Chapter 240
Chapter 240
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 240
Chapter Title: Hunter, Cleaner, and Swordsman (8)
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Woojin’s voice, as he spoke of working for the Raptors, carried an indescribable regret.
“…I couldn’t turn away. Logically speaking, it would’ve been better for the world if I’d died there along with everyone else. The countless Raptor wounded I saved would just go on to produce more victims like them. But… but… once I saw it right in front of me… I weakened. Yes… I’ve grown old. The iron will of my youth has worn away along with this decrepit body. I thought I wouldn’t end up like this. I thought I could remain Woojin forever, no matter how the years passed…”
“No one here—no, no normal person in the world—would blame you, sir.”
Liza, who had been listening beside him, reached out to pat the old man’s shoulder, but Woojin raised a hand to push her away.
“I’m already condemning myself. I can’t run from it or refute it. After that day, I lived as a Raptor doctor. Those two kids pushed my wheelchair, and I saved the lives of countless beasts. From a distance, I’d often see those I’d saved with my own hands skinning people alive. Limping on the legs I’d fixed, holding blood-drenched knives, cackling madly. You understand me? No, no. You absolutely can’t. Instead of killing them with the skills I had as a doctor, I saved the kids and myself. I saved their lives, but in exchange, the Woojin who was a doctor died.”
Ian couldn’t comfort or condemn the old man, whose hands trembled faintly.
Long ago, he’d had such a conversation with Woojin. One of the patients had sneaked into the storage shed and stolen all the medicine, leaving Woojin without morphine or alcohol for immediate use. He’d cursed up a storm, harvesting all the aloe he’d been growing for burn treatments and boiling it down into booze.
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“Old man.”
“Goddamn ungrateful bastards—not even dogs, filthy thieves blowing up hospitals…”
“Old man.”
“What! If you’re gonna scratch your ass talking about being picky with patients again, get out! I can handle it alone!”
“…Why’d you quit being a mercenary?”
“Huh? Why bring that up out of nowhere?”
“Well, you’re Woojin. Even I know your name as a mercenary. If you wanted to run a clinic, you could’ve done both. Then you wouldn’t be boiling pots of aloe just to squeeze out a bottle of alcohol, right?”
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It had been about eight months since Woojin saved his life. His speech was getting less slurred, no leaks, and with money issues coming up, Ian had asked the question that had long bugged him.
Ian thought Woojin’s answer back then was a sight to behold.
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“You jaw-for-brains could fill a book with the nonsense you spout here, but this one’s top of the list. What, do mercenary work while being a doctor? Pfft.”
“It doesn’t seem illogical.”
“Always with your logic and efficiency bullshit. How many times have I told you it’s chaining you to the past? Let it go, for god’s sake. Be free. Why’d I quit? Just because, you idiot! When someone wants to quit a job, do they need a grand reason? I just didn’t want to anymore.”
“That’s… hard to buy, hack!”
“Shut up and stir the pot, you fool! And throw out those cigarettes you can’t even smoke!”
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Every time he asked, Woojin said he just didn’t want to. Just because. Too annoying. And on nights they stayed up drinking, because he didn’t want to kill more people. So he’d run away.
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“As you age… you start thinking too much. Yeah. I’d done beastly things without hesitation to survive, to keep living. But then I realized, no matter how hard I struggled, I’d die in the end anyway. How to put it… like a student who hasn’t studied at all but has an exam in a few hours. Scared, thinking I’d soon face the guys I killed, blew up, chopped to pieces with my own hands. I got scared of killing people. In that mindset, mercenary work would just get me killed, so I quit.”
“Then why keep your name? Just yesterday, three guys got shredded by turrets after yelling about collecting blood money. If you really wanted to run, you’d change your name.”
“Pfft, pride, you idiot. Being a killer means you’ve got to own it, at least the fact that you’re a killer. Forget excuses like no choice, justice, revenge—hammer it into your skull that you killed people. If you run from that, you’ll be fleeing nonstop your whole life. Unless you rip your brain out of your skull.”
“…Didn’t you tell me to be free?”
“Exactly. You face it to become free. I’m not saying you’ll get it now. When the time comes, you’ll understand on your own. You’ve lived as both beast and man, after all.”
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That was Woojin’s conviction—the will of the man who’d let Ian Desmond live as Metaljaw.
Now, that steadfast Woojin was confessing he’d betrayed his beliefs for those two kids.
“The Hippocratic Oath, the Geneva Declaration—they don’t say what to do in cases like this! So many doctors in this era say, ‘When a patient’s in front of you, you just save their life as a doctor.’ But isn’t that… just escapism? If my medicine creates more victims, how is that medicine…?”
“Sir…”
“Saving lives was never that horrific before. It hurt more than losing both my legs. To avoid facing my human failure as Woojin, I threw myself into medical work. Naturally, I handled a lot of those cyborgs in the process, mastering how they’re made and repaired. The legs on Mahmer you saw today and Liza’s arms—I combined what I learned there with my original prosthetic knowledge. Their tech isn’t that impressive to begin with, so my results aren’t great either.”
At Woojin’s words, Liza raised her two arms. They looked unmistakably crude and heavy compared to old-gen high-tech prosthetics, but they moved, gripped, and released without issue.
It was hard to comprehend. Prosthetics aren’t just simple hydraulic pumps and levers. Even basic motion responding to Liza’s will required advanced tech—parts even the Dome struggled to obtain. How could an old black marketeer get them?
“That’s a face that says it’s unbelievable.”
“Honestly… I can’t deny it. How’s this possible? Even if you’re a genius who can whip up jaws and limbs without training… this is a whole different league. Were you even more of a genius than I thought?”
