WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 60: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (60)
──────
#60.
“Huh? What’s that?”
Onik had been thinking it was about time to let Yeon-ri rest, but he sensed something through a faculty no one else possessed and swiftly turned his head.
A scream erupted from that direction a moment later.
“Arghhh!”
The high school rider with bad intentions had been unwillingly thrown into a rodeo.
Ju-won’s assigned horse looked thoroughly determined to throw its rider.
It leaped and bucked, twisting in midair and kicking wildly, and a vicious killing intent seemed to cling to every movement.
Once a horse was this angry, falling off was no longer the worst possibility.
What came after the fall was even more frightening.
An enraged horse had teeth that could bite a person apart and hind legs that could kick a person.
Realizing a trainee might die, several instructors rushed over in a panic.
“Th-that! Why has that horse suddenly gone crazy...?!”
“Ju-won! Stay calm! Don’t pull the reins! The mane! Grab the mane with one hand! Grip with your thighs! Keep your heels down! Lean forward!”
“Hey, hey! Don’t grab the saddle horn! You’ll fall! One hand on the reins, one hand on the mane! Brace yourself against the mane!”
“You remember the fall training, right?! If you think you’re going to fall, pick where you land! Don’t get stepped on!”
When a horse went wild, the worst thing its rider could do was try to forcefully control it.
Usually, it was not something they did on purpose.
It was simply a survival instinct and defensive reaction that panicked riders fell into.
Yanking the reins with all their strength was the clearest example.
For a complete beginner, it was better to prepare for the fall and cling to the reins with all they had.
Protecting the head and cervical spine came first.
Even in the worst case, they had to avoid full-body paralysis.
But if the rider was not a beginner, the wiser choice was to hold on as long as possible and calm the horse.
A horse enraged at its rider might not leave a fallen rider alone.
Holding on for as long as possible mattered because, even if the rider eventually fell, it bought everyone nearby time to respond.
The instructors raised their voices, keeping their tones as gentle as they could.
“Remember! If the horse starts running, then! When that happens, work the reins left and right in turns! That’s how you slow it down! Got it?!”
As they reminded the high school rider of the accident-response training, the instructors divided up their roles and tried to draw the wild horse’s attention.
If the rider fell, they wanted the horse to turn its attention toward them instead of attacking the fallen rider.
It was, naturally, dangerous.
Whenever something like this happened, instructors found themselves questioning their profession.
In Seoul, a bowl of pork-and-rice soup had cost over ten thousand won for ages.
And in times like these, they earned less than three million won a month while also having to fear for their lives.
Sometimes they were even sued over responsibility for accidents. The balance was far too uneven...
Still, they could not hold back when a trainee might die.
Despite the instructors’ efforts, Ju-won had fallen completely into panic.
His mind had gone blank, leaving him unable to think.
He was like a driver who stomped on the accelerator, thinking it was the brake, then mistook the result for sudden unintended acceleration.
“Arghhh! Aaaah!”
While the high schooler screamed, Legal Hunter, a bad adult, pointed the camera at him first.
‘What luck!’
His first visit to a riding school, and such an exciting accident had broken out.
Legal Hunter heightened his viewers’ dopamine with dramatic commentary.
Inside, he was delighted by his good fortune. When he saw who the rider was, he even thought it served him right. Outwardly, though, he kept his expression under control.
「Neighhh!!」
The crazed horse stormed through the people trying to calm it.
It was a sudden burst of speed that caught the instructors off guard.
If it only bucked in place, it would lose space.
If it lost space, people might grab its halter and reins. Then it would have no way to mess up the rider on its back.
Ju-won’s assigned horse was determined to thoroughly mess up its rider while it had the chance. To be honest, it had not liked him for some time.
A human like this needed to have the hierarchy sorted out once and for all.
If he died, that was his fate.
At that moment, the frightening boy urged Yeon-ri after it.
‘I was going to watch what the adults did first, but it got away...!’
Onik’s gaze fixed on the raging horse, and it felt the presence of something frightening approaching.
It was the sixth sense the frightening boy forced upon other living beings.
There were pros and cons to that.
The horse, blinded by rage, had finally turned its attention toward something other than its rider. That was certainly good.
But it was bad that this made it push its speed to the limit.
“Hyah! Hup!”
Like an experienced rider, Onik pressed his heels into Yeon-ri’s sides. Before they gained speed, he flung the bow aside.
‘I’m sorry, Master Bowyer, but a person comes before a bow!’
Human life was precious.
Too precious to lose to suicide, and too precious to lose to an accident.
Yeon-ri accelerated like the wind, as though it carried no rider at all.
It was not simply because Onik was still a small child and weighed little.
At the exact instant Yeon-ri’s hooves struck the ground, Onik pressed his weight downward as well.
