WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ The Little Prince in the Ossuary

Chapter 62

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"Holy shit! Was that an EMP just now?!"

The soldier in the back seat swore.

An electromagnetic pulse would knock out every piece of electronics in range. Nothing else explained what had just happened. That didn't make it any less staggering.

Gyeoul thought.

'I need light.'

Illumination rounds, and fast. Before the chaos could descend any further, the darkness had to go first.

He worked to get the radio back up. Military hardware was built with some EMP resistance. Sure enough, after a few tries, the vehicle-mounted radio came back on. Static crackled out the moment it powered up. Jamming, by the sound of it. Not enough to cut off comms inside the camp entirely, but reaching outside would be difficult.

Just as Gyeoul reached for the handset.

Boom! Bang! Bang!

The mortar position flashed three times. Seconds later, three illumination rounds burst open across the sky in quick succession. Each burning at the equivalent of 525,000 candles, drifting down slow under their parachutes.

At the same moment, Gyeoul leaned out the window. Wide field of view, fast shots. Eight rounds to drop five heads.

Even with visibility restored, there were no other targets to spot inside. Either no mutants remained, or only a handful.

Right. From the moment the Trickster was captured to the moment this attack began, barely any time had passed. How many infected could it have multiplied in that window? If the spread had been any greater, the nature of the assault itself would have been different.

He put his concern for the refugee zone aside. The two vice-captains, Min Wan-ki especially, would have put the Gyeoul Alliance's full influence to use. They'd have put not just allied factions but hostile ones on alert as well. Against a small number of mutants, sheer numbers alone would be enough.

"That way!"

Gyeoul pointed toward the direction with the heaviest gunfire and explosions. The driver turned the wheel immediately.

Outside the camp fence, it was chaos. The fighting was fiercest along the perimeter from the northwest all the way down to the southwest. The mutants had apparently used the continuous stretch of mountain terrain and riverside woodland to approach undetected. There was no other way they could have slipped past aerial reconnaissance.

After reaching the fighting, Gyeoul made a brief radio call to report his position.

The soldiers holding the line couldn't spare him so much as a glance. They hadn't let up on the trigger for a second. Under the harsh light flooding the night, the number of enemies pressing in was overwhelming. Gyeoul joined them. Single shots, nothing like the soldiers around him.

Click, click, click. Each light pull of the trigger, one mutant dropped.

It wasn't about conserving ammo. They had boxes stacked and ready to burn through. Accuracy wasn't the issue either. There were so many packed in that anything you fired would find something. By the numbers, just hammering the trigger was the smarter call.

But overheating was the problem.

"Watch your rate of fire! You want to blow out your barrel?!"

Shouting alone wasn't enough. Gyeoul sprinted between positions, tapping each frantic soldier on the shoulder and warning them their barrels were overheating. They flinched and lifted their fingers off the triggers.

Some had been on full auto from the very start. Faint as it was, a reddish glow had crept into their barrels. Lucky it was cold. In summer, they'd have already blown.

"Private Titus! Fill those magazines! You there, Private Orsi! You too!"

The pre-stacked magazines wouldn't last much longer. Hearing their names, both rattled soldiers nodded hard. The enemy wasn't shooting back, but they stayed low anyway, crawling on their knees to gather up the spent magazines scattered around them.

Can't blame them, that was how they'd been trained. If anything, holding to their drills at all in a real firefight was something. Proof enough that US Army training wasn't as hollow as people liked to say.

"Don't stack your fire! Don't let a surge in one spot drag everyone over!"

Soldiers shooting at whatever they saw had abandoned their assigned sectors. Firepower was bunching unevenly. Once it started, it kept repeating.

Until they got back to their lanes, Gyeoul plugged the gaps himself.

Three Humvees' worth of fire helped enormously.

Ratatat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

Up close, the .50 cal heavy machine gun sounded no different from a line of bombs going off. The firepower matched. The rounds were thick to begin with, and punch-throughs were common. Where the line of fire swept through, only bodies were left.

A shame the mutants weren't packed tighter. Dense enough, and a single 250-round drum could account for a thousand of them.

Wishful thinking, of course. The mutants were showing signs of growing smarter.

At the position where Gyeoul stood, one rifleman tore open his canteen and poured it down his overheated barrel. Hot metal and cold water met with a long hiss of rising steam.

"Damn it! Even the Taliban weren't this bad!"

An Afghan vet, by the sound of it. His voice was shaking badly. Hard to blame him, what they were looking at was too much. In every direction beyond the wire, mutants were fanning out and charging. Every new flare lighting the sky revealed more of those faces. Horrifying.

Gyeoul tapped him on the shoulder.

"Stay calm! We're holding just fine!"

Then he stepped in to fill the gap. Stretching a single magazine far longer than any regular soldier could manage, Gyeoul covered the holes in their line. The soldier next to him just looked baffled. Every target he lined up, Gyeoul had already put a round through the head. Closest first, not a single miss.

