A Friend's Vengeance and a Collapsing Mountain
At a guest quarters of the Aymara.
Far off, at the southern heart of the Eastern Continent where Daehan had yet to expand, lay Wonnam Port.
A harbor built in the early days, following Haneul's word, to cultivate friendship with the surrounding natives.
"Wow... Is this for real?"
"What are you standing around gawking for? Get down, quick."
"Yes, sir!"
The moment Lee Yung enlisted in the navy, he had been hauled off to a place that made absolutely no sense.
Every elder in his family held a high naval rank, and insisting he had to set a good example, the whole clan had gathered and sent someone off by drawing lots.
Of course, the harder and more remote the posting, the faster the promotions, so those angling for the top ranks sometimes volunteered for such places on purpose.
"I knew it'd be remote, but not this remote..."
The mountains ringing him on all sides weren't merely yellow—they were bare, pale-white rock, stripped of every trace of green.
No, calling them barren hills would be too generous. Rocky peaks without a single blade of grass rose up to greet him.
This was the seaside, yet the air felt dry enough to make him wonder if he'd wandered into a desert.
"How long am I going to be stuck here...?"
At least the navy sent unmarried soldiers back to Sinsi around the time of marriage age, so they could find a match.
Plenty of men ended up finding wives among the locals, though. So who knew.
"Recruit! Get over here!"
"Yes! Coming!"
He scampered off quick as a whip, it seemed—he was determined to make a success of military life.
Lee Yung adapted fast to the strange new place. The western desert outside Sinsi where he'd trained had looked roughly like this anyway.
Today, while standing his post on the fortress wall, Lee Yung spotted a large group of people approaching in the distance.
"Hey! People over there!"
"I see them. Must be the Aymara."
"Ah, the natives we trade with, sir?"
Lee Yung stared with fascination at the hundred or so people making their way down along the river.
He had never seen a native in his life before today.
"Interesting, huh? So many of them just go around draped in cloth?"
"Something's odd, though."
"What is it?"
"They just keep coming. Endlessly."
These were people who visited now and then to chat a little, and who beamed with delight whenever they were given cloth as a gift before heading home.
"They live up in the high plateau. There'd be no reason for that many of them to come down here."
"True enough? It's not like there's farmland here, either?"
While Yunsim observed them curiously, someone set out from the fortress to meet the newcomers—an older soldier, no doubt someone who'd lived here long enough to know at least a little of their language.
"Why have the Aymara come swarming down like that?"
"I'll go find out."
"Good. Take care of it."
Stepping out of headquarters was Kim Usam. He'd already been here twelve years. He'd come for his career, but on a routine patrol he'd fallen head over heels for a local woman, married her, and was now serving here for life.
He had, of course, made trips back to Sinsi plenty of times—with his wife's family in tow.
"I wonder what's going on. They're not ones to come down often."
After taking a wife and learning their language, he had exchanged news with them many times, but never had this many come at once.
They lived five to seven days' walk away and rarely descended; a few would come down occasionally, just to trade news and go back up.
"Ah. Amaru, is it?"
At the head of the column walked a face he knew well. A friend who'd only recently visited, saying he'd been made chieftain and wouldn't be able to come down often anymore.
"Oh, Usam. My friend."
"Amaru. My friend. What brings you here?"
"We have been invaded..."
"Oh no..."
The words struck like a thunderbolt. His wife's parents and family lived near the port, so they were fine—but much of the Aymara's kin were still up on the plateau.
"Could we perhaps borrow your strength?"
"Hoo... We are soldiers, you see."
"Are you not fighting men?"
"We are, but we are men who fight only when the nation commands it."
These people, closer to a tribal confederation than a nation, had only a vague notion of what a state and an army were. They seemed to think of the soldiers as mere warriors.
"Then what are we to do..."
"Hmm."
"Can we receive help?"
"That? It should be possible."
Though payment was required, he knew Daehan never demanded terms that would crush them. He decided to head back and file a report—because an idea had just occurred to him.
"So you're saying we should give them support?"
"Didn't Haneul-nim say it Himself? That we should all live together in joy?"
"What does that have to do with any of this?"
It sounded right, in a way, but the current commander—his term of office nearly over—couldn't help feeling uneasy about the whole thing.
"Hmm... Why not just do it a few years from now?"
"Then for now, we just settle them here?"
"Yes, yes, do that."
Once the present commander left, Kim Usam, the deputy, would become the new commander—so the message was: sort it out yourself when the time comes.
"Your friend's going to resent you for this."
"Ugh. The Daehan Company boys are going to curse us out for this, aren't they?"
"Then I'll just make them plenty of money, won't I?"
All sea transport of supplies was handled by the Daehan Company, so any request had to go through them—and what was it with these people, always hunting for gold and silver? Every single supply request gave him a headache.
"Is that really true?"
"Mm. Wait a few years and your chance will come. Settle down here in the meantime. I'll help you plenty."
"Thank you!"
And Kim Usam had one more plan up his sleeve.
"Now, to get help from the homeland, we'd have to send them something, right?"
"You don't mean slaves, do you? We have nothing to give..."
"No, you have plenty."
Meeting with them as often as he did, Usam knew exactly what those glittering things were—hanging from their arms, their legs, woven into their clothes.
"You have plenty of that metal you make your ornaments from, don't you?"
"Hm? You mean this shiny stuff?"
"That's the one!"
They went about draped in chunks of gold. If the Daehan Company men had seen it, they'd have gone mad and expanded the fortress on the spot.
"We have lots of it here and there? Is it valuable?"
"Very! Melt it down into lumps the size of your fist, and the homeland will fill the fortress to the brim with food!"
"You mean that building? How full?"
