WeTried Translations
Translator: Coughing Baby
Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 280: Boar Hunt (8)
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But the sight was soon hidden behind other people. Amid the glittering commotion, the military police officer, nerves pulled taut, lowered his voice and warned Gyeoul.
“Please be careful. These are not people with ordinary thoughts or ordinary behavior.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Even as Gyeoul nodded, the large military police officer was still bracing against the pressure from behind. At last, with a displeased look, he moved a few steps aside. The moment he did, a frantic man surged forward. The eyes behind his lenses were glazed with excitement, to the point that he almost looked like a mutant.
Yet once he actually reached Gyeoul, he could not bring himself any closer and only stamped his feet.
“What do I do, what do I do, what do I do...”
With him acting like this, Gyeoul had trouble finding anything to say. As he managed only an awkward smile, the other stars and comedians cautiously approached. There was a long-haired, muscular guitarist in a FUCK YOU T-shirt, a voluptuous woman in a sparkling dress, a huge rapper loaded with gold jewelry, a blond man with an actor’s air, and more. The stale smell of cigarettes, cannabis, sharp and gentle perfumes, and various body odors mixed together until even the air felt crowded.
“Hey.”
The FUCK YOU T-shirt asked,
“If you don’t mind, would you let me shake your hand?”
“Of course.”
Gyeoul readily took his thick hand. Every finger was callused. The long-haired guitarist flinched, then handled Gyeoul’s hand as if it were something fragile.
“I wanted to make sure I said this. Thank you for your dedication. Always.”
“Likewise. Thank you for your support.”
It had been quite a while since Gyeoul had exchanged that greeting.
“Me too, me too!”
Gyeoul held out his hand to the lipstick-wearing man, who had belatedly begun making a tearful fuss. But this one did not stop at a handshake and turned it into a fierce hug. The people around them grimaced.
Just calmly dealing with them one by one was an ordeal in itself. Someone even collapsed in a heap. After several handshakes and several autographs, Gyeoul exchanged polite words with all of them. Thank you for gracing the occasion. The soldiers will be happy.
Once he escaped that spot, Corporal D'Angelo handed Gyeoul a glass and filled it with whiskey.
“The Company Commander should start things off today. Everyone is waiting.”
Gyeoul did not enjoy alcohol, even if drunkenness was only a sensation for him, but the toast belonged to the Company Commander. In the first place, it would be awkward for both the Company Commander and the Executive Officer to decline alcohol at an event like this. Captain Singh, the Executive Officer, could not drink for religious reasons.
When Gyeoul used the makeshift stage as a podium, cheers, whistles, and applause burst out. He had to wait quite a while for it to quiet down.
“I’ll keep this short. It’s embarrassing too.”
At his modest manner, laughter burst here and there like intermittent geysers. Gyeoul slowly met their eyes, then raised the amber glass above their eye level.
“Remembering every battle we have endured, to survival and victory.”
To survival and victory! No one had practiced it, but everyone fell into perfect rhythm.
Once Gyeoul drained his glass in one go, the room loosened up.
Captain Singh offered Gyeoul a seat at the officers’ table.
“You went through a lot.”
“A lot?”
“I mean those people. They were loud.”
The Captain was pointing, of course, at the place where the stars had gathered. Even now, when their eyes met, one singer blew Gyeoul a kiss. Gyeoul gave a brief nod and turned back toward the staff officers. Whether the engineer officer was a fan of that singer or simply found her attractive, the officer looked extremely envious.
“You’re quite popular.”
“I suppose so.”
“I did not expect someone to actually faint earlier.”
“Ah, that person. They were very good at acting.”
“Acting? That was acting?”
Lieutenant Montgomery looked openly confused. Gyeoul nodded.
“While they were being carried away, they had one eye cracked open and were looking around. They hadn’t lost consciousness.”
“Huh...”
This time, it was an incredulous sigh. Some of them also seemed offended. Not only the engineer officer, but even the independent company’s staff officers and NCOs. Gyeoul said gently,
“Why is everyone getting angry? They live on attention. Let it go.”
The operations staff officer complained.
“Even so... It’s hard to look kindly on it when it feels like they used you, Company Commander.”
“Don’t get angry. Just drink. The advantage of this table is that there are two people who don’t drink, right? Whoever drinks the leftover alcohol first owns it. You must have been feeling deprived all this time.”
At Gyeoul’s words, Captain Singh smiled faintly. Even with his full beard, enough of it moved for the expression to show. Singh’s glass held nothing but clear water. The intelligence officer asked,
“Captain, do you avoid other drinks too, not just alcohol?”
“As long as it is not alcohol, I can drink anything. However, tomorrow is one of Sikhism’s holidays, Gurpurab. I haven’t been able to observe them properly for a long time, and I don’t know when I’ll get another chance, so I want to cleanse my body as much as possible before reading scripture tomorrow.”
