WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 378: Each One's Homeland (12)

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There was no need to destroy the enemy vehicles completely. Crippling their mobility would be enough. The question was how to do it. If it had been even a two-lane road, he might have tried, but blocking a four-lane road, sidewalks included, made everything harder.

Gyeoul weighed every possibility in sight. The tower crane at the construction site, the absurd number of grimy manhole covers, the camping trailer still running, the enemy’s oddly uncoordinated movements. Rather than blocking individual intersections, sealing off the convention center’s entrance routes would be best. But those routes were also the center of the enemy deployment on this side. What if he went down through a manhole and set off explosives? Could he destroy enough of the road?

The hesitation lasted only an instant. Even if he used everything he had, it would not be enough. This method would need far more explosive force...

Ah.

Gyeoul’s anxiously wandering gaze stopped on the camping trailer.

Using the gaps beneath wrecked vehicles and other cover, Gyeoul crawled forward and pressed himself against the side of the trailer. He was close enough to hear the enemy’s rough voices clearly through the rumble of tank engines.

“Detour? West? Communications are this fucked, and you want us to advance separately? Bullshit!”

Someone was screaming behind a tank. But the emotion Gyeoul heard in it was fear. The traitors were not free from the communications failure either. Of course they would be reluctant to get isolated.

A surprise attack here was unlikely to go well. Gyeoul ignored their argument and felt along the side of the camping trailer. It should be around here. What he was looking for was a small gas cylinder. From his experience in Olema, he knew camping trailers of this type used LPG gas. Not only for cooking and heating, but even the refrigerator did not use ordinary refrigerant.

Sure enough, Gyeoul soon found two mid-sized gas cylinders. He shut the valves and carefully disconnected them, keeping the noise down. The pressure gauges showed roughly ninety percent and seventy percent remaining. That much was enough to recreate the scene he had seen in Sacramento.

‘No, is it too much?’

Gyeoul looked around uneasily. As expected of downtown D.C., there were plenty of shopping streets and hotels. From the outside they looked empty, but there might be people hiding inside, waiting for the firefight to pass. Considering how much foot traffic this street must have had, it was no idle worry.

A necessary evil. Unavoidable damage. The core of Mrs. Chadwick’s sophistry.

It was true that people had limits, but the attitude they took toward those limits was where the human and the inhuman parted ways.

Thinking it over, denying humanity was also one way to swim out of the water. Just as death was.

But Gyeoul hated it. Before, it had been anger like a dying ember. Now that he had decided he would become even a little happier, it was disgust, boiling so fiercely it surprised him.

Should he say it felt as if he could feel his real heart, the one he had lost?

Before going underground, Gyeoul checked the surroundings again as gunfire echoed around him. It looked less like America and more like some Middle Eastern battlefield. The nearby buildings were riddled with bullet marks. Even if civilians were inside, they would have tried to get as far in as possible.

If he gauged the force of the explosion carefully, he thought he could minimize the damage.

Srrng.

He lifted the manhole cover almost silently. He lowered the two gas cylinders on a cord, then climbed down the ladder himself and closed the cover again. Aside from faint threads of light coming through the small holes in the cover, the underground was sunk in near-total darkness. Even Gyeoul’s vision, excellent thanks to 「Environmental Adaptation」, had some difficulty making things out.

The tunnel hummed with vibrations from above. It was larger and wider than expected. It was a water supply route. Lights were fixed to the walls, but they were not on.

Right now, Gyeoul was trying to partially recreate the battle he had fought in Sacramento, only with offense and defense reversed. This time, Gyeoul was simply in the Trickster’s position.

It was the scheme of the very monster that had died ramming its head in frustration after failing.

In the pitch-black dark, he measured the distance with a light run. With skills far stronger than when he had taken that blindfolded test aboard the Pequod, Gyeoul calculated the exact distance he had moved. Seeing what seemed to be a passage connected directly to the inside of the exhibition hall, he felt relieved.