Apparently he was picturing a single warehouse's worth.
"I'm telling you, we'll pile real grain up to the top of those walls!"
"Gah!? It's worth that much?"
Amaru was floored. Living on barren wasteland, food was the most precious commodity his people knew.
"This stuff we can get in any amount you like!"
"Just wait and see. I'll get you living somewhere good soon enough."
Kim Usam intended to settle here permanently regardless—his career advancement hinged entirely on this region's development.
That was why he'd been patiently working, ever since his marriage, to bring his wife's family and tribe down to settle here.
He'd been planning to get serious about it once he made commander anyway—thanks to these invaders, the job had just gotten a whole lot easier.
"And I will help my friend avenge his people."
It was really quite simple. Nothing extravagant—just food, axes, and plate armor, and these people would become the masters of this land.
The locals were still wielding stone axes.
"Daehan Company boys, I'm about to make you weep with joy down here. Heh heh heh."
The Aymara began building a settlement near the fortress. Being close to the river made drawing water easy.
The only regrettable thing was how meager the flow was.
Drinking water was fine, but securing water for farming was proving difficult.
"I wish there were more water..."
"Shall we build a dam? With a few people lending a hand, it should be easy enough."
"There's a way to do that?"
"Seems like there might be."
He went into the fortress and came back with a permit to use explosives.
The river feeding down into Wonnam Port ran between sheer rocky walls, and it seemed that setting charges and bringing down the mountainside would let them throw up a dam in no time.
"Can't know for sure until we try, but it'll work out."
A dam wasn't something you could just slap together anywhere, though... Would it really be all right...?
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Crowds of people swarmed over the mountains ringing the river—some boring holes into the rock, some packing in explosives, others sealing the holes shut again.
After days of working the mountaintops, the laborers' faces showed less hardship than bright anticipation of the new hope taking shape before them.
"Will a lake really form here?"
"Hard to say? Collapsing a whole mountain to dam a river... Goodness."
The natives were dubious about an idea beyond anything they could imagine—but so what if it failed? The Daehan folk were paying out generous daily rations of food, so anything was fine by them.
Meanwhile, Usam and Amaru watched the workers.
"Usam? Can this little stick of a thing really bring down a mountain?"
What Amaru was turning over and over in his hands was an explosive charge. Cast into stick form for easy burial in drilled holes, it looked for all the world like a toy.
"Haha. Just wait. You're in for quite a surprise."
"Hmmmm..."
Usam decided to simply stand back and watch—a small part of him wanted to tease his primitive friend. Just how startled would he be?
The endless digging and burying had already been going on for a week, and it was time to wrap up the first phase of the work.
No precise calculations, no engineering—just bury it roughly, blast it, and if it wasn't enough, blast it some more.
"The workers are taking a break, so the digging must be about done. Tell everyone to climb up high now. Get ready to run."
If the entire mountain came crashing down, it would be a genuine catastrophe—and Usam was, truthfully, hopelessly careless about contingencies.
Even before the fuses were lit, the Daehan folk, apparently with no interest whatsoever in watching things blow up, were already fleeing into the distance.
"Huh? How far are you all going?"
"Who knows? You'd better tell the locals to hurry up too."
"Haha! We're plateau people, my friend. We're faster than you!"
Tap tap. Fzzzzzzzzt.
Nothing would probably go wrong, Usam figured, and lit the fuse. The flame raced along the cord.
"Everyone run as far as you can! Now!"
"Let's go!"
"Eh, there's nothing to see anyway? Shall we head back?"
Everyone had been talking like some magnificent spectacle was about to unfold, but all that seemed to be happening was something burning with a fat plume of smoke. The crowd's interest evaporated on the spot.
"Your daughter—how old is she this year?"
"Why? Looking to match her with your son?"
"Ahem..."
"Hahaha!"
As the locals chatted idly and strolled toward the neighboring peak behind them, the fuse crept ever onward, and smoke thickened across the mountainside.
"Why is that smoke coming out in such clouds?"
"Run! Now!"
Usam was growing genuinely anxious watching the locals amble along, cracking jokes.
If something went wrong now, imagine the resentment he'd have to face—and what on earth would he write in his incident report?
"Please, I'm begging you—RUN!"
"Ah... all right, all right. I'll tell them."
When even Amaru stepped in to hurry the people along, they finally broke into a run.
And as always, there is never a shortage of impatient friends on a fuse line.
KOOOOOOM
Soon, one by one, came sounds like a giant gnawing the mountain apart.
RUUUUUMBLE
"What the—!"
"What is that sound?!"
The ground shook with the explosions, and the people were struck dumb with terror. Rain rarely fell here; they had likely never even heard thunder. There was no way they could have known a sound like this.
"Even the earth is roaring! The gods are furious!"
"AAAHH! RUN!"
KOOOM. KU-GOOM. KU-GU-GOOM.
The sequential blasts were drawing closer and closer.
Krrrrrrr...
And then came another sound—something ominous, something collapsing.
"What— the ground is splitting open!"
"AAAHH! It's getting closer! RUN!"
Something felt monumentally, catastrophically wrong. The mountain was collapsing outright, the peak sinking lower bit by bit.
"AAAAAHH! The mountain is falling!"
"RUN!"
Usam and the natives began running for their actual lives. With every explosion that sounded, they could see the earth behind them caving in.
"AAAAAAH!"
"Somebody save me!"
Kim Usam, thirty-two years old. At home awaited a beautiful wife and three children cute as bunnies. He could not die here.
"Save me! I haven't even gotten started yet!"
Every time he glanced back at the collapsing earth closing in on him in real time, he swore to himself: never again. I will never do anything this stupid again.