Chapter 74
Chapter 74
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 74
Chapter Title: The Inherited Sword (1)
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Ye-hyeon’s mother lost her life giving birth to him.
Lee Seung-hyun thought of Lee Ye-hyeon as the son who had killed his mother. That was why he had never been able to bond with his own flesh and blood from infancy. Ye-hyeon said he learned the “real reason his father hated him” in his third year of middle school.
During those anxious teenage years, he had rebelliously demanded to hear about his mother and gotten the beating of his life.
I couldn’t hold back and spoke up.
“Does that even make sense?”
“Even so, I didn’t get hit except when I rebelled.”
Ye-hyeon said something unhelpful.
Yoon rolled his eyes toward the ceiling from the side. From his reaction, it seemed like Ye-hyeon’s usual excuse.
I barely suppressed the urge to roll my own eyes when Ye-hyeon continued, anyway.
“That was the year I realized my father wasn’t aging at all, in a creepy way.”
Lee Seung-hyun had always been young.
Up until his third year of middle school, Ye-hyeon had been too afraid of his father to even look at him properly (and apparently, Seung-hyun often left him alone for days on end). So he hadn’t noticed anything strange. But once he started rebelling in earnest, he picked up on the oddity.
Naturally, Lee Seung-hyun didn’t explain properly.
Ye-hyeon tried rebelling several times to get answers, but Seung-hyun was stubborn. So at some point, Ye-hyeon gave up. He stopped crying, throwing tantrums, and talking back just to get slapped. He quit scouring the internet and books for cases of people who didn’t age. He dropped the wild imaginings that Seung-hyun might not be his real father, or that he could be some kind of vampire.
Resigning himself and accepting reality as it was wasn’t hard.
Ye-hyeon quietly endured Lee Seung-hyun’s cold indifference, his irritable nagging, and the rare, capricious moments of warmth that you could count on one hand.
Right up until just before the war broke out.
“Just before?”
“About six months prior?”
Ye-hyeon said this while neatly slicing the walnut pie crust with his fork.
“Or seven months? Anyway, less than a year.”
Lee Seung-hyun had shown up out of nowhere while Ye-hyeon was studying at college in the US and started drilling him mercilessly.
There was no explanation, of course. Ye-hyeon just did as Seung-hyun ordered: run, get hit, hit back, and run again. He had to learn survival techniques that seemed like he’d never need them in his life, along with all sorts of martial arts. It was a hellish time. Seung-hyun was an outstanding soldier but not a merciful teacher.
And that was when Ye-hyeon first witnessed Seung-hyun’s inhuman healing ability.
Ye-hyeon paused, staring down at his walnut pie plate, then abruptly dropped his fork.
“I found out by stabbing him with a knife.”
“I don’t get why that’s stayed as your trauma.”
Yoon grumbled softly from the side.
“If it were me, I’d feel relieved. Weren’t you covered in bruises back then anyway?”
“I stabbed a person in a fit of rage, and it turned out to be my own father.”
Ye-hyeon muttered so quietly it was hard to hear, then shivered slightly.
He furrowed his usually untroubled brow.
“It was really awful.”
It was in the midst of that physically and mentally grueling time that the war broke out.
He received an Enhanced Body implant and was thrown onto the battlefield. Only then did Ye-hyeon realize his birth father wasn’t some dracula or yokai, but a possessor of an Enhanced Body. And it seemed Seung-hyun had known the war was coming ahead of time.
All the things he’d been taught proved useful.
The seniors didn’t share detailed stories about what the war was like.
They probably didn’t want to revisit those horrific memories. And it wasn’t all that necessary anyway.
What mattered was that Lee Seung-hyun—who often visited the unit, apparently not wanting his son to die, always found Ye-hyeon uncannily, pulled him aside, gave some awkward nagging, and left—had one day dragged him out from the front lines.
Ye-hyeon had rebelled, insisting on staying at the front, and gotten beaten to the brink of death.