When Gyeoul reached the point he had chosen for the collapse, he set the two gas cylinders side by side and opened the valves all the way. After checking how quickly the gauges dropped, he hurriedly withdrew. His gas mask could filter harmful gas, but it could not solve a lack of oxygen.

With an exit from underground beside him, gripping a grenade with its pin pulled in one hand, Gyeoul steadied his breathing and waited for the right moment. He could not use plastic explosive for ignition. Wired detonation had too short a lead wire, and wireless detonation was likely to fail in an underground structure.

Every time he was about to release the grenade, 「Survival Instinct」 crawled up the back of his neck. The strength of that warning would be the force of the explosion. It was a stopgap measure on the level of feeling an elephant with his eyes closed, but for now, he had no choice but to rely on it. Gyeoul tried to overlap the expected aftermath of the collapse with his 「Memorization」 of the map. He hoped this method would work.

A moment later.

Ting.

The safety lever snapped free from the grenade he had hurled with all the force of 「Throwing」. Gyeoul immediately left the tunnel. It was a utility room beneath the convention center. This place was not safe either. He charged up the stairs and finally entered the exhibition hall, finding cover at the exact moment that,

A tremendous blast numbed his hearing.

Beeeeep.

His vision shook. He thought he had lost his balance, but the ground itself was tilted. And that tilt grew steeper by the second. As he clung to a cracked edge and held on, he noticed people in a similar situation to his own, only much worse. Several exhibits had been swept underground, opening up his view. He smelled spilled gasoline. Several empty cans were visible too. It looked as though they had been refueling armored vehicles. Enemies. Gyeoul aimed his gun at them before they could regain their senses.

Kakakakang! Kakakang! The gunshots sounded muffled and frustrating in his dulled ears. They felt unreal because they were so quiet. His vision, which kept warping, felt just as unreal. It was like a scene from a movie loaded with special effects. Even in that state, his aim was accurate. Each time brass flew, blood flew too. Nausea churned in his stomach. In the middle of his blunted senses, only the recoil striking his shoulder felt clear.

After eliminating every visible threat, Gyeoul crawled into cover inside the silence filled with ringing. Then he came face-to-face with a corpse. Not one of the people Gyeoul had killed, but one of the USS mercenaries who must have been guarding the event hall.

And not only here. Corpses were scattered everywhere. Among them were soldiers whose eyes had never closed. One man, his lower body crushed by a track, was someone Gyeoul knew. Lieutenant Raul Ellsworth, the Medal of Honor recipient he had been told to watch because of matters of faith. Whether he had remained an ally until the end or turned traitor and died by bad luck in the middle of combat, there was no way to know now.

‘There may have been another insider, or internal information may have leaked.’

It was hosted by the Association of the United States Army, but in the end, it was a civilian event. Its guard and security measures would have had plenty of weaknesses compared to major government offices. Was the security of a private mercenary company truly better than D.C.’s Department of Transportation? Was there not a single mercenary who valued money over trust? What about fanatics? Patriots who had gone insane?

Some of the mercenary corpses had been stripped of weapons. He could guess how the Marines outside had secured body armor and weapons.

His hearing returned together with the phantom sound of rushing water. Because the recovery was fast, it felt as if the space around him were shrinking. A water pipe had burst, and rough waves were pushing into the inner side of the event hall. Gyeoul exposed his upper body and killed more enemies who had not yet recovered from the shock. Two magazines were emptied in an instant.

Wiiiiing!

One armored vehicle was veering around like a maddened horse. It had not spotted him yet and was too busy avoiding the cracks in the building. Using the limited visibility, Gyeoul swept past and threw plastic explosive beneath the armored vehicle. Since they were indoors, where the jamming was weaker, remote detonation was possible. Gyeoul clenched the Clacker hard and felt the vibration through his whole body. After the blast pressure rolled past, painful even from the edge of the explosion, the armored vehicle showed no further movement.

Only now did he have room to check the damage outside. Gyeoul moved to the edge and looked past the shattered outer wall at the place where the entrance route had been.

