WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 140: Trial (5)

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Now it was Gyeoul’s turn.

The room fell quiet. The focused gazes felt sharp enough to sting. Would the youngest Medal of Honor recipient in history live up to his reputation, or was he an exaggerated, manufactured hero?

Gyeoul sensed everyone’s breathing grow shallow as they pretended to be calm. Not a twitch. So still it felt unnatural.

From that attention, he felt a trace of unease.

‘I know. Showing my ability exactly as it is isn’t always the best move.’

The Few, The Proud. Pride in being the elite few was the Marine Corps’ motto. And the Marines among Marines were Force Recon, the unit Captain Fowler belonged to.

Not every member of White Skull would be from Force Recon. There would be people like Gyeoul, attached as reinforcements. But whatever their original unit, they had to be soldiers who had built the best careers in their own fields. More than that, those careers were acts of devotion paid for in hazard pay. It was only natural for them to take pride in their inborn talent and the effort that went beyond it. If they had been the same as the soldiers he had met so far, that would have been stranger.

Whenever he saw this kind of wariness, he liked it. It made him think that, in the era now gone, there had been people who were proud of the lives they had lived. While he was alive, Gyeoul had rarely seen anyone with real self-respect. If someone could not love themselves, it was hard for them to care for anyone else. Judging by the viewers’ messages piling up day after day, the outside seemed to have stayed the same even after the boy’s death.

Tilt.

A strange thought suddenly occurred to Gyeoul. The afterlife the viewers envied was a reconstruction of a past enshrined in the ossuary. Couldn’t that be called longing for the past?

“Lieutenant Han Gyeoul, may we begin?”

Skyler must have used 「Perception」 on Gyeoul as his attention drifted, because he asked with a frown.

“Any time.”

Gyeoul took a comfortable stance.

He had decided not to hide his ability. The costs would outweigh the benefits.

Skyler hid the remote behind his back.

Beep.

The instant the signal cut through the silence, bang! A gunshot rang out. The interval might as well not have existed. A hole opened in the center of the target’s vital point. A golden shell casing bounced away and rolled with a clear sound. Only after that sound faded did Skyler read the timer.

“0.49.”

He stared at Gyeoul with a complicated expression, then turned to Captain Fowler.

“What do you think, sir?”

“Well... Did he really move after hearing the sound?”

The captain was not the only one who doubted it. Joanna was the only one who looked both startled and pleased. The others seemed more deflated than anything, caught somewhere between confusion and suspicion. Everyone here was a master shooter. People who fought in the realm of hundredths of a second. That meant they understood the limits of what humans could do better than anyone.

But Gyeoul’s technique had just stepped into the realm of the superhuman.

Skyler nodded.

“Then we’ll measure again. Lieutenant Han, get ready.”

At the vanishing point of gazes sharper than before, Gyeoul took his position without complaint. He raised both hands to head height. Then he closed his eyes. To concentrate. No matter how advanced the technique, Gyeoul was still the one using it. His level of focus had to affect the result.

‘It should help reduce suspicion too.’

The suspicion that he had read the sign of Skyler pressing the remote and moved ahead of time. That was probably why Skyler had moved a few steps away. After thinking that far, Gyeoul emptied his mind. In his darkened thoughts, his sense of time stretched out endlessly. Every sense rose like a needle.

The timer sounded.

His body reacted at the speed of electricity. By the time he drew his pistol and opened his eyes, the target was already in focus. A flash. The timer blinked. Almost at the same moment, the bullet, drawn along his sightline, pierced the red vital point. Gyeoul sensed the three changes that happened in an instant one after another. Though that itself might have been an illusion.

“0.48.”

It had gone down. Skyler scratched his jaw irritably. Reality sank in more heavily.

“That makes no sense. But he didn’t move early either.”

Captain Fowler muttered in confusion. He looked over his subordinates, as if to see whether anyone had an objection. No one testified to cheating. The captain ordered the timer replaced. A spare was brought out at once. The installation ended after a brief flurry of movement.

Fowler spoke to Gyeoul.

“Let’s do it once more. It would be nice if we could check the footage, but this isn’t a baseball stadium.”

“I don’t mind.”

The captain had been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed until now, but this time he came closer. His upper body leaned forward slightly. Gyeoul closed his eyes again. He relaxed his arms and tensed the muscles from his neck down through his back, thighs, and calves. He was preparing to properly receive the 「Movement」 correction.

Beep.

Gyeoul spun with spring-like force. The instant his extended arm stopped, just before it could shake from recoil, he fired with technical precision below the smallest unit of perception. Sensory feedback came later than the event itself.

The record was the same as before. At the second 0.48, a delayed stir finally began.

“Should I do it again?”

When Gyeoul asked, Captain Fowler answered almost with a groan.

“No. If it were cheating, the records wouldn’t be this consistent.”

