WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 202: Survivors (5)

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Tap, tap, tap. The dead jackrabbit’s legs kept striking the ground. Postmortem spasms.

Before touching the rabbit, Gyeoul sprayed it with insect repellent so any fleas or bedbugs would fall off. Bedbugs, in particular, required extra care. If they spread through the Company, it would be no small problem. Even Gyeoul would have a hard time bearing it unless 「Environmental Adaptation」 dulled his senses.

After watching for a moment, he cut deep into the artery running through the rabbit’s neck. Then he grabbed it by the legs and lifted it. Fresh blood streamed out. Draining the blood was meant to reduce the gamey smell. The blood itself could be heated and eaten, of course, but some soldiers would be repulsed by it. It would not help morale. Not unless they could cook it properly.

‘This is only the start. If the results are poor, I can think about it again then.’

When Gyeoul returned, Sergeant Morales greeted him.

“A good start, sir. At least we won’t be going back empty-handed.”

Morales said that, but did not look truly happy yet. The rabbit weighed about as much as a rifle with the magazine removed. Once it was skinned and the edible parts were separated, though, it would shrink to less than half.

Gyeoul hung the rabbit beneath Xcel’s saddlebag.

「Tracking」 resumed. The farther they moved from the roads humans had made, the more animal traces appeared. Among them were some unusual footprints. The horses seemed uneasy after smelling the droppings. Gyeoul soothed them and tried to ignore the tracks as they passed, but Private Schultz seemed to have noticed too. Perhaps thinking Gyeoul had missed them, Schultz called him to a stop.

“Lieutenant, there’s something here. Strange footprints. They look recent.”

“I saw them too. But I’m not going to look for it.”

“Uh... What animal is it, sir?”

“A tiger.”

They must have thought it was a joke. Morales, Harper, and Schultz laughed together, but when Gyeoul quietly stared at them, their faces finally stiffened.

“Are you serious, sir? Not a bear?”

“Yes. You can tell it’s a feline just from the number of toes. And it’s more likely to be a tiger than a lion.”

Harper sounded doubtful.

“I wasn’t born around here, but I’ve never heard of tigers living in this country.”

“I doubt you would have. This one probably isn’t wild either. It was likely someone’s pet. I do wonder where it was being raised, though. It’s strange that it made it all the way here.”

The country with the most tigers in the world was the United States. Their number reached a staggering ten thousand. Nevada, right next to California, had no restrictions at all on keeping tigers as pets. It was illegal in California, but some people always wanted to do what they were told not to do.

“Are you avoiding it because it’s dangerous?”

At Sergeant Morales’s question, Gyeoul shook his head.

“Of course not. The ammunition would be a waste, but with automatic weapons on hand, what is there to fear?”

“Then wouldn’t it be better to catch it? I don’t know if it would taste good, but we aren’t in a position to be picky. If we caught that one animal, it should be enough for the entire Company, even if it’s not ideal.”

“I don’t plan to catch carnivorous or omnivorous scavengers. Actually, there were other tracks on the way here too, but I deliberately didn’t follow them because they looked like coyotes and animals like that.”

“Why is that, sir?”

“We don’t know what they’ve been eating.”

Morales took a moment to work through it, then understood and looked disgusted.

“Damn. I didn’t think that far. They might have eaten people or mutants.”

“Mutants aren’t easy prey. But infected corpses must have been scattered all over every place that got bombed. That means even weak animals like coyotes could have eaten plenty. A feral tiger would also be able to hunt for itself. Same with bears. It’s better not to catch them. If they attack, we kill them.”

No cases of cross-species infection or animal carriers had been reported yet. If there had been any, the Department of Defense would have issued a warning. But this world had many variables. There was no harm in being careful.

The soldiers let go of their lingering regret.

