WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Little Prince in the Ossuary

Chapter 92

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Night by the Lake (10)

“Fire!”

At that moment, the world flared white. Lightning. In the black and white rain, the soldiers at the end of his firing line died like a silent film. They had only been crawling up the slope, then their heads dropped. No death cries, only rain, like falling asleep. A clean death. The thunder that came a beat later tore through every other sound.

The two men at the mortar position had been Gyeoul’s targets. Especially the assistant gunner. He was sitting with his back turned, too busy handling shells to look this way.

The first shot blew out the assistant gunner’s eye. The gunner on the left turned in shock. The second round hit between his brows. The impact snapped his head up. He stared at the sky, already dead, then slowly toppled backward.

The survivors poured out return fire. Some rounds hit body armor, some men survived even while wounded, and some shots missed entirely. There were nine of them, and they scrambled for cover. Their desperate bursts scraped out hundreds of rounds.

“Cover him!”

Gyeoul ran for the mortar position. Sprinting low, he heard bullets whine over his head. Cover fire from Elliot’s squad. The enemy was desperate too. Gyeoul rolled sideways. The line of fire he had avoided by a hair left one sharp tearing whistle, then vanished.

He tumbled into the mortar position, caked in mud. The assistant gunner still had a shell with the pin pulled in his hand. Rigor mortis was still far off, so the corpse gave up the shell easily.

Only the mortar tube remained. A manual Clacker was attached. The boy flipped the tube upside down and shook it. Rainwater poured out through the muzzle. Then he dropped the shell into the muzzle. A cold sliding sound. He gripped the middle of the tube with one hand, held the Clacker with the other, and drove the opposite end into the ground. Gyeoul aimed at the men firing back and pulled the Clacker trigger.

Boom!

He did not have 「Heavy Weapons Mastery」, but this was close range and direct fire. The shell landed true. It did not explode. Too close.

One corner of the position collapsed. Bullets bit into soft earth. The enemy only stuck their guns out and fired blind, but they were still dangerous. Gyeoul fired back. Not at people, at the shells. An explosion flashed behind cover. The muzzles that had been poking out above rocks and beside trees went limp.

The next moment was the problem. Maybe because of the vibration. Where the shell had gone off, the ground shifted. The slope began to slide. Enemy soldiers hidden there panicked and ran out.

The boy was below them.

‘Damn.’

Gyeoul had to evade too, but he could not turn his back on the enemy. Even now, malice poured down. Six men. He reacted fast. Tududud! A soldier hit in the chest went down. He did not die. Then the flowing earth swallowed him.

Elliot’s squad fought desperately too. Other enemies dropped one after another.

“Lieutenant-nim! Get clear!”

He could not tell whose shout it was. There was no time. A furious boulder came roaring down. Gyeoul clenched his teeth. Too late to dodge. He jumped straight at it instead. The edge of the rolling boulder, the instant he kicked off, felt like his foot sank, but he managed a second leap. Barely. The third leap felt like trying to step on water and run. Even so, he forced one step out somehow.

That was the end. The rough flow snatched his ankle. In an instant, he was buried to below the neck. His chest was crushed. Gyeoul choked. As sensation flooded him, the boundary between reality and simulation vanished. He reached out. Toward the sky.

The sky disappeared. Darkness deeper than night. The texture of soil rose to his fingertips. His body would not move. Dirt filled his mouth. His eyes burned. He could not breathe, and he could not make a sound.

His heart pounded like mad.

‘I do not have a heart.’

It had been a pleasant illusion. Every sensation was only the output of Situational Computation, that thought always circling in his head. It rarely grew this faint.

Was this how it ended this time?

Gyeoul did not care about the death closing in, did not think about what came after, and focused only on this moment. Even suffocation helped erase thought. He pushed synchronization to its limit. A high sync rate meant intense pain.

「Warning (Control AI): In a situation like this, excessively high 「Sensory Synchronization」 may cause mental illness. This Control AI recommends resetting your synchronization rate for <<Pain>>.」

Don’t. Stop talking. I do not want to hear it. The boy repeated it to himself.

「Warning (Control AI): The warning function for the world host’s mental health cannot be disabled. Because improving the happiness of Afterlife Insurance subscribers is the purpose of this Control AI’s existence.」

Yeah. So stop.

「Warning (Control AI): 」

The voice ringing straight into his head cut off. But it was already too late. Gyeoul had lost the thread of the illusion.

Thunk, thunk. He heard digging.

Something cold and sharp struck the back of his hand. A scream rang out from beyond the cold dirt. Small, muffled, and far away. In reality, it was closer than it felt. Starting near the punctured hand, the weight of the soil eased. Soon, from his fingers to his elbow, he felt rain and wind. Only for a moment. Someone grabbed the boy’s hand and arm and pulled hard.

