WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 146: Great Calamity 【■■■ ■■■】 (12)

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The gun in Han San's hand was not the Type 38 rifle he knew so well.

It was the Murata hunting gun his father had dropped, the one that had flown all the way to him.

It was already loaded. His father had finished loading it.

Before he even looked at his father, Han San knew what kind of round it was.

A slug round. A single projectile.

A slug.

He fired.

Booom!!

The gunshot, which had been swallowed by the sheets of rain and refused to grow louder, rang out like thunder.

The front half of the Murata hunting gun, heated by firing and then rapidly cooled by the raging rainstorm, shattered apart.

As Han San was thrown back by the recoil, the slug struck the Mountain Lord squarely in the shoulder.

He felt the hit clearly.

【 Gwoooong—!!! 】

The Mountain Lord screamed.

Yes. It was a scream.

The shoulder connected to the forepaw caught in the bear trap became a bloody ruin.

White bone showed beneath the rain, and the downpour hammered against it. The beast howled.

Still howling, it twisted its body.

The whole world spun.

“Ah.”

The instant Han San uttered that sound, gravity lost its direction.

Bang!

His shoulder burned, and then a terrible numbness spread through it.

For a moment, he did not understand what had happened.

Then he did.

The force of the Mountain Lord twisting its body had shaken the ground, and a flying stone had struck Han San's shoulder and sent him tumbling.

“Urgh.”

The Mountain Lord had an injured shoulder.

So did Han San.

His numbed arm gave out, and with a clatter, the Murata hunting gun fell back to the ground.

The hunter had lost his weapon again.

“San!”

A weapon flew toward him.

Han San instinctively raised his uninjured hand.

As if they had arranged it beforehand.

A Type 38 infantry rifle.

The gun his father had fitted and passed down to him had already been loaded with a five-round clip.

All he had to do was fire.

All he had to do was pull the trigger.

But before he could rise, before he could lift the rifle...

Boom!

The Mountain Lord regained its footing.

It leaped.

Toward his father.

Then it roared.

【 Euhhhhhhng—!!! 】

Once more, the world shook. His vision flashed and shattered.

“Cough!”

His father took the roar head-on and coughed up blood.

He dropped onto his bad knee with a thud and could no longer rise.

If his body had not grown sturdier over the last year, his heart would have burst, the old Baekdu Mountain hunter thought.

That was why he felt relieved.

Thank goodness.

His son had saved his life.

But Han San could not think that way.

“Father!!”

Han San staggered forward.

He forcibly shook off the paralysis caused by the roar. He tried to get even a little closer to his father.

As he moved, he raised the gun with one hand, the gun his father had prepared for him, intending to fire and draw the tiger's attention.

Han Man-seok raised his head.

“San.”

“Ah.”

In that brief exchange, in that single look that pierced through the rain, every meaning was conveyed.

He could not fire now.

They were both at their limits. Everything was at its limit.

Even that Mountain Lord was at its limit.

If he fired carelessly here and missed, there would be no chance to load the gun again. The wounded beast would flee without hesitation.

The hunt they had waited decades for would end in failure.

But...

‘Wouldn't that be better?’

Wouldn't that be better?

If he fired and drew its attention, if he made it flee, then he could save his father right now.

‘Father.’

He wanted to live with his family.

He wanted to be happy.

He did not want to fulfill some grand historical mission. He did not want to earn enough money to buy a country. He did not desperately crave the power to overturn the world.

He simply wanted to live with his family.

He wanted to be happy.

He wanted to help the people close to him, as long as it did not become a burden to himself or his family. He wanted his younger sibling to have the things everyone else carried around.

If something unjust happened, whether to himself, his family, or someone he knew, he only wanted enough influence and ability to keep it from happening, or to resolve it if it had already happened.

In the end, the wish of an old man who had struggled through one life to its very end was that simple.

He had not been granted some special talent for infinite greed or the hunger for power.

Even now.

Even now, Han San could not accept the bargain of saving his bullets for a chance to kill the Mountain Lord while putting his father in danger to overcome his trauma.

‘This is enough.’

This was enough.

The muzzle rose.

Staggering forward, he raised the reluctant barrel as much as he could toward the tiger. Ready to accept a miss if it came, Han San was about to pull the trigger.

- San.

Perhaps that voice had never actually been heard.

Humans heard speech through sound waves in the air. For that, one's mouth had to open.

His father's mouth was closed.

There had not been time to begin with.

Yet the moment their eyes met, Han San clearly [heard] his father's words.

- Catch it.

- Father.

- Trust me.

The danger he had to stake on that trust might mean losing his father.

And then losing his mother, who could not live without his father.

Han San bared his teeth. His hand tightened.

He thought of everything. From every direction.

And so, Han San saw his father's shoulder.

He saw the faint movement of its muscles.

He understood.

He did not pull the trigger.

The son trusted his father.

His father felt that trust. Behind his fur-covered face, he smiled.

The Baekdu Mountain hunter watched the beast marked with the king's seal upon its brow.

It was at its limit too.

Its shoulder and paw were in tatters, and its staggering steps had lost their former force.

Everything father and son had poured into this fight had not been in vain. The damage from the buckshot and the blood steadily pouring from several penetrating wounds had turned the rainstorm, which should have been the beast's stage, into a torture chamber.

Water was the greatest beast of all, and it treated all creation like a dog.

Not even water itself was an exception.

That was why the Mountain Lord moved a little slowly.

Even the motion of thrusting forward its head came just a little late.

That was enough.

Thwip!

Something flew.

Something no longer than a handspan.

A steel arrow.

In his father's hand was a small crossbow.

Han Man-seok had carved it himself using materials his son had bought with money he had earned. In an age when guns existed, it could never be more than a toy.