How much farther had they gone after that? There were traces of one kind or another everywhere, but few had been made recently. They had entered the forest before sunrise, yet now clear white sunlight pierced the dense greenery in bright shafts. Gyeoul had found deer droppings and was hesitating over whether to track them when...

Gobble- gobble- gobblegobble-

A birdcall came through the branches shaking in the wind. It sounded fairly far away.

A wild turkey. Shh. Gyeoul held a finger to his lips. Sergeant Morales, who had been about to say something, fell silent. Still, Morales looked puzzled. It was not a sound he should have been able to hear without sensory correction.

After judging the direction, Gyeoul closed the distance. The same pattern of calls repeated once more. Clearer this time. It was calling others of its kind. That was why some hunting calls made a similar sound. If things went well, he might be able to catch two at once.

Even a female weighed over four kilograms. It was fine enough quarry to be worth using live ammunition. Gyeoul aimed his rifle while seated in the saddle. His line of fire passed through a narrow gap between tangled branches. The soldiers held their breath, but they also looked confused. They could not see the target.

The instant a leaf on a branch swayed, within a narrow field of vision less than one inch tall and wide, the turkey’s bare head burst apart with a pop!

Flapflapflap!

Startled by the male’s death, the unseen female spread her wings. Unlike their domesticated relatives, these turkeys could fly. Very nimbly, at that. But once it took to the air, it only put itself in more danger. The moment it shot up above the dense canopy, a rifle round severed its neck.

A faint smell of gunpowder drifted from the end of the suppressor.

“Let’s go.”

Gyeoul slung the rifle behind his back and lightly spurred his horse. Ha ha. The soldiers laughed. This time, their mood truly seemed to improve. A male and female pair of turkeys was an excellent result. Since they had flour and spices secured from private homes, they could boil them into something stew-like and stretch the portions.

Once they retrieved the fallen female and the head-shattered male, the birds were quite heavy.

“Wow, this thing is huge. It has to be over a meter, right? How much do you think it weighs?”

Schultz laughed and compared the male to his own body. The limp male was large enough to cover the upper body of the well-muscled private. Gyeoul took it for a moment, tilted his head, and estimated the weight.

“About ten kilograms. We’ll know exactly after butchering it, but more than half should be edible.”

It was quite large compared to the species average. The meat might be tough from age, though. On top of that, the female weighed a little over four kilograms, just as expected. And...

“Morales, Schultz, Harper. I’ll cover you, so look around for a nest. Since the male and female were together, it’s probably nearby. This happens to be the laying season.”

In truth, Gyeoul already knew where the nest was. Still, he had the soldiers do it. It was a matter of their mood.

Less than a minute later, Private Harper found the nest hidden under a pile of grass.

“Here it is! One, two, three, four... Oh, there are eleven!”

Harper held up the eggs and shouted in a bright voice.

“You blockhead, your voice is too loud. What if there are mutants nearby?”

Harper flinched at Morales’s rebuke, but it ended with a single glance around. Then Harper carefully brought the eggs over, as if afraid of dropping them, and put them into the bag attached to Gyeoul’s saddle. The other horses’ tack did not have accessories like bags.

“Lieutenant, I can say for sure that you’re a better hunter than my father.”

At Schultz’s words, Gyeoul tilted his head.

“Your father enjoyed hunting too?”

“It was just a casual hobby for him. More of a family trip than serious hunting, you could say. Still, there were few years when he skipped it, but he only brought back a turkey once. He bragged so much about how hard they were to catch that my mother got annoyed.”

In this world, stories about family were a delicate subject, but Schultz’s expression did not look bad at all.

“Your father was right. We were lucky.”

Many hunters spent an entire autumn roaming the mountains and still failed to catch a single turkey. That had been Gyeoul’s experience too, back when he had only a few cycles stacked up, or none at all.

Gyeoul backtracked along the way they had come for a while. He planned to start tracking again from the deer droppings.

‘Still, there are more animals than I expected. What’s going on?’