Then he used his thighs like springs, temporarily reducing the burden on Yeon-ri to nearly zero. Horse and rider rose together with a razor-thin delay between them.
At least in that moment, neither diminished the other’s strength.
With his hips lifted from the saddle and his legs acting as springs, Onik was the ideal rider for a running horse.
The stronger the human body’s spring and the more precise its control, the more it helped the horse.
Onik had learned this riding technique through talent and instinct alone.
Even if someone else used the same technique, without Onik’s leg strength and sense, they could never lessen the horse’s burden as much as he did.
The distance between pursuer and pursued closed quickly.
The rider on the fleeing horse clung on desperately, only increasing the horse’s burden, while the surrounding fence forced it to change direction. Both factors favored the pursuer.
「Huff! Huff! Pff!」
「Huff! Huff! Huff! Huff!」
Before long, the two horses’ heads were lined up as they ran in the same direction.
Two rough, inhuman breaths formed a duet beside Onik’s ears.
Ju-won’s assigned horse glanced at the frightening boy with the whites of its eyes showing.
The frightening boy and Yeon-ri were to its left, the fence to its right. There was nowhere to escape.
Slowing down would not make escape any easier. The heavy burden was still clinging to its back.
“Aaaah! Mom! Mom!”
The force of the turn it had been forced to make earlier at a corner of the arena had left Ju-won hanging dangerously off the horse’s right side.
Both hands gripped the saddle horn.
His right foot, precariously lodged in the right stirrup, barely supported the high schooler’s weight.
His left foot had slipped free and kept scraping the ground, making the situation even more dangerous.
The ground beneath it flowed by like water at high speed, a violent current like a valley after rain.
In that situation, Onik swiftly pulled both feet from his stirrups.
Then he moved in a blur and crouched on the saddle, as if preparing to leap.
“Yah!”
The next instant, Onik stood atop both stirrups at once, on the two horses running side by side with their heads level.
Eastern mounted acrobatics had unfolded in a place for learning Western riding.
Even in the early Joseon period, not many military officers could perform mounted acrobatics at this level with two horses.
Those who saw this rare sight were horrified. As people trained in riding themselves, they understood the danger all too well.
“What is that?!”
“Dangerous!”
“He’s really insane!”
Whether people shouted or not, Onik calmly changed horses.
His heart rate rose, and hot blood surged through his veins.
But he was not afraid. He was only doing what he could do.
No one knew better than Onik what he could and could not do.
With its saddle empty, Yeon-ri naturally slowed and fell behind.
Holding the runaway horse’s reins in one hand, Onik gently guided it toward the open space on the left that Yeon-ri had left behind.
At the same time, he firmly grabbed the back of the high school rider’s neck with his free hand.
“Hup!”
When Onik pulled hard, Ju-won was yanked upward in one swift motion.
Ju-won’s right foot, which had been wedged in the stirrup, came free naturally as the stirrup changed angle.
Onik hauled up the high schooler at once and draped him like laundry over the lower part of the horse’s neck, then tightly secured him by gripping his belt with his right hand.
The frightening boy’s powerful hand was a strong, springy restraint.
“Whoa, whoa!”
Onik then alternated the reins from left to right and right to left, steadily slowing the horse.
He never pulled the reins hard. He thought pulling harder might make the horse more agitated.
“You’re a good horse, right? Won’t you calm down now? No one’s going to hurt you!”
The frightening rider spoke softly to the runaway horse. The meaning might not have reached it, but the feeling did, which made the words effective.
He had to let the horse know that he had no intention of hurting it.
「Huff, huff, huu...」
As he kept turning it left and right, its speed had no choice but to drop each time.
Once it had slowed enough, Onik pulled the reins deeply to the left.
With its head pulled around, the horse began circling.
Onik had only acted on instinct, but this was an emergency stopping technique called a One-Rein Stop.
With its neck sharply bent left, the horse kept meeting the frightening boy’s eyes.
The boy smiled brightly and continued to offer kind words.
“It’s okay, it’s okay! You don’t have to be scared! If you just stop running, I’ll give you a tasty sugar cube!”
The horse, watching him cautiously, recognized that the frightening thing was not angry at it.
The boy did not seem likely to harm it, and the frightened horse gradually regained its composure and came to a stop.
Fear was passing into submission.
「Snort...」
Onik stroked the roots of its mane until its breathing settled.
Then he asked the high school rider he had rescued.
“Big brother! Are you okay?”
“...”
“Hello? Big brother? Can’t you hear me?”
Ju-won remained draped there like laundry, moving only his head and eyes to look at Onik. Onik was reflected in his eyes, but his gaze was unfocused.
Because he had screamed at the top of his lungs until moments ago, traces of saliva still clung around his mouth.
