WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈

Chapter 2: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (2)

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The elderly Jo Jeong-ho was always worried about the environment his grandson was growing up in. Whenever he spoke with other villagers, he would lament over it once every three or four conversations.

“It’s bad enough that the boy is growing up without parents, but he’s being raised in this remote backwater too... It’s not as though I can move to the city at my age. What am I supposed to do?”

An old farmer who had spent his whole life digging in the earth and sowing seeds could hardly leave his rice paddies and fields now. What would he do for a living in some unfamiliar place where he had no ties?

Onik’s father, a sailor, did send the old man money every year.

Still, it was a precarious amount for grandfather and grandson to start a life in the city with. The sum also varied from year to year, which made it unreliable.

The old man spoke ill of his son, then of himself as well.

“That rascal could at least send a little more money. He abandoned his duties as a father and wanders around alone... My failure to raise my son properly weighs heavily on me. Far too heavily.”

Unlike his grandfather, Onik was very satisfied with where he was growing up.

First, his grandfather was here, and he loved Onik.

His grandfather did not express his feelings much and was rather blunt, but Onik knew there was deep love beneath that bluntness.

Second, there were many living things here that belonged to both categories: things he could kill and things he was allowed to kill. Better still, some things even earned him praise when he killed them.

Today, while home alone, Onik heard dogs barking in the distance and went out through the front gate.

His sling was tucked into his belt, and each pocket held a heavy handful of ball bearings.

Onik knew every dog in the village.

To ordinary people, all dogs might sound alike when they barked, but not to a boy with remarkably sharp senses. Onik could tell exactly which dog from which house was barking just by hearing it from afar.

Among the distant barks he heard now were the fierce voices of stray dogs from elsewhere, mixed together in a pack.

It looked as if he would get to play a game far more fun than killing ants today: killing feral dogs.

Excited, Onik hummed a baseball team’s cheering song.

“Let’s charge ahead♪ Let’s fight and win♪ Until our strength for victory runs dry♬”

As he walked, Onik remembered when his kind schoolteacher had asked about his dream for the future.

“What do you want to do when you grow up, Onik?”

He had not been able to answer right away.

He could not say aloud what was truly in his heart: ‘I want to kill people and be praised, loved, and respected for it.’

Unable to meet his teacher's eyes, the boy hesitated before giving a different answer.

“I want to be a baseball player.”

“A baseball player? A pitcher, or a batter?”

“A pitcher. The adults in the village all say baseball is a pitcher’s game. I’ll become the best pitcher and lead the Lotte Giants to a championship.”

“That’s a big dream. I hope you achieve it. Your teacher will cheer for you.”

Onik liked the Lotte Giants.

There was no other reason. He simply loved Lotteria so much that he liked everything connected to it. Still, the affection itself was sincere.

Separate from that affection, he found it hard to watch their games. Watching a broadcast often made the urge to kill people boil up inside him.

That was why Onik was an unusual die-hard fan who confined his support to everyday cheering. He only sought out games after the team had won.

‘Lotte makes the best hamburgers in the world, so why is its baseball so bad for my heart?’

There was another reason, besides being a Lotte Giants fan, that Onik had named baseball player as his made-up dream.

Whenever Kim Yo-han, Pastor Kim’s second son, saw Onik spin his whole body and launch a projectile with his sling, he would make a great fuss.

“Wow... No matter how many times I see it, that form is no joke. You’d be incredible if you became a baseball player someday.”

A sling throw was naturally different from a pitcher’s motion.

Still, they did share a similarity. Both involved a powerful motion that put all the strength of the body into one hand.

In fact, Onik was skilled enough to bring down every bird that flew into the paddies and fields with an ordinary stone.

To a child growing up without parents, the sincere praise of others was very precious. Whenever he received attention and praise, it felt as though warmth seeped into his chest.

Onik cherished the praise Yo-han often gave him. That was why it had slipped out as his made-up answer when his teacher asked about his dream.

‘I have to get lots of praise today too!’

He followed the barking dogs down familiar winding paths. Soon, the chirping of sparrows joined in from much closer by.

Onik saw a flock of sparrows fluttering into someone else’s field and felt tempted to load a steel ball into his sling. He held himself back.

He had not forgotten the lesson his respected grandfather had taught him.

Once, when Onik had gone out to the field to help his grandfather, he saw a sparrow pecking at kernels of corn. He had felt both dislike and the urge to kill it.

When he tried to load a steel ball into the sling he carried almost everywhere, old Jo Jeong-ho stopped him.

