Blood-Drenched 203 Hill
The words rang hollow in my ears. Of course, unless they were complete idiots, the Japanese army had heard plenty of rumors about me. But seeing it in person was an entirely different matter. Honestly, I’d assumed most of the stories were just the Korean army inflating their own achievements. And yet here we were. Our formation was already a chaotic mess, and now a cavalry unit had driven straight into the heart of it. How the hell were they supposed to hold?
“Damn it, of all times!”
Had the Korean military ever produced soldiers like these in its entire history? Nogi knew little about Joseon’s military beyond the general belief that it was weak, but he knew enough of its history. From its founding through the Goryeo era, that once-proud spirit had vanished. A nation that bowed and scraped before China, offering its women and tribute, then rejoiced at receiving far more gifts in return. During the Imjin War, it had survived only thanks to Ming reinforcements. More recently, it had remained silent even as the Great Powers carved it up and the Sino-Japanese War erupted on its own soil. He had always believed such a country’s army would amount to nothing.
Even the Korean Empire troops climbing the hill with them had seemed like little more than warm bodies in decent-looking uniforms. But this… this was something else entirely. These soldiers tore through the Imperial Japanese Army as if declaring they were no ordinary Korean troops.
They say the North Army of Joseon is strong. Could it actually be true?
A woman charged at the front, wielding only a saber while the other cavalrymen carried rifles. A blood-stained handaxe hung at her waist. The Japanese soldiers, who had been desperately pushing upward after repelling the Russians in hopes of seizing 203 Hill, had no strength left to stop the cavalry slamming into their rear.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Crack!
Men died under rifle fire. Others were trampled beneath hooves. At the head of the charge, the woman swung her saber and severed the heads of Imperial soldiers. Her skill was in no way inferior to the Russian Cossack cavalry they had fought on the way here.
Just as the cavalry tore through their ranks and shattered their morale, another force appeared from afar, carrying a three-legged crow banner. Unlike regular Korean troops, these men radiated murderous intent. Their numbers were substantial—perhaps half the total strength of the Japanese forces present.
“Let us avenge the Military Ministry and His Majesty!”
“We will soak this land of Manchuria with the blood of those Japanese bastards!”
“This is not a place for you filthy island monkeys!”
The absolute worst-case scenario was unfolding before Nogi Maresuke’s eyes. They had successfully pushed back the Russians. Victory had finally seemed within reach. He had wanted to tell his dead son that he had taken revenge for him—that his death had been meaningful, a sacrifice for the capture of this hill and the triumph of the Empire, never a dog’s death.
But now…
Hot tears streamed down Nogi Maresuke’s face.
“Has this battle ended in the defeat of the Imperial Army?”
He looked up at the sky. Had the heavens abandoned the Empire?
Even with a successful surprise attack, victory had been uncertain. Now they had failed to capitalize on that advantage and were suffering catastrophic losses. The Imperial Army was defeated. The dream of rising to the ranks of the Great Powers as a beacon of Eastern civilization was crumbling. They would become the textbook example that the yellow race could never defeat the white.
If so, they had to salvage something—anything.
That woman leading the cavalry charge. She would undoubtedly become a massive obstacle, a grave threat to the Empire in the future. The way she rampaged across the battlefield in a woman’s body was proof enough. She had to die.
Nogi Maresuke frantically shouted orders at the nearest soldiers.
“Stop her! Fire on that bitch! Concentrated fire!”
They were still elite troops who had fought through the war. At his command, the soldiers took aim in unison and unleashed a storm of bullets at the woman at the head of the charge.
Bang! Bang-bang-bang!
The Japanese Arisaka Type 30 rifles spat fire. The rounds clearly struck the madly charging woman. And yet… that was all.
She had been hit multiple times. The Imperial soldiers were not amateurs; their concentrated fire should have been more than enough to kill a single target. Even a disorganized mob could land effective hits with that volume of fire.
“With bullets that can’t even kill one person, it’s a wonder you’ve managed to fight a war at all. You’d be better off shooting the horses, you idiots.”
The woman who had been shot showed no concern and simply charged faster. She even mocked the Imperial Army while doing so. There wasn’t a single drop of blood on her. Instead, she was smiling. A smile of utter contempt, as if asking whether this was truly their best effort. The expression was so profound it seemed to radiate pure disdain.