The scale of the collapse exceeded his expectations.

The area near the entrance route looked like a landscape painting with the canvas torn open. About twenty meters east to west along the road and about fifty meters north to south had sunk all at once. The sheer weight of the tanks and military vehicles lined up there had triggered additional collapse. Because the underground tunnel was so wide, not all four lanes had vanished, but the remaining portion was too unstable for armored vehicles to pass.

The tank he had been wary of during his initial approach had fallen into a pit filling with water. The slope was steep, and its track had come off, making escape under its own power impossible. There were many other armored vehicles in the same situation. Gyeoul’s gun aimed at traitors abandoning their vehicles. Tatang! Tang! Tatatang! Most of them wore body armor, so most of his aim points settled on their necks. Corpses with their heads hanging grotesquely fell and sent up splashes. Dark red stains spread through the muddy torrent. The screams of the injured, who did not even need to be shot, filled the broken street.

‘Thankfully, the civilian buildings are mostly fine.’

Every window had been blown out, but no building had its outer wall completely destroyed. That meant even if people had been hiding inside, they likely had not suffered serious injuries.

He could see enemy vehicles that had not been caught in the collapse, but only a few, separated from the rest. At least toward the west, advancing would be impossible. Judging by the frequency of the gunfire and its distance, the south under Colonel Emmert’s control was still holding well.

Then the sound of a small motor brushed Gyeoul’s ear. A closed-circuit camera watching the building interior.

Gyeoul’s reflexive shot shattered the lens.

‘No way she’s still in here, is she?’

Clarissa Chadwick. It was baseless intuition, but considering the motive she had revealed herself, there was a chance she had remained here. As an act of patriotism, discarding herself in the truest sense.

If that assumption was true, there was even less reason to hurry. Confirming allied survivors came first. After recovering spare ammunition from the corpses, Gyeoul used 「Tracking」 to follow the traces of the firefight that had happened indoors.

The traces led to a corridor lined with offices. He destroyed every closed-circuit camera he saw.

“It’s an intruder! Shoot!”

Sudden gunfire echoed. Gyeoul lowered his smoking muzzle. Thud. The enemy junior officer who had dropped the weapon and slumped against the wall was trembling in pain, yet wore an expression that said he could not understand what had just happened. With shaking hands, the man pressed down on the bleeding from his leg and rolled his eyes with difficulty.

All four men he had been commanding were dead.

“C-crazy. H-H-Han Gyeoul, Lieutenant Colonel...”

“If you make noise, I’ll kill you.”

With that threat, Gyeoul kicked away the dropped gun and seized the traitor’s radio.

「-Answer! What happened there!」

Then he glanced around and found the exhibition hall’s sector markers. After thinking for a moment, Gyeoul held out the radio and Bayonet to the bleeding traitor.

“Request support. To W-3 sector. Say it’s a small enemy raid.”

“...”

The traitor rolled his eyes again. This was W-1 sector, and the W-3 Gyeoul had mentioned was south, past one staircase. If anyone came up, they would have their backs to this side.

Perhaps the traitor had realized Gyeoul’s intent, because fear and anger spread across his face. Gyeoul sighed and smashed the radio into the man’s mouth. Then he stomped down on the man’s two hands, the ones stopping the bleeding, crushing them along with the gunshot wound beneath.

Ooooooo.

Bloody foam boiled over the corners of the man’s mouth. Shattered teeth leaked out with it. Gyeoul held down the man’s agonized thrashing by force. Although the traitor had the larger build, Gyeoul barely wavered.

After a dozen or so seconds, Gyeoul lightened his foot, pulled the radio out of the man’s mouth, and made the demand once more, revealing as much 「Threat Level」 as he could.

“If you want to live, do it.”

With Gyeoul reflected in his widened eyes, the traitor nodded desperately. The quieter threat worked.

A moment later, seventeen new corpses lay scattered down the far end of the corridor. Three wounded prisoners came as a bonus.

Footnotes:

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