WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 76: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (76)
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#76.
If he was going to kill the bad police officer, he had to do it before the night was over.
The frightening boy had mapped out the day and night shift rotations at the town police substation.
With the help of a kind, diligent AI, he had logged the police officers' conversations and reviewed them carefully.
Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok, on his second consecutive night shift today, would be off work for the next two days.
Those two days would be an ideal time for him to put that shameless plan of his into action.
The following two days would be day shifts. Murder was more troublesome in daylight than in darkness.
Killing him then would also be too late.
A murder committed after the right time had passed held no meaning beyond punishment. It was an empty murder.
Fortunately, the boy still had a long night ahead of him.
Having made up his mind, Onik cut straight across the dark mountains. He was headed for his precious village, fading away day by day as its people grew old and disappeared.
He could not take a car.
The buses had already stopped running, and he could hardly call Legal Hunter and ask, “Could you give me a ride?”
It was even less possible when he thought of the lie he had told Grandpa.
「Flap flap flap!」
Mountain birds that had stayed awake through the night flew up from the branches of the black forest.
Something shaped like a human boy crossed the mountains with violent momentum, shedding ominous killing intent. Startled, the birds fled in all directions with frantic beats of their wings.
The Onik of this moment was far from a quiet predator.
His eyes held the ominous gleam of restrained murderous intent, and he followed the shortest route with only one thought in mind: saving time.
「Crash! Crack!」
Whenever shrubs blocked his way, he hurled himself straight through them.
He did not care that his clothes were becoming a mess.
Once morning came, he would have to make up another lie for Grandpa. But what could he do? One lie always called for another to cover it.
‘As long as I don't get hurt.’
If he said he had been playing in the mountains and rolled through a thicket, Grandpa would probably understand.
Grandpa might think his grandson had something he wanted to hide, but since he had not been hurt, that would be enough.
Every time he broke through dense shrubs, the branches scraped and snapped roughly against him.
But no matter how fiercely the tough, jagged branches clawed across his skin, they left only faint red marks. No wounds remained.
The frightening boy had never even suffered an ordinary grass rash.
After roughly forty minutes, the sparse lights of the decaying clan village came into view.
Onik had refined his murder plan in his head throughout the run.
There was not the slightest hesitation or wasted movement in what he did next.
‘First, the bamboo.’
As the final inheritor taken in by Master Bowyer, Onik kept materials at home for maintaining bows and replenishing arrows.
Properly dried bamboo was indispensable for making traditional bows and arrows.
That was why the old cowshed at the Songryeong Jo Clan Head House was filled with bamboo, cut from nearby mountains or bought from suppliers and laid out layer upon layer to dry.
Giant bamboo, Henon bamboo, moso bamboo, dwarf bamboo, broadleaf bamboo, and arrow bamboo.
They were all neatly sorted by thickness according to their variety and use.
Bamboo grew more resilient the longer it dried.
Onik had learned that drying did not simply remove moisture. Some kind of chemical change took place as well.
Even Master Bowyer did not know precisely what that change was, but a master bowyer had no reason to understand it that far.
To make bows and arrows of the highest quality, bamboo had to be stacked in a shaded, well-ventilated place and dried for at least three years, sometimes five years or more.
Master Bowyer's storage shed contained fine bamboo that had dried for over five years.
But Onik had decided not to touch Master Bowyer's bamboo.
Using that precious bamboo felt like a grave wrong of a different kind from murder.
‘How much care has Elder put into tending that bamboo?’
Of course, Master Bowyer would not scold him for using it.
But...
‘Materials that hold Elder's time and effort shouldn't be used to kill someone.’
So Onik selected bamboo that he had cut or acquired himself.
It was material for making the weapon for his second murder.
Regardless of species or age, none of it had dried for even a full year. Still, compared with fresh bamboo, it was clearly harder and more resilient.
Anything too thick was unsuitable.
One bamboo rod, collected before its nodes grew thick, one that was easy to close a hand tightly around. A carving knife to shape the rod. A bundle of jute cord once used to bend and secure bow staves.
After collecting these things, Onik immediately turned and ran to the village hall.
The blue Porter truck was still parked in front.
