanyang (old Seoul) when Japanese forces invaded during the 1592 Imjin War, a byword in Korea for a leader hastily abandoning his post to save himself.
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