“Don’t kill it.”

The old man tossed a stone to drive the sparrow away. The boy, who had been excited at the thought of earning praise by killing the thieving bird, asked in confusion.

“Grandpa! Isn’t that a harmful bird? It’s stealing the corn you worked so hard to grow. The kernels aren’t even fully ripe yet.”

“Sparrows steal grain, but they also eat the bad insects that ruin crops. The awful Reds in China didn’t understand that and killed all the sparrows across their vast land. They paid dearly for it.”

“Ah...”

“Remember this. Whether it’s a person or an animal, it’s rash to decide whether something is good or bad by looking at only one side of it.”

“Yes, Grandpa! I won’t forget!”

That lesson had remained deep in the heart of the boy who wanted praise for killing things. It made Onik, who was always thirsty for death, more careful.

Death could not be undone.

If he killed something hoping for praise, only to find that it had been a thoughtless act, and it became something he would be blamed for forever...

That was something Onik truly wanted to avoid.

Thankfully, he was free to kill feral dogs as much as he liked.

Of course, it was not legal. Yet laws and regulations were no more than distant, empty echoes in this remote rural village, where the authorities struggled even to capture or control them.

‘This village really is the best!’

The smiling boy had heard from the village elders that there was a valley packed with guesthouses not far to the north, and a campground not far to the south.

Every vacation season, city people came flooding in, then abandoned huge numbers of the dogs they had raised.

Even outside vacation season, the number was only a little smaller. Dogs abandoned by their owners were plentiful all year round.

Dogs had a keen sense of smell.

They were also clever enough to see the elderly, the frail, and children as easier targets than healthy adults. They could even distinguish the scent of the elderly and frail.

That was why it was only natural for packs of dogs abandoned by their owners to drift into this village. The residents were old, and livestock ripe for the taking was scattered everywhere. It was a good hunting ground.

“Woof! Woof!”

The feral dogs were close. The uneven ground and thick brush along the road still hid them from sight, but Onik could tell they were within a hundred meters.

The dogs were closing in quickly. Not on him, but on a farmhouse with a chicken coop.

Anyone who had lived in a rural village would know that once a dog at one house started barking, the dogs at other houses began barking just as fiercely, unwilling to lose.

There was no way to know every reason a dog barked.

One thing was certain, though. When the wind carried the scent of danger, or a rival that might become a threat, they barked first to warn it away.

The village dogs were barking first now, and the approaching feral pack barked back in a contest of nerves.

Familiar with the land around the village, Onik estimated the feral dogs’ path from the sounds he heard. Then he took a high position beside that route, with the afternoon sun behind him. He loaded a steel ball into his sling, hooked the knotted loop over his finger, and counted silently.

‘Five, four, three, two...’

Then one.

The feral pack entered the killing zone.

Onik had already begun spinning the sling at three.

Adding a full-body twist that rose powerfully from his planted foot to the pale blur of the sling’s high-speed rotation, the boy whipped his arm out in a motion like a sidearm baseball throw.

“Snap!”

A small, sharp crack split the air, and the round steel ball cut through the wind with savage force.

An oblong projectile like a rugby ball was better for stabilizing its flight. Yet Onik’s accuracy was exceptional regardless of a projectile’s shape.

“Crack!”

The sound of a feral dog’s head breaking beneath the steel ball was much louder and more satisfying than the sling’s crack through the air.

The red spray scattering through the air looked as lovely as starlight to the young slinger. It was a beauty like a flower that bloomed and fell in an instant.

The feral dogs reacted to the sound, but the flight time was only about 0.6 seconds. It was far too little time even to understand what was happening, much less dodge.

‘Reload.’

By the time the first prey’s head burst, the boy had already loaded the next shot with hands quicker than sight.

Whenever this happened, Onik imagined himself as independence fighter Jo Yang-jin. His movements were so fast and mechanical that anyone watching would have been startled.

The next moment, his sling tightened with a sharp snap under the strength of his shoulder and wrist.

Then came the release. Onik’s extraordinary senses found the exact instant to let go of the knotted loop, down to fractions of a second.

More precisely, it was a sense for catching the moment when he could kill a living thing.

A skilled slinger’s projectile could approach maximum speed with only half a rotation. Like the tip of a sharply cracked whip, the end of a violently spinning sling broke the sound barrier at the moment of release.

The wind split again, short and sharp.

At the sound, the feral dogs whipped their heads around to look at the boy. Their gazes crossed the steel ball’s line of fire in midair.

Flash.

