WeTried Translations
Translator: Coughing Baby
Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 403: Wind from High Places (1)
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At the tail end of spring, morning at a garrison 3,000 meters above sea level was as cold as January in Washington. This was Leadville, Colorado, a small city where the average daytime temperature did not even reach 20 degrees Celsius in midsummer. Frost clung to the window at dawn. Beyond it, he could see a mountain range capped with eternal snow.
Gyeoul left his room to get the newspaper, but stopped before he had gone far. The new Ensign in the same officers’ quarters was coming up the stairs with Gyeoul’s newspaper in hand.
“Good morning, Sir.”
After taking the local paper the man offered with a salute, Gyeoul made a slightly sour face.
“I told you there was no need for this.”
“In Korea, this is only natural.”
“But this is America.”
“I would appreciate it if you could think of it as necessary for our sake. Even if only to set an example for the others, I intend to maintain strict courtesy for the time being. It would be a problem if even one person lost discipline and started taking things lightly.”
Gyeoul thought for a moment, then slowly nodded his understanding. The new Ensign saluted once more, turned, and went back down the stairs. The sun had not even risen yet. Gyeoul stared at the Ensign’s dark back for a while, then shook his head, returned to his room, and closed the door.
The new Ensign, Kang Seon-yeol, had originally served in the old Korean military, and until recently had been employed by the private military company USS (United Security Service). In other words, he could be called one of the patriots President Woo Jung-young of Korea had sent abroad to earn foreign currency.
But he had been fired. USS’s situation had worsened after its failure to guard the quarantine war arms expo, and some Korean mercenaries had also come under fire for inappropriate remarks made in private. The Korean mercenaries who had been in the same position as Ensign Kang had gathered at a bar after being placed on standby, pointed at the TV, and drunkenly ranted that Americans were too dramatic.
It was mockery of the atmosphere mourning the victims of treason. So many people had died in Korea, yet here they were making such a fuss over a few thousand dead.
The grief of losing one’s country and hometown, the anxiety of living day to day, a life with little to spare, unease and loneliness in a foreign land, subtle discrimination, twisted patriotism, reason dulled by alcohol... If one wanted to look for causes, there were plenty. Still, they were words that should never have been said, and there had been other people in that bar who understood Korean.
The decisive reason for their dismissal was that the mercenaries had been wearing their work uniforms at the time. They had damaged the company’s image. That was not wrong, but it was a weak basis for cutting even people who had not been there simply because they were Korean. The fundamental reason was likely the worsening business conditions.
At that point, President Woo Jung-young tried to contact Gyeoul. Help us, he said. Could Gyeoul not save at least some of the people facing deportation?
Gyeoul thought.
‘The people who caused trouble... Could they have known something?’
The resentment toward America that President Woo Jung-young had revealed when he met Gyeoul. Of course, the contents of that conversation must have been kept secret. But atmosphere and rumor had a way of spreading. With that sort of background, it would not have been strange if some of the officers and soldiers who had become mercenaries shared the president’s resentment toward America.
It was only a guess.
Gyeoul had not accepted the president’s request out of pity. The proposal simply was not bad. He had already been planning to transfer some personnel out of the Independent Battalion to other units, so if he could choose and receive quality personnel, there was no reason to object.
A few private contacts had been enough to handle it.
After mulling over Ensign Kang Seon-yeol’s compulsive attitude, Gyeoul soon set the thought aside, sat down in his chair, and peeled the plastic wrapping off the newspaper. He had turned only a few pages before he saw a feature article. The headline was The Last Suppers of Death Row Inmates.
Local media with little proper news often ran features like this. Because of that, there were many days when the paper felt half like a magazine instead of a newspaper. For example, it might offer a detailed breed-by-breed analysis of how to acclimate pet dogs to an altitude of 10,000 feet.
Today, though, the weight was different.
Gyeoul looked down at Lieutenant General Xieru’s photograph. In her prison clothes, she looked fiercer and more blunt in the picture than she had in person. The paragraph below explained the meal she had requested before her death and the execution process. Reading it, there was not much difference from what the judicial authorities had announced. In other words, it did not mention that Gyeoul had also been there when she enjoyed the final meal of her life.
‘It’s hard to call that a meal.’
There had been only three things the Lieutenant General wanted before her sentence was carried out. A glass of Seobongju liquor, one Zhonghua cigarette, and a private meeting with Han Gyeoul. The Lieutenant General had not invited Gyeoul to drink with her then. Still hale, she smoked the strong cigarette and laughed quietly.
“What a nostalgic scent. You must have gone through some trouble finding these.”
Whether the liquor or the cigarettes, they were rare items whose imports had stopped two years ago. The Americans must have paid dearly for them from some nostalgic private collection. But Lieutenant General Xieru had no reason to thank them for their trouble. It was only the treatment she deserved.
After taking a sip of Seobongju, she judged the taste of the liquor like this.
“This one glass holds bitter, sweet, sour, spicy, and fragrant tastes all at once. It is a good drink for someone soon to die while looking back on their past life.”
Then she drained the remaining liquor in one breath and set down the empty glass. From that sight and from what she had said earlier, Gyeoul glimpsed her firm resolve not to leave any lingering attachment to life.
At the end of their short private meeting, the Lieutenant General looked at Gyeoul and calmly left these words.
“Once again, I leave my people in your hands.”
Those were also the last words of the Lieutenant General’s life. After that, she did not say a single word until the moment her sentence was carried out.
The execution under federal criminal law was carried out by lethal injection. The same method as euthanasia. First came general anesthesia, then paralysis of the organs, leading to death. To make sure she would suffer no unnecessary pain, Lieutenant General Xieru’s drug tolerance and allergic reactions had been checked thoroughly in advance. She was not someone who should be allowed to die in agony.
