WETRIED TRANSLATIONS
The Wizard in the Poncho
[Translator – Aren]
Chapter 161 - The Impressively Hardcore Gun Wizard
5TB Phone World, October 21st, 2038, 8:17 PM.
-Tap, tap.
I tapped the screen of the budget phone with 128GB of RAM, checked the local time, then sighed and looked around.
After joining up with the soldiers in the concourse on basement level 1 of Gyeonggi Provincial Government Office Station, we Supreme Archmages took some time to regroup with them properly. The 1st basement level bore clear signs of chaos. The ticket gates had been smashed apart, and the windows of the underground shops had shattered everywhere.
Still, considering the unprecedented disaster had practically wiped out all of Seoul, maybe this wasn’t so bad. Supreme World’s Seoul had looked far worse.
But better surroundings weren’t enough to overcome the soldiers’ despair, nor was the bright smile on Go Ryeoha’s lips, the only woman among the Supreme Archmages.
"Here, I brought canned food. Take one each. There’s water and towels too, so wet these and wipe yourselves down!”
"...."
The soldiers didn’t respond even to Go Ryeoha’s gentle tone. Some leaned against walls or pillars, while others had stripped off their CBRN protective suits, spread them on the floor like mats, and collapsed on top of them. Whether curled up or lying flat, they were completely silent except when their guns dug into them badly enough to make them shift position.
The pastor bustled around with Go Ryeoha, Bible in hand, reciting prayers.
Surprisingly, this fanatic zealot behavior of his actually worked on some of the soldiers.
A few soldiers who had looked completely listless slowly raised their heads when the pastor pulled out his Bible and introduced himself, then awkwardly gathered around and began worshipping with him.
"Right. I’m Pastor Park Yohan. I do church-planting work in Chungcheong Province. Presbyterian. Now, if any of you want to hear the word of the Lord, come on over. Doesn’t matter if you’ve never gone to church. Our Lord God, take pity upon your young lambs who have fallen into tribulation and watch over them. Good. Shall we hear some Gospel, then?”
"Amen."
Just like a damn fanatic zealot to spot a chance to evangelize even in a place like this.
Still, I couldn’t deny that it was necessary. The 8 soldiers holding a Christian service in the basement concourse looked noticeably better than the others. Most of the soldiers simply lay there limp unless it was time to rotate shifts.
Hamza, Lee Sejun, and I kept our distance from the scene and sorted through our packs in front of a clothing store whose windows were less shattered than the rest.
Even so, anyone could see the soldiers were in bad shape, which made me click my tongue inwardly. Hamza, who was unpacking beside me and organizing bottles of water, looked concerned as well. As for Lee Sejun…I glanced over to see what he was doing and found him sitting on the floor, checking his machine-gun belt round by round.
Looks like he was making damn sure that it wouldn’t jam.
I didn’t want to disturb Lee Sejun during his rare Captain Korea moment, so I decided to focus on Hamza instead.
“What’s with that look?”
"Everyone’s mentally exhausted. It’s dangerous.”
"Because they won’t be able to respond properly if we’re attacked?”
"No. Someone who’s given up on themselves becomes a burden to everyone else.”
Hamza, a Pakistani medical student, offered an opinion containing both compassion and cold rationality.
The moment even one of them took their own life, there would be no going back. True to Hamza, who was better than anyone when it came to thinking about escape routes and how to carry them out, he seemed to have already grasped the unit’s situation.
"Jemin-ssi. Do you know why they’re turning a blind eye to what’s basically desertion?”
"No. I don’t. And since I don’t, just shut up and tell me the answer.”
Dumbasses like me prefer stealing a look at the answer sheet and then swaggering around like it was our own ability rather than solving the problem ourselves. Hamza gave me a contemptuous look after hearing my refreshingly honest answer, but soon went back to kneeling on the floor and sorting the pack.
"Because they look like they might kill themselves. They know that if they stop someone from leaving and that person dies afterward, it’s over. So even when someone says they’re deserting, they just look the other way.”
"That doesn’t mean I’m letting you run off, Hamza.”
Even a dog hanging around a village school for 3 years can recite poetry.