His upper body came free in one go. Gyeoul wiped his face with one hand. His breathing barely resumed. Dirt left in his airway triggered a violent coughing fit.

“Good God! Are you all right, Lieutenant-nim?”

Gyeoul nodded first. The person he still could not see clearly showed obvious relief. He offered a prayer of thanks to God. Someone tried to help the boy officer up. Gyeoul declined, then washed himself in rainwater. The downpour was so heavy it did not take long.

“Please give me your hand for a second. I’ll wrap it.”

Elliot said it. Only then did Gyeoul check his wound. Blood was running from the back of his left hand. Deep enough to see bone. He moved his fingers. They still worked. Gyeoul silently held out his hand to Elliot. Elliot pulled gauze and bandages from the emergency kit on his belt. He was moving so fast that he dropped more than he held.

“Sorry. I meant to be careful, but I rushed and messed up.”

A soldier apologized to Gyeoul. He seemed to be the one who had struck the back of Gyeoul’s hand with the shovel blade. Even while watching the direction where the fight was still going on, he kept glancing back. Gyeoul reassured him.

“No need to... apologize. Thank you... for saving me.”

His words kept breaking up. He was still short of breath.

After First Aid was done, Gyeoul checked his gear.

His night vision still worked, though the axis was slightly twisted. The pistol in his holster was fine, and only the rifle had taken damage. The laser sight attachment was gone. Dirt had gotten into the barrel and chamber. Kneeling, he field-stripped it fast. He gripped the barrel after removing the suppressor and swung it hard, shaking dirt out by inertia. Then he poured in water from his canteen. It would rust badly later, but the gun was already rain-soaked, and what mattered was now.

Reassembly took seconds. He reattached the magazine and pulled the charging handle twice, confirming there was no problem with cycling.

“Let’s go. We’re almost done.”

“Lieutenant-nim, you look exhausted. Shouldn’t you take the rear?”

“You don’t need to worry. I’m really fine.”

“But your expression...”

“It’s not what you think, Elliot. A different reason. Something very... personal.”

Elliot still looked worried, but the commander was Gyeoul.

After losing men again and again, the enemy could no longer overwhelm even a platoon by numbers. Jeffrey’s platoon defensive line and Elliot’s squad led by Gyeoul poured in crossfire.

The enemy was trapped in a booby-trap zone. Blind command had driven them in there. The engineers had carried a lot of explosives in case opening the floodgates became impossible and they had to blow the dam. All of it had been laid as traps.

Even in this favorable situation, casualties happened.

Two men from Elliot’s squad went down in a row.

“Argh! Fuck! I got hit! I got hit!”

Only one man screamed. Gyeoul searched for the enemy he had just fired at. In the direction where the last muzzle flash had flared and darkness had settled again. Quiet. Changing magazines? Gyeoul waited calmly. The rain was too heavy. At this distance, catching heat signatures through night vision was hard.

Tatatang! The moment gunfire erupted, Gyeoul corrected his aim point. He dumped eight rounds on full auto. He could not confirm the hit.

‘He’s dead.’

「Combat Sense」 was positive.

“Upston! Upston! Goddamn it!”

Elliot grabbed the corpse and screamed. On the other side, they were treating the wounded man. The squad’s firepower dropped in an instant. Gyeoul kept the enemy suppressed and checked the dead soldier. The bullet had crushed the nose and gone up. It must have penetrated and ricocheted after hitting the helmet. Mushy brain matter spilled from the shattered back of his skull. Gyeoul closed the dead soldier’s eyes.

The ground shook. A powerful explosion erupted a little behind them. A fountain of soil shot up higher than the ridgeline.

Something he had missed under the blast reached his ears a moment later.

[Kiiiiiiiiiiiiii-]

A sharp screech like steel being scraped. Gyeoul lowered the radio volume.

‘So it took the bait.’

Jamming noise, or the Trickster’s death cry, filled the radio. The dissonant sound, constantly shifting in pitch, lasted around ten seconds, then cut off. The comms net went quiet.

Still, it was strange that it had not died instantly. The trap had two sticks of plastic explosive jammed in. If it had been close, it should have been blown to pieces the moment it detonated, dead without a chance to scream.

‘No. It was a crafty bastard. It may have suspected something.’

It might have sent another mutant to touch it instead.

He would need to be careful the next time he used the same bait. The jamming signal this one released while dying would also include information about the trap that killed it. He hoped no other Tricksters were within radio range, but hope was not certainty.

“You bastards! I’ll kill every last one of you!”

Elliot roared in fury and sprayed rifle fire toward the woods where the enemy had cover.