“Genius, my ass. Well… time to get to the point.”
Woojin shoved an empty canned tin aside to clear space on the table, then turned to Liza.
“Liza. Please.”
“Yes, sir.”
As if they’d planned it, Liza wiped the canned soup residue from the filthy table and placed her mechanical arm on it.
She pulled a screwdriver from her pocket and calmly began disassembling her arm piece by piece.
As screws came out one by one, the streamlined casing opened to reveal the interior, Ian, Budlam, and Dorian’s faces filled with shock.
Inside her prosthetic was living tissue—clearly biological—pulsing like a web between mechanical parts.
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Click-clack. Ker-chunk!
Liza calmly reassembled her arm with practiced movements. Budlam unconsciously held his breath as a part crawled into place beside the tightening screw, drawn by the tissue.
In the heavy silence laden with meaning, Liza spoke first.
“I was a college student, a scavenger, a vagrant.”
She tested the reassembled hand, slowly bending her fingers one by one and flexing her arm.
“I won’t bother describing life in the wasteland without arms. My companions abandoned me after I lost both to mutants while fleeing. A Dome transport hauling refugees spotted me, barely saving my life, but I was little more than a rotting corpse.”
The Dome had no spare capacity for civilians like her then. Unwashed, unfed, rotting from infection, she couldn’t even work as a whore. Shuffled between refugee camps, she awaited death. When someone grabbed her by the scruff in a filthy alley, she thought her end had come.
“I’d heard rumors of cannibals. Figured they were dragging me off to that…”
No. The one who lifted her collapsing form was a legless old man. He placed her on his lap in a wheelchair, wheeling her into a shabby tent in a dim valley canyon that saw no sunlight.
Even in that gloom, it shone vividly: a green cross made from a broken jar and dim bulbs. Liza thought she was dreaming.
She vividly remembered the old man’s blazing eyes. In front of two girls shrouded in filthy rags, he bellowed at the dying Liza.
‘Say you want to live!’
‘A doctor doesn’t treat without consent! I’m still a doctor. I’ll live as one, and prove it no matter what! So please, please consent!’
A wheelchair doctor thrusting a handwritten ‘surgical consent form’ on filthy paper, brandishing a bluish dagger under the stained-glass flicker of the green cross in a dirty tent. Who wouldn’t think it a dream?
But his angry, tearful face looked so pitiful, she mustered her last strength and nodded.
Thus, she could share this moment now.
“Sir… didn’t just learn about cyborgs from the Raptors. They’ve long seen everything in the world as resources—even mutants. I think they obsessed over mutants. They can’t match Dome tech, but if they figured out how to harness the power of special mutants that seem miraculous or mystical right now… they could close the tech gap.”
“Nest being a mobile fortress meant frequent clashes with mutant packs. Rare, but even before the 38th District incident, there were ambiguous Type 2.5s we now call that, or non-aggressive Type 3s. Back then, we lumped them all as Type 3.”
“So… this is made with that tech?”
“Yeah. ‘Cell Gear’—connecting human bodies and machines using mutant byproducts. Still in development, pretty iffy… but usable.”
Woojin, now calmer and catching his breath, added to Liza’s explanation.
“Mutant virus has incredible penetration. The moment the host dies, it invades every cell to keep functions going. Unprecedented how well it ‘knows’ the human body. And everyone in this era is infected with the mutant virus, no exceptions.”
“Its greed isn’t limited to living things either. Abominations merge corpses and infected around a dead host into one massive composite Type 3 mutant. They even manifest absorbed inorganic objects as body parts. Remember Old Picture? Data proved it—the core of that giant Type 3 had that worn-out shoe pair deep inside.”
The point: mutant virus can incorporate external objects as body parts. Woojin got the idea from there—could he link prosthetic control signals to living nerves without fancy electronics or composites?
“The result… as you see. I got new arms, rumors spread like wildfire, and Woojin Urology became a black market pillar. Naturally, word reached Dome higher-ups. Audit Division sent people after me, but…”
“Refugees hid you, right?”
“…Yes. Your name was already bigger than the Dome’s in refugee zones. They have hospitals for rich elites, so they fought to keep ‘Woojin Urology’ safe, hiding you fiercely. Most Moby Dick members owe you like that. Few in number, but no betrayers among them.”
“People with nothing to lose band together like ghosts in that regard. That’s how you became head of this massive black market org.”
“Not head—director, you punk.”
“That’s how wastelanders are. They break laws and rules daily, but stick ironclad to personal codes. Moby Dick survived as a group ‘respected’ by refugee zone folk.”
Ian nodded, finally getting it all. Penniless people left what they could in gratitude; those piled up, patients started bartering like at a market, turning into cash for meds and gear, evolving into a bazaar overnight. Byproduct market formed as Woojin bought mutant parts for prosthetics, drawing sellers.
“Uh… old man. One last thing.”
Doubts cleared, but no root answer yet. Ian judged this moment perfect for the question tormenting him all day.
“After seeing that mess… you have no aversion to using byproducts? Even after suffering among those horrors using people on people?”
“What? …Hah, hah. In this world…”
At Ian’s hesitant voice, pensive Woojin burst into hearty laughter.
“Shock of shocks. That boar-jaw’s having such gentle thoughts now.”
“Fuck off. I’d use it even if it creeped me out. But people are different. Worried they’ll get used to it and end up like Raptors, thinking ‘so what if we grind up people?’”
“Yeah… I see…”
Ian thought his eyes held unknowable thoughts. At least, Woojin was no longer the old man he’d known.
Stroking his chin briefly, Woojin placed the empty plastic bottle that had held glow-lamp fluid on the table.
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