Even without Ears-branch magic, it was easy to stop Hamza from steadily building up toward another escape attempt. A good leader doesn’t suppress each person’s individual traits, but guides them in a useful direction. Rather than letting Hamza use that good brain of his to figure out how to escape alone, it was better to steer him toward thinking up solutions that benefited everyone.
Thinking that, I checked the time, then, now that I had enough breathing room and was in a safe place, asked the question that had been bothering me.
"More importantly, how do you know you guys got here a week ago? Do you know what the hell is going on with the time?”
"Jemin-ssi…”
-Teary!
Hamza, who was usually busy trying to run away whenever he saw me, spun around the moment he heard my question. His eyes went wide, then filled with emotion as he started tearing up.
"All the soldiers have lost their minds, Ryeoha-ssi is too busy taking care of them to think about it, and Sejun-ssi isn’t the kind of person who thinks about this stuff in the first place, so I was the only one who’d been wondering about it…!”
As if finally getting a chance to vent, Hamza spilled out everything he had figured out.
Summarized the Baek Jemin way, the information went like this.
According to Hamza:
The earliest our expedition from Supreme World could possibly have arrived in 5TB Phone World was October 20th. If an armed force had suddenly appeared right in the middle of the subway station, civilians and the government alike would have panicked and responded. Meaning we had arrived only after the world had already gone to hell.
If time in Supreme World and 5TB Phone World matched perfectly one-to-one, then the moment our expedition arrived, the police or military of the still-functioning 5TB Phone World should have detained us and dragged us off somewhere like a prison for questioning. No matter how much of a mess South Korea was, it still had some weight behind it.
It wasn’t such a damn useless country that it would sit on its hands when 89 armed troops suddenly appeared in the middle of Seoul.
At that point, I decided to apply a concept from Supreme World to 5TB Phone World as well.
The critical point.
In Supreme World, it referred to the point when the military, police, and government agencies concluded that the monsters’ infections and proliferation could no longer be controlled. Applying the concept here, 5TB Phone World appeared to have passed its critical point sometime around the afternoon of October 20th.
That was where the problem lay.
In Supreme World, the expedition had been gone for an entire week, long enough that people had even forgotten where they went. Yet here in 5TB Phone World, they had barely survived for a day or two.
Hamza had wondered about this distortion of time, but between the soldiers who were mentally falling apart, Go Ryeoha wanting to take care of them and Lee Sejun busy hauling supplies because he didn’t really care, he hadn’t had anyone to hold an intellectual discussion with.
But of course, this was Hamza.
This foreign-worker bastard, more serious about running away than anyone else, had already conducted an experiment while everyone else was busy fighting to survive.
"Instead, I set a timer on our authorized phone from Supreme World, and set another timer on a local 5TB phone according to the local time, then used them to roughly estimate how time was passing.”
"Hey. You bastard. You weren’t seriously planning to run away, right?”
"Jemin-ssi. I’m not that kind of man. No matter how strange and dangerous Ryeoha-ssi is, or how skilled she is at killing people, she’s still a woman. I wouldn’t have abandoned her and left.”
Hamza…was he actually a manly guy?
I discreetly used Ears-branch, Stage 1 [Mind Reading].
'Go Ryeoha-ssi is incredibly powerful, so she’ll be a huge help when escaping. I need to leave Korea. Fast. I feel like I’m going ot die if I keep listening to the angel.’
For fuck’s~ sake~.
I gave up expecting anything and quietly examined the results of Hamza’s experiment.
"1 hour in Supreme World ended much faster than 1 hour in 5TB Phone World. I was busy packing, so I couldn’t watch closely, but even a rough estimate puts the ratio at least at 5:1. I haven't been able to confirm whether that ratio stays constant or suddenly spikes whenever some kind of incident occurs, so I’m being conservative about it. And I had another strange experience too.”
"A strange experience?”
"I get dizzy every time I check the time. Maybe the different times are confusing me somehow. I get really dizzy.”
A time ratio of at least 5:1. On top of that, testimony that recognizing the time caused confusion or dizziness.
Was time itself treated as a kind of record?
Or maybe records weren’t the trigger at all. Maybe it was any piece of evidence you could trust besides your own memory? It was a weak clue, but I shoved it into a corner of my mind for now and stood up.
Some people might wonder if this temporal distortion could somehow be put to good use.