Onik waved a hand back and forth in front of Ju-won’s face, then inwardly shook his head.
‘He’s completely out of it!’
Around then, the instructors who had run across the arena checked on the middle schooler and high schooler with stunned expressions.
Even now, their professionalism showed in the way they circled around to approach carefully from the front and sides.
They were being careful not to provoke the horse that had only just calmed down.
Onik reassured the adults with a smile.
“I’m okay! But this big brother is out of it! He doesn’t look hurt, but I think he was really scared! I’ll hand him down, so please catch him!”
After saying that, Onik took down the living laundry and handed him to the instructors.
A first-year middle schooler passed over a dazed high schooler without even seeming to struggle, letting out only a single, “Hup!”
“Urk!”
The two instructors who caught him stumbled, their knees buckling for a moment.
It was not because they lacked strength. They simply had not prepared to use it.
The extraordinary boy had passed him over so lightly that they subconsciously misjudged his weight.
Legal Hunter, who had filmed the entire thing, cheered inside at another excellent scene.
After stepping down by way of the stirrups, Onik kept the promise he had made to the horse.
“Here, eat! It’s a sugar cube!”
He should at least have been panting or trembling. Instead, the boy who had done something so dangerously reckless only moments ago looked far too calm.
Those watching did not know what to say.
The instructor assigned to Onik from the start of the day felt the same.
What Onik had shown was mounted acrobatics no riding school taught.
To begin with, there was no one who could teach it.
Not only riding schools, but even action schools that trained stunt performers might not have anyone capable of teaching it.
To find such a person, they would likely have to search abroad.
‘There’s no way today was really his first time riding... But I can’t even say where he could have learned that...’
What the instructor had seen the boy do was utterly absurd, yet Onik’s attitude made it seem as though he did not think much of it.
Still, he seemed happy to receive admiration and praise from so many people. His bright smile never left his face.
The instructor was deeply confused.
#
Onik’s actions once again became an online sensation, and once again made the news.
#
These days, so few people watched the news that many did not know this, but terrestrial news channels had been relaying and reporting online community issues for years.
Even when they were nothing more than entertainment-driven topics.
Many cases did not even involve the bare minimum of fact-checking.
They simply read through a post, often consisting of nothing but text and photos, then read the comments reacting to it and called it a day.
Reports like that were highly likely to receive at least one sharp comment.
『You’re reporting this as news? How are you any different from YouTube gossip channels?」
Of course, the producers working at news centers had plenty they wanted to say.
What did people expect them to do in an era when terrestrial news channels competed with YouTube creators?
Ratings were already on the decline. Should they not mix in something exciting to air?
With shrinking budgets, how could they produce quality reporting and coverage...?
Questions like, “Have you forgotten that you damaged the credibility of news yourselves while getting called trash journalists?” “Was the reporting better when you had more money?” and “Wasn’t rejecting YouTube itself at the beginning a mistake?” should not be asked.
They could not refute them, and it would only make them angry.
The lawmakers of South Korea, the weakest nation in Northeast Asian morality, needed to quickly pass a law banning fact-based violence for the moral advancement of their country.
They should do it for the fans of a certain baseball team that had not won a championship in over thirty years.
Fear the fury of the Giants.
In any case, under these circumstances, the daring feat performed by an extraordinary middle schooler in a rural village counted as quality news material.
More than anything, there was footage to show the viewers.
And the footage was surprising, strange, and exciting!
This was not the first time Onik had appeared on terrestrial news.
He had been reported on when he caught an Asian giant hornet barehanded, and when he became the youngest person to earn a perfect TOEIC score.
Then there was the time that perfect scorer, famous as an English prodigy, suddenly rode a Sky Kong Kong pogo stick and chased a water deer. That had made the news too.
There had also been a report after he cooked hot pot with mushrooms gathered from a wild hill, because he had been targeted online. The explanation afterward led to another report under the title, “Genius Boy Who Identifies Mushrooms.”
All because they were issues attracting attention online.
There were several terrestrial broadcasters, and each one had only selected two or three stories, yet it had still come to this.
The networks also always paid a certain amount of attention to the topics aired by the others.
Nor had those reports been aired very far apart from one another.
By now, the news center producers at each broadcaster had enough reason to remember and take notice of a child named Jo Onik.
“...This kid named Jo Onik has unusual drawing power, doesn’t he? Instead of just feeding off community posts, shouldn’t we go out and do a proper report on him at least once?”
The interest within the news centers stopped at about that level.
But on top of the influence held by news centers, which traditionally carried more status than other departments, there were exchanges and personal connections among executives and producers.
As a result, the ripple effects spread to the entertainment production divisions and studio departments of the individual broadcasters as well.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