“...”
Onik paused for a moment, remembering his first murder. Then he took cotton work gloves from the truck's toolbox, put them on, and pulled out the leaf-spring support bracket with a click.
It was the heavy piece of metal that had caught the boy's attention that morning by presenting an unexpected possibility for murder.
Onik weighed the ugly piece of metal in his hand.
‘About... a little heavier than one geun of meat?’
The frightening boy's extraordinary senses were as accurate as a decent scale. It felt as though it weighed roughly 620 to 630 grams.
That was more than enough weight for a projectile meant to kill a person.
After putting the metal in his bag, Onik made one final stop at the village hall's shared storage room and took a gas torch.
He had left it there because he occasionally needed it while filming cooking broadcasts in front of the village hall, whether to light firewood or give food a smoky flavor.
With that, Onik had everything he needed.
He turned his back on the village.
Then he melted once more into the dark mountains, where no one would come.
Somewhere, insects chirped. Yohan's grave was not far away.
Sitting on a cool rock touched by starlight filtering through clouds and branches, the frightening boy began making the weapon he would use for his second murder.
「Scrape, scraaaape.」
The hard bamboo shaved away wherever the blade moved. The knife cut through it as though it were clay.
The compressive strength of properly dried bamboo exceeded that of concrete, but that meant little before the extraordinary boy's strength and skill with a knife.
There would be no disaster where he applied the wrong force, placed the blade incorrectly, and split the bamboo.
After all, he had learned how to handle bamboo from a master craftsman recognized by the nation.
The weapon Onik was making was a staff sling.
In the West, it was called a staff sling.
With one, even a stone larger than a palm could be thrown a great distance. A heavy stone weighing more than one kilogram could be launched.
In the past, it had even been used, if only to a limited extent, as a siege weapon.
But the leaf-spring piece he wanted to launch today was long and flat from side to side. Unlike an ordinary staff sling, which usually used round or oval projectiles, he would have to rig the cords differently.
He needed to adapt the method ancient Greeks had used to fire arrows from slings.
The boy, broadly knowledgeable about the history of murder, knew the specific method.
‘...There's nothing difficult about it.’
Instead of fastening one cord to the staff, he would use two.
The leaf-spring piece would hang like a swing from one short cord and one long cord.
He would make the knot loop on the short cord large, then hook it over one edge of the leaf-spring piece.
The long cord itself would be wrapped halfway around the opposite edge of the leaf spring. Its knot loop would be small, serving as a trigger ring around his finger.
It was naturally harder to use than an ordinary staff sling, whose cord released by itself when swung properly.
Like a hand sling, the user had to judge the release point directly.
There was another difficulty.
The points that transferred centrifugal force to the projectile were divided between both sides of the leaf spring.
That meant the loaded projectile was that much more unstable.
So from the moment he began the rotation, he had to align the direction of force precisely.
Otherwise, the long projectile would wobble from side to side and follow an unintended path.
Or the cord might simply slip free.
But neither possibility was a problem for the frightening boy.
‘No one can judge a sling's release point better than I can.’
Not only in Korea. Probably not even in the world.
Especially when he meant to kill something with blood flowing through it.
Onik was confident that he could release the trigger ring at exactly the right moment, within exceptionally tiny units of time, each second divided into dozens of pieces.
The same was true of starting the rotation.
There was no need to worry that the projectile's spin would become unstable. Onik's senses had clearly surpassed human limits.
‘Done.’
The sturdy bamboo staff sling was finished in no time, with only a little carving and several knots.
It was surprisingly easy to make.
The problem was that it was a weapon painfully difficult to master.
To achieve meaningful long-range accuracy with this primitive weapon, one had to pour an enormous amount of time into training.
If the pitchers of the Lotte Giants, the strongest baseball team on earth and one that always hid its power, broke their forbidden seals and trained with dedication for about five years, then, hmm...
It would probably still be impossible. It was not easy. Truly.
Onik loaded the projectile as a test.
Once loading was complete, the long cord with the trigger ring bent twice.
Once when it wrapped halfway around the leaf spring. The other time when it caught in a groove the boy had carved with his knife.