But what good would come from staying too long in a city buried beneath thick black clouds, in a Seoul where even monsters and survivors were hard to find?
"Okay. Now that I know, we should make sure we get back as quickly as possible.”
"What if we get back and the blockade line’s already been breached?”
"What do you mean, what?”
What else could I do? If it was breached, it was breached. Not my fault.
Considering what happened with Go Ryeoha, Lee Sejun, Hamza, and the 80-odd soldiers, they’d probably have forgotten that the Supreme Archmages even existed anyway, so I figured there wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn't like I’d run away on purpose.
* * *
After taking some time to regroup, we Supreme Archmages left the limp, listless soldiers where they were and met with Warrant Officer Lee Seongchun and Staff Sergeant Kim Seonghun for a briefing.
We brought over some pamphlets from what had once been a ticket-office waiting room on basement level 1 and spread them across the floor. They were packed with subway maps and promotional information about stations on the Shinbundang Line, which made things easy to understand even for someone as hopeless with Seoul’s geography as me.
Besides, it wasn’t as though this expedition had accomplished absolutely nothing.
Warrant Officer Lee Seongchun.
The soldier with the shiny bald head, sunken eye sockets, shadowed eyes, and intimidating face, but a ridiculously comical voice, and who had smoked his first cigarette only after coming here, slapped himself on the cheek as he spoke.
"Well, I’ll be damned. I put on some skin lotion after getting here, and now my skin’s feeling nice and springy.”
The pastor raised an eyebrow.
"Skin lotion???”
"Everyone who lived here disappeared anyway, so I borrowed some. Wasn’t looting, stealing, or raiding or nothin’. I put it on credit. Credit. Anyway, let me tell you what we found.”
Warrant Officer Lee took the water bottle Staff Sergeant Kim Seonghun handed him and tapped the pamphlet with his index finger as he spoke.
"Thanks to Hamza-ssi, we didn’t actually suffer that many casualties. But some of them were nothing but goddamn idiots apparently, so people scattered. Still, some of the guys keep in touch because we’ve been through thick and thin together. They share information and all that.”
He was a ridiculous warrant officer who mixed standard Korean with dialects from all over the country, but maybe all those years as a warrant officer really did count for something. Even in a situation this insane, he remained composed and continued speaking calmly.
There was exactly one reason I was certain this warrant officer was ridiculous.
-Tsk, tsk, tsk…
It’s not ‘through thick and thin,’ it’s ‘through thin and thick.’ Figures a soldier would use an expression wrong like that. Still, being the magnanimous Great Archmage I was, I had decided to be considerate toward the soldiers.
Even while doing this, Warrant Officer Lee continued rubbing his cheek and shared every important detail without leaving anything out.
"We started with 89. Some of the special operators, the sharper ones and the dumb ones, took people with them and split off. 4 groups. 2 of them have contacted us. There’s Kim Junbeom, the guy from Yonsei University who uses Eyes-branch magic, and that scary-looking big-headed guy who uses Hands-branch magic, that…that… What was his name again, Drainage?”
"Im Junho, Im Junho. The guy who dug drainage ditches with me.”
"Ah~. Right. Im Junho. Anyway, Kim Junbeom and Im Junho at least have some loyalty left in them, so whenever they learned something, they used local phones to contact us.”
Rather than use the communications equipment they had wisely brought with them, Warrant Officer Lee Seongchun immediately distributed locally acquired phones to the squad leaders and assigned each one a temporary number so they could tell them apart. Worried that the equipment and phones they had brought might not work with 5TB Phone World’s cell towers, he had rebuilt their communications network around local phones instead.
The official rationale was that if Ears-branch wizards wanted to eavesdrop, they could do it anyway. They might as well rely mainly on local phones, which were easy to obtain, and save their original communications equipment for genuinely important situations.
Of course, the moment I saw what kind of radio they’d brought with them, I couldn’t help but click my tongue. I glanced over and spotted a backpack tossed like trash in one corner by a pillar. The green tin-can-looking thing sticking out of it was obviously a 999K. They'd even wrapped box tape around the handset over and over to secure it.
"Kim Junbeom originally went around looking for people entering the subway without authorization, so maybe that's why he found those weird bastards so fast. Said they had a gunfight and he killed some of them, but being out on the edge of Seoul, there were monsters around, so he ended up losing them. They were running off with kids, and from the way the kids reacted, they sure as hell weren’t their parents.”