This time, Gyeoul asked,
“Are you saying you’ve missed several holidays?”
“Yes. They are not regular like Christian Sundays, but several holidays are set each month.”
“You should have told me in advance. I could have accommodated you to some degree.”
“As I told you once before, the path to realizing God’s name exists only within the heart. Conscience, compassion, courage, and love are the true names of God inside us. Therefore, rules and forms are only tools for cultivation. It is good to keep them, yes. They are not absolute.”
“...”
“And as an officer, I cannot inconvenience the soldiers with my personal faith. So you don’t need to worry about it.”
It was still a respectable view of religion, even hearing it again. Even more so because Singh had said before that there was some distance between his faith and his attitude toward rules. After all, Sikhism surely had fanatics too.
The performance began on stage. Superb playing and an alluring singing voice. It had a vividness that no recording could reproduce. Conversation naturally broke off. Gyeoul thought about the morale performance troupe.
‘That strange man said something like he accepted the extra schedule because of me. In other words, the others came because they wanted to...’
If so, Major Ju Wei must also have wanted to attend of her own will.
Then there was that strange gaze. But if she had come to see Gyeoul, she was oddly passive, which made it stranger. How much had she noticed? There was no way she knew nothing at all.
After all, when she had been sent out of San Francisco, they had put her on a submarine. On top of that, information about the mission to pursue Changcheng 9, Operation Fair Strike, had been released to civilians in broad outline. Major Ju Wei would naturally have seen it. TV, newspapers, radio... Because of her fame before the plague, she was being used for public opinion work within America and frontline morale visits. They would not have locked her away like a prisoner.
Then what was her purpose?
‘Regardless of her purpose, pretending not to know is safer.’
The details of Operation Fair Strike were still classified, and they were also a truth that could be fatal to the current political situation. Gyeoul could not affirm anything she asked. Even accepting a word of thanks would be difficult. A small suspicion could give birth to a major incident.
If there had been no embedded press, he might have reconsidered. But with cameras watching now, a private conversation was difficult, and arranging a private meeting would be even more troublesome.
Murray studied Gyeoul’s face.
“What are you thinking so hard about?”
“Nothing. I just suddenly remembered the past. Does the alcohol taste good?”
The intelligence officer looked deeply regretful.
“Even with the two of you not drinking, there still isn’t enough alcohol. On a day like this, I’d like to get thoroughly drunk and pass out until the next day... but I suppose we still can’t.”
“The day will come soon when you can rest properly. There won’t be any limit on how much you can drink then either. Keep your spirits up.”
“Do you sincerely believe that?”
“What if I didn’t?”
Gyeoul sipped his sports drink instead of alcohol and spoke again.
“It’s not just the equipment that’s at its limit right now. We’ve been getting through one crisis after another without a break. Soldiers and officers alike are badly worn down. It only doesn’t show because we’re winning for now. Somehow, day by day, we just have to hold out until we reclaim the mainland...”
Captain Singh agreed.
“There is certainly an atmosphere like that. Success or failure aside, the end of this operation will become the psychological culminating point of the offensive. Long-term rest and refit will be a necessity, not an option. Lieutenant, what are you worried about?”
“I...”
Lieutenant Murray let out a deep sigh.
“Of course this operation will succeed. But will they really stop there? When they can push the enemy back, won’t they try to go as far south as possible?”
Captain Singh understood at once.
“You mean the Panama Canal.”
“Yes.”
Anyone with an interest in the quarantine war acknowledged that they needed that canal. That alone would sharply reduce the Navy’s burden.
The intelligence officer explained the reasoning.
“Urban warfare, which should have been brutally difficult, is unfolding far too easily. But that’s only because the mutants are running away. It won’t be like this later. If we rest and reorganize, those things will rest and reorganize too. And their reproductive capacity is horrifyingly strong. Yet the battlefield would be the complex cities, mountains, and jungles of Central and South America.”
“So... even after the operation ends, you think we’ll advance past the old border without any grace period?”
“That is my prediction. Objectively speaking, missing an opportunity like this would be foolish.”
The operations officer, whose taste for alcohol had been soured by the pessimism, objected to the fellow officer.
“By then, won’t we have enough lure signal beacons? Right now, their use is limited because there are too few, but later, we should be able to use them across the entire front.”
The attitude was that urban warfare or mountain warfare would not matter.
But the rebuttal came immediately.
“How long do you think that lure signal will work?”
“...”
Gyeoul sympathized with this concern too. Given the mutants’ adaptability, expecting it to remain effective indefinitely would be far too optimistic.
“That has a point. What do you think, Company Commander?”
At Captain Singh’s question, Gyeoul answered lightly.
“Yes. Personally, I think they’ve already adapted.”