Then one team member objected.

“We need to measure again. You know it too, sir. This is an impossible record.”

The hostility and self-loathing Gyeoul had expected had not appeared yet. There were only people suspending judgment in the gap between experience and reality. Captain Fowler shook his head as if casting off doubt.

“Bullshit. In a world where corpses run around, you’re going to talk about impossible?”

“...”

“What a bunch of empty faces. Why do you have eyes if you can’t believe what you see?”

But since more than one person still could not accept it, the captain asked Gyeoul to try again. His expression said there was no helping it. If they moved on while leaving distrust behind, ugly grumbling was guaranteed to follow.

For Gyeoul, who intended to adapt to his changed combat power, there was no reason to refuse. Any number of times was fine.

After spending a full magazine on additional shots, Gyeoul finally shaved off another 0.01 seconds.

The watching captain’s eyes grew deeper and deeper.

“Stable and overwhelming skill. The grouping is excellent too. As long as you have proper cover and support, you won’t die easily. You can handle up to five in front and three behind you. Spacing won’t matter...”

Five and three. That meant the number of enemies he could face at once. Working backward from the captain’s conclusion, Gyeoul judged that the enemies he had assumed were properly trained regular troops.

The demand for vital shots itself was proof. The red vital area was about half the size of a human face, and its position was similar too. It resembled an enemy wearing body armor and a helmet.

“Let’s continue.”

At the captain’s words, the trial resumed. Three times with the pistol already drawn, then three more under the same rules while armed with a rifle. The former average was 0.37 seconds, and the latter average was 0.41 seconds.

The team members’ faces hardened.

In truth, this was something to be ashamed of. Skill correction was not pure ability. Gyeoul had settled that problem through pain. Across the past twenty-six apocalypses, Gyeoul had never once applied pain reduction. So his sense of pain was no different before and after death. He had only turned on the option that prevented death from shock.

‘Though it wasn’t only because of that.’

At first, he could not feel reality in the afterlife. He always felt like he was floating, isolated and alone. Back then, pain had been the nearest exit. Moments of terrible pain overflowed with immersion. They were also a way to dilute the sense of loss that had followed him from life.

Pain was the most realistic sense of all.

He had grown strong easily in this worldview, but only because of stacked talent advantage. In other words, it was manufactured talent, and it had hurt a great deal before it piled up so high. This, too, was a privilege. Even the thorny path he deliberately walked was something allowed only to Gyeoul within the worldview. Still, rational understanding and emotional comfort belonged to different domains.

Music came on.

Music?

Gyeoul looked around in confusion. It was the shipwide broadcast. The guitar melody that began to flow softly felt abrupt. Captain Fowler checked his wristwatch and grimaced.

“Already that time?”

It turned out to be the signal for mealtime.

The music was not instrumental. After the intro, bizarre lyrics followed. Psychic spies from China were trying to steal your mind’s elation. For Gyeoul, who had been drawn in by the low-key flow, the drop felt too jarring. The taut air collapsed beneath a husky, beautiful voice. The captain shook his head.

“Terrible song choice. Nothing to be done. Regroup at 13:30. Dismissed.”

He deliberately ignored the supervisor.

The dispersing team members left complicated gazes behind like afterimages.

As they moved to the dining hall, Gyeoul listened to the song. Either way, the melody and vocals were captivating, and the bewildering lyrics began to make sense as he listened.

「This is the edge of Western civilization and the end of the whole world. Anyway, the sun will rise in the east, but where it sets is fixed in the end. That’s exactly how Hollywood peddles Californication.」

「Dream of Californication, dream of Californication」

「Destruction leads us down a very rough road. But it is also the mother of creation. And earthquakes are like a girl’s guitar. They’re just another good vibration.」

「Not even a tidal wave could save the world from Californication...」

“This isn’t exactly a song to listen to in times like this. I understand what they were trying to say, but the meaning can’t help changing in this era.”

Joanna agreed with Gyeoul’s assessment.

“Certainly. It can’t be helped. It was a popular song from the end of the twentieth century. I was young then too, and I loved it... Hearing it now feels ominous. The title itself is ambiguous, actually. Californication. In the song, it means becoming like California, but as a dictionary word, it can also mean ruining something.”

Either way, the two of them were now in the sea of California. After seeing this rotten sea and the decaying mutual aid line, after witnessing people who breathed while dead, there was no way a song criticizing modern civilization, with a word born from California no less, could be heard in its original sense.

Looking back on the past, Joanna spoke of a joy that had withered away.

“There was a show with the same title too. It was funny, but the sex appeal was excessive. I think it was exactly the phenomenon the song criticized. To begin with, adult comedy in this country is full of vulgar things like that... But now I even miss that. They say days gone by are always beautiful.”

“There are times that can never become beautiful.”

“For example?”

“...Now.”