The captives trembled in fear. One of the men who had already been half-delirious defecated. His pants bulged.

“Stop! Hold fire! The enemy is pulling back!”

Gyeoul stopped the soldiers. A wounded soldier ground his teeth.

“Then we chase and kill them!”

“No, first we get clear ourselves. Everyone, look there.”

Gyeoul pointed into the darkness on the far side of the battlefield. The soldiers looked where the boy officer pointed, and a moment later they shuddered. Hard to distinguish from the dark, but if you looked closely, countless movements were there. The Trickster had died, and the mutant swarm was spreading out in every direction.

“Anyone got illumination?”

“You mean signal grenades? I have three rounds.”

The grenadier stepped forward.

“Lend me that for a second.”

Gyeoul took his rifle. He loaded a red signal round first in the single-shot launcher under the barrel. Raising the grenade sight, he aimed at the point where Captain Harris’s force was falling back. Thunk! The launched grenade streaked out, bright and clear.

Worried about enemy fire, Gyeoul waited for the first flare to burn out, then changed position and fired the last two rounds. Precise aim was unnecessary. He returned the rifle to the grenadier.

“Nice work.”

“...”

The soldiers looked like they had forgotten their anger in an instant.

“Lieutenant-nim... this is, well...”

Elliot hesitated, stumbling over his words. Gyeoul had no intention of blaming him. Even if you hated someone enough to want to kill him yourself, you could still feel that no human should die like that.

“Think of it as the price for what they did. It’s not like we never told them to surrender.”

“...Right.”

The Sergeant let out a long breath and let go of what was left of his attachment.

The enemy still did not seem to understand Gyeoul’s intention. Did they even know a mutant swarm was approaching in the first place? It would be a problem if Captain Harris collapsed too quickly, so Gyeoul searched for a suitable target. He excluded Ghouls. He picked one normal mutant and fired a single shot.

Kyaaahhhhh!

He had intentionally missed by a little. The wounded mutant let out a long roar.

“Let’s head back now.”

Gyeoul led the squad. As he tried to lift the dead body, another soldier panicked and snatched it away.

“Lieutenant-nim, you’re wounded!”

“Wounded? Ah, this little thing?”

Blood was still seeping from the hand struck by the shovel blade. The bandage had turned red, and rain-diluted blood kept dripping. Still, it did not interfere with carrying a body and moving. After seeing the soldier’s face, Gyeoul gave up trying to persuade him.

Now Gyeoul tried to contact Jeffrey.

“David One, David One. This is David Actual. Do you copy?”

[...]

There was no static on the channel, but no reply either. A moment later, Gyeoul realized his mistake. It was already past midnight. He switched frequency and tried again, and Jeffrey’s voice came through.

[This is David One! David Actual! No, Lieutenant-nim! Are you safe?]

“I’m fine, but we got one KIA and one wounded.”

[...That’s rough...]

“Jeffrey. How is your side?”

[Since you left, none have died yet, but I think we’re about to lose one. A shell took his leg off...]

After a brief silence, Jeffrey spoke again.

[Anyway, you supported us faster than expected and saved us. I saw you going in for the attack.]

“We can talk about that later. A large mutant swarm is approaching now. I think you should pull your troops back to the office.”

[Pull back? Not hold the line?]

“Can you hold it? How much ammo do you have left? There are a lot of mutants.”

[Well, no, not plenty.]

“Then do as I say. No need to rush too much. Captain Harris is fighting in your place right now. I’ll move down west and come up along the road. I’ll contact you again at 100 meters out, so watch for friendly fire.”

[Understood. Please get here fast.]

Gyeoul ended the transmission.

Gunfire was intensifying behind him.

============================ Author's Afterword ============================

#Publishing Contract

This novel has signed a publishing contract with Image Frame Co., Ltd. They used to be called Gilchatgi Publishing. It has been a while since the contract, but I did not mention it because the serialization schedule on other platforms was not confirmed yet. I felt like I would only raise your expectations for no reason.

For now, there will be no title change at publication. The CEO read it and seemed to think the title was appropriate. Well, that does not change the fact that the first impression is not great. Anyway, that is how it is.

Serialization on other platforms will begin with an N-site first. It is scheduled to start in about 3-4 weeks.

I need some time to revise the manuscript for that. I will try not to disrupt serialization, but I am not confident.

Revising something already written is harder than I expected. Haha.

It will also come out as a paper book.

#About the Afterword

Even if you tell me to write one more line of the novel instead of spending time on the afterword, an incompetent author often cannot write even one line of the novel in the time used for an afterword. This amount of time does not matter...

Anyway, from now on I will reduce Q&A. I will pick only two or three per chapter. Today the afterword already got long, so I will skip it.

I should sleep now...

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