Waiting for Gyeoul to let up so he could line up his own shot, the soldier yelled.

"How are you doing that?!"

"Take your time."

"Take my time?! In this?!"

The soldier emptied his magazine in five seconds flat. No wonder barrels were giving out and magazines running short. Even with soldiers dedicated to nothing but reloading, it hadn't been nearly enough. With nothing left to swap in, he just fired a grenade.

Thwump!

The blast took four mutants. One that barely cleared the radius hit a mine. A bounding type. It launched above the mutant's head and detonated with a crack.

A ring of dirt and blood mist rose in the flare light, too vivid under that glow. The direct kill radius was thirty meters or so, but fragmentation reached much further. Dozens of mutants staggered or dropped. The ones that got back up came charging soaked in blood, flesh stripped from rolling relentlessly across the ground.

'Lucky. Even a few more minutes without flares and this could have gone very wrong.'

Distance was humanity's weapon. Under cover of darkness, the mutants had punched through half the minefield. A few more minutes of delayed response and they'd have been through the wire already.

Those few minutes made all the difference. Beyond the wire, the scene was brutal. Bodies so thick the ground beneath them had disappeared.

A jet engine passed high overhead.

They'd have come because the communications blackout was suspicious.

For now, though, the air force was useless. Too close to drop ordnance safely. Danger Close. Close air support would have to wait until daylight.

A deep rumbling climbed up through the soles of his boots. Mortar fire.

The sound of shells going off changed with distance. Sorting them automatically was what 「Combat Sense」 was for. If the mortar support was concentrating in one direction, a crisis was developing there. Gyeoul read the 「Insight」 flowing from 「Combat Sense」.

Equal pressure across every front. Either no sector was being pushed especially hard, or all of them were. Looking at the situation here, though, the latter seemed unlikely.

Still, no way to be certain. Judging this sector was holding, Gyeoul climbed back into the Humvee to monitor comms. His personal radio was still dead.

The radio operator made room and summarized what had come through. There wasn't much to tell. If anything truly urgent had come up, someone would have run straight to him.

"Situation's stable. The Weapons Company just took over the mortar positions, and all companies are now fully engaged. At this rate, holding shouldn't be a problem."

"Good to hear. What about the refugee zone?"

"Nothing coming in, so it's probably fine. Last word was that every checkpoint has been reinforced and is holding. A few mutants were spotted, but the refugees had already taken them down themselves."

"Good."

Worth the preparation.

Still too early to relax.

[Graaah!]

A bellow that rattled the air. Grumble. The bulk was unmistakable even at a distance. It hauled itself up from the riverside and crossed the minefield perimeter in a single charge, then roared again, settling into the buildup phase for its next pattern.

Gyeoul stepped out of the vehicle and lined up his shot immediately. Full auto. He burned through twenty percent of a magazine to shut it up before it could enter the charge pattern. Then again. And again. Too far out to approach and finish up close, and there was no room for a single mistake.

One charge and it would carve a clean path straight through the minefield.

Soldiers were reflexively concentrating fire on Grumble, most of it hitting body mass. A waste. In the directions they'd abandoned, mutants were pressing in. Gyeoul barked.

"If you can't hit it properly, leave it alone! I'll handle it!"

Mutants flooded into the gaps. Soldiers deciding they couldn't hold detonated Claymores. Two of them fixed to the wire went off, and everything caught in two wide overlapping arcs dropped dead.

There was a cost.

Clang!

The wire, already shredded by incoming fire, finally gave way under the Claymore backblast. Sections of it whipped over the soldiers' heads. Some took hits.

Bad luck stacked.

The flare burned out, and no replacement had gone up before it did.

The sky went black.

'Damn.'

Every line of aim he'd built on that light was gone. Grumble was at a distance the Humvee headlights couldn't properly reach. Even Gyeoul couldn't just ignore a drop like that.

[Graaah!]

Finished with its roar, Grumble came charging through the mine blasts. The ground between them vanished at a terrifying speed. A position directly in its path was smashed flat. A soldier too slow to clear it went airborne. Hit the ground. Didn't move.

Crack-crack! Crack-crack! Crack-crack!

Six rounds in three short bursts stopped Grumble's rampage. The moment it shook off the hits and started to roar again, Gyeoul already had a grenade with the pin pulled.

Thrown with everything he had, it hit squarely in the back of the throat.

"Front! Hold the front!"

Grumble's stomach exploding at his back, Gyeoul frantically urged the soldiers to hold. When the monster began to recover, he turned for just a moment and fed it another grenade while it was still vomiting blood and organs.

A blast from somewhere deep inside the body. Blood erupted from its nose and mouth. Ruptured eyes bulged outward.

"Eyes front!"

Gyeoul had to shout them back. Fear had gripped the soldiers and they were still fixated on Grumble.

Roars were coming from other directions now. Faintly layered beneath them, distant screams. Human. Once Gyeoul confirmed the soldiers were holding the front, he got back in the Humvee.