Pulled taut and bent twice, the trigger ring was finally slipped around the boy's finger.
Holding the staff drawn behind him, with the leaf-spring piece hanging down, Onik suddenly opened his eyes wide.
“Hup!”
Muscles bulged along the frightening boy's forearm.
The bamboo staff sling drew an arc with murderous force. The heavy iron piece hanging like a swing was pulled taut with a whang.
Before the sound had faded, the iron piece broke the sound barrier.
「Bwoom!」
A small sonic boom erupted.
It had broken the sound barrier in the same way as a whip, but the projectile was much larger. Its pitch and volume could not be the same.
Between moments split and split again into fractions of a second, Onik released the trigger ring with a snap.
「Whuuuuung!」
The ugly piece of metal spun furiously through the air.
No, it was closer to tearing the air apart than cutting through it.
To Onik's eyes, which could observe an instant, the air itself warped.
Even in the black darkness deep in the mountains, his bright night vision did not miss the transparent shock wave.
The leaf spring's long, flat shape helped stabilize its flight.
As long as it was launched precisely in line with the staff's plane of rotation, it would naturally spin sideways.
The leaf spring's path was more stable than Onik had expected.
「Crack!」
The trunk of the pine tree he had chosen as a target burst apart with a thunderous roar.
The leaf spring that struck it hummed with powerful elasticity as it sprang upward in spinning circles. Splintered wood fragments scattered with remaining force like shot.
They were fragments that could truly injure an ordinary person.
What remained was a deep gouge.
If Onik gripped a Joseon axe with all his strength and put the weight of his entire body behind it as he chopped into a tree, it would leave a similar mark.
No one in this world could survive being struck by an axe swung at full force by the frightening boy.
A murderous echo spread through the silent mountains.
“Phew...”
Relaxing his muscles, Onik ran swiftly up and down the slope to retrieve the leaf spring.
Then he repeated the test shots from varying distances.
He was learning the leaf spring's flight characteristics at different ranges.
The broken leaf spring had a subtle asymmetry in its curve. It had not broken away as a piece symmetrical around the leaf spring's center.
Air resistance from the broken surface also affected its flight.
The farther it flew, the more gently its path curved to one side.
In baseball terms, it was like a cutter or slider.
Onik thought coldly.
‘That's even better.’
The leaf spring only broke the sound barrier briefly at launch.
No matter how hard Onik threw it, he could not avoid its final path being caught by a patrol car's dashcam.
If matters went according to plan, the chance that the dashcam's memory would remain intact was low.
But no matter how low that chance was, he had to prepare for it.
Then the curving path of an asymmetrical projectile was an advantage.
The frightening boy's murder plan was almost without flaws, but even so, he wanted to make it safer still.
Vehicles on remote mountain roads normally drove with their high beams on.
Other vehicles were rare, and drivers had to avoid water deer or wild boars that suddenly appeared in the road.
Patrol cars were no exception.
According to what Onik had looked up, a driver's visibility with high beams on was usually around one hundred meters.
When visibility was very good, the light could reach as far as three hundred meters.
But that distance was meaningless to ordinary people's eyesight.
(It mattered to Onik, so he had looked it up. As an extraordinary boy, he had no real sense of how good ordinary people's eyesight was...)
For maximum safety, Onik intended to make his long-range throw from at least one hundred and fifty meters away.
He already had several possible locations in mind.
‘If a curving path is added to a throw from that far away... even if the police officers notice something suspicious, the investigation will run into trouble from the very beginning.’
If not for these circumstances, he would not have needed to prepare a staff sling just to launch the leaf spring.
With Onik's monstrous strength, even an ordinary sling with a somewhat longer cord could throw a heavy projectile a great distance.
But he needed an even longer-range throw, and he had to pierce the thick bullet-resistant film on the patrol car's windshield.
Onik did not know how strong the bullet-resistant windshield film was.
That was another reason he needed the bamboo staff sling.
At the same time, he needed the projectile's trajectory to be as straight as possible.
‘...I wish I could kill something with it.’
Onik's ominous talent showed itself most fully when he killed living things.
So the quickest way to understand the murderous potential of a new weapon was to use it and actually draw blood.
