WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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Chapter 162: A Bridge Too Far (10)

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Cold rose from the ground. The darkness, smelling faintly of brackish water, felt colder than the air itself. It was a moonless night. The new moon was due, so its thin light would not show itself until dawn. The night’s synesthetic weight made the cold worse. Tan Guosheng shivered. He was coming down with a mild fever. Gyeoul could feel his body beginning to lose function as well. Since daybreak, he had never had a chance to properly recover from all the strain.

They needed to pull back for now. Before that, he made one last check of the surroundings. Through the stifling view of the night vision device struggling to read the thick fog, the world had shrunk to a small circle with a radius of twenty meters. Inside it, there were no chances and no clues. Gyeoul gave Tan Guosheng a hand signal.

The two crawled back and found cover behind them.

“What about forcing our way through with a vehicle?”

The officer made the suggestion.

“The remaining distance isn’t that far. If we can get one started somehow, it won’t even take a full minute to reach the inland waterway. With the fog this thick, we shouldn’t need to worry about Taowu’s Throwing. Its accuracy will drop a lot. Same for its sprint. How would it predict a collision course?”

That was not entirely true. The Department of Defense’s Quarantine Strategy Institute, which had predicted the existence of the Silent One, had warned that Tricksters might possess integrated combat ability (Joint combat ability). In other words, they might go beyond simply transmitting information and remotely control the abilities of other variants.

It was still an unproven hypothesis. At the moment, the data had only been shared within the U.S. military.

There was no need to take an uncertain risk. Gyeoul opposed the idea for another reason.

“Can we find a vehicle with a battery that hasn’t drained?”

By now, the anti-theft systems would be dead too. The officer answered stubbornly.

“With this many vehicles, one of them has to be in working order. Or we could force the ignition...”

Even with a dead battery, there were ways to start a vehicle. A few of them.

“That’s even more dangerous. Our position will be exposed while we try, and there’s no guarantee it will work.”

They were already trying to muffle their footsteps. The noise of grinding gears would be worse. To make certain, they would have to push the vehicle. The time alone was a problem, and the movement would be far too large.

“We also have to consider the state of the fuel. A lot of impurities will have formed. If the filter clogs, that spot becomes our grave.”

The possibility Gyeoul raised was slim, but not easy to dismiss. He had actually experienced it before in the accumulated turns of the apocalypse. Old oil drained from abandoned cars was poor fuel. Engines or generators fed with that kind of oil would have their insides wrecked before long.

In the end, the most it was good for was heating and other crude uses.

The officer groaned, then raised another possibility.

“If we search the trunks, there might be fuel stabilizer. Or weapons...”

Fuel stabilizer dissolved coagulation in fuel mixtures.

But it was not a realistic option. How long would it take to open them one by one? They did not have keys either. Noise was still an unavoidable problem. This was on a different level from breaking glass.

“Damn it.” The officer trailed off and groaned. He knew it was too much himself.

Still, the idea was not worthless. Fuel. Fuel. Muttering to himself, Gyeoul checked beneath the van he was leaning against. He was looking for the drain plug, the cap on the outlet used to remove bad fuel. Could he loosen it with his bare hands? Gyeoul gripped the hex bolt and twisted hard.

Creak. A faint scrape of friction. The bolt loosened. It had been tightly fastened, but Gyeoul’s grip strength exceeded a hydraulic motor’s. A volatile smell drifted out through the gap. Little by little, faintly.

“I see! We can set a fire and draw their attention! Good, very good!”

Tan Guosheng whispered in excited admiration. Gyeoul agreed.

“The smell alone should be enough to lure them for now. We’ll let out as much fuel as possible. Even accounting for what evaporated over the past year, there should be enough to start a major fire.”

Once flames reached a certain scale, they would feed themselves. With luck, the fire might spread across the avenue. If they forced the Trickster to retreat from the high ground, a crack would open in its surveillance.

They acted at once. But the officer could not loosen the plugs on his own. Gyeoul moved busily. He loosened each one until it was just short of coming off. If he opened them one by one in advance, the variants might catch the smell too early.

There were more abandoned cars than expected. That likely meant the infection had spread with startling speed. Even so, the fact that the city’s survivors still numbered in the hundreds of thousands proved the variants’ intent once again.

“Do you have a way to ignite it?”

In answer to the officer’s question, Gyeoul showed him a Zippo lighter.

“A gift from a comrade.”

“Good.”

He opened the lid and checked its condition. As long as the flint was dry, it would light in almost any situation. It had the drawback of leaking fuel easily, but what mattered to a soldier was reliability. That was why Zippo lighters had been loved for so long.