"South!"

The driver floored it. The engine whined.

Flash.

A belated flare went up. The soldiers at the mortar positions must have been working themselves to the bone. One shot bought only fifty seconds of light. To keep the darkness from breaking through, they had to fire every forty-five. How many rounds were left was anyone's guess. Hundreds had already gone. Running back and forth to the ammunition dump was brutal work. But brutal was still better than dead.

Gyeoul lowered his night vision scope.

Through the windshield, another Grumble. It had pushed through the alternating bursts of light and dark, and was in the middle of tearing a soldier apart, top from bottom.

[Kah! Kah! Kaaah!]

It swung the torn body around. Viscera scattered. A length of large intestine flew and slapped against the bulletproof glass of their vehicle. The driver slowed, retching. Before the Humvee fully stopped, Gyeoul kicked the door open and jumped out.

He rolled once and came up like a spring, firing seven aimed shots on the run. The massive body staggered back. But Grumble was rarely alone. Regular mutants closed in to block him.

Too many. A section of the line had collapsed, and they poured through like a wave over a seawall. Considering how many had already fallen, this was effectively their final push. There would be no next wave.

So shooting his way through alone wasn't going to work. He threw the grenade meant for Grumble into the mass of mutants and rolled behind a sandbag position.

Explosion. It vibrated through his whole body.

Right in front of him, a mutant with nothing left below the waist. He jammed the rifle stock into its snapping jaws, drew his bayonet, and drove it through the crown of the skull. The sound of bone caving. A spray of brain matter. What had already been dying was finished.

A roar like thunder followed. Grabbing his rifle, Gyeoul pushed forward. An instant later, Grumble tore through the position right behind him. One of the monster's arms grazed his back and Gyeoul lost his footing for a moment, falling onto a soldier's corpse. Disturbed by the impact, the body opened its eyes. The soldier-turned-mutant looked up at him.

He crushed the throat with his knee and took a kneeling firing position. The mutant, close to finished anyway, flailed, but not enough to interfere with his aim. Calmly, he lined up on Grumble and fired. Then he tore a grenade off the soldier mutant and 「Threw」 it.

The soldiers had already been briefed on how to hunt Grumble. Several of them moved in on the half-crippled creature.

The regular mutants that had been closing on Gyeoul were being cut apart. The Humvee's heavy machine gun.

"Eat this, you bastards!"

A soldier shouldered a rocket launcher (Mk.777). It tilted. The weight was off. The warhead was absurdly oversized, built on the logic that nothing else mattered for killing mutants, just cram in as much explosive as would fit. A grotesque thing.

Oh no.

Gyeoul shut his eyes. Flash! The outlines were visible even through closed eyelids. He was well back from the blast center and still had trouble staying upright. The thermal pressure wave hammered the mutants flat. That was the kind of weapon it was, the kind that shattered bones and ruptured organs through pressure alone.

The rockets didn't stop at one. A second, then a third, detonated among the mutants.

Barely holding his footing at the crosscurrents of those blasts, Gyeoul spotted a mutant that had rolled to within a few steps of him. Something was wrong with it. Both eyes had burst. Blood streaming from its ears, it couldn't get up. The pressure had probably destroyed its inner ear. Gyeoul took a breath and put a single round in it.

The soldiers, having retaken the line, swept through the remaining enemy.

So many bodies. Just within Gyeoul's line of sight, the dead numbered in the thousands.

Word came in that the last Grumble on another front had been taken down. The radio operator relayed it.

"They happened to have a missile launcher over there, so they just hammered it down with firepower. Even Grumble can't keep its arms and legs in one piece after a direct hit from an anti-tank missile."

The missile he was referring to, the TOW, penetrated sixty centimeters of solid steel plate. At that level, even Grumble's Physical Resistance couldn't fully block it.

'Anything above Gamma Grumble might be a different story. But they're a long way from getting there.'

Gunfire and explosions were dying down on most fronts. Gyeoul let out a long breath, sensing the situation was wrapping up. It had been a long stretch of tension for a single engagement.

What stood out was how the surviving mutants behaved. A strange, patterned shriek spread among them, and every one that heard it began to pull back. An organized retreat, clear as day. The soldiers couldn't believe what they were seeing.

They even set fire to the Nacimiento riverbank on the northern side of camp. Almost certainly the work of the electricity-wielding Trickster. Whether by luck or by design, the wind direction had been accounted for. Smoke blanketed the camp.

Jeffrey's voice came crackling over the radio.

"Unbelievable. Seriously. They're throwing everything imaginable at us. Fine, go ahead and take the crown, you mutant bastards."

The jamming signal had disappeared, though. Of course it had. Keep broadcasting while pulling back from the camp, and the next thing waiting for them was an anti-radiation missile.

Out of concern for a follow-up attack, the camp's soldiers weren't sent in pursuit.

One hurdle cleared. Gyeoul let his rifle hang at his side.

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