A keepsake only useful for catching rabbits now and then.

That keepsake lodged in the Mountain Lord's eyeball.

Dead center.

【 Gwoong! 】

The Mountain Lord's head snapped back.

For an instant, its jaws opened wide.

That instant was enough.

Han San moved.

He ran.

He squeezed strength from every inch of his body. He kicked off the ground. He ignored the pain in his shoulder. He shielded himself from the wind and rain with that dangling shoulder, raised the rifle with his good hand, and leaped as though slicing through space itself.

In that moment.

In that fleeting instant.

The seventy-five-year-old hunter shoved the muzzle into the Mountain Lord's open mouth.

He pulled the trigger.

“Ah!”

Bang!

“Ah!”

Bang!

“Ah!”

Bang!

“Ahh!”

Bang!

“Ahhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhh!!”

Baaang!!

Five gunshots.

Five bullets.

Seventy-five years of passion pierced through the beast.

The world stopped with a crack.

The beast froze with its jaws wide open.

Then everything moved again.

Thud.

Spray, gravel, and sand burst upward.

The beast collapsed.

Darkness flooded into the eye it had not even managed to close and pooled there.

Its protruding tongue twitched once.

The arrow embedded in its eye wriggled once.

Then neither moved again.

Han San stood there, holding the Type 38 infantry rifle that had fulfilled its purpose.

He felt dazed, as though his heart and every drop of blood in his body had been suddenly sucked away.

Still wearing that expression, Han San raised his head and looked up.

Rainwater ran down his forehead, brushed past his cheek and lips, then dripped from his chin.

The rain stopped.

The dark clouds were breaking apart.

They scattered in whirling spirals, and beyond them, something seemed to reveal itself.

The rational answer, that they had simply entered the eye of the typhoon by chance, was crushed beneath the sight of the opened night sky.

There were stars.

Stars.

Countless stars.

The stars of the summer night sky sat above the clouds, dry and untouched by the rain, fixed in the night sky of Gangwon without a trace of moisture.

That sea of stars was twisting.

Beyond the Milky Way, swirling like water around a bend, there was something.

One especially brilliant star.

Deaths as numerous as the stars surrounding it.

All of it.

The world.

At this very moment, it twisted, shrank, and shattered apart as if screaming.

‘It changed.’

Something had.

‘Definitely...’

The regressor felt as though he had seen a page in the notebook written across the starry sky turn over.

It did not seem that Han San was the only one who had seen it.

“This cannot be.”

The voice came from above.

Upstream.

On the hill.

Old Woman Wangdae stood where the mist had cleared.

The palanquin was gone. So were its bearers.

The old woman walked down on her own feet, stepping across the stone gabions as her wet skirt dragged behind her.

“This must not happen.”

She held an axe.

The yellow axe Han San had seen in a dream on the night he regressed.

Yellow Battle-Axe.

A golden axe that beheads traitors to the nation in Heaven's name.

“One who obstructs the king's path.”

The axe rose.

Old Woman Wangdae's black eyes, devoid of light, turned toward Han San.

The shaman cried out.

“Heaven shall strike you down!”

Heaven said nothing.

“Heaven...”

Heaven never said anything.

It merely sent fire.

Flash!

Lightning struck.

In the beginning, there was light.

The light that had struck Meokbawi Valley in his previous life, Heaven's fire that had smashed the lid over the abyss and called forth water, soil, stone, and trees, struck the exact same place in this life the regressor was living again.

Old Woman Wangdae smiled broadly.

The lightning struck the smoothly carved concrete embankment and bounced away.

Split into dozens of branches, the lightning illuminated the surroundings like fireworks.

Old Woman Wangdae's smile froze.

One branch of the scattered lightning struck the tip of the golden axe she held aloft.

“Arghhh!!”

The world sizzled in black and white amid the old woman's scream.

Flump.

The axe flew away and landed on the water with a splash.

Smoke rose from its blackened tassel in thin wisps.

Then it became quiet.

Han San watched in silence.

Without strength.

Without moving.

“San.”

His father called to him from behind.

The son turned.

He had no strength.

He wanted to roar with joy.

He truly wanted to.

The embankment had held. The village had been saved. And his father was alive before his eyes.

But now, he truly had no strength left.

So Han San only said quietly,

“Father.”

“Mm.”

His father approached.

Crawling.

He was truly crawling.

Han San tried to approach him, but staggered. His strength gave out, and he fell to one knee.

Splash.

The eyes of the prone father and kneeling son met.

His father reached out.

“Don't worry.”

Holding his son's hand, he said,

“I'm not going anywhere.”

Han San.

Han San, the old man who had lived seventy-five years carrying regret...

“Father...!”

The moment relief spread through his entire body, the last of his strength drained away.

Splash.

His other knee hit the ground.

Then his thigh.

Soon, the flowing water rose and struck his entire body.

As everything around him suddenly grew distant, Han San quietly closed his eyes.

Crying.

And smiling.

Rain began to fall again.

It was gentle rain.

Along with it came footsteps.

Many footsteps.

They climbed over the stone gabions.

Soon, men carrying guns and hwando swords raised their heads over the weir.

Sang-jun stood at the front.

Inwang Gang had finally arrived.

Yet the moment they did, they stopped.

Before them was this sight.

The wet embankment and weir beneath starlight.

The weakened current.

The golden axe sunk beneath that current, and the massive old woman who had been burned alive.

And the corpse of the Mountain Lord, which made everything around it seem small.

Yet there was something there that had lost none of its presence.

It was a young man who had fulfilled his calling and lost consciousness, asleep with his head resting on his father's lap.

Midnight passed.

The date changed.

July 22, 1934.

Meokbawi Valley did not burst.

The regressor's hometown was safe.

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