“Naturally, there was no explanation.”
“Yeah. Well, when I rebelled saying I planned to die at the front, he did say one thing.”
Ye-hyeon explained to me, someone who fully understood why his master had made that pad lip.
“If you want to die that badly, I’ll prepare a spot for you, so don’t worry.”
Why say it like that?
Yoon let out a long sigh from the side, rolling his eyes upward. He didn’t seem surprised by this new account of Seung-hyun’s misdeeds. I was starting to lose control of my expressions too. Ye-hyeon recounted his past in a flat tone, but I wasn’t dumb enough to miss the horrors unfolding behind those matter-of-fact words.
How had he grown up without a single place to lean on?
Neglected and abused, without even a single warm hug.
Unaware or not of my darkening gaze, Ye-hyeon pressed on with the story. According to him, this was where the key part began.
Lee Seung-hyun had shouldered the battered Ye-hyeon and returned to an area with civilians.
Then, out of nowhere, he shoved a greatsword into Ye-hyeon’s hands.
A greatsword.
“The one from the video?”
When I murmured softly, Ye-hyeon gave a long smile.
“He didn’t hand it over from the start.”
But they sparred with a sword of exactly the same width.
He said he couldn’t leave the unidentified building until he perfectly mastered the swordsmanship Seung-hyun was passing down. He made multiple escape attempts to return to the front lines where comrades like Yoon, Ami, and Joo were, but failed every time. People presumed to be Seung-hyun’s colleagues blocked his escapes.
And they all said the same thing.
Don’t worry—I’ll prepare a spot where you can die soon.
Just as they’d said, a place to die was prepared before long.
“You said you saw the video.”
I nodded at Ye-hyeon’s question.
“That only captured the final moments of the battle. Hundreds of Badgers perished because of that one thing.”
A disaster that struck when they had victory in their grasp.
No matter how many bombs they dropped or how many Badger units charged, it wouldn’t die. It kept reviving and reviving, slaughtering everything in sight.
It inflicted such devastating losses that all forces converged there.
Several names I knew were woven into the explanation.
Richard Green’s unit, led by Green himself—only three survived, including Richard, total annihilation.
Choi Yoon’s unit—only four survived, including Yoon, total annihilation.
Richard and Yoon, having suffered severe injuries in the process, were evacuated to the hospital and didn’t witness its end.
The fighter jet piloted by Choi Ami crashed, putting her in a two-year coma from the impact. Joo’s unit got caught in an explosion, leaving most combat-ineffective.
Lee Seung-hyun and his colleagues didn’t see its end either. Seung-hyun succeeded in severing the creature’s arm but paid with a fatal wound. Eric, called Shashinsky, and his redheaded subordinate didn’t see its end. Many of the elders’ hands were lost there too.
But those who had received Enhanced Bodies far earlier than the general public inflicted major damage on it.
And Jason Tvein and Lee Ye-hyeon, who etched its end into their eyes.
Tvein was injured but didn’t leave his post.
If Ye-hyeon failed, he was set to take a bomb and perish with the creature. On the day Ye-hyeon got permission from Seung-hyun to leave and returned to the battlefield, he was assigned to Jason Tvein’s unit.
The final force.
If even Tvein’s unit failed, an atomic bomb would drop.
In that place shrouded in thick defeat, before it could rampage through the ruins, Jason Tvein received a high-yield bomb, and Ye-hyeon was handed the sword.
And that was when Ye-hyeon first met Jaeyeon.
A woman with sly, fox-like eyes and shimmering hazel bobbed hair.
She was cradling a sword in her arms.
‘She looks eerily like Lee Seung-hyun.’
‘What?’
The woman, who had barged in and scrutinized Ye-hyeon’s face, smiled faintly at his bewilderment.
She thrust the sword she’d been holding toward him.
‘A gift from Hilde.’
‘Pardon?’
‘She said to bet our hopes on this.’