Just once would be enough.
One killing that made brilliant red blood pour out in a rush.
That one killing alone would let the frightening boy's skill with the weapon grow astonishingly. For him, it was merely a matter of instinct.
Sniiiiff.
Onik's chest slowly expanded.
He drew the scent of every animal he could smell here into his nostrils.
Since experiencing his first murder, the frightening boy's sense of smell had become equal to that of a bloodhound.
That meant most hunting dogs were inferior to him.
He could smell fatty acids and many different pheromones that other people could not detect.
And he could even control olfactory fatigue at will. That alone made the frightening boy an uncanny supernatural phenomenon.
He also possessed another sense that could not be described in human language.
The instinct that made him ride around with Legal Hunter and suddenly shout, “This is the place today!”
The combination of that instinct and his sense of smell made Onik the hardest tracker in the world to shake off.
Onik's eyes gleamed.
‘That way.’
The boy's figure cut through the darkness.
His steps across the rugged terrain were light, almost without weight.
Unlike when he had raced in a straight line between town and village at full speed, he was running as a hunter now.
Before long, he found his target.
A wild boar wandering in search of food.
The distance looked to be around seventy meters. Onik stood near the middle of the slope, looking down at the wild boar heading toward the foot of the mountain.
Sliiiide.
Onik skidded to a sudden stop on the slope and completed his loading in the same instant.
His arm pulled back and locked into place. A faint friction sound came from his small hand, veins bulging as it gripped the bamboo staff tightly.
‘Just as I thought. The feeling is fundamentally different when I'm aiming at something alive...’
The projectile hanging like a swing swayed with inertia, then found its balance beneath his precise hands.
The boy, like an iron mace halted just before its downward strike, finally unleashed the staff sling with ferocious force.
「Bwoom!」
A roar like cannon fire rang out.
Only four seconds had passed from loading to firing.
Hearing the roar, the wild boar jerked in surprise and froze in alertness.
It was a foolish choice. If it had leaped away the moment it heard the sound, it could have avoided a fatal wound. With luck, the projectile might have missed altogether.
But...
When it sensed an invisible threat, the harmful beast's habit of stopping, hiding its presence, and checking its surroundings called down its death.
The wild boar turned around, and its head exploded diagonally.
The leaf-spring piece had traveled seventy meters in less than a second, though it was far slower than sound.
It could crush a wild boar's skull as easily as tofu.
As always, the spray of blood and brain matter was beautiful.
The distance would have seemed far to an ordinary person, but not to Onik's eyes.
Beneath the canopy that deepened the darkness, the blood shooting through the air was terribly clear.
Through this familiar, joyous killing, Onik found his sense for it.
It was the instinct of a natural killer that gave him confidence he could hit without fail from more than twice this distance.
#
The frightening boy had another calculation in staining the leaf-spring piece he would use as a weapon with wild boar blood.
He scrubbed the leaf spring against the dirt, then found a stream to wash it.
But that would not wash away the plasma proteins clinging to its surface. They simply could not be seen.
So if the police later analyzed the bloodstains on the leaf spring, the wild boar's DNA would become a clue with high investigative priority.
Vehicle collisions with wild animals were common in this area.
That did not necessarily mean roadkill. Larger wild boars were often hit by moving cars, rose right back up, and ran away.
So if the police began investigating, they would think this.
「Looking at the condition of the plasma on this leaf-spring auxiliary support bracket, it clearly came from a vehicle that recently hit a wild boar.
Maybe it even fell off because of that collision.」
「A truck that drove through an area where an accident occurred recently.
Among them, one with an illegally modified eleven-millimeter auxiliary support bracket, and one where luminol reacts at the bracket's mounting point.
We can identify those vehicles and run genetic analysis on the plasma proteins!」
「Start by checking all nearby CCTV! Review every saved recording. There won't be many vehicles that qualify as suspects!」
The places Onik had considered for carrying out his plan were remote roads where only regular traffic passed.
So the police who began investigating would initially feel sure they could make an arrest.
They might not be able to charge the vehicle owner with murder, but they could at least punish them for violating vehicle management laws and causing death as a result.