For an instant, reflected sunlight traced the steel ball’s trajectory.

“Thud!”

This time, it struck the body. The feral dog collapsed, the area below and behind its shoulder blade caved in, and it coughed up blood.

Onik had watched adults butcher dead dogs many times, so he knew that the dog trembling on the ground had badly injured its lungs.

Perhaps its heart too.

The boy let out a hot breath without realizing it.

Ah, everything that bled red and died was so beautiful...

“Grrrr! Woof! Woof!”

The feral dogs raised their hackles and barked at him.

Unease, tension, excitement, stress.

And animal fear and hatred.

If they had time to bare their teeth and threaten him, they should have charged boldly.

If the pack had split apart and rushed him all at once, even Onik, standing on high ground, would eventually have had to run away.

But Onik knew very well how hard it was for a frightened creature to be so bold.

Dogs were not killing machines.

“Snap!”

A smooth reload and throw drew another streak of light.

A pale flash shot straight ahead. At its end was a living target that jerked upward in terror.

“Yelp!”

The instinctive diagonal leap was not enough to escape.

One dog twisted in pain and spun halfway through the air. It slid hard across the ground with the force of its own jump.

Its front leg swung at an unnatural angle as it writhed with yelps. The bone that had pierced sharply through the flesh below its chest was its humerus, shattered by the steel ball.

Their companion's screams, since it had not died at once, deepened the remaining feral dogs' fear. Fear rose high and broke through the dam of hatred, flooding over it in an instant.

The pack of feralized pet dogs broke into a full-speed run.

Away from the village. Away from the terrifying boy. Away from that living, breathing human-shaped death.

“Snap!”

Another steel-colored flash broke the hind leg of a fleeing dog. Its joint bent backward, and the dog tumbled violently across the ground, crying out as the earlier dog had.

Next. The boy’s fifth shot unfortunately missed. The fleeing dogs convulsed in fright at the sound of dirt bursting apart with a thump, but that was all.

The surviving dogs raced into a blind spot beyond a low field ridge. The sling’s effective range still stretched much farther, but there was nothing he could do without an open field.

Onik lowered his empty sling.

‘Is this as far as it goes...?’

He could chase the dogs on foot as they ran, but he could not do that and throw projectiles at the same time.

He could catch up and beat them to death instead, but there was no guarantee that he would not get hurt. There were still many dogs left.

If Onik got hurt, his grandfather would be sad. So this was the right time to stop.

He had promised his grandfather that he would.

At the end of the killing, the boy steadied his excited breathing and savored the fullness rising within him.

It was something more than simple satisfaction.

Was it only his imagination? The more living things he killed, the more keenly the senses and abilities needed to kill seemed to awaken in him.

He even felt as though he was growing a little stronger.

After several deep breaths had calmed the stir in his heart, Onik walked toward the two dead dogs and the two dying ones.

“Whine, whine!”

The two dogs with injured legs urinated as they scraped desperately against the ground. They were struggling to get even a little farther from the frightening boy.

Even a dog with injured legs could be dangerous to a child at close range.

Yet Onik approached without fear.

If he swung a loaded sling without letting go of the knotted loop, it became an excellent close-range weapon.

There were even weapons made with fixed weights specifically for that purpose.

Onik had diligently searched for things related to his interests on his smartphone every night. In English-speaking countries, this was apparently called a slungshot.

It was a historic weapon of slaughter, beloved by many killers for a long time.

Jo Yang-jin’s memorandum also recorded him caving in the face of a Japanese police officer with the same method. On a deserted road, an officer passing beside him had died without even a cry when Jo Yang-jin’s surprise attack shot like lightning from his roomy sleeve.

A highly skilled slinger was dangerous at both long and close range.

“Crack!”

The slungshot fell like a small mace and caved in the dog’s crown.

The light of life vanished from the eyes of the four-legged creature, which had been shedding tears. That vanished light rose in the boy’s chest as another swell of feeling.

“Crack!”

The other dog breathed its last.

Brain matter splattered across the boy’s face. What would have horrified an ordinary person was, to Onik, a stimulating spice that deepened the flavor of killing.

He had killed everything there was to kill. Now it was time to call someone and receive praise.

Onik wiped his face, took out his smartphone, and called an adult who would praise him.

A little later, that adult appeared with some friends. He was the fifty-six-year-old President of the Village Youth Association, with streaks of gray in his hair.

“Oh, our Onik! You caught feral dogs again! Well done! You did so well!”

The boy lowered his eyes and smiled brightly.

Footnotes:

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