The sight of the immortal woman caused even the soldiers who had fixed bayonets and tried to rush her to falter and step back. In that moment, the cavalry following her opened fire on the Imperial troops all at once.
Rat-tat-tat! Bang!
The Imperial Army collapsed helplessly beneath the gunfire. Soldiers who had been fiercely fighting the Russians were now being cut down by Korean bullets.
Was this even possible? It was dirty. Far too dirty. Striking the exhausted Imperial Army from behind—what kind of underhanded tactic was this? Of course, it was war, and their emperor had been killed, so the reaction was understandable. Yet Nogi Maresuke still felt an overwhelming sense of injustice.
What was even more absurd was that this monstrous woman belonged to the Korean army. The soldiers kept firing at the same woman, but it was useless. Eventually, fear began to take hold.
“It’s an oni! That thing is an oni!”
They threw down their rifles and began to flee. The once-mighty Imperial Army was now running for their lives with their tails between their legs. Soldiers who had been willing to face death against the Russians now felt primal terror. At least the Russians could be killed. Up until now, they had fought them as fellow human beings. But who would want to fight something that simply refused to die?
There was a fundamental fear in battling something that was not human. And the woman seemed to know it. Whether it was confidence born from her immortality or sheer dominance, her lips curled into a grin that stretched from ear to ear as she trampled the Imperial soldiers.
The monster showed no mercy to any soldier who turned their back. She thrust her saber into them or shot them with her pistol. Finally, having cleared every obstacle in her path, she charged straight toward Nogi without hesitation.
With the bright sun at her back, the sight of her rushing toward her enemies looked like the descent of a sun goddess.
“A-Amaterasu…”
One of the officers guarding Nogi Maresuke muttered in a daze.
Amaterasu. The ancestral sun goddess of the Japanese Imperial family. Their progenitor. An absolute being.
Yes. If she were not a god, something like this would be impossible.
Nogi Maresuke, exhausted beyond measure after losing nearly all his sons and soldiers, his mind clouded with fatigue, found himself inexplicably agreeing with the officer’s words. Was the goddess who presided over creation now attempting to forge a new world with the blood of the Japanese people?
The mad Amaterasu, her face filled with ecstasy every time bullets mercilessly struck her body, charged straight at him. Before long, the woman who had trampled the Imperial Army without mercy stood before Nogi.
In that instant, a flurry of memories flashed through his mind. The faces of his dead sons briefly appeared. And then…
Slice!
Suddenly the sky seemed to spin. His head struck the ground, and in his final moment, he stared at his own decapitated body spurting blood. That was the last thing Nogi Maresuke ever saw before falling into an eternal sleep.
“Aaaah! The commander! The commander has been killed!”
“We surrender! We surrender! Please, just spare our lives!”
“We’re fighting for the future of the East! Whose side are you Koreans even on?!”
With Nogi’s head severed, the soldiers’ panic grew even greater. Some fled in terror, others collapsed and wailed, and some even cursed the Korean troops for siding with the Russians. But every single one of them felt the same thing: they had already lost, and none of them would leave this place alive.
Once Nogi Maresuke died, the army he had barely held together completely disintegrated.
When the main force of the Sapodae finally arrived, the remaining Japanese soldiers surrendered. I flicked the blood off my saber with a few sharp shakes.
“If nothing else, I have to admit the Japanese officer’s saber is perfectly suited for killing people.”
I had lopped off quite a few Japanese heads with it. While I was already familiar with the motion, the Japanese saber truly excelled in many ways. It made sense, considering it was designed for beheading and close-quarters combat.
I grabbed the hair of a severed head rolling near my feet and walked toward a terrified Japanese officer.
“This is Nogi Maresuke. Is he your commander?”
“Th-that is—ugh!”
I drove the saber into his thigh.
“I’ll ask again. Is this man Nogi Maresuke?”
“Y-yes, he is. We surrender, so please treat us as prisoners of war. I beg you.”
Good. That’s how it should be. Mad dogs only listen when you beat them.
Bang!
The Japanese officer who had just been begging for his life collapsed with a hole in his head. The disarmed and surrendered Japanese troops stood there in stunned silence, unsure what to do. I gave only one order.