“...Are you saying those things are deceiving us?”
“No.”
Their losses were far too severe to see it that way.
“I just wonder if only the side sending the radio waves has adapted.”
Only then did the officers understand Gyeoul’s guess.
Communications officer Evans furrowed his brow.
“In other words, you believe the Tricksters have already adapted to the lure signal, but the other ones that should be under their control are still stuck with the old communication standard... It sounds strange when I put it that way, but in any case, they’re still on the old signal system.”
“Yes.”
“That is certainly a plausible guess. Those things have such absurd adaptability that we cannot even use chemical rounds carelessly, so it is strange that disruption still works even after this much time has passed.”
Gyeoul nodded.
“I once heard talk that they may bite each other to transmit limited traits. For example, radio reception ability. I wonder what else there could be besides that... but I think it’s true. They just don’t have the leeway to spread it that way right now.”
It was probably because the number of Tricksters had decreased through Preventive Scalping, and right after the lure signal beacons were deployed, they had suffered fatal losses again. The U.S. advance that followed had also been too swift. Those cunning things were so weakened that they could not even send out decent jamming waves for the moment. It meant each individual was busy simply trying to survive.
Lieutenant Evans added another opinion.
“Or we could assume that the trait transmission you mentioned is irreversible. Otherwise, each individual may have adapted in a different way, leaving them unable to unify... It could be both...”
Gyeoul smiled faintly.
“That could be. Though that’s only wishful thinking.”
It meant they might be unable to alter the radio reception ability once it had been transmitted. This might be the hypothesis that best explained the current state of the war. If it was correct, the mutants would have to fight at a disadvantage until they finished replacing their generation.
“More importantly...”
Gyeoul looked over the pondering officers one by one.
“Don’t you think the mood is too heavy?”
Lieutenant Murray glanced sideways at the surrounding tables and agreed.
“It seems the soldiers are watching us.”
“Of course they are. There’s nothing on the table but glasses.”
“...”
Even though good music was playing and buffet dishes had been laid out, the officers had only been holding glasses and whispering about serious topics. The soldiers had no choice but to be bothered by it.
“Staff officers. Go get something to eat, each of you. That’s an order.”
With an order that did not really feel like an order, Gyeoul chased the officers away.
========== Author’s Note ==========
#Today’s recommended song - Diamonds (One Voice Children’s Choir)
It is a nonprofit choir many of you probably know. Though most of the songs I recommend are already famous. From the same choir, I like Only Hope, Glorious, Rise, Adventure of a Lifetime, and so on.
#Q&A
Q. NeoGGM: @I am leaving a malicious comment for the author again today. All hail Skarlochen!! ...I will give you 27 coupons, so please do not sue me.
A. I cannot sue you in the first place... T_T
Those who have not read Seal Breaker probably will not know what Skarlochen means, and I do think it might feel a little off-putting if the comment section becomes flooded with Skarlochen.
Q. qgegegqe: @When I heard it would end within 100 chapters, I thought it sounded like an incredibly long work, but we are not even at 300 chapters yet. What a packed structure! We must offer sacrifices.
A. By ebook standards, it has gone past nine volumes, so I do not think it counts as a packed structure. T_T
Q. PleasePickUpSoap: @The more immersed people are in a world, and the higher their Empathy is, I wondered if the end of one world might affect people, so I wanted to ask.
A. In general, yes. It is also why Days after Apocalypse is one of the basic Grade B world settings. However, Gyeoul is a bit different, and the reason requires psychological explanation, so it is hard for me to say outright. Still, to give a clue... it may help to think about which side feels more like hell, the reality in the story or Virtual Reality.
Q. wnsdlfh: @Joara’s bookmark system kept jumping around, so from around chapter 220, I ran all the way here over several days, recommending each chapter one by one. It was fun! But the only things I read on Noble are Ossuary and Life, Once Again. Do you happen to have any recommendations? haha. P.S. I got a coupon, so I am quietly leaving it here... haha.
A. Right now, on Noblesse... no, among web novels, there is not really anything I am reading... Thank you for the coupon. :)
Q. Hoch: @I have cursed you to write 200 more chapters due to failure in length control! I want to enjoy the childlike innocence longer. T_T
A. I am already failing at length control in real time. At first, I expected it to end around chapter 250... trembling...
Q. CurryRice: @Looking at the last man, why does Hedwig automatically come to mind...?
A. In my limited knowledge, I had to search to find out what Hedwig was. It is a famous musical. Yes, in appearance alone, the feeling is similar.
Q. Crysis2: @I always feel this, but Ossuary has the best immersion! By the way, was it too greedy to hope for lovey-dovey flirting when Anne appeared? T_T
A. Given the current situation, would it not be more natural for both Gyeoul and Anne to keep a certain distance and restrain themselves?
Footnotes:
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