He stripped rags from a body abandoned in the middle of the parking lot. The remains were a gaunt skeleton, scattered across the ground. Predators seemed to have picked it clean. Teeth marks remained on bones strewn here and there. Some had been broken open so the marrow could be sucked out.

The dead person’s clothes were damp, but that was not a problem. He only had to soak them in oil. The plan was to bunch them up, set them on fire, throw them under a vehicle, and run.

After that, they went through a mental rehearsal. They memorized the plug positions on each vehicle, then reviewed where and how they would flee after opening all the tanks.

Tan Guosheng crouched like a sprinter at the starting line and asked Gyeoul, “Shall we start?”

“Please wait a moment.”

Gyeoul pulled out a spare magazine for his pistol. Then, with mechanical movements, he removed the live rounds. Dadadadak. He kept the supporting hand, the fixed axis, pulled tight against his body, minimizing the ringing noise. The puzzled officer soon understood Gyeoul’s aim. It was a trick often seen in movies.

Of course, it was common only by human standards. No matter how cunning the Trickster was, it would be hard for it to guess this much. It was the kind of trick that must have seemed fresh to people too, at first.

“Wouldn’t setting the fire be enough? I don’t think you need to waste ammunition like this.”

He had understood the intent, but the officer seemed to think it was excessive preparation.

Gyeoul did not.

“A sudden fire is too obvious. Atasca... hm. If gunshots are added, it will be more convincing. More of them will focus there. The gap that creates will be worth more than one magazine.”

The tense officer did not question the blemish in the middle of his words.

The word he swallowed was Atascadero. The Trickster first encountered at the state hospital had used diversion naturally. Though the ones here were clearly different individuals, at least one of them would notice the same scheme. It was safer to assume so.

Gyeoul scattered twelve pistol rounds behind them. The area was wide enough for the fire to spread. It was in the opposite direction from their escape route.

“Then I’m going. Don’t miss the timing to join me. While we’re moving, please avoid using your gun if possible. I’ll handle most situations.”

Gyeoul would decide the timing. The officer nodded obediently.

In a short time, gasoline began flowing from dozens of cars. Because it was highly volatile, the smell spread quickly too. The day had already been humid.

Kyeeeeeeeek!

Eeek, eeek. Sharp shrieks echoed. Signals rang out from every direction. Gyeoul sensed countless presences. It was instinct, a blend of his own senses and the senses that served as correction.

How much plague had been hiding in silence on this night? The scale was enough to be felt through the vibrations in the ground. Most of them were probably barefoot, yet it was still like this. Maybe the plan to use the fog and darkness had been a mistake. Against humans who ruled the sky, darkness and fog would be ideal conditions. He could not rule out the possibility that far more were active than usual.

At the same time, the number that did not move would be no small thing either.

‘There were ones that kept their positions even during the day.’

Their collective behavior surpassed ants and exceeded even bees. In the daylight, Gyeoul had observed the monsters’ division of roles. Even while many groups chased Gyeoul and Tan Guosheng, the sentries in charge of district boundaries had held key positions.

The sounds of them wading through puddles overlapped. An ominous discord. But once they came somewhat close, they seemed to slow down. It was no illusion. The distances caught by 「Combat Sense」 proved it. Apparently they had learned what this smell meant.

But the flood of volatile liquid met standing water. Its spread accelerated. Gyeoul could infer that from the variants’ agitation. When he had looked down from the high water tower, the traces of flowing water had been cracks through the city, as if some enormous being had thrown a stone at a glass-pane ground.

‘It will break into pieces.’

The fire that would soon race in every direction would chop the mutant horde apart.

But the moment gunfire rang out, they would not be able to give up easily either. That was Gyeoul’s prediction.

Their escape route lay inside the shrubs. In a spot blocked on all sides, Gyeoul threw the burning clothes beneath an abandoned vehicle. Judging from the rate of the gasoline flow, he guessed there were about thirty seconds left until ignition. A communal funeral. As cremations went, it would have plenty of company.

“Now all we have to do is wait.”

At Gyeoul’s words, Tan Guosheng trembled. It was not only because of his chills. Expectation and excitement.

The two lay flat and waited for the height of night.

A kind wind blew. In the distant view revealed for an instant, the variants were in confusion. Gasoline had spread rapidly along the water channels. With the scent of burning at the stake rising from every direction, shadows wavered, unable to decide where to flee.

Pow!

Combustion began with a small explosion.

A wall of flame charged forward. Hot brushstrokes swept across the ground without hesitation. Sometimes lines, sometimes planes. Vivid color painted an abstract picture of light and shadow.

Kkuaaaargh! Aargh! Aaaaaaaargh!