At her own request, the Lieutenant General died in military uniform.
Gyeoul folded the newspaper.
An alarm rang. It was not one he had set to wake up. It was time to call Anne. Since leaving D.C., unless something major came up, there had not been a single day when he skipped a video call with her.
No, it would be more accurate to say he could not skip it.
When he launched the video call program on his laptop, before long, the lover he always missed whenever he could not see her face appeared on the screen. Gyeoul naturally wore an unguarded smile, as if the mood that had sunk a little while he recalled Lieutenant General Xieru had been a lie.
Gyeoul asked with infinite tenderness.
“Did you sleep well?”
「Well enough, for a night without Gyeoul. What about you?」
“I’m not sure. It was disappointing.”
「Disappointing?」
She looked puzzled because he had said it was disappointing, rather than saying whether he had slept well or not.
“Anne, I want to dream of you, but I almost never dream.”
The brief, intermittent half-sleep that sometimes came while he passed through the darkness alone was conceptually different from sleep while he had been alive. Therefore, in the world provided by Afterlife Insurance, subscribers lost the ability to dream. Since being separated from Anne, Gyeoul had truly come to miss those dreams. It was an emotion he had once overcome after entering the afterlife.
Anne, who had no way of knowing any of that, simply blushed at the sweet words.
「That’s good. If you don’t dream, it means you’re sleeping that deeply... No, maybe it means every day is that exhausting. Is your body all right? Training must be very hard.」
“As you can see, I’m perfectly fine.”
Unlike the other unit members struggling to adapt to the thin air, Gyeoul possessed 「Environmental Adaptation」 as a talent, so even during intense activity, he did not feel any more exhausted than usual.
「What’s the weather like there? Is it much colder than Gypsum?」
Gypsum had been the temporary garrison where the Independent Battalion had stayed until last week. They had briefly lodged at a National Guard base at the local airport. Its altitude was around 2,000 meters above sea level. They had gone through intermediate acclimation there before coming up to the 3,000-meter range.
“The weather...”
Looking out the window, Gyeoul asked playfully.
“Anne. Have you ever seen a bird flying backward even while it flapped its wings as hard as it could?”
「A few times during typhoons... I guess it’s like that there right now?」
“It isn’t always like that, but strong winds often blow in out of nowhere. The sky is pretty fickle here. Maybe because the ground is so high.”
It was a region where sleet often fell even in May.
Ground Zero, with a similar altitude, was probably not much different.
Anne added a few more words worrying about Gyeoul’s health, then suddenly sighed.
「I miss you so much I’m going crazy.」
“Me too.”
「Military families suddenly seem incredible to me. I suppose I’ll have to get used to it too. My man is Han Gyeoul, after all.」
“...”
Gyeoul fell silent. An urge rose fiercely like storm waves, then slowly settled. The ordinary words “my man is Han Gyeoul” struck his heart in a way that was not ordinary at all. A late-learned habit was a frightening thing. Since he had finally confessed his love, they had spent many days together that made him embarrassed just to remember, and yet...
As if she had read his reaction, Anne gave a rueful smile.
「We’ll need to brace ourselves before we meet again.」
The same rueful smile spread to Gyeoul’s lips.
“You’re right. I expected it to some degree, but this is really beyond imagination.”
He had guessed as much early on. Once they crossed the line, they would not be able to hold back for a while. The intensity had simply gone beyond the range of his predictions. Gyeoul felt more alive than he ever had since being born.
Their pleasant conversation, regardless of its contents, continued for about half an hour.
After checking the time, Gyeoul said,
“I can’t put it off any longer. It’s time to go.”
「Yes...」
“I’ll call again tonight.”
Then, as Gyeoul tried to end the connection, Anne narrowed her eyes and asked,
「Wait. Aren’t you forgetting something?」
“Forgetting something?”
Gyeoul thought for a moment, then let out an “Ah.”
“Come to think of it, I didn’t say the most important thing. I love you, Anne.”
「How could you leave that out?」
Anne’s scolding expression softened.
「I love you too.」
Only then did the call end.
Gyeoul went outside, ate, then stood before the four Companies that had finished preparing for the march. The deputy company commander who had joined them here, Major Singh, was hurrying to finish the departure preparations. No extra instructions were needed, because this was not their first time. A rapid march starting here in Leadville and reaching Alma. In terms of distance, it was only 17 miles, about 27 kilometers, but in terms of elevation, it was a steep mountain road where they had to climb 1,000 meters and come back down. On top of that, the oxygen was thin. Because of concerns over altitude sickness, the words rapid march were still little more than an empty goal.
Later, they would have to be able to make the round trip on this road as a true rapid march.
Because this was not training that cut them any slack, several ambulances had also been prepared to follow the column.
This was also the process of imprinting Gyeoul as commander on Bravo, Charlie, and Delta, the three Companies that had never fought a proper battle with him. When everyone felt as if they were dying from exhaustion, an officer who moved around without showing fatigue and encouraged the soldiers looked special for that alone. This direct impression was fundamentally different from the kind of extraordinariness one encountered indirectly through broadcasts and the like.
When Gyeoul nodded, Major Singh radioed in.
“Alpha Company, move out.”
The column began to move. The soldiers, for whom this was already the third march, were already wearing gloomy expressions. It was understandable. Their feet, injured during the last march, probably had not even healed yet. But stamina was not the only thing they needed to build. They also had to cultivate the endurance to withstand pain.
If they wanted to survive at Ground Zero, they could not remain a special force in name only forever.
Ruff! Ruff!
The short-legged King of Spain followed behind Gyeoul.
Footnotes:
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