WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS x FLAME COMICS

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint ◈

Chapter 526: Episode 101: Something That Exists Nowhere (1)

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「Hospital Room, 9:12 AM.」

―Everyone, gather at the eastern entrance of the industrial complex by 7 PM tomorrow. We're going beyond the ‘Final Wall’ to save Kim Dokja.

Jeong Huiwon received that text last night. The sender was Han Suyeong. As always, it was an arrogant text. After reading it, Huiwon stood for a long time, staring blankly out the window.

「Jeong Huiwon didn't want to return to the Scenario.」

She had fought harder than any other Incarnation. More than anyone, she had wanted to save Dokja and bring the Scenario to an end. At last, she had made it this far.

「The Final Wall she had seen in the Final Chapter of the Scenario.」

Even now, whenever she closed her eyes, the memory was vivid.

The memory of fighting alongside Dokja after he became the Enemy of Stories.

Amid the flood of terrible fables, she survived by cutting down one thing after another. She broke through the wall and reached her own final destination.

「Yet Han Suyeong was telling her to board that train once more.」

She was telling them to return to the place where the Final Wall had stood.

That there was something they had left behind on the train they had gotten off.

"Huiwon-ssi."

Only then did Huiwon realize that the hand gripping the curtain was trembling.

"Did you get it too, Hyeongseong-ssi?"

"Yes."

"What do you think?"

"Dokja-ssi, the one we remember, is here."

Dokja, the one they remembered, slept soundly. His eyelids had forgotten every tragedy in the world. Huiwon gently covered his eyes with her hand.

Some misfortunes disappear simply by not being seen.

「This Kim Dokja was the Dokja they remembered.」

The Dokja who had overcome Geumho Station, Chungmuro, Gwanghwamun, the Demon Realm, Olympus, Journey to the West, and the Final Wall with them was right before her. He remembered Huiwon's sword name. He remembered Hyeongseong's trauma. He remembered his promises to his Allies.

That much was exactly the Dokja they loved, and the Dokja she wanted to protect.

She wondered whether it was right for a person to be divided so simply, but this wasn't only a matter of Avatar.

When someone loved another person, they loved a part of that person from the beginning.

The bloodstains on Dokja's wounds crumbled away with a faint crackle, turning to smoke. Broken fables drifted through the air before scattering into the sky beyond the window. Huiwon didn't know where those fables were headed. Perhaps they would vanish forever. Or perhaps they were returning to another Kim Dokja.

「Kim Dokja, who remembered TWSA and had loved a single story all along.」

Huiwon didn't know that Dokja.

No one can love what they don't know.

"Hyeongseong-ssi."

"Yes."

"If Dokja-ssi had been in our place, what do you think he would've done?"

Hyeongseong didn't answer for a long time.

* * *

「Hospital Room, 1:31 PM.」

As though many people had already visited, flowers and gifts were neatly arranged on the hospital room table. Gifts for when Dokja woke up someday.

Jang Hayoung toyed with a flower petal for a moment, then slowly approached Dokja.

"You're the Dokja I remember, right? The Dokja who saved me in the Demon Realm."

The clock beside his pillow was ticking.

He was the one who had made time flow again in the 73rd Demon Realm, where it had stopped.

The one who had moved her when she despaired before the wall of talent.

The Demon King of Salvation.

"Honestly, I didn't want to come back to Earth then."

Hayoung smiled bitterly.

"I don't have a single good memory here."

She was a Dimensional Traveler. Like most Dimensional Travelers, the circumstances were incomprehensible. One day, while working overtime at her company as usual, she felt a pain in her heart and collapsed. The moment her breathing stopped, she thought, 'I've lived too diligently.' If there was another life, she vowed, 'I'll never live diligently again.'

Then she opened her eyes in the Demon Realm. Watching the industrial complex residents bustle about on their way to lunch, Hayoung muttered,

"Because of you, I ended up living diligently again."

* * *

「Hospital Room, 6:24 PM.」

"Throw it. Your turn."

At Lee Gilyeong's words, Shin Yuseong tossed a 100-won coin. The spinning coin landed on the back of her hand with a tap. It was heads.

"How many times has it been?"

"Ninety-nine."

"Then it's forty-nine to fifty."

Gilyeong dusted off his hands and rose from his seat. Lee Jihye, sitting on the guardian's bed, asked,

"Are you two making that bet again? The one about whether Dokja ahjussi is alive if it comes up heads?"

"What are you talking about? Ahjussi is alive right here."

"Then what's the bet?"

The children didn't answer. Jihye frowned.

"Do you really believe that?"

"Believe what?"

"That there's a Dokja ahjussi we don't know. That he still hasn't gotten off that train..."

Neither child answered. Jihye stared blankly at Dokja, then suddenly rose and pointed at him.

"This ahjussi is the Dokja ahjussi I know."

"..."

"The one who saved you two, and saved me, is this ahjussi."

"I know."

"You think that's all?"