Under a starless sky, screams that sounded almost human echoed. The writhing shadows were like a primitive rite. Like Native Americans circling a sacred campfire. The death throes of diseases burning alive caused confusion even among the unburned ones. Sharp light and shadow stretched toward the sky. Rays that began from the ground almost looked like polarized light. Gulp. Tan Guosheng swallowed dryly.

Tatatang! Tatatatang!

At last, the gunshots they had been waiting for rang out. More precisely, it was the sound of pistol rounds going off in a chain.

“Lieutenant Colonel, now! We have to move!”

At the quiet shout, the officer was badly flustered. He had clearly not expected this kind of scene.

“You want us to cross through those things while they’re running wild like that?”

As he said, the variants’ confusion was horrific. Ones wrapped in light and heat, sizzling as they burned, ran in every direction, and the ones caught up in them lost control and floundered helplessly.

“If not now, we won’t get another chance! Hurry!”

The variants running wild beyond control would interfere with the Trickster’s surveillance. Even if Gyeoul and Tan Guosheng slipped in among them, it obviously would not be able to distinguish the two.

Gyeoul forced his escort target to stand. He meant to drive the officer into action before thought.

Once they started running, there was no taking it back.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it...!”

Even as they ran, the quiet mutter came through clearly. Human sounds were very different from a monster’s, no matter how small. By Gyeoul’s standards, anyway.

Bang! A vibration traveled through his fist. While running, Gyeoul knocked out the one he encountered. It had noticed the two humans’ sprint amid the chaos. And that was only the beginning. More of them began to notice as they stumbled around. He could not use his gun. If he did, the bullets he had gone to the trouble of scattering would become pointless.

Kuaaaaargh!

A cry told its comrades the two humans were escaping. But it was useless. They were in the middle of extreme confusion and countless death cries. The ability to pick out a warning from all those overlapping sounds was too much for an ordinary variant. Even for a ghoul.

In the burning smoke, Gyeoul kept his course straight. If he turned this way and that in the middle of this, even Gyeoul might lose his sense of direction.

‘Grumble?’

Dancing flames, swaying shadows. Among them, the unusually huge outline belonged to a Beta Grumble. They passed behind it. It was sensitive to smell, even if not as much as a hound, but it could not distinguish two humans brushing past amid every kind of burning-flesh stench. Tan Guosheng looked like he might faint. Cough, cough. The cough he could not hold back burst out. It was fine. The monsters that had inhaled smoke were busy coughing too.

At last, the waterside came into view. Seawater rippled in small waves with the current. The rotting sea, filled with all sorts of floating debris, was welcome at this moment.

A single line of flowing fire blocked their path. Tan Guosheng tried to slow down, so Gyeoul shoved his back. Under no circumstances could he slow down.

“Don’t be afraid! You can jump over it!”

“Uaaaaaah!”

The officer barely found his balance between the instinct trying to stop him and the force pushing his back. Then he jumped before it was too late. In truth, Gyeoul had accelerated and half thrown him.

Splash! In an instant, the cold, now grown unfamiliar, climbed from his toes. His breathing reflexively broke.

As he swam, Gyeoul looked back at the two hundred meters they had crossed.

The fog that held the light became a smoke-filled dark cloud, writhing as currents of heat wrapped around it.

The fire had also spread to the buildings along the route. The Trickster that had stayed on the rooftop seemed unable to find a way out. With the fire at its back, its silhouette burned through the fog.

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

#Ssing Ssing

Adding this after the phone call. The reason Ssing Ssing became an orangutan is the same as the reason the qilin became a giraffe. The imagined animal existed first, and when people later encountered a real animal that seemed similar, they attached the existing name to it. Though Chinese people today no longer call giraffes qilin. They call them long-necked deer.

#Googling

I googled The Little Prince in the Ossuary and got a little shock. A lot of people were talking as if this novel was doing really well. On Twitter and such...

Please don’t do that. It’s embarrassing...

I wish I could show you directly how badly this novel is doing these days...

#Q&A

Q. Namu Sora Bread-nim: @Author, I know even the illustration plans haven’t been clearly mentioned to you, so I’m not sure if you would know, but, uh... when exactly is the publication date?? I bought Your Name as a collector’s edition this time, so I thought I should buy Ossuary too.

A. Well... when would it be...? I think it will be sometime next month, but I’m not sure. I did receive a review PDF. The main text alone was around 425 pages.

Q. Jingado-nim: @ When is the physical book coming out! I calculated the cost of supplying fifteen years’ worth of fried dumplings and realized it was impossible, so I thought I’d buy the book instead!

A. Haha. Rather than that, just buy fried dumplings and eat them. They’re more useful than the physical book.

Footnotes:

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