"Shouldn’t rescuing the children take priority? Whatever the reason, that's still…”
As our old-fashioned pastor let out this displeased question, I organized what Warrant Officer Lee Seongchun had told us.
Special operator Sergeant Kim Junbeom.
Awakened while escorting civilians through the fog as part of the first blockade-line forces. Eyes-branch, Stage 2. Its effect was to speed up the movement of one object he was looking at. In other words, he could designate one object within his field of vision and accelerate it
He could use it to throw objects, accelerate grenades before throwing them so they flew farther, or sometimes accelerate allies in danger to help them escape faster.
After discovering the existence of outside personnel using the subway without authorization, he volunteered to help stabilize the blockade.
On top of that, he was a Yonsei graduate, which is considered to be quite prestigious in Korea. Horn-rimmed glasses or not, he truly had the bearing of an impressively hardcore Gun Wizard. And it looked like the people he had fought were the same ones I’d seen kidnapping children through Past Sight.
It seemed he’d put rescuing the children at a lower priority, but after hearing Warrant Officer Lee out, I finally understood the sort of judgment you’d expect from a Yonsei graduate.
"Pastor, cut him some slack. He figured if he prioritized rescuing the kids, those bastards might use them as shields, so he deliberately shouted and acted like he didn’t give a damn about them. Apparently he only noticed what was going on during the gunfight as well. If he’d been just a little slower, they might’ve turned the tables on him.”
"Huuh."
"Still, monsters came crashing in while they were getting back aboveground, and it sounds like they took casualties and got pursued. So he said he wouldn’t come back…Haah. Foolish bastard. Makes it worse because you can tell exactly what he’s thinking.”
9 soldiers had gone with him.
4 casualties.
Then contact was lost after he said he couldn’t lead the monsters following them back to the main force and would draw their aggro instead.
"Im Junho’s a crafty dongsaeng of mine, so he went around looking into all kinds of things. Maybe because he’s cautious, he managed to get a read on some of the local survivor groups.”
Special operator Sergeant Im Junho.
He awakened in the fog when Gyeonggi’s defenses collapsed under the monster counterattack during the first Seoul expedition. He was a man in his mid-40s who reenlisted on the condition that his family be relocated to the rear areas of Gyeonggi Province.
He looked intimidating too, but surprisingly, he neither drank nor smoked and was devoted to his family. Apparently he and Warrant Officer Lee Seongchun were close enough to call each other dongsaeng and hyung.
Sergeant Im Junho took advantage of his Hands-branch magic, using protection made with his own blood and the promise of cooperation with military forces as leverage to maintain contact with local survivor groups. It paid off, and he succeeded in meeting some of those groups in person.
In a way, you could say he had achieved the greatest results.
"Haah…But Im Junho says he shouldn’t get too close to those survivor groups either. Says their eyes were going wild or something. He also mentioned that these people seriously weren’t right in the head. He had some connections there, so he got a look at some of them, and wow. Those bastards didn’t have the eyes of wizards. They’ve got the eyes of people who actually kill people. He said that they looked like the kind who’ve stuck sashimi knives into someone.”
"Hsss. Haah.”
As the pastor let out a troubled sigh, we Supreme Archmages exchanged glances.
Apparently, while I was asleep, the pastor had told everyone about the Mist of the Other Shore, the sacrifices, and the Disciples, because they all seemed to have realized it too. The horrifying possibility that to the survivors of 5TB Phone World, we were nothing more than sacrifices they could make without feeling any guilt.
I thought of the notebook in my coat, the one Sergeant Lee Jinho had given me, and shook my head.
Sergeant Lee Jinho.
He probably…made some sort of deal in exchange for learning how to escape and being allowed to escape with them.
Whatever the deal was, it must have been horrifying enough that there was no need for me to spell it out.
“The one place with people you can at least reason with is…”
He tapped one of the subway stations on the Shinbundang Line as he spoke.
"Suji Fire Station near Suji-gu Office Station. Maybe because the people there used to be firefighters, they haven’t completely lost it. So, what do you say? Want me to get in touch with Im Junho…?”
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