But no matter how hard they searched, no vehicle matching those conditions would ever appear.
The wild boar that left its genetic material had died deep in the mountains, not on a road...
Onik intended to make the police waste their investigative resources in the wrong direction.
By listening to conversations inside the town police substation and patrol cars for several days, Onik had learned that local police staffing was chronically short.
New cases would continue piling up while they wasted their investigative resources in the wrong direction.
To make matters worse, it was September.
The harvest season for many autumn crops was just around the corner.
Having grown up in the countryside, Onik knew the police substation and police station would soon become very busy.
‘There'll be lots of thieves again this year. Especially bad thieves who steal cabbages by the truckload.’
Harvest season was a major season for crop thieves.
Cabbage and radish thieves became especially active during kimchi-making season. One successful theft could easily earn them tens of millions of won.
Once that season arrived, the police would have no choice but to pull personnel from investigations already struggling.
Or suspend those investigations altogether.
With the number of unlit police safety centers increasing every day, there was no other way.
Once an unsolved case was pushed aside like that, it was unlikely that many resources would ever be assigned to it again.
This was not Seoul or Gyeonggi Province, where money flowed freely.
The police officers' enthusiasm would also be unlikely to remain the same when they resumed investigating.
Onik remembered the police substation chief's voice recorded on the device on the first floor.
「Ugh. Let's close this case out perfunctorily. We have to think about our performance record too.」
「Besides this one, close out the cases that have dragged on but aren't likely to cause trouble. If there are materials we can force into place, that is.」
Those words decisively damaged one rural boy's trust in the police.
Even while angry, Onik had wondered whether evaluating police work by performance records was truly right.
As with the dilemma of law, he could not think of a better method, which made his worry deepen.
What was the best that people could do...?
#
Having prepared for a perfect crime, Onik crossed the mountains in the middle of the night again.
His destination was not one of the places he had considered for carrying out the plan.
‘...I should check one last time.’
He knew the patrol car's routes and schedule by heart.
He had even learned who would patrol tonight and in what order.
But while Onik had been crossing the dark mountains and preparing for his second murder, he had to consider the possibility that something had happened at the town police substation and disrupted the shifts.
What if he saw a patrol car coming from afar with its high beams on, threw the leaf spring at once, and found someone other than Lieutenant Seo Mun-seok in the driver's seat?
He could not kill the wrong person.
Never. Absolutely never.
In one of the conversations Onik had wiretapped, Seo Mun-seok had complained of extreme fatigue.
There was a chance, however small, that he would miss patrol because of that fatigue.
On the other hand, there was another possibility, infinitely close to zero but one Onik had to consider.
The possibility that Seo Mun-seok had deeply regretted his wrongdoing in the meantime.
It was a ridiculous expectation, but also a hope he could not help holding.
For a rural boy who habitually slashed his own heart with the blade of self-hatred.
That was why Onik wanted, one final time, to retrieve data from the spy camera and download the recording from the patrol car Seo Mun-seok was riding in through Bluetooth.
There might be even one word of sincere reflection or regret in it.
Fortunately, he had a chance.
Patrols starting from the town police substation went far around remote mountain roads, checking them carefully before returning to their starting point.
And along the way, there were places where the vehicle stopped briefly.
Places where officers inevitably had to patrol on foot. Or places where they habitually parked and rested.
The boy knew all those places as well. The tracking device had done its work.
The frightening boy had several opportunities to catch up to the patrol car on foot.
He could cut almost straight through mountain country without paths, while the police driving the car had to follow winding roads over great distances and sometimes conduct foot patrols.
Thanks to that, Onik easily found the patrol car stopped at the roadside.
A middle-aged police officer with one hibiscus insignia on his epaulet sat in the lit driver's seat.
From the bushes above a low retaining wall on the left side of the road, Onik watched the driver's seat and could not hold back a sigh.
“...Ah.”
The bad police officer was watching pornography.
His eyes were bloodshot. He was completely focused. And terribly serious about it.
Footnotes:
The line about the Lotte Giants uses a fan-ironic image of the team as the world's strongest baseball club, supposedly always hiding its true strength.
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