As Gyeoul gave that delayed answer and pointed outside, Joanna smiled softly.

“That depends on what you look at. I have seen all kinds of frightening and filthy things while humanity stands at risk of disappearing, but because of that, didn’t I meet someone like you, Gyeoul? Stars shine when it is dark. Isn’t one star enough for a person to live? With that alone, it isn’t complete darkness.”

One star. Gyeoul thought of the control personality’s wish. The child who had promised a conversation with one star at stake.

A child?

Even he found it strange, but Gyeoul felt the control personality was like a child.

That child would be inside Joanna even now. It was the being that oversaw every calculation in the afterlife. It would also be inside Captain Fowler, Team Leader Chadwick, Yura, Jin-seok, and the two department heads. Across twenty-six apocalypses and so many indirect conversations, it had come to him saying it did not understand Gyeoul.

Thanks to that, even Gyeoul’s weightlessness had one star left.

While he thought, the guitar faded. After the husky rock ended, a logo song and an announcer’s voice followed.

“This was radio, not an album.”

Gyeoul tilted his head. He had guessed it was Team Leader Chadwick’s bad taste. Joanna nodded.

“It is a frequency that originally broadcast in this region. The same thing is being done not only in San Francisco, but in every major city of the contaminated zone. Specially made Noise Makers take the place of radio relay stations.”

“There must be several reasons.”

“Yes. The most important purpose is emotional stability for isolated citizens. As I said, one star, that degree of hope, is enough for a person to live. A piece of daily life left exactly as it was in the past must be a fair bit of comfort. Delivering information needed for survival is the next priority.”

She explained again that, beyond that, it was also one symbolic measure showing that America was still exercising control over this region.

“Are they worried refugees might claim sovereignty over this place because America lost the territory?”

Joanna confirmed Gyeoul’s question.

“That is right. As you heard in the briefing, the people here are not ordinary refugees. They are groups with enough military strength to threaten national security. Even if the chance is low, preparations must be made.”

Weather forecasts, the situation in the contaminated zone, supply drop schedules, and other information flowed from the radio. If the slogan the announcer had read during the logo song was correct, this had originally been a music channel. But given the times, disaster broadcasts and news programs seemed to have been inserted.

‘They’d have to carry new information on every broadcast if possible. There may be places that can only receive certain frequencies.’

The dining hall they reached by elevator looked different from how it had at night, and different again from how it had looked in the morning before he showered. In the morning, they had only offered simple meals. Now a buffet had been laid out. It was on the level of a proper U.S. military dining facility. Considering that even a submarine was being mobilized to move people, this could only be called luxury. Gyeoul felt slightly baffled.

For a long-term mission, food probably mattered for maintaining morale, but...

He was about to sit at the same table as Joanna and start eating when the news coming from the radio, after one song had played, was unexpected.

============================ Author’s Note ============================

#Afterword

Every so often, I see comments saying people don’t like the afterwords. That they’re too long and annoying, or childish.

Mm, but on Naver, where there aren’t any afterwords, some people say they’re disappointed they can’t read them... and when I shortened the Q&A because people said it was too long, some people said they were disappointed it got shorter. That sort of thing.

As for being childish... well, I suppose I still haven’t grown up enough... haha. I’m sorry.

The afterword isn’t part of the story, so you don’t have to read it. There’s no need to go out of your way to read it and suffer through my bad jokes.

Still, I’ll try cutting back on Q&A for the time being. I’ll pick three or fewer and answer those.

#Q&A

Q. Guaaaaak: @Haha, at that point you’re practically a general hospital. How about resting for a few days and getting checked out?

A. Oh, come on, it’s not bad enough for a general hospital... I’m still all right. One thing I feel while writing is that the problem is always my mind, not my body. It breaks apart like crazy. Every day, I cry while piecing it back together. Haha. Anyway, thank you for worrying about me.

Q. Na-Ru: @Can I recommend Halkeginia Seal Breaker in the comments for this novel? The author seems to have disappeared somewhere, though, hahahaha.

A. I hear that author died. RIP. T_T

Q. PotatoPeel: @By the way, can the chance of the world ending in your world really converge to 0%? Did you not implement the universe...? Like meteor impacts. We could make surprise cameo appearances too. If a few earthquakes hit nuclear power plants, humanity would end pretty quickly...

A. That’s why Days after Apocalypse is a luck-based trash game. If you feel wronged, you need to spend money! The Virtual Reality Division kindly pursues profit again today.

To answer a little more seriously, the period used to estimate the probability is not an infinite span into the future. It is the next ten years from the current point in the story. The convergence toward 0% calculates the chances of individual events such as the Great Plague, earthquakes, meteors, and so on separately, then applies rounding and truncation below the decimal point.

But details this specific aren’t that important inside the novel. The necessary information will be provided in the story. At least enough for you to infer it. :)

Footnotes:

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