For an area a mutant horde had swept through, there were a lot of traces. Few were from yesterday or today, but even the older traces were only a few months old. Unless something had clawed up a tree like a bear, it was impossible for traces older than that to remain. Even skills in the realm of genius had their limits.

Considering they were relatively close to the origin point of the infection on the west coast of North America, it was strange.

Maybe the mutant horde that had broken off in this direction had been smaller than expected.

“What do you think?”

When Gyeoul shared his suspicion during the slow, tedious search over the ridge, Sergeant Morales, the noncommissioned officer, sank into thought, and so did the other two privates.

“It does seem like they would have had little reason to come this way.”

That was Morales’s conclusion. Before the next words could follow, Gyeoul’s arm blurred. Whir, thwack! The Bayonet stuck into the ground and trembled. A red mark spread across the place the blade had scraped after rotating once. The ground squirrel died with its head split open. The blade had hit it diagonally. It had been buried in the grass, listening to the approach of humans and horses.

“Huh.”

Leaving the stunned sergeant’s exclamation behind, Gyeoul made a slight detour and retrieved the knife and the squirrel corpse.

“What makes you think that?”

Gyeoul cut the small animal’s throat and flicked it a few times to scatter the blood. Ugh... Morales seemed slightly disturbed by the bits of brain flying off, but continued speaking.

“It’s nothing impressive. At the time, mutants were just stupid, so wouldn’t they have moved toward wherever they saw the most people? Then at a fork between a local road and a highway, they would naturally have been drawn toward the highway. There were large cities nearby whether they went up or down. The defensive forces would have been concentrated that way too.”

Meaning the fighting would have drawn in even more mutant hordes.

“Now that I hear it, that makes sense. It feels wrong to call that fortunate, but thanks to that, it seems less likely we’ll starve to death here.”

As Gyeoul spoke, he could see a black bear watching the humans and horses from far away between the trees. Its body was broad and plump. No matter how he looked at it, it did not look like an animal that had suffered from lack of food. If the ecosystem had been devastated, top predators like bears should normally have left for somewhere else too.

“That one has no fear. Do we look easy to it?”

As Morales said, the bear was slowly closing the distance. Black bears were gentler than their close relatives, but they were still predators by nature.

‘It must have smelled the blood.’

Otherwise, the chance of encountering one like this was low. Not only the ground squirrel, but the rabbit and turkeys caught earlier were hanging behind the saddle, dripping blood, so it would not be strange if the bear had caught the scent from somewhere and followed Gyeoul’s trail.

Separate from that, the bear’s approach felt a little unnatural. A black bear that was not starving rarely showed hostility toward humans first. Perhaps it had picked up bad habits around mutants or humans. Or had a bad experience.

Harper sighed.

“I hate wasting ammunition on something we can’t even eat.”

A single shot would be enough anyway, but Gyeoul silently lifted the Bayonet. The soldiers’ expressions turned strange.

“Surely you’re not going to kill that by throwing a knife too, sir?”

“We have no choice. If it gets close enough to be dangerous, I’ll have to kill it.”

“No, sir, I was asking if that was possible...”

Gyeoul had pretended not to understand on purpose. He turned and placed himself between the bear and the soldiers. Xcel’s fear came through the reins. He suppressed it with the control granted by 「Riding」.

“That’s reckless. It would be better to just use a gun.”

Morales’s warning was tight with tension. Morales looked ready to pull the trigger at any moment, so Gyeoul signaled that it was fine.

Even if it was a bear, Gyeoul was actually higher by the 「Threat Level」 assessment.

When he stared quietly, the bear stopped at an ambiguous distance and faced him. It bared its teeth from time to time, but did not come any closer. It would be easier if it ran away. Since he could not show it his back, leaving was difficult too.

‘Should I just kill it?’

They had no time, and giving the soldiers something to talk about would not be bad. When people stayed still during rest, all kinds of thoughts came to them.