Jihye kept talking about why this Dokja was the real Kim Dokja.

Yet strangely, each time she continued, she felt Dokja drifting farther away from her.

"And..."

Jihye tightly grasped Dokja's pale hand.

It didn't feel real. She had barely managed to grow up alongside the owner of this hand. She had learned how it felt to lose someone precious. She had learned what was worth protecting. In a world that was a complete mess, she had barely managed to make room to breathe.

Dokja must have learned those things from someone, too.

Yuseong murmured,

"Ahjussi must've had a childhood too."

In the Star Stream, the birth fable of the Demon King of Salvation was "King of a Kingless World." But that was the birth fable of the Demon King of Salvation, not Dokja's birth fable.

「The birth of the human Dokja was probably not so grand.」

What kind of story had Dokja lived in order to exist under the name Dokja?

"Unni."

"What?"

"Are you going tomorrow?"

"We decided not to."

"But you're going, right?"

"I'm not. I don't want to go back to the Scenario again."

Jihye looked down at the children, whose heads had grown so much larger.

They were still children she had to protect.

Yuseong and Gilyeong quietly looked up at her, then held out their hands.

"Do you want to throw one too, noona?"

Jihye stared at the coin placed in her hand. Then she slowly flipped it into the air. The spinning coin fell into Jihye's hand. Yet she couldn't open her palm.

"Unni?"

The feeling of the coin in her hand. She couldn't tell whether it was heads or tails, but the coin was definitely there.

"Are you okay?"

Jihye felt the coin in her hand for a long time.

* * *

「Hospital Room, 10:48 PM.」

Yu Sangah was the first to speak.

"His fable value is steadily dropping."

Dokja's blood continued to evaporate, as if biological decomposition that should have taken decades was happening all at once. Lee Sukyeong asked,

"Seolhwa-ssi, is there any way?"

"At the moment..."

"Can't we use the method you used to save us? Something like Story Repair?"

Lee Seolhwa sighed softly and turned to Sangah.

"We were able to use Story Repair on Sukyeong-ssi and Sangah-ssi because the Star Stream's system was still intact."

It was a world where skills and Stigmas existed. A world where everything was a component of stories. There, treatment meant repairing fables.

"Recently, skills and fables haven't been working as they used to. Aileen-ssi and I are gradually losing our power too."

"Is it because the Star Stream's influence is disappearing?"

"That's the only conclusion we can reach for now."

"Then the reason Dokja-ssi's wounds aren't healing must be similar."

The Dokja before them was an existence created through the [Avatar] skill. And [Avatar] was a system skill of the Star Stream.

Seolhwa delivered her final diagnosis.

"If he stays here, Dokja-ssi will eventually disappear."

Sukyeong silently looked at Dokja.

The world Dokja had built over his entire life was now killing him. As though a reader was no longer needed in a world where the story had ended.

Sukyeong placed a hand on her sleeping son's cheek.

"If I'd known this would happen, I should've stopped you back then."

The moment her hand touched his cheek, fables bloomed between them. The two of them had fought in Dark Castle. Sukyeong still remembered that time.

The face that had looked back at her across [The Fourth Wall]. There had always been a wall between them. Yet that was the first time Dokja had knocked on it first.

Even if she went back, she wouldn't be able to stop her son.

Sukyeong took her son's hand. A hand that had always loved books.

Perhaps another Dokja was still somewhere, riding the subway and scrolling with this hand.

"I shouldn't have given you the name Reader."

* * *

「Eastern Entrance of the Industrial Complex, 8:00 PM.」

Han Suyeong and Yu Junghyeok stood waiting for their Allies like trees of mismatched height. The cold winter wind dampened their cheeks, while warm breath streamed from their mouths.

Suyeong shoved her hands into her parka pockets and grumbled,

"No one's coming."

She had expected it might turn out this way. Suyeong poked Junghyeok in the side with her elbow.

"Hey, can't we just do it ourselves? If my genius brain joins forces with your brute strength―"

"The two of us aren't enough."

"Oh, why? You've managed just fine alone until now. This time, there are two of us."

Instead of answering, Junghyeok quietly looked down at his hand. A transparent ring swirled above it.

[The Stigma Regression is evolving.]

The countless rounds he had lived through churned over the ring.

"You don't know what my Regression means."

Junghyeok slowly twisted the ring in his hand.

"You don't know what happens every time I repeat a Regression."

Fables shrieked in pain within his clenched fist.

Sentences bursting apart like insect eggs. They were the screams of people who had died again and again throughout his life.

"There is no such thing as a perfect round. Just as there is no fable that sacrifices nothing. If I regress again this time..."

Perhaps he would lose someone again. The world would sink back into tragedy.

The world created to save Dokja might be destroyed without saving anyone.

"I know," Han Suyeong said. "And..."

She looked toward the entrance of the industrial complex.

Since when had long shadows been cast beneath the cold winter sunlight?

"Those people know too."

Footnotes:

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