“All Sapodae units, open fire.”
A force that existed solely to desire the enemy’s death. That was the Sapodae. Prisoners would eventually be sent back into the war. We would eliminate every last one of them to minimize their war potential. We’d leave just enough alive to work them like slaves.
“This is an unacceptable way to treat surrendered soldiers! Is the Korean Empire not a nation that understands righteousness and benevolence?!”
Perhaps because they still thought of themselves as proud Imperial troops, one man had the nerve to raise his voice in defiance.
“You call us weak and spineless in normal times, but suddenly remember righteousness and benevolence when it suits you?”
“Even if that weren’t the case, showing mercy to surrendered enemies is the duty of the victor!”
“Let me ask you the reverse. Logically speaking, if we Koreans killed your emperor, what would you do to us?”
“!!!”
They would have done the exact same thing. That was why they stood there speechless, faces frozen in shock.
Yes. That was exactly it. Just as they worshipped their emperor as a living god, to the people of the Korean Empire at this time, the emperor was like a father. Therefore, this revenge was perfectly justified.
Bang!
The man who had been protesting moments earlier stood there stuttering, unable to form a single coherent word, before a bullet hole appeared in his head and he collapsed.
“And you weren’t even properly surrendering—you were just begging pathetically for your lives because you knew you couldn’t win. What are you waiting for? Kill them all. Go borrow a machine gun from those dumbass Russian soldiers standing over there.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Starting with my shot, a merciless hail of bullets poured down on the Japanese soldiers waving their white flags. Was this acceptable? If they didn’t like it, they shouldn’t have killed the emperor. As expected, the emperor’s death turned out to be far more advantageous for us. It gave us the perfect justification to crush them like this.
This was a war drawing the eyes of the entire world. We had to use the emperor’s assassination as an excuse to thoroughly annihilate the Japanese army.
“Leave not a single one of the Japanese bastards who assassinated our Majesty alive!”
The Sapodae had already sealed off their rear. The few remaining Japanese soldiers could offer no meaningful resistance and simply died where they stood. Killing these men meant the Japanese army would no longer be able to target Port Arthur. All that would remain was their main force around Mukden. Even the supplies we had been providing from the Korean Empire would now be cut off.
“What should we do about the embedded journalists?”
One of the Sapodae soldiers asked. Right. There was one foreigner in the middle of the battlefield, frantically scribbling away. I was curious what he was writing, so I decided to take a look.
“War correspondent. How exactly do you plan to write your article?”
“W-well, you see…”
When he couldn’t speak, I snatched the notebook from his hand and read it.
“What were you going to write? Oh ho. The Goddess of the Battlefield, Korea’s Joan of Arc. Aren’t you being a bit too generous? I thought you’d call me barbaric.”
I was described as Korea’s Joan of Arc, the Goddess of the Battlefield, and so on. Like a single ray of light appearing in the hellish chaos of the mortal world. The hero of Korea, which had been powerless against the aggression of the Great Powers, who had achieved a glorious victory by annihilating the invading Japanese army.
“Th-that is…”
He kept opening and closing his mouth, unable to speak. There was no need to be that scared. I had no intention of doing anything to people from countries other than Japan. If anything, I needed to stay on good terms with the war correspondents.
I politely returned the notebook.
“If you write it like this, I’d be grateful. Please make sure to write well about how our Sapodae fought for our country.”
In truth, if he had written that we were barbaric, I had planned to threaten him a little. But from a distance, our actions probably looked more like we were resisting than accepting surrender. The real problem, however, was the Russian army.
The Russian forces that had burst out from 203 Hill had been on the verge of annihilation while fighting the frenzied Japanese troops. They had grown extremely tense at the appearance of the Korean Imperial Army, but once they realized we were not the enemy, all the tension drained from them. Their commander, Anatoly Stessel, was dead. Only Roman Kondratenko remained.
“Why didn’t you just wait on the hill? What on earth possessed you to do something like this?”
“Are you the Countess Ok of Manchuria?”
With dark circles reaching all the way to his chin and a face exhausted beyond measure, Kondratenko, sitting there drenched in blood, stared at me blankly. Countess Ok. That title still felt a bit strange to me.