After making his decision, Gyeoul snapped the reins. When Xcel kicked off the ground, the bear flinched too. At the moment collision became imminent, one of Gyeoul’s arms blurred. The Bayonet flew at an unavoidable speed, but clang! It sank about halfway into the bear’s forehead as the bear instinctively shook its head, then bounced off.

The gap while its head returned was enough.

In the instant they brushed past, Gyeoul was holding the crowbar.

Crack!

The pry end that broke locks drove vertically into the thick skull. To avoid falling from the horse, Gyeoul simply let go of the handle. He rode past the bear. The bayonet had only been meant to knock the breath out of it from the start.

When he pulled the reins and turned around, the bear was already dying. Even with part of its brain destroyed, it had not died instantly, but it could not control its body at all. Death was only a matter of time.

There was no need to watch a certain death. Unless he was reducing its pain.

Gyeoul drove his horse toward the bear. Crunch, squelch. When he pulled out the crowbar, he deliberately stirred it around hard. The flailing black bear shuddered. Strength left its thick limbs. Sticky strands stretched between the hole in its skull and the pry end.

When he returned, the soldiers looked at him in bewilderment. Even so, it had been a bear, and he had killed it far too easily.

“I’ll make sure I never do anything that makes Lieutenant angry.”

Schultz’s admiring joke drew a short laugh from Gyeoul as he wiped the blood from his face.

In the hunt that continued until noon after that, they were able to catch a pair of black-tailed deer and their fawns as well.

Maybe because this was a national park, it was a good hunting ground. Would it be worth staying here for a while and making preserved food? They had plenty of salt. Gyeoul thought he should suggest it to Captain Langford.

Author’s Note

#Turkey

In 1999, during California’s fall season, about 27,000 hunters received hunting permits from the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Across the entire state, 5,798 wild turkeys were hunted. In other words, only about one in four hunters acquired even a single turkey.

Of course, many of those hunters were people who came to a private ranch hunting course over the weekend, had fun for a day or two, and left, so the case would be a little different for professional hunters. Still, it is true that turkeys are fairly difficult prey.

#Tiger

As of 2016, the number of wild tigers remaining in the world was about 3,890. But the number of tigers in the United States estimated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is a minimum of 5,000 and a maximum of 10,000.

As you can tell from how wide the margin of error is for official statistics, the U.S. government actually has little interest in this issue. It only regulates purebred Siberian and Bengal tigers.

So private organizations estimate that at least more than 10,000 exist. Some claim there may be more than 20,000, but I judged that to be an exaggeration from radical animal-rights groups, so the story mentions about 10,000.

I’ll post one reference related to the story setting. :)

#American Black Bear

There is a widespread myth that North American black bears are small and gentle, so they do not attack people. That is not always true. I read that over a twelve-year period, more than 1,000 cases of aggressive behavior by black bears were reported in national parks in North Carolina. Many cases were caused by people who trusted black bears to be gentle and hung around trying to feed them, bringing trouble on themselves, but there are certainly cases where they attack first too.

A bear is a bear.

#Preview

There will be an event next chapter.

#Correction

As of 12:50, the animal hunted in the final part was changed from pig to black-tailed deer.

#Q&A

Q. Bug: @ How did the helicopter even run... If he learned piloting skills, he should at least know the basics... No, since he knew, did he put in fuel and fly it?

A. It would still be a problem even with a maintenance soldier or maintenance officer. Even if they tried field maintenance, it would be impossible with bare hands. Most of all, there is no way to tell with the naked eye which parts of each aircraft are still intact.

Q. Calpis: @ Author, I want to see Gyeoul use a finishing move like the Tunguska meteorite or the Tunguska event on the Chinese nuclear terrorist. How about using Author as fuel? Is that too much?

A. Then the world setting would be done for, wouldn’t it?... If the novel ended like that, I would probably get murdered. Ha ha.

Footnotes:

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