The bobbed-hair woman kept spouting incomprehensible nonsense.
Just like Lee Seung-hyun and his colleagues, who never gave proper explanations.
‘Good luck. I don’t care who wins.’
‘...Excuse me, but who the hell are you?’
‘Don’t stare like that. You’re no different.’
Jaeyeon reached out with a hand painted red manicure and brushed Ye-hyeon’s hair behind his ear.
Their gazes met in the air. The man who hadn’t even washed after rolling through battlefields, and the woman who was eerily pristine and beautiful.
Jaeyeon quietly studied Ye-hyeon’s eyes, then laughed brightly.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice if the world just trampled you and moved on?’
Ye-hyeon succeeded in slaying the creature.
***
The story was over.
As the gentle murmur of words cut off, silence descended on the high-ceilinged living room. I stared at Ye-hyeon, speechless for a long while.
It was midnight. The day had ended before I knew it. Beyond the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, ebony darkness had settled, and the cool, wind-scented space mingled with the smell of night. A silence heavy enough to press down on my shoulders. The ticking of the clock’s second hand battering my ears.
The weight of the silence choked my throat.
I took in Ye-hyeon observing me with inscrutable eyes and Yoon watching Ye-hyeon ambiguously, then moved my lips.
No proper voice came out.
“My sword.”
“Yeah.”
“The sword you handed to me.”
“I...”
The one I had named hope and passed on.
“My greatsword.”
“Do you want to hold it again?”
Ignoring my stammering voice, the pale one asked back.
“Do you want to hold it again, Hilde? I have it.”
My breath caught.
I was already shedding tears without realizing, and now I couldn’t handle my own breathing, starting to gasp. I clutched my heaving lungs with both hands. I coughed in futile efforts to calm my breath.
Tears blurring my vision, breath growing ever more ragged.
My heart ached.
“Hilde!”
“Hyperventilating.”
My seniors’ voices buzzed in my ears.
“I’ll get a paper bag. Stay still.”
“Cup your hands over your mouth, Hilde. Cover it with both hands.”
Memories burst forth.
I broke into coughs and sobs. My sword. The one I always carried, gripped every time I swept the battlefield with Kyle. There was no need for swords on Earth. Humans used guns, bombs, and robots instead of long, heavy lumps of metal.
So my sword had rusted away in its sheath for so long, under the name of precarious peace.
I had no intention of letting go of something I cherished like a doppelganger.
“Ye-hyeon, paper bag.”
“Hilde.”
A white paper bag thrust toward me.
“Hilde, grab the bag.”
In the end, I handed over the sword.
To a human.
To the ally I ultimately chose. But to someone whose identity I didn’t even know.
On some day I can’t precisely recall. I left a sword—unsure if it would even be used—along with a short video message for an unknown person.
Memories surged.
‘Grip this.’
I recorded the message in an empty room.
‘If the worst happens, if mutual destruction is the only path left. Before you hit the nuke switch, grab this and charge in.
And hope that a shred of emotion remains in him. Hope he recognizes the weapon of a comrade he shared so much time with, and hesitates even for an instant.
Hope you’re cold and competent enough to drive a blade into his heart in that moment of hesitation.
And if not a shred of emotion remains, hope you’re prepared to embrace him and perish together, or that you have no attachment to life.’
The message left to the last remaining force, a pitiful human who knew how to wield a sword.
‘Let’s hope for that. Slim chance though it is.’
Lee Ye-hyeon gripped my sword.
My sword. The one like my other self. The one my kin recognized at once. The one I’d brought all the way to Earth. It ended up in the hands of a human with no lingering attachment to life—who, ironically, stood firm on the battlefield to the very end—and who had cultivated judgment and courage amid abuse and neglect.
Now, in the boy kneeling before me, desperately trying to steady his breathing.
“Hildebert.”
“Ye-hyeon.”
I squeezed his name from my ragged breaths.
“So you received my